side. Nearer Iowa then and more than small comfort. Eight o'clock in the morning. Turned-up bowl of the bandstand. Trees and wet grass. Sand impacted in the sandbox by last night's late rain. Gulley of an outflung leg. Four-finger handprint. Pail's perfect circle. I adjusted the wind filter and she sat on the swing now, a nautical creak working down the links of the chains, tips of her fingers lightly touching them. She began to rise toward me, nothing in her eyes.
'I see myself in a big stone house on the Oregon coast,' Brand said. 'I'm exactly sixty years old. I built the house myself, rock by rock. I see myself as one of those unique old writers who's still respected for his daring ideas and style. Young disciples make pilgrimages to visit me. They come hiking up to my house carrying knapsacks and copies of my books. There are no roads in the area. It's like Big Sur, only more lonely and remote. The house is right above the ocean and I can see seals basking on the rocks and big lean seabirds skimming over the waves and even an occasional shark, the fin of a big beautiful shark bright in the sunlight. The shark is my personal symbol. At the back of all my books there's an imprint of a shark just like the wolfhound on Alfred A. Knopf books. The surf thunders on the rocky beach. The wind comes off the water and blows past the house and goes whistling through the woods out back. I see myself as lean and craggy. The young disciples come from every corner of the world. Sometimes they come in groups, a bunch of young Frenchmen and their girlfriends bringing greetings from famous old French philosophers and writers, guys I shared symposiums with and signed petitions with, famous old French intellectuals who haven't given up their revolutionary ideas and who still exert a profound influence on French foreign policy. The young disciples usually stay a week or so. We have quiet talks and go walking on the beach. They ask me about my life and thought. Sometimes I get a stray, a young female disciple who comes all alone from Sweden at great personal expense and hardship. She is young and blond and lovely. The Swedish experiment has not worked, she says. We go to bed together. We can hear the wind and the gulls. There's nothing in the room except the four stone walls and the bed. Afterward she tells me I am like a man half my age. We speak only rarely. She cooks simple Swedish meals for me. We walk on the beach. I read her the first chapter of my work in progress and she tells me it is the best and truest I have done. She asks me about my wife. I had been married years before to a beautiful Vietnamese girl who died of a rare lung disease. I say nothing to the Swede. I merely take her hand and lead her to the bed. Two weeks later I tell her that she must go. My work demands the tension of loneliness. She understands. I go back to work. It is all hard and clean. The surf crashes on the rocks. A month later a tall lovely Australian girl with titian hair comes walking up the steep rocky path. She is carrying a knapsack and my lone book of verse.'
In the afternoon I went to the library. Then I walked back out to Howley Road, almost not noticing the brightness and calm of the day, the trees in their easy bending eagerness smelling of higher terrain. Suddenly I regretted the calmness of lowlands, of sea level, and thought if this were mountain country all my earnest plans might be shoveled easily into the wind. In the pitiless insanity of nature above the timber-line no other resolution is needed than that of a river changing color as it flows down the continent toward its own promise and past. Pike was alone in the camper, barking softly in his sleep, and there was nobody in the bar across the road.
I spent sixteen straight hours slopping white paint on the dull green walls of my hotel room and then, using a much smaller brush, printing the two thousand words of the next part of the script in black paint over the white.
I finished early in the morning. I went out to the camper, where I spent most of the day either sleeping or watching Sullivan and Brand play chess. In the evening I went back to the hotel. Glenn Yost came up to the room and looked at the walls. I told him it had cost me two sizable bribes and a promise to pay for the repainting when I checked out. His crazed eye was very active. I told him that during filming he would stand by the armchair and read the words and sentences as they progressed around the room. He'd be on camera intermittently; from time to time I'd pan one of the walls, perhaps in accord with the line he was reading, perhaps against the line, camera and man reading in opposite directions. I'd anticipate the script at times. I'd also shoot passages he had already recited. Somewhere along the way we'd cut, reload, re-position, and proceed again. I gave him time to read through the whole thing, showing him exactly where certain passages picked up after being interrupted by windows or door frames. The left eye jumped. I told him to be cool, that none of this mattered in the least.
'I stand here frankly amazed.'
'The eye's really hopping,' I said.
'I don't know but what I'd rather be at home fixing the screen door.'
'Fellini says the right eye is for reality and the left eye is the fantasy eye. Whenever you're ready, Glenn.'
'What the hell, let's go.'
I stood over the tripod and gave him a hand-sign.
'Our luck was lean that year. There were about ten thousand of us. The rest were indigenous. We were spread all over the southern part of the peninsula, surrendering to anybody who happened to come around, all told about seventy thousand troops, American and Filipino, and the Japanese had to get us out of there so their own people could move in and prepare for a big assault on Corregidor. We were just in the way which was a new feeling for somebody who considered himself a pretty fair rifleman and his country the only invincible power on earth. The first thing they wanted to do was get us all assembled at a place called Balanga. We were to get there on our own from whatever company or platoon or command post had been shot away around us or starved or bored or diseased into submission. There were nine of us who started walking across a precleared firing area toward Balanga. It was only twelve or fifteen miles from where we were. They didn't give us any food but that was nothing new. We had been employing maximum stress procedure for some time and following the example of the indigenous personnel, eating dogs and monkeys and lizards. Once I saw one of them, a Filipino, eating the meat of a python. I never ate python and I never ate monkey after the first time. Lizard you can keep down but monkey-meat is like eating something that came jumping and swinging out of hell itself and I was willing to go just so far with the max stress routine. The other thing was malaria, which everybody had. But it really wasn't too bad. We got some sugar cane from the fields and ate that and there were streams to drink from. We had a colonel with us and he had a pass that some gink officer had given him when we surrendered. He showed this pass to anybody we ran into on the road and they didn't give us too much trouble. They searched us and took rings and watches and anything else they could find, like my Zippo lighter, which twenty years later I began to regret because it would have made a good ad in the campaign they were running, full-page black-and-white-bleed authentic owner testimonials. this zippo survived the bataan death march. We got to Balanga that night. We had covered the distance in one day with no strain at all. Then we heard the enemy had executed about four hundred indigenous military personnel, officers and noncoms. The Filipinos were on their way to Balanga like the rest of us when they were stopped by some ginks who were part of an aftermath reaction force. They let everybody go except the officers and noncoms, who were lined up in several columns and then tied together at the wrists with telephone wire. Then they took out their swords and bayonets and killed them. We heard they beheaded most of them. They didn't use any guns and it took about two hours to kill all four hundred. Must have been something to see. We heard it was revenge for something the indigenous personnel had done, but nobody knew what. To tell you the truth I don't think anybody cared. In the situation we were in, which was one of total, complete and utter heat and boredom and wondering what manner of crawling scabby insect you were going to dine on next, the fact of four hundred headless Filipinos was a topic for pleasant clubhouse gossip, something to discuss briefly in mild awe and almost admiration for the ginks for at least having a sense of spectacle and to be grateful for in a way because it took our minds off our own problems. Balanga was unforgettable. Thousands of men were pouring into the town. They put some of us in pastures. Others they kept in small yards behind barbed wire. We were all jammed together and it was impossible to sit down and the whole town smelled of defecation. The whole town. We were told to use a ditch but it was full of dead bodies and the smell of the dead and dying kept most of us away. Men with dysentery couldn't control themselves and had to defecate where they stood. Others just fell down and died. All this time in Balanga standing in the pasture and later burying some of the dead I tried to think of my wife and two small daughters, sanity, a home and a bed, her breasts and mouth and lovely hands, but she kept drifting away and I was too numb or unfeeling to care really whether I could bring her back, the sight of her standing naked in a dim room, and on the ground next to me a man I had thought to be dead was jacking off, flat on his back, beating it in a quiet frenzy. The ginks presented us with copies of the humane atrocity clause of the Cape Town Accords. Then they gave us rice to eat and sent us north. There were guards this time. We were walking to a place called Orani. We saw a lot of corpses on the road. Some
