Yes, I can cook, he says. They exchange a look. Is the river its water or the banks that shape it, she thinks out loud, and she knows he is listening with those big ears of his and she doesn’t mind, for, in a gust of smoke coughing, he jokes, “Is that your Christian energy plan? You’re sounding like me.” “Can’t stand the smoke get out of the kitchen,” she says, time elapsing how, when — for she is like a woman who has agreed to spend the night with a man she hardly knows.
They were the land’s, the land vaguely realizing northward toward water. Something we were withholding from our land of the living. It comes out of nowhere but months of talk, what he says now, but out of nowhere stilclass="underline" they have no right to ask if and where and why you go to church, temple, or — it’s unconstitutional, he says to the fire. She pricks up her ears, some woods person’s instinct, something Out There, while with one part of her mind replies out loud, “Unconstitutional, eh?”—for in her heart of hearts she knows those founding fathers would have been astonished to find God in the three-person of our checks and balances laboring openly in our vineyards loving every minute of it.
“A piece of him,” it came to her, his words so self-effacing, she thought they were from the Avon Bard when some medieval noble, asked if he was ready, laid his neck upon the block, it moved her the more she remembered a play she had been in as Portia dropping mercy like rain upon a place of justice. “You have survived your experience,” he said. “I’m not so sure,” she said, and picked out a faint glint back in the trees and at the same moment a glint in the dark sky like a tonal frequency there then gone, and wondered if their privacy was breached. “What, though, is it we have survived?” he said to her, as she let her eyes seem to close but in thought not sleep. “If you have to ask that,” she murmured, “we don’t need some philosopher as king.”
Yet now far keener than a philosopher’s parse is detected suddenly the surveillance unmistakable, violently unsurprising after all these months in the public eye, the discovery simultaneous by the two of them as a couple, her hand suddenly on him, his forearm, his spare shoulder and rib, seeking his anger wherever in his body it might be found — our satellite listening system at last kicking in, thought both, now huddling, preparing for the night and acquainted with it, they now in some intimacy knew — beyond speech, the blank terrible chance — like a blanket absent but to be replaced by the not-too-wide, not at all thick, NASA mylar tarp the man unfolded from his pack — that she, still young, would not get what she deserved, nor even quite he, imagining how his government might work.
Just then in her reaction to the triple pop from vein of hardwood log — locust, she thought, recalling the man who had made her a gift of the pistol or her father or her child — though where were locust trees here in this tract of earth vaguely realizing outward or even inward toward and away from our northern neighbor? — the man with her saw her face as he might upon waking in the fresh damp of dawn, makeup-less, as formed as chiseled Presidential stone, her skin both fresh from the unknown of sleep and worn by the terrible campaign waged from war zone to war zone for weeks reflecting years of belief that what she ran for was hers already while her opponent elsewhere put it to a field of mystified but impressed migrant farm laborers, You would not seek me if you had not found me.
“Why did you come?” she says, her eyes closed. “Because you’d be here. Also the fossil beds.” “Why?” she said. “These very,” he said, “small Cambrian soft-bodied animals — the fittest don’t necessarily survive.” “But me?” “One of yours told one of mine you had a free day.”
We watch them really sleep — together sleep. She wakefuller than he for certain moments. A pallor in her heart. A new state of affairs in her mussed hair — while we prepared to defend the signed contract covering the use of these audio-visual tapes rolling far and near. She’s cold, he too, they may be dreaming now (of which they will later compare notes uncannily kindred, of the iron kettle, it sings on the stove, a time to plant tears the almanac says) yet dreams are pathless pathmaking.
Watched, however, even into their joined and interinanimate dreams not so much by our satellite in its synchronous earth orbit able to record only a dream’s visible signs, but in fact now by another, a third person, were their eyes open upon this creature standing over them with what looked like a chain-saw or a ghetto blaster, a denizen of our northern neighbor we had learned originally but a separatist at the very moment that our own nation had annexed this region? — and now and now and now — what was this language he spoke, picked up by our satellite like the images of these three people down to the very interlaced fingers of the two sleepers on the ground still adream, closer perhaps than ever, what did they, we, our technology, hear him say, this weird mountain person caped and overalled could he be speaking of our own election campaign — your stomach growls — a light from the very breath of the speaker: “I know you both, I’m here, I left the army, the country, the church, thrown out because I didn’t believe as you, though my belief is just as much a belief as your own knowledge in the absence of evidence and you share mine though you don’t know it and I would vote for you both had I the vote but I am here,” the wilderness man continued, his eyes under the killer-shaggiest of eyebrows turning into luminous mist, his time passing perhaps and his voice receding, until our man on the ground, letting go the woman’s hand yet gripping it again, now protectively aroused to eloquence spoke up to him, upward, still aware of the battery-operated chain-saw half swinging above them—“You are, you are, you’re saying why wait, aren’t you? Why I know you, you are Ahab on a stump speaking to all of us”—all of us the syllables seemed sucked upward and toward a glinting acoustic receiver out in the trees near the wolverine’s den — sounds of us like thoughts we have retracted, thinking better of them; and he was gone, the atheist deserter once a litigant suing our government, now a denizen of this new territory. Gone now from their awakening view, the woman and man on the ground, turning toward each other chilled, their stomachs growling, hands clasped in some fugitive and passing union, thinking almost one thought if that.
This might have been inferred by our extreme lenses from the position the next morning of the sleeping bodies — the embers ready for the next camper or campers, though this protected territory not yet legal for visitors. The two known tracks gave access to the clearing from the dense old growth woods of this new 40- by 50-mile tract just acquired by us from our northern neighbor, is all we need to know. The still frontier-like state of our union. Waiting the return of our rivals to the campaign reflecting as we with our endemic lens might too on the survival of the campaign trail in a new century.
THE LAST DISARMAMENT BUT ONE
It will not go away, this curious survival of ours. We tour the crater, contemplate its 1760-mile (though possibly immeasurable) perimeter. It is already in the atlases, where schoolchildren may trace it. It is history. It is where our neighbor used to be. We internalize this crater. We express it in other terms. That twist that left us so little to work with that it might be nothing but ourselves.
We see it again to grasp what happened to that distinguished member of the community of nations. Powerful out of all proportion to its landlocked size, it one night became in seconds this awful map of itself cut into the earth. What an unusual map, life-size, with a visible depth yet a height absent perhaps only to the eye. Instead of mountain peaks and moving rivers, factories and airports, teeming cities and calm old towns, now these cliffs like the receding coast independent of a vanished sea go far beyond the horizon perhaps to make the horizon us. We keep returning to the wonder of it. The crater proves to be the exact shape of that vanished nation. What had we here?