Her father said that it was interesting what she had said about Indian language having a word for water in a pitcher for drinking and a word for water in rivers, harbors, lakes, and so forth, but not a bunch of words to distinguish among those various bodies of water as we do.
Alexander politely rejoined that he believed the word for "geyser" was the same as the word for "waterfall." He had to go, he said, and bade his future father-in-law goodbye.
"The Hermit-Inventor—he said that," said Mayn loudly as the first dark figure moved toward him among the gravestones. "If you can describe something, you must take responsibility for it. My grandmother must have told me."
Jean was calling to him, she was horribly upset — what had he meant by leaving like that after some aria of Gertrude’s? she kept waiting for him to come back, she thought he was sick, and then the dumb show aborted and before anybody could leave the police came in to ask questions because that Chilean de Talca had disappeared and there was blood and one of his handmade English shoes lying on its side in the theater vestibule if you call that a theater, and it was being said that de Talca had either murdered someone or had been murdered, the flurry had begun about ten minutes or so after the end of the show when no one was sure it had ended, and she had looked outside and couldn’tymd him, and from what Spence had said — she was crying somewhat tensely, not sadly — she had guessed from what that Spence had said that Jim had returned here of all places, she was crying excitedly and he held her so close she grunted into humor and ran her hand over his grass-and-gravestone-clammy back, and he said he had been intensely tired and had lain down and dropped off and had had an incredible dream and he was sorry he had put her through this, and she said As long as he was sorry, while he half-wondered how she had obtained a car to drive the fifty miles.
But three other figures were making their way across the turf and gravel of Maplewood Cemetery, and it was God knows two in the morning almost.
We already remember his dream, since, thinking to find being in it, we had encouraged trace matter to beam it up to him where he lay hoping to window what would come, until, like queer turns of coast weather, we found we had been the trace but knew this only after we had passed from it to being its effects so much less bodied we hardly recalled tracehood except the glow so red-orange in the cold, cold ground it might have been a heart.
He was coming across the Windrow burial ground, he knew he had come as fast as the wind and he had not actually passed all the places between the Statue and here. He could see himself by the misty force of a Moon that was turned mostly to another world and gave this one tonight only its doubts. He kneaded the vermilion clay in his pocket. Her ancestors lay here and he knew the place was by a field on the far side with a short hedge on the field side and two maple trees on either side of the family stone, with small stone markers also here. And so he found the place and smelled the recent turn of earth against iron and found this trace of digging a few feet apart from a stone whose name his fingertips and eyes read to be that of Margaret’s mother who had taken to her early-hastened grave secrets in letters known to have come to her — confiding in her — from a great man in Washington who "lost nothing save honor," Margaret once said, when he sold railroad bonds to friends in Maine, where even now the Anasazi healer might have arrived and found what he had voyaged the continent to see. The pistol was as warm in his other pocket as the lost bison cells had been precious. He wanted to be with the Anasazi seeking those small famed foam volcanoes that form below waterfalls when it has warmed up and then gets cold again, towers like buildings, though two or three feet tall only. The Hermit-Inventor had doubted such existed, but the Prince had wondered if the Anasazi needed to go so far to find them. He heard pressures upon the ground at a distance and knew the dead do not walk and he crouched to the place that had been dug, and his hands felt the shape of his child there in the New Jersey soil. He felt the pistol again and remembered the Anasazi saying he would give it to the right person when the time came if he had patience. The pistol was outside him and he outside it; but long time had entered him, he knew his people were thinking of him as best they could, and he recalled what Margaret had liked best in him, his way of thinking about objects they would contemplate together and after a long time he would say what they made him feel. But there was a thing in him she had said she did not like, and she scarcely told him what it was, it didn’t matter because she loved him, yet it would matter. He saw the figure nearer, and felt the steps in his very fingers, and it was not Margaret coming across the burial ground but a person he knew as well as the thousands-of-years-past people he had seen join into one, descending from the north straits toward better country. But the long time that had entered the Prince was now new, it was not back in time but forward but as if not so far ahead in time from that old Bering Strait crossing that it passed beyond this moment: as if nothing strange should happen to him.
But Spence, his ringed hands flashing wildly, his voice deeper, his need immense, was telling and asking, and could not say enough except this was not what he was really about; and Mayn, who tolerated him in the damp aura of faint danger here that would pass, recognized that de Talca had been convinced of Mayn’s involvement with Chilean interests from way back though it had been de Talca’s own family that had been responsible for the death of Mayga Rodriguez upon the discovery that her intimate liaison with Mayn around the time the U-2 cover got blown extended to pages of a music score known by certain Masonic elders to have circulated its never-performed opus plotting the demise of patriarchy in the haciendas, the business of the mines, the male-decreed alliances of marriage, the public power of the arts, and education in the sciences and techne even to the organization of Chilean shipping and the redesign of the railroad system.
The other two figures came more slowly, but, but for one, all the speeds equaled out — Jean’s intensely attentive silence and her soft touch upon Mayn’s neck and ear and ribs; Mayn’s strange easing of Spence, calming him, reassuring him; the man and woman hand in hand approaching close enough to be now the diva, her hair not piled high but over her shoulders, and her friend the physician who was talking to her steadily; and always Spence’s final, frantic summaries of what he understood to have been de Talca’s deal through an ultimately warm-hearted and tactically unreliable Chinese woman to get hold of a child and thus lure the Cuban escapee in return for the risky freeing in Santiago of that renowned old logia lauterina liberal the diva’s father at a precise moment when de Talca’s superior had found tampered-with a messenger’s large envelope containing coded music and a fortuneteller’s witness that Mayn and Spence were brothers and in cahoots with the woman Kimball who had arranged a secret retreat to some supposedly spiritual center in Colorado near the national meteorological research center for the Chileans her intimate the wife Clara and Clara’s exile-economist husband who had openly criticized the American government for clandestinely supporting the operation of DINA right in his own adopted backyard of New York—
all speeds equal to ours so unincorporated if still accommodated to a multiplicity of — but ours until we felt again light that did not have to reach us nor anywhere, light at last at rest, not gong nowhurs no matter how real the people who claimed to brang it to us cheap, split, fused, shredded, exploded like possibilities, imploded like an uncertain East Far Eastern erotic praxis— until, arriving to ask what was happening, what was happening, and full of such should-haves and should-haves as would have driven a less dramatic person into chaos, the distraught woman Luisa was, she said with a smile, now calmed by the anguish of Swiss citizenship, and her doctor, a polite man of perhaps Mayn’s age though less healthy though less used, suddenly said, "I believe my mother knows your aunt… in Boston?" while his beloved diva looked into all the faces there as if to know them and one day become them, and Spence and Mayn communicated agreeably by Colloidal Unconscious to say they were sure what they would find on this old site if they should pursue it, but—