The Einstein Intersection (14 page)

“Look,” I said. “I don’t see the pattern in your formality. What I do see I don’t like-“

“It’s not for you to judge,” Pistol said. “You can accept it, or you can go away. But you can’t go around disregarding other people’s customs, joking with the profane, and flaunting the damned.”

“Will you please tell me what customs I’ve disregarded, what I’ve flaunted? I’ve just said what was on my mind.”

His country face hardened again (hard country faces I was to become used to in Branning). “You talk about Lo Green-eye as if he rode by you among the lizards and you hail Kid Death as though you yourself have looked down his six-gun.”

“And where”-I was angry-“do you think Green-eye is? He’s sleeping by the coals up there.” I pointed up the rise. “And Kid Death-“

Fire surprised us and we whirled. Behind us in flame, he stood up and smiled. As he pushed back the brim of his hat with the barrel of his gun, red hair fell. “Howdy,
pardners
,” he snickered. Shadow from grass and rock jogged on the ground. Where flame slapped his wet skin, steam curled away.

“
Ahhhhhh-ahhhh-ahhhh-eeeeee
!”
That was Pistol. He fell against his cart, his jaw flopped down. He closed it to swallow, but it fell open again. The dog growled. I stared.

The fire flared, flickered, dimmed.
Then only the smell of leaves.
My eyes pulsed with the afterimage and rage. I looked around me. Pulsing darkness moved with my eyes. Behind it, on the rise by the road, the light from the road lamp brushing his
knees,
was Green-eye. He rubbed the tiredness out of his face with his fist. Kid Death had gone to wherever he goes.

The cart started behind me.

Pistol was still trying to get seated and at the same time guide the dog. I thought he was going to fall. He didn’t. They trundled away. I climbed up to Green-eye’s side. He looked at me... sadly?

In the light up from the road, his sharp cheekbones were only slightly softened by wisps of adolescent beard. His shadowed socket was huge.

We went back to the fire. I lay down. Sleep pawed my eyes down and the balls beneath my lids exploded till dawn with amazing dreams of Friza.

The Dove has torn her wing so no more songs of love.

We are not here to sing; we’re here to kill the Dove.

Brel
Jaque
/La
Colombe

It is in the lightning and the thunder of the elements that warm him so that he takes time to pause and to reflect. There is a dragon there. They do not hear, nor he. The elements have rendered voice inaudible. There is a dragon there.

Hunce
Voelker
/
The
Hart Crane Voyages

I think of people sighing over poetry, using it, I don’t know what it’s for... “Oh, I’ll give your bores back!”

Joanne
Kyger
/
The
Pigs for Circe in May

She is with me evenings.

My ear is a funnel for all voice and trill and warble you can conceive this day.

She is with me mornings.

Came back to the house early.
They have brought wine for New Year. There were musicians down in the white city. I remember a year and a half ago when I finished The Fall of The Towers, saying to myself, you are twenty-one years old, going on twenty-two: you are too old to get by as a child prodigy: your accomplishments are more important than the age at which they were done; still, the images of youth plague me,
Chatterton
, Greenburg,
Radiguet
. By the end of TE1 I hope to have excised them. Billy the Kid is the last to go. He staggers through this abstracted novel like one of the mad children in Crete’s hills. Lobey will hunt you down, Billy. Tomorrow, weather permitting, I will return to Delos to explore the ruins around the Throne of Death in the center of the island that faces the necropolis across, the water on
Rhenia
.

Author’s Journal/
Mykonos
, December 1965

Throughout most of the history of man the importance of ritual has been clearly recognized, for it is through the ritual acts that man establishes his identity with the restorative powers of nature or makes and helps effect his passage into higher stages of personal development and experience.

Masters &
Houston /The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience

The lights of Branning were yellow behind mist and brambles as night made blue, wounded retreat through the chill. Sun streaked the east while there were still stars in the west. Batt blew up the fire. Three dragons had strolled down to the pavement, so I rode down and ran them back. We ate with grunts and silences.

This close to the sea morning was damp. Beyond Branning, boats floated like papers towards the islands. To My Mount then, and the jerky, gentle trail down. Hisses left and right as we prodded them, but soon they were stomping and pawing in easy convergence.

Spider saw them first. “Up ahead. Who are they?”

People were running along the road; behind them, people walked. The road lights, tuned to an earlier month and longer night, went out.

Loosely curious, I rode to the head of the herd. “They’re singing,” I called back.

Spider looked uncomfortable. “You can hear the music?”

I nodded.

His head was still; the rest of his body swayed under his face. He switched his whip handle from hand to hand to hand; it was a quiet, beautiful way to be nervous, I thought. I played the melody for him because the sound hadn’t reached us yet.

“They’re singing together?”

“Yes,” I told him. “They’re chanting.”

“Green-eye,” Spider called. “Stay by me.”

I put down my blade. “Is there anything wrong?”

“Maybe,” Spider said. “That’s the family anthem of Green-eye’s line. They know he’s here.”

I looked questioningly.

“We wanted to get him back to Branning quietly.” He flapped his dragon on the gills. “I just wonder how they found out he was coming in this morning.”

I looked at Green-eye. Green-eye didn’t look at me. He was watching the people along the road. I couldn’t think of anything else to do, so I started to play. I didn’t want to tell Spider about the man in the dog cart last night.

The voices reached us.

At which point I decided I better tell him anyway. He didn’t say anything.

Suddenly Green-eye urged his dragon ahead. Spider tried to restrain him. But he slipped beneath one hand after the other. Worry perched on his amber eyebrows. Green-eye’s mount stomped ahead.

“You don’t think he should go to them?” I asked.

“He knows what he’s doing.” The people were thick on the road. “I hope.”

I watched them come, remembering Pistol. His terror must have spread over nighttime Branning like harbor oil. Dragons herded down the road; people herded up.

“What will happen?”

“They’ll praise him,” Spider said, “now. Later, who knows?”

“To me,” I said. “I mean what’s going to happen to me.”

He was surprised.

“I’ve got to find Friza. Nothing changes. I’ve got to destroy the Kid. It’s still the same.”

I recalled the look on Pistol’s face when he’d fled the Kid. Spider’s face-I was shocked at the recognition- twisted under the same fear. But there was so much more in the face: strength rode the same muscles as terror. Yes, Spider was a large man.

“I don’t care about Green-eye, or anyone else.” My words were
carapaced
with belligerence. “I’m going down to get Friza; and I’m going to come up with her again.”

“You-
“ he
began. Then his width accepted me. “I wish you good luck.” He looked again after Green-eyes swaying ahead of us towards the crowds. So much of him rode ahead with the boy. I didn’t realize how much of him lingered with me. “You’ve done your job, then, Lobey. When we turn the herd in, you’ll be paid-
“ He
stopped. Some other thought. “Come to my house for your pay.”

“Your house?”

“Yes.
My home in Branning-at-sea.”
He coiled his whip and kneed his dragon.

We passed another signboard. The white-haired woman with the cool lips and warm eyes looked moodily at me as I rode by.

THE DOVE SAYS, “WHY HAVE NINETY-NINE WHEN NINE THOUSAND ARE THERE?”

I turned away from her mocking and wondered how many people swarmed up through the morning. They lined the road. As they recognized the young herder, their song crumbled into cheering. We entered the crowd.

A jungle is a myriad of individual trees, vines, bushes; passing through, you see it, however, as one green mass. Perceiving a crowd works the same way: first the single face here (the old woman twisting her green shawl), there (the blinking boy smiling over a missing tooth) and following (three gaping girls protecting one another with their shoulders). Then the swarms of elbows and ears, tongues scraping words from the floor of the mouth and flinging them out “-move!” “Ouch! Get your-
“ “
-I can’t see-“ “Where is he? Is that him-
“ “
No!” “Yes-
“ while
the backs of the dragons undulated through the clumps of heads. They cheered. They waved their fists in the air before the gate. My job is over, I thought. People jostled My Mount. “Is that him? Is that-
“ The
dragons were unhappy.
Only Spider’s calming kept them peacefully heading forward.
We crowded through the gate at Branning-at-sea. At which point a lot of things happened.

I don’t understand all of them. In the first few hours a lot were things that would happen to anybody who had never seen more than fifty people together at once thrust into alleys, avenues and squares that trafficked thousands. The dragon herd left me (or I left it) to stumble about with my mouth open and my head up. People kept bumping into me and telling me to “Watch it! “ which is exactly what I was trying to do; only I was trying to watch it all at the same time.
Which would be difficult even if it kept still.
While I watched one part, another would sneak up behind me and nearly run me down. Here’s fragmenting for you:

The million’s music melded to a hymn like when your ears ring and you’re trying to sleep. In a village you see a face and you know it-its mother, its father, its work, how it curses, laughs, lingers on one expression, avoids another. Here one face yawns, another bulges with food; one scarred, one longing with what could be love, one screaming: each among a thousand, none seen more than once. You start to arrange the furniture in your head to find a place for these faces, someplace to dump all these quarter emotions. When you go through the gate at Branning-at-sea and leave the country, you retreat to the country for your vocabulary to describe it: rivers of men and torrents of women, storms of voices, rains of fingers and jungles of arms. But it’s not fair to Branning. It’s not fair to the country either.

I stalked the streets of Branning-at-sea dangling my unplayable knife, gawking at the five story buildings till I saw the buildings with twenty-five stories. Gawked at them till I saw a building with so many stories I couldn’t count, because halfway up (around ninety) I kept losing myself while people jostled me.

There were a few beautiful streets where trees rubbed their leaves over the walls. There were many filthy ones where garbage banked the sidewalk, where the houses were boxes pushed together, without room for movement of air or people. The people stayed, the air stayed; both grew foul.

On the walls were flayed posters of the Dove. Here there were others also. I passed some kids elbowing each other around one such poster that wrinkled over a fence. I squeezed among them to see what they looked at.

Two women gazed idiotically from swirling colors. The caption: “THESE TWO IDENTICAL TWINS ARE NOT THE SAME.”

The youngsters giggled and shoved another. Obviously I missed something about the sign. I turned to one boy. “I don’t get it.”

“Huh?” He had freckles and a prosthetic arm. He scratched his head with plastic fingers. “What do you mean?”

“What’s so funny about that picture?”

First disbelief: then he grinned. “If they’re not the same,” he blurted, “they’re different!” They all laughed. Their laughter was filigreed with the snicker that let you know when laughter’s rotten.

I pushed away from them. I searched for music; heard none. After the listening stops, after the searching-when these sidewalks and multitudes will not bear your questions any more: that’s what lonely is, Friza. Clutching my knife, I made my headlong way through evening, isolated as if I had been lost in a city.

The shingled tones of the Kodaly cello sonata! I swung around on my heels. The flags were clean and unbroken. There were trees on the corner. The buildings slanted high behind brass gates. The music unraveled in my head. Blinking, I looked from gate to gate. I chose. Faltering, I walked up the short marble steps and struck my machete hilt on the bars.

The clang leaped down the street. The sound scared me but I struck again.

Behind the gate the brass studded door swung in. Then there was a click in the lock and the gate itself rattled loose. Cautiously, I started the walk that led to the open door. I squinted in the shadow at the doorway,
then
went inside, blind from the sun and alone with the music.

My eyes accustomed to the dimmer light: far ahead was a window. High in dark stone, a dragon twisted through lead
tesselations
.

“Lobey?”

But I have this against thee, that thou didst leave thy first love,

The Revelation of John/Chapter 2, verse 4

My trouble is, such a subject cannot be seriously looked at without intensifying itself towards a center which is beyond what I, or anyone else, is capable of writing of . . . Trying to write it in terms of moral problems alone is more than I can possibly do. My main hope is to state the central subject and my ignorance from the start.