fly true.”
The drizzle was making the driveway asphalt shine and gave a film-noirish intensity to our conference. The sun was a golden smear in a coarse gray sky washed by blue stripes of watercolor. As I made feeble motions toward helping Gloria with the leaves, John set about dressing, first in the large green-and-brown mock-arboreal pants, then a jacket, and last an olive wool hat stiffened in front like the cap of a Swiss yodeler. You would think he would have looked absurd, a walking tree, but in truth he looked distinguished, younger than his years—a gentlemanly shaman off to blend with the forest.
The light failed within an hour. Back in bed, I must have been napping when his truck drove off loudly into the darkness. As she set my dinner on a tray before me, Gloria moved with an abstracted grace, smiling to herself.
“Did he get a deer?” I asked.
“Of course not, not so soon. Not immediately. But he said he’ll be back in a few days. He’ll bring a fawn blat.”
“A fawn what?”
“Blat, apparently. It imitates the sound a fawn makes, so the mother comes.”
“My God, how cruel. This is the cruellest guy I’ve ever met, and you seem to think he’s great.”
“I don’t think that.” Yet the inward-directed smile could not be erased from her tense cheeks, the tucked corners of her lips. “He’s hopeful. He says that the signs are good.”
“Signs.”
“You know, darling. Signs. Intimations. He feels things.”
“And I don’t, huh?”
“Oh, Ben, you do, but everything you feel has to do with yourself. John feels things about others.”
Where are the stars? The ancient legends describe the sky as full of stars, congregations of bright points that to unsophisticated eyes took on the forms of gods and godlike creatures—a centaur, a dragon, a bear, a whale. Our ancestors watched their sheep by starlight, and mariners steered their fragile ships upon the teeming sea by stars they knew by name and faithful location. Now the night sky presents a hazy slate, whose faint points of light can be confused with the small coagulations that float in the vitreous humor within the eyeball. Scientific apparatus less subjective than human sight reports that there is still a universe of mass and momentum out there in the dark, behind the closed closet door, so to speak, and science, though reluctant to admit the dimness, or visual negligibility, of the stars relative to their reported presence in their past, has tried to produce theories as to why this should be so. A general muffling of signals has been proposed, due to a cosmic moment of stasis. The universe after twenty-five billion years of inflation has reached the point where the Big Bang’s initial momentum is exactly equal to the total amount of matter and, like a ball at the apogee of its toss, it is momentarily at rest, a pause reflected in a heavenly brownout before a future surge in the other direction. The bloated, feeble state of our sun—the muddy color of brick and so swollen its arc subtends a third of the horizon— would seem to offer confirmation. We have entered, on the cosmic scale, a dull, declining time.
Another proposal is that, through an unforeseen but perfectly well understood effect of quantum mechanics and its uncertainty principle, “virtual” particles, called into “being” with their anti-particles, for titanically small periods of time, are multiplying in the gravitational and electromagnetic fields that permeate “empty” space, exciting each other into existence in such numbers that space is becoming a semi-transparent gel, occluding protons from afar. The condition may be restricted to our galaxy, or the nearer portion of it. A third school of scientific thought holds simply that industrial pollution and the dust raised by the last war have thickened our planet’s atmosphere. But the war ended ten thousand revolutions of this planet ago, time for most dust to settle, and industrial production is still far from regaining pre-war levels. A fourth theory is that the ancients simply had better eyesight than we, or (a fifth theory) their astronomical descriptions were grossly exaggerated, to benefit the priestly hierarchy and its imbecilic royal puppets.
Coming back in the late-afternoon dark from a visit to the dazzlingly lit spaces of the Beverly Hospital (the doctors say I am doing fine: my impotence, incontinence, pain, paranoia, depression, and sense of dislocation are all on track in the normal course of healing), we picked up in our headlights, to one side of the driveway, a man disguised as