far away as his horse. He did not want to look in the direction of the man awaiting him in the stretch of raw meadow beyond. His focus was to hold his sphincter clapped shut and to hope the falcon claws that remained fixed to his shoulder did not strengthen their grip.
Then, in midstream, he had what he felt was the strangest series of imaginings yet. If he had seen phantoms and phantasms before, and been confused by their palpability, he now had an idea that the beasts beneath him were not there at all. They were not simply bigger and more numerous variations on the falcon; they were something else. He was wiggling on his hands and knees across thinner air than he could breathe.
The resistance of the beasts’ backs altered as this idea formed. He felt himself squishing and sliding. He had to keep going.
At the slightest hint of doubt, the bridge of skins began to fade beneath him and he felt as if he were falling at first—and then rising—for instead of a bridge of bison across the creek he saw blood-damp acres of their rotting carcasses. Miles of buzzard-picked skeletons. Miles and piles. And, between the heaps of maggot-writhing tissue and sun-brittle bones, white people in alien costumes wandering oblivious, as if in a ritual. As if in a trance. Some ate food that looked like toys. Some talked to themselves or to little boxes. There were people in the little boxes, and the remnants of bison black with flies. Mounds of skulls. Crows and bones and tribes of souls—white people in bright colors and all the ground around black with dried blood. There were endless little pictures for sale, like pieces of a puzzle that no one knew how to put together. So many little pictures and little voices and little faces and little boxes filled with a noise like that of black flies. Wheels turning—wheels upon wheels driven by a hum, like the furious buzz of black flies in a box.
He had to keep going. He knew that if he did not keep his head he would fall either into the creek or into some deeper fit of madness than he was in already. He had to keep his head, and so he thought of his lost hat, imagining where it was—how far it would travel, what would become of it, what people would think. What did people think? He had to keep moving, just like his hat, which by then was very far downstream, bobbing along in the water the way it seemed to have drifted away from him in time. For time is a kind of river, it is said.
Which, to some, might well raise the question of where one goes when that river is crossed. Maybe time, if we could apprehend it, is nothing even like a river.
And perhaps Mind is not something we think with our brains that we possess and somehow are, and yet can lose in moments of calamity like a hat, but rather something both within us and beyond us, ever open to discovery … like a dark and shining territory … fertile, haunted, and filled with possibilities. Of all kinds. Of all kinds. The young dumbstruck officer kept crawling—hearing again those silent words: Real enough, Lieutenant. Real enough.
CHAPTER 1
Time of the End
WHERE DOES THE TIME GO? THE YEAR IS 1844. KARL MARX IS IN Paris playing indoor tennis with Friedrich Engels, who has just authored The Condition of the Working Class in England. In Iceland the last pair of great auks have been killed, while in the booming and embattled United States the first minstrel shows are packing in crowds in the East, as former slaves Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass lecture on abolitionism, and hosts of eastern white folk are packing up and heading west via the Oregon and Santa Fe Trails. War looms with Mexico, the lunatic bankrupt Charles Goodyear will receive a meaningless patent for the vulcanization of rubber, the shrewd bigot Samuel Finley Breese Morse takes credit for inventing the telegraph, and a deluded mob murders the deluded visionary Joseph Smith, Jr., and his brother Hyrum in a jail in Carthage, Illinois. Many people are asking themselves, “What hath God wrought?”
One such individual in Zanesville, Ohio, was just straggling out of a peculiar iron sphere, about the size of three B & O hopper cars, which sat balanced in a cradle of railroad ties ringed at a distance of ten feet by