This is a process that has no limit, and yet when we try to follow it, we keep bumping our heads against something. Usually it’s a lantern, left behind probably by those who first explored this region of the universe, and then extinguished by time and a lack of fuel. By the same forces that turn us into raving lunatics if we weren’t already born that way. Or certain the alternatives are even worse. I roll my pants legs up and sit with my feet and calves in the hot water and almost immediately I am joined by a woman named Mary, a former grad student in Dennis’ department who has gone on to an Assistant professorship at the University of Houston and is, according to Dennis, in the midst of a vicious divorce, a woman who retreats to the things and the places she knows so as to have the courage to become someone altogether new. To throw off the past while wallowing in it at the same time, and in this she reminds me of myself if only because the cowardice of it seems so familiar. The swagger designed to obliterate something underneath, a child living in a hole in the ground, the water dropping continuously from the tree roots, from the places in the soil that are cold to the touch at first, and gritty, just the sort of thing to keep you from sleeping, until you get used to it, until you can’t imagine a day not spent in the company of centipedes and the creeping millimeters of frost. Around the edges you may expect to find certificates, blank piece of paper let fall from an open briefcase, a careless and as such, evenhanded redistribution of those things that differentiate one person from another, that mark one out as worthy of notice while dooming the other to senseless toil and long division. At the center, though, there are no more words to be placed on the paper, no more paper really to accept the words. All of it has disintegrated the way castles do when the state declines to refurbish them. Or when there are no individuals left with a taste for history. They have been shuttled out the back door with a promise of brandy or peanut brittle, to the accompaniment of a brass band. Mary spares no moments stripping down, removes her clothes as if they have been chafing her and invites me to do the same, to get down off the lip of the Jacuzzi and settle in, but my view of the pool and the woman in it, my original object of pointless observation and terrible longing, would be lessened by the oblique angle a position in the apparatus offers, and besides, I am beginning to realize I am not the man I think I am insofar as I thought I was any sort of man at all. As opposed to a visitor from another planet, say, or a mistake in generation. A thing that wasn’t meant to disintegrate immediately, but probably wasn’t meant to thrive either. Like a piece of soap. Or a creature of the sort one sees on occasion scurrying over the surface of a brick.

That night, after the drums and the cartoon characters, after the glass building glinting in the east, we wind up back at Dennis’ place. Bamboo lining the fence around the pool, the deck above the pool all shadow and sounds of footsteps, as if there are strangers milling about above our heads. Uninvited creatures from the same place that gives us manna and hymns, that promises recreation unlike anything we can imagine. Sometimes the numbers become so overwhelming, you must release some of them into the environment, no matter what the consequences. Sometimes the air is thick with counting. Suppose you were to notice your own face on the front of the head of someone else, were to see it from across the room and recognize it immediately? And suppose there were three options as to what you could do. The first is the same as the second inasmuch as it causes turmoil so permanent and unsettling, it isn’t really an option at all. Best to file it away in a place that is all but inaccessible, that is treacherous as the spine of a mountaintop and twice as picturesque. The third is that which presents itself as no option at all, really, either, but an inevitability. A fait accompli, like cavities in the teeth. Or desiring that which is desirable by definition. The young man and the woman in the white dress have followed us here as well, and they take to the pool almost immediately, the two of them in continued close proximity until they begin to remind me of some sort of aquatic mammal, something social and possessed of the instinct of pair bonding and, of course, keeping one’s head above the surface so as not to drown, and not to see too closely what is lurking underneath. The pool is lit, but barely, making the water a circus of shadows and I wander away from Dennis and Michelle and whoever else might still be discussing what the body does and does not know about itself and make my way to the Jacuzzi attached to the side of the pool so as to be able to watch the woman’s naked body (or more precisely the shadow of that body) move in the water some feet away, always interrupted by that of the young man careful to position himself between his prize and the gaze of others. Everything we see turns into its own justification. But by virtue of it being visible it also becomes tentative, a suggestion at best, an idea that gives way to others before it has been fully formed.

Settlements dot the side of the mountain, and every now and then one of them slides off. You can hear it at night but there’s nothing you can do. You’re still in your pajamas and they have butterflies on them. Maybe next time you will know how to react. You will turn the flashlight off and jump around corners so as to surprise anyone who might be waiting there to ambush you, to poke you in the eye with an umbrella. Not that this is a common occurrence, but you’ve read about situations such as these in the past, when you were waiting on a bus, or a friend who was supposed to bring donuts. Our patience runs thin whenever a cold wind is involved, whenever we suspect duplicity on the part of our superiors. But then time passes and we realize we have no superiors, that everyone was born with exactly the same number of chromosomes, give or take a few. Then the opposite shore suddenly gets crowded. It threatens to sink beneath the weight of all those people demanding a rope bridge or a ferry, something to allow them to cross and peddle their chickens on this side of the river. But suppose they were just phantoms too, that we dreamed them up so as not to be so lonesome over here where entire weeks go by without our laying eyes on a single soul. Maybe that would explain everything. Maybe it would keep us from being frightened when the door closes and the lights go out and we have untold hours to go before morning. At least it will make our superstitions crystal clear. It will allow them to be cataloged and sorted by men of science we import specifically for the job. And they don’t come cheap either! Some of them have grown used to travelling from one place to another on litters carried by volunteers, and some of them don’t wait for volunteers but just start pointing. They are the ones you have to keep an eye on because they seem to think they are entitled to everything you own. The quilts with pictures of Civil War battles on them. The hand iron that weighs at least ten pounds. And when they are satisfied they have grabbed up everything of value, they will toss you a nickel, if you’re lucky, the arc it describes in the air one they diagram with perfect ease before that nickel ever even manages to find the ground.

The pleasures remain speculative, and enormous. They swarm about the body like clouds of insects, though their attention is limited to those parts we rarely pay attention to ourselves. The joints, the place behind the ears that gets tender when the weather is changing or when someone is coming to visit. The doctor says there is nothing he can do about the future. He holds his hands out as if offering you money. The French accent takes you aback, but there is a moment when you try to hide this because it seems unkind. The sort of thing that makes people stick themselves with the open end of a paper clip, draw blood. At least so long as there is blood to be drawn, so long as it hasn’t dried up like ink in an antique inkstand. How many times will we undo the things that have been done to us by repeating them? By making them worse? And when will there be a solution that doesn’t rely on three parts peroxide and one part will with a capital W? How odd the Germans kept falling in love with the concept, kept trotting it out like a show pony, to explain everything that shouldn’t have an explanation. They found themselves enamored of the very thing that ought really to have sent them scurrying for the closest burlesque hall. It’s a tendency you find sometimes in grocery stores, the occasional spectral employee who watches you bag your own groceries or look for the most promising date on a gallon of milk from his place at the end of the aisle, his eyes glazed over from too much introspection, his skin turning yellow because of the cheap lighting or the imminent failure of his liver caused by too many nights spent trying to reason with people of his own invention over a bottle he did not create. I think sometimes we are haunted by memories of things that never actually happened to us, by events that transpired solely in the imagination, and this is, perhaps, ultimately what makes us human. It separates us from the bonobos inasmuch as their imagination is probably just something designed to make life more interesting. Something to keep them from getting bored in the trees. Of course, it’s possible they suffer from other things we can’t imagine, other faculties too simian in nature to communicate to the rest of the world. But why should this invalidate the original concept? Why should it even make us think twice about typing it up, disseminating it in a pamphlet? Or a mass email of the sort that advertises weight loss programs and promulgates the latest conspiracy theories about where the president was born?

Three sentences take the place of those thoughts that might string themselves out forever. Might double back and entwine themselves together in a helix of sorts, though the word makes it seem as though the order is more strict than it actually is. There are, of course, gaps and broken bits to contend with and when we behave as if such things don’t exist, we are guilty of a false sangfroid that makes us ultimately more vulnerable to viruses and other pieces of genetic material let loose on the environment by someone who imagines his place in the universe is secure. And he is jealous, to be sure, of his position because he knows deep down that he is no more guaranteed a place than are the rest of us. His credentials could be called into question at any moment. His funding could be pulled due to any slight violation of the initial agreement. The lettering, after all, is miniscule and it keeps changing its content mysteriously, as if someone has gone in secretly in the middle of the night and erased key passages and exchanged them for others, less comprehensible. But who would have the time or the means to accomplish such things? And who would have the motive? They are questions that occur briefly, in the morning, when the children are pretending they are birds and they make a sound simplified by their failure to observe the real thing more closely than is possible if they were simply to walk out the back French doors and keep going. Into the gardens the neighbors keep and the occasional copse of trees. And the roadways forking and re-forking from here to the horizon. Which is itself merely the visible part of another avenue, this one serving for the transportation of souls to and fro, their wispy boundaries fragile and apt to be damaged at the slightest touch. They can tear on pine needles, on the eaves of houses. They can dissolve in the chemical content of the rain that pelts them ceaselessly on some days, that weighs them down and makes it impossible to escape their fate. It washes all trace of the individual from them so that what you are left with is a simple concoction of enzymes and seed fibers, or the photonegative of same.

Elsewhere there are rumors that turn out to be true. But they start out as complete fabrications. The kind of thing that songwriters occupy themselves with when they are not writing songs. A quick check of the allusions reveals they all come from the same introductory textbook (and its accompanying workbook, with pen and ink illustrations and graphs with no corresponding numbers or explanations), something thrown together by otherwise serious publishers when they haven’t time anymore to oversee production themselves. They are too busy cutting the sides of the baitfish, carving away at the scales and wiping them from their fingers, the sunlight making rainbows in between the bits of blood and gore, of white flesh that, in different circumstances, might have been sufficient to make the bystanders hungry. To introduce them to the idea of perspective. And self-abnegation. But who has the stomach for such things when the wind is dying down and the mosquitoes congregate in great black clouds over the bay. The shapes they make suggest an understanding of geometry at some rudimentary level, something that informs the movement of the whole and yet escapes the grasp of the pieces. It can’t be otherwise or we’d risk losing credibility. We’d get lumped in with those who say they’ve seen angels hovering above the street. When pressed for a description, when asked to provide the single detail that exceeds the imagination, that could never conceivably be cooked up by the individual mind, even one with a close familiarity with Rilke, they make a strange ticking in the front of the mouth by placing the tip of the tongue against the teeth there and then breaking the suction. Perhaps this is a measure designed to change the subject. Perhaps it is a demonstration of the very thing they have been asked to provide. No one can be sure one way or another because those who asked the question originally don’t stick around for an answer. They congregate in the shade beneath a tree close by. And stare out toward the horizon as if they have come to believe the horizon is disappearing. It is tumbling like large swaths of prime, oceanfront real estate into the insatiable maw of the sea. Only there’s no water on the other side of this particular horizon. No empty space either. They come eventually to suspect, in fact, that words are simply unavailable for about half the things they see.

Trained by unsubtle groping beforehand, with girls who were trying on the role, he finds the place inside her jeans that welcomes him, that moves moist against his fingers with an urgency he has imagined previously, but only in the manner we imagine environments we can see from the front porch, but haven’t visited yet. Mountain tops or industrial centers along the length of a river, places where they are said to forge chemicals that might burn the skin, that might turn the less than wary into so much tattered flesh. Or lure them into vulnerable positions by a scent not unlike lavender, and yet that much more intense, something built on the blackboard initially, and perfected with calculators, with tubes of glass. She pulls him free of his own modesty and guides him in and the world takes on a strange angle. It is part speculation still, out of habit, and yet actual, a place where what has been promised does indeed come true, but the difference is not in orders of magnitude. The sensation is altogether unique now, a part of him aglow even if he can not see, and the sounds she makes are unexpected, the guttural complaint of something in pain, or sort of in pain and sort of something else, it’s hard to put a finger on. But it is not mere sensation he is left with. The mind is in the way and it remembers where it has been previously, how thoroughly it had been invited to participate and what an exceptional job it had done until now sorting and figuring, determining ahead of time what was real and what merely shadow allowed to pass for real until such time as something better came along. It stood at the streetlight and watched those it had reared from infancy try out their new legs. It watched as they shuttled back and forth across the street to where the grocer had his back turned and it was possible, so long as you didn’t make too much noise, so long as you didn’t trip over a broom, say, or start giggling hysterically at the thought of what it was you were doing, to snatch something off the rack at the front of the store. Clark bars. Or condoms. Apples with what looked like stubbled hair on their skins. And so they continued and continued and she made those sounds as if she had learned them first from a tape recording and was experimenting with variations, but not altogether confident in her ability to pull them off, and at some point Squid realized he wasn’t entirely sure what the goal was, how one knew when the whole thing was supposed to be over. Not that he lacked all knowledge of the biology involved, the production of certain heavy elements and their transfer from one place to another. It’s just that he couldn’t tell if that had happened yet. He didn’t know what such things were supposed to feel like.