But he had nothing with which to step.
Yet now he went right over the membrane along the spoke to the brain. Close up he saw the blue line that had plowed or washed sideways between a cavernous canal and an infinitesimal drag or suck that he did not see why he could see. But the wash sank in, and its dim trace faded against the Sun’s flood charging the brain.
Imp Plus passed without thought from one spoke to another; he would see if he could see the blue trace. But it was not there, and in that field of absence the other, once-known pain that was not the burning twisting caving came to him along its axis of distance.
There were shoes of yellow hide standing by the fire. They had marks on them that were a map of how to get back. In California a shoemaker’s axle had spun against a rim of sole, but the shoemaker was not making the shoe. Imp Plus took steps through the night in Mexico, he was following the voice and the flashlight that bobbed ahead of him. The voice was not singing or speaking, the sound she made broke between breathing and humming at once. He stepped on thorns which he did not see. The shoes were back at the fire. He cried out “Ow.” The light stopped bobbing and the beam wheeled, hitting the car which was at a distance elsewhere. The light passed a pale thing close to it, and then the beam came to him. The woman was not making the sound now. She said, “All I wanted was some sun.” He wanted to tell her about TL but she was afraid she had nothing to give back. The empty shoes of yellow hide were back by the fire near the baking potatoes. He wanted to lick a honey-sweetness but it was in himself. He was thirsty but for what was already in him. One desire filled the place of another; a thing tightened on him like shoes.
Feet came to him along the axle of the other pain that was not the crashing, caving pain, and was barely out loud. But then they were his own feet in daylight. Toes stroked a throat, and they went on under the California water to a mass with a nipplelike knob he squeezed. The toes under the Sun-drenched cloud of water were his. He was up to his shins and not in Mexico.
The toes that squeezed were under the water somewhere and under the basking woman. The bigger toe he knew had an oval hornlike plate set into its end. Next to it, a thinner longer toe had a small square plate. A long weekend was what he and the woman had ahead. Yet she was travelling light, she said, as if she knew something about Operation TL. Or was glad to have only themselves. Now she rested wafting face down in the shallows of the sea. He pinched, not tight. She rolled her head back out of water and said, “What you want.”
It was the face that rolled back. Did he know face? The pale thing the flashlight beam had passed in Mexico not four weeks before had also been a face. Another woman’s face. Pale and not California. Though when seen close up, wet like this. Though not so wet. Wept. Tear-damp.
But this woman half sunk in the Pacific sea let water run over the wide-set eyes of her turned-back head. They were blue where his were brown, he could see them. And her whites were clear blue-white.
His sight of her had come to him through the nipple fixed out of sight between his two toes. His sight of her had spiralled up to him. It had come through parts of him he was going to lose at the end of the long weekend and had begun to miss.
The sailing shearwaters and the flapping, crook-winged, hook-billed diver osprey had gone away into the open sea air. The woman had turned on her back.
He had seen swirls of foam and felt twists of ill will clouded in acrid smoke, and he had dragged a long breath in. So long he caught a film of spray and his front swelled out, and she said, “Vanity.” She laughed and the blue-green water tipped into her mouth and was her color. She coughed and sat up in the shallows and held him. Her breath woke a knee. Below her shoulder which was cool, her gentle gland turned outward pressed against his shin stem. Her armbone wet the back of his knees, and the end of her arm came around in front reaching up higher.
These good things came to him. And she coughed some more, and many gaps in his sudden and towering headache raced independently back and forth bringing the acrid camouflage of smoke — and when she got to her feet she rose up that axis of distance that was the once-known pain that was not the crab twist of cave-crash. What came to him out of the air and the distant glint of his car and of hard glassy particles in the sand of the dunes, were bodies of her nipples and then dark-blooded pores of her nipples and her whole face. And before he knew it he had followed the curve of her lower lip up over the sea-bright chap creases dried and cut in fine puffs, and in beyond the fleshy skin into the ingrown body the shining loin of the mouth saying the Sun was warm.
What had come to him then came now on a wing or spoke of his sight. And with it came the grinding crackle that turned him into a new blast-burnt hollow, and with it came the blue dart. And of all things the Dim Echo was saying, “Hypothalamus active.” The blue dart was this time so much into the brain that the blue line was right above the gland of flame he had stopped short of before. And so deep that the dart itself might have been what jabbed into him the caving rip of burn-pain. But Imp Plus knew that this time the pain was on the next spoke over. Where he saw he also was. Though this next spoke or neck of sight stood below and ran from another pole.
But what had come was this: that in the Sun of that spring seashore, he’d seen the ingrown body of her mouth: seen edges, tips, grooves, and arches of a tongue laid he only now saw with a velvet of cones or nipples small like light-receptor cells that did their own winking, each one: and here was the point, the point which had not hurt here except with the hum of distance but now with the other pain ground him and twisted him into an instant: the point was that he had looked into the mouth to find a formed emptiness that was the ingrown body and he had known he did not fear an unknown and brain-scrambling loss that would take place on an operating table the next week: and instead had had a new desire. There were words he had not prepared to remember for the point of the desire he now saw.
But the space of the desire that seashore afternoon on Earth had been he now saw as unknown as the tongue’s bed of velvet nipples had been to his eyes. The difference (and again pain came on the heels of the blue dart) was that here now in orbit the desire was a thing not lost. It was not the pale strip across the pores of her back and the groove of her spine, and it was not the fine smoke of rehydrated sweat from the armpit that far down his body his calf hairs had brushed while she sat in the sea and that had then gone up toward him along that axis of distance. No. What he understood now in orbit was that the desire’s aim had been unknown. And where his present microsight came to him by division upon division, this unknown desire that was in place of fear divided its long vacancy into the non-burning pain of waves that even then had always hummed an axis of distance.
And as the brain from several — how many? — spokes, wings, necks, or routes as if it had no scale — or, for that matter, thought of him — came at him and went back, came large and went back to less, he got the product of this multiple division.
The product was the other pain of the caving.
But as he got this product it changed.
For the blue discharge showed its dart at once and more than once not just in the spot the Dim Echo might have been calling hypothalamus right above the furled flame now still more tightly furled. This time the discharge of line or dart went on longer or stronger against the Sun’s flood.
But this was not the change. The change was that from the caving-out, the caving-in, the breakage like a stretch where cushions of blood shot into cords that twisted narrower and narrower into instants like quanta, there was no pain.