clump of palpitating caterpillars, a micro world, a man beyond the man who made it. The material, after all, was made of chemical substances and therefore could be said to possess some basic life-force different in degree but not in essence from that shared by all things which crawled or walked. This is what he told Sullivan and this is what Sullivan told me. The Cocoon had been just the beginning of his work but soon after it was floated into the loft he ran out of money, got into trouble with the landlord for setting fire to an alley cat as part of a formal satanic ritual and finally borrowed enough money to book passage on a freighter bound for North Africa, departing in a pair of Sullivan's flyless dungarees and the Lady Hathaway shirt I had given her as a birthday present.
The membrane had microscopic pores which enabled air to enter. Natural light could barely penetrate but the spotlights were an adequate substitute. Sullivan preferred them actually, claiming that sunlight was overrated. I put my fingers to one of the pieces of sculpture; the paint was dry, a deep gray; the others were browns of varying flat tones, a black and bone-white, a glacial silver. The three windows in the loft, pale and wavering behind the skin of the sandwich wrap, were shut tight, and yet the wrapping undulated as if grazed by a sea breeze. Some of the smaller power tools lay on a workbench. I went from figure to figure, thumbing each one, running the back of my hand over the bending surfaces. The building was quiet. I wondered why this one door had not been marked; to give a door the name River was an act of odd joy, or poetry, or childhood. I thought of the river in Old Holly then, and then of leaves, palms up, turning in a gentle current above the long, still, suspended fish with silver-dollar eyes, and then the woman ironing clothes in the shingled house, standing in her slip, the blinds not quite shut, and the September music of that warm night, elms and leisures of a dark street when the lawns smell of sweet wet grass and you are a boy, the hopelessness of lust, her bare arms and the shine of silk moving as her slow body moved, twice my age at least, ironing with the smooth movements of a lioness caressing her cubs, and I held to a tree and watched for an hour or more, twice my age, her light brown hair, lazy eyes, the softness of her face, never seen before and never since. All I wanted now was sleep.
A stained chunk of foam rubber, the remains of a mattress, lay under the workbench. I dragged it out and rolled my body into a ball and went immediately to sleep inside the plastic envelope of that room. Sins and rivers passed through my dreams, underwater faces fish-staring in my mind. I woke up to silence and chill, the accusations of the klieg lights. The city was full of people searching for the man or woman who might save them. My body stank of cold sweat, liquor and fear. The loft seemed endless, a scene lifted from the sandy bottom of a dream. A shape in the shape of my mother was forming in the doorway.
5
I was wearing green military-advisor sunglasses, a pair of wolf-hide moccasins, black chinos, a tight T-shirt and a khaki fatigue cap cocked low over my eyes. Pike was sprawled in the back seat and Sullivan was at my side watching New England un-bury itself from the last snow of winter bleeding now into the earth. The radio was announcing a sale on ground round steak and then some old-time rock came on, lush and mystical, cockney voices wailing through a prayer wheel of electric sitars, and we roared past Boston in a low cloud of crematory smoke. The windows were closed and the heater on and I moaned and chanted in the wrap-around fallopian coziness of my red Mustang, an infinitely more religious vehicle than the T-Bird I had owned in college. All America was on the verge of spring and the countryside was coming to glory, what we could see of the countryside through the smoke and billboards. There is nothing more thrilling than the first days of a long journey on wheels into the slavering mouth of an incredible and restless country. I shouted as I drove, exceeded speed limits, quoted poetry and folksong. Proper old Boston was behind us, its churches and gang killings, and ahead was Maine where surf blew over the rocks, where ruddy lobster-men in yellow hats and hip boots crackled with tales of the deep. We stopped in Salem for lunch and then visited the House of the Seven Gables, where the pretty little guide would not accompany us up the secret staircase, fearing quick cougar paws in the dark, and in late afternoon we reached the coast of Maine and saw a black apocalyptic storm clenched over the ocean, the air cool and tense, about to break, and when it came I thought the car might bust wide open and Pike woke up thinking we were all about to die and then told us about the great elliptical migrations of the cranes of Europe. I spurred the frisky Mustang past hundreds of bungalows, guest cottages and motels, twenty-five hundred miles from Marlboro country, and neon lobster phantasms swam across the wet road. It was evening when we got to Millsgate, a small white town on Penobscot Bay. The rain had stopped and we had dinner in a fishnet restaurant and then set out on foot to search for Bobby Brand's ascetic garage, Brand in exile, Brand junkless, Brand writing the novel that would detonate in the gut of America like a fiery bacterial bombshell. We went up a small hill, walking in the middle of the street. There were no cars, no sounds at all, and the air was so sharp it seemed to scratch the lungs. Four dogs came toward us and Pike barked at them but they just trotted by. The moon was full, obscured every few seconds by long swift clouds, and the whole sky seemed to be breathing. At the top of the hill I found the street we were looking for and we turned left and walked past the village green. A row of white houses flanked one side of the green; opposite the houses was a white clapboard church with a steeple. The high school was set back at the far end of the lawn, facing the street. Several porchlights were on and we could see the cannon and the black pocked balls stacked on the grass beside it. Up ahead there was a gap in the trees and I looked down to the water which was streaked silver from the moon and from the white lights of the houses set in the woods above the small coves on either side of the bay.
'New England is the most sexless place in the hemisphere,' Sullivan said. 'It has the sex appeal of Hyde Park in London on a warm afternoon when they all take off their shirts and collapse on the grass and then you understand why they had to go to Africa to get their kicks.'
We reached the garage.
'To be human is to go through stages,' Brand said. 'I've been through them all. But that's over now. I eat, sleep and write. I'm all through shooting smack. I'm all through dropping acid. I'm working all that New York insanity and violence out of my system. I go over to the high school and play basketball with the kids. It's beautiful here and this is where I am. I'm purifying myself. You can help me, Davy. My brain needs cleaning out. I think the way I talk. The way I'm trying not to talk anymore. You can help me get rid of the slang. You have my permission to correct me whenever I fail back into the old drug argot or military talk. One of the things I've figured out for myself up here in exile is that there's too much slang in my head. It's insidious. It leads to violence. You can help, Davy. I want to be colorless.'
We were sitting around a small table in his camper, inside the garage, drinking instant Maxwell House. The main part of the camper was plastic, designed to fit over the cab and back of a Ford F-250 pickup truck. The truck itself was black, the rest of the unit a dark gray with black trim around the windows and door. Inside were three bunks, a table, a hotplate and a typewriter; this was where Brand lived. I had met him years before when Merry and I went out to East Hampton one weekend. He seemed to be a one-man dispensary of meth, acid, hashish and various amphetamines. I was drawn to Brand. He represented the danger that was lacking in my life, real danger, not the plastic stuff available in great quantities at the network or the celluloid peril of those movie roles with which I challenged the premise of my marriage. All the bright young men of Madison Avenue searched for some facsimile of danger, some black root which might crack the foundation of their basic Episcopalianism, and we looked to the milder psychedelics, the study of karate, the weekend skydiving club, the sports-car rally. That weekend Brand gave me a tab to slip under my tongue, a ticket to unapproachable regions, and what I remember is the sight of myself at the age of sixty, mangled larvae clinging to the bleak flesh, the pit, the hellish comedy of my face; and that was the last occasion, save one, on which I tried to cross the swamp all alone. Brand had gone from Yale straight into the Air Force, where he flew an F-4 fighter-bomber over the elephant grass of a disappearing province. After his discharge (which may have been medical) he lived in a rooming house in the West Nineties shooting heroin and cocaine, then drifted into peace movements of the sing-along type and finally discovered acid, political activism and writing. Brand was roughly my age. He was tall, had sandy hair, wore glasses, was likable and frightening, lived off his family most of the time, seemed to change his personality every few weeks and sometimes minutes, could easily be visualized lying on a bed in a college dorm wearing a sweatshirt, denims, loafers and white socks, reading an economics textbook, dreaming of spoons and blue flame. He had a pair of copulating dogs tattooed on his right forearm.
'My aunt Mildred owns this garage. She lives right down the street but she's in Bangor now finishing up some legal business. Too bad you can't meet her. She plays the clarinet.'
'When do we leave?' I said.
