EYE OF THE STORM

Don Tumasonis

We remember. We forget.
The older you are become, the harder it is to distinguish
the nature of past experience, to separate reality from dreams.
With years, the two modes blend in a way that almost requires
dedicated research to sort out what really was resting at the
basis of memory. If you ever manage at all.
One thing I do remember, that I am absolutely certain of,
was the power of my memory when I was young-young being
those first few years of childhood, when impressions are
strongest, when mentation has begun churning its powerful
wheels, and with self already formed, attention fastens on each
and every object of the whirlwinds of sensation that mediate
between us and existence.
Until I was seven or eight, I could have told with fair
detail the events of any day of the prior two years-who had
said what in school, what lessons our teacher had assigned,
who fell out of which tree and broke what arm-to the day,
almost to the hour.
I think all children share this ability to greater or lesser
degree, and lose it when they find that no one cares very
much about the experiential treasures they had carefully
hoarded up, now and then pulling one out for display like
some small, bright colourful gem from the soft leather bag of

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remembrance. Once the realisation hits that their own unex-

ceptional histories, although unique, share a commonality that
renders them trivial for others, they forget. Or rather, they
lose the will to remember, and the square-cut, rawhide
drawstrings to the pouch of Memory dry and stiffen, and then
clench shut.

I grew up west of a city that liked to style itself 'America's

Binningham', basing the thin boast on weak likenesses in
nineteenth-century industrial prosperity. If ever that claim had
common currency, it was long ago relegated to the dustbin of
worn-out adages of everyone except the inhabitants of that
smug Upstate town, who for the most part had no real
conception of their putative English prototype. Jane Jacobs
helped things along, mentioning the conceit in one of her
books. Or maybe the conceit grew from the mention itself.
True, a tenuous analogy could be drawn: for at least a
few decades after the war; jobs were for the taking and
industry bubbled and bustled in a place that imagined itself
continuing the industrial revolution, the torch passed on from
Britain. The area seemed impervious to depression, inflation,
slumps, cracks-whatever happened outside, things chugged
along famously, probably due to the paternalistic habits of
local industrial magnates who, as one labour organiser put it,
'made feudal barons look like paladins of socialist liberality'.
The myth was strong enough to draw my parents there
from the shores of Lake Michigan, with me in tow, all of us
quite young.
I never really knew my father well, and because I easily
sensed the barrier that had been at one point erected between
us, never pushed the issue very far-the issue being who he

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was, and what he thought, and why he acted the ways he did.
The surface of the story was conventional, I suppose.
Tough streets, Chicago, migrant ghetto, brothers band to-
gether for self-protection, grow up poor, bright enough kid,
the Depression. Exam-based uptake for the Coast Guard-
gets one of two plum slots allotted monthly for Cook County
in the depths of the slump, when everyone wanted any job,
even military, or so the family folklore went.
He fed his Jack London fantasies, perhaps even Melville-
ian ones, for two years, with storms on Lake Michigan or
hunting down rumrunners on the Atlantic. And going ashore
with white lightning thrust upon him by relieved moonshiners
who wrongly thought, with their lights spotted from the sea
some dark Carolina coastal night, they were under arrest.
Had he wanted real adventure, he would have stuck it
out a few years more, when his ship, the Escanaba, went down
with all but two hands while on convoy duty in the North
Atlantic.
The job was not permanent, however, and with his two-
year contract up, and other eager aspirants snapping after the
longed-for berths, he went ashore, marrying his neighbour, my
mother, a waitress then who worked for a dollar a day.
They remained childless for ten years before I was born.
Only long after did I appreciate how my arrival had marked
an end to a chapter in their lives. Better said, an end to a style
of living, an attitude.
Their house was full of books, a haven in the intellectual
desert of other nearby titularly middle-class homes, all essent-
ially printless. Domestic book-buying pretty much stopped
when I came on the scene, so until I started plunking down
my hard-earned, or hard-filched dollar-whatever the case
may have been-the only new books making their entree into
the household were from the public library.
The books on loan were different than those on our

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shelves, something even I as child could see. \X'here postpartal

parental reading was either lightweight fiction or travel, or
handbooks of various sorts, the permanent and contrasting
home library was composed of meatier stuff. Classics in
abundance, literature, some criticism, books on opera, even
musical scores. Were a sociologist to furtively examine the
place for evidence of class standing, for educational back-
ground, those books would have led him to think the level
much higher than it was.
The gilt spines weren't just for show-I had a fair idea,
from maternal bits and conversational snippets over time, that
the difficult books had been read, sometimes several times, by
my father.
Neither one was willing to explain why the content had
levelled off, then plummeted to the nadir of Reader's Digest
books and worse.

I pried. I did my very best to find out the wfD, but got no
answer. \X'henever I questioned my father, he would retreat
into Eisenhowerian noncommittality, or if directly confronted,
just stolidly say he 'didn't know'. Sometimes he would follow
that last phrase with 'what you're talking about'. I was certain
this was feigned ignorance. After a while, I figured out that no
answer, at least from his lips, would ever be forthcoming.
It was the habit of my family in those distant, newly
prosperous post-war years, with every family its car, to go out
for a Sunday drive. I think then Americans still saw driving a
car-never mind its already being some two-ton monster
heavy in steel and chrome-as an extension of bicycle trips of
their own youth to distant countryside. With the sole
difference that instead of man under his own power taking
himself and the machine along, this time the machine took the
man and itself for a ride, until it wound up owning the people.

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For as far back as I can remember, I, and then my sib-

lings in their turn, were forced to this ritual of being trundled
out to the '47 Ford, the two successive Studebakers, followed
by the Dodge, and then a Ford again, until individually we
became old enough to dig our heels in. I dug mine in early,
which is what the rest of this is about.
Itineraries consisted of different back road routes to the
west, or sometimes south, of where we lived. Those areas
were mostly rural then, almost exclusively so. My father would
vary the plan, since repetition was probably just as boring for
him and my mother as it was for myself.
The trips would normally take an hour or two, with a
break of some sort halfway, as a sop to the easily-bored
children. Unless perks of various kinds were included, we
would have made the trips unbearable for our parents. The
stops might involve watching canal locks operate as pleasure
craft drifted through, punctuated by the occasional barge, or
our halting by some landmark to read its history on a sign set
up by the state. It helped if there was an added enticement,
usually involving a treat, often in the form of ice-cream.
Bribes like these were about the only way to pacify the
small monsters I suppose we were. On the other hand, driving
for its own sake ...
Unusual landscape features ameliorated the boredom.
Our township, sited just south of one of the Great Lakes, was
notably flat and uninteresting from a topographic view. A few
tens of miles to the south west was a terrain more corrugated
and wooded than Limousin. But our lacustrine flats were
notably devoid of variations in altitude. Therefore any hill of
size-which in that area mostly meant various glacial deposits
left behind in odd forms with odder names after the melting
of the Ice: drumlins, eskers, and the like-was approached
with more than routine interest and respect by we children. A
glide down a long steep slope, gears in neutral, was almost

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worth in equivalent terms the ice-cream cone that awaited at

the bottom.
So then: hills, car rides, ice-cream, short childhood
attention spans.

My parents never spent a day apart from each other, unless

visiting relatives, as far as I know, for the length of their long
married lives together. Except for one time.
That must have been when I was about five or so. One
day, my mother left us to spend a long weekend in Manhattan,
hundreds of miles away, with a friend, another married
woman whose husband was my father's boss. I was devast-
ated. I had no idea, with my child's sensibility, that mothers
were ever allowed to leave their responsibilities in that fashion.
I dreaded the eternity of a weekend that faced me, alone with
my father.
He, to give him his due, did what he could to keep me
happy. I had no siblings then, and was spoiled as a result.
However, when my father proposed the usual Sunday tour, I
was somehow more reluctant than usual to go. The trips were
bad enough themselves; to take one with a truncated family
was unthinkable. In the end, the realisation that the journey
would be made regardless of what I wanted or thought, had
me acquiesce-no force was necessary, since I knew that to
protest would be useless.
I remember nothing of that trip itself. What I mentioned
previously concerning the comprehensiveness of the child's
mind for events remains true. It is merely that the incons-
equential is gradually edited out, with only the significant
remaining. Then that too, fades.
I retain one main impression of the place of our arrival, a

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tableau or mental diorama laired in the brain like some

stealthy beast. Around that neural construct are a number of
details, perhaps encrustations since accrued, or pictures made
up to explain to myself partway, the nature of what I had
seen.
What I remember is this: a high, broad hilltop, and a
darkened sky. No view out, however, since we are parked in
the middle of tall and weathered farm buildings which, but for
the openings afforded by the road going through them, make
an enclosure, a sort of greensward plaza, walls three storeys
high. A large black oak-from its enormous size, hundreds of
years old-in the centre of things. The paved road runs
around both sides of it.
We are out of the car, and the sky is going black.
Although no rain has yet fallen, you can feel its inevitability in
the air. The atmosphere is pregnant with water's potential to
fill all space, where the air is only an intruder. The waiting for
the fall of drops, that never come, is like the blindfold second
before the executioner's axe. We are waiting, in other words,
for a change of state, not a process.
My father is standing next to the Ford, with myself at his
side. When we, on our other rides, had stopped by some farm,
it was always to see the animals. Sometimes a friendly farmer
would bring some over for us to pet and admire. There is no
friendly farmer, however, in this.
There is a woman. She is tall and thin and supple, the
opposite of my mother, and is wearing a long black dress with
full sleeves. Her eyes are green, with purple flecks-they seem
to glow. She talks to my father, smiling, as the wind whips the
dust from the road. There are no animals about. The buildings
are in disrepair, the unpainted wooden sidings almost black
with vertical age.
They each hold a glass in their hands. I remember
clinging to my father's wide pant leg, tugging, pleading to go

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home. I know something is horribly wrong. The woman's hair

is a dark auburn red. The two converse on, smiling all the
more, and I am dreadfully ignored.
And then I am taken away by two women, who were
perhaps the sisters of my father's companion. They are each
tall, like her, and dark. They have no scent at all, and they are
neither beautiful nor ugly. I did not cry, knowing the
hopelessness of what was to come. I was being taken away, to
avoid my disturbance of the ongoing-conversation. I have no
memory whatsoever of crossing a threshold, or being inside,
or of doing anything, or of anything done to me.
Despairing of myself, I see behind me the woman and
my father, tiny figures on the green, standing closely together.
The air is thick, like treacle; it is no longer air: unbreathable.
There is a strange, sharp, familiar, but unidentifiable smell, an
ambient taint. It is not from the sisters. It is the one thing I
can recall from that moment. Nothing more remains.

I was later in the military, the army, and had come home on
leave. It was wartime, we were making friends for democracy
in south east Asia, and I was part of the machine.
My brother, who was away to college with a deferment,
had recently bought a ten-speed bike, which he left behind at
home during studies. With two weeks on my hands, about to
ship overseas, and my old circle of friends dispersed by war,
time and chance, I needed something to do. I was fit, so I
took to roaming the countryside on two wheels. With
increased suburban development, much had changed, even
during the few years I had been away.
It was sometimes hard to determine where I had cycled:
whole forests had been scythed down; streams had disappeared,

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diverted to culverts and hidden in pipes; wide ponds where

the red-epauletted blackbirds had sung were now parking lots
for shopping malls. Generally, I was able to reconstitute my
former impressions of the land, mentally placing the new
impositions like some transparent overlay upon a palimpsest,
whose fundament, with so much change wrought, was at
times unrecognisable.
I didn't care-it was enough to be away, and not know-
ing where I was, was then unimportant.
On one long trip, I found myself out in the country, on
unfamiliar ground. A wide-fronted storm was coming up, and
the whole of the air was darkening. Lightning flashes started
to bum across the sky in so many places, so frequently, that
more than once I was looking directly at the branched fire as
it tore the heavens in front of me. I was unsure of precisely
where I was, having been a bit inattentive, mind wandering as
I pedalled, daydreaming.
I was in the open, on a gravelled lane, no house in sight,
with fields of grain and wire metal fences hemming me in-
surely no place to be in the middle of an electrical storm, but
there was nowhere to hide. So I kept cycling, in the vague
hope that I would soon enough find shelter.
When the rain came, it hit so hard, it stung. It blew
almost horizontally; I have never been in a downpour more
violent, with the lightning crashing around me, with little or
no interval between the bright flashes of light, and the
heart-shaking explosions, initiated by sounds like huge sheets
of canvas miles wide being ripped apart. Flash, rip, and blast
were virtually simultaneous.
To be honest, I was very frightened, unprotected as I
was. However, there came eventually a point, wind blowing
through me and a downpour so dense I could hardly see the
road, when I became resigned and fatalistic. Giving myself
over to whatever was about to happen, I got off the bike, on

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which it was impossible to stay upright, and began to trundle

it along the road, drops stinging, beating upon me. There was
nothing else to be done. I looked down, to avoid being hit in
the eyes by the bullet-like rain that struck almost like hail,
thrown by the strongest of winds.
There was a slight upward slope to the track that I barely
noticed, struggling to stay upright in the gusts that hit me like
successive waves, almost pushing me over. It was like standing
in heavy surf, bracing for the next thump, the next wall of
water.
I have no idea how long this kept up-it could have
been a few minutes; it could have been a quarter of an hour
- I lost my sense of time. I only concentrated on moving
forward, tensing my muscles uselessly against the dreaded
purple flash, the final shock, which I wouldn't even see
coming.
And then, as suddenly as it had begun, the rain stopped.
The wind lessened, and then quickly died down to a soft
breeze, to almost nothing. Sodden and shattered, I saw up to
the grey sky above; a few sunbeams were already shining
through the clouds. The one black wall of the storm was
moving rapidly away; I was in the clear, elated at having
survived.
Looking around, I saw that the way, with its wet and
gleaming surface of crushed stone, went up an isolated hill,
one quite high for those parts. I decided to ascend it, the
storm being over, rather than try to retrace my route, of
which I was now unsure.
The grade was steep to the degree that I made no
attempt to pedal up the tall mound, choosing instead to
continue rolling my brother's ten-gear alongside me. There
was a chance that on reaching the top, I would be able to
orient myself by finding some familiar and distant landmark,

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enabling me to regain known territory without too much

bashing about on muddy backcountry tracks.
Small tan rivulets drained downwards over my feet as I
trudged uphill. Everything was shining, glistening. Once I
reached the top, a flat broad place, maybe an acre or two in
all, I stopped.
The view was large and encompassing. Wherever I was,
the nearby landscape had retained much of its original form
and appearance. Aside from one or two cuts for the few roads
visible, and two or three distant farms, you could have thought,
excepting the power lines, that the panorama was not too far
removed from what it had been a hundred years before.
Forested, golden fields, bucolic, ideal.
The summit was not much more than grass, barring a
large charred tree-stump of enormous girth, occupying the
dead centre of the hilltop. The tall wreck clearly had been hit
by lightning on many occasions; it was hard to guess what it
was, but given the diameter of the trunk, I would say oak.
There were not many of these big monsters left in our part of
the state, and in fact, I had only seen one other that matched
these dimensions before, tucked away in a small glade in an
obscure corner of a trackless state park. For some reason, the
pioneer ethic was inimical to letting these trees stand.
One rarity less, then, with squirrel's somewhat ill-
considered acorn placement, after several centuries, finally run
out of luck in the evolutionary draw.
While considering the loss of the tree to posterity, I idly
glanced around, a cool breeze still blowing, the skies still
mostly grey. I noticed that the track divided around the tree,
rejoining once past it, then continuing straight on. On either
side of where I stood, at some distance off, were low
hummocks or berms, some of them regular enough to suggest
foundations of former structures. Leaving the bicycle upright

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on its stand, I started over to investigate, when I felt my

hackles rise of their own accord.
It didn't take a second more before the wind slapped me
hard from behind, almost hard enough to throw me off my
feet. Rain hit, at least as solid and penetrating as before. The
gusts slammed me repeatedly as I half-stumbled, half-ran back
to the bicycle, knocked over by the winds. Without thinking at
all, I pushed the thing as fast as I could past the wreck of the
tree, seeing lightning flare again, moving up on me.
If I had a single thought, it was to get off that hill as fast
as physically possible. When you're threatened, at risk, the
mind kicks into high gear, and things seem to slow down
around you. I had in an instant seen and analysed the
situation, and was now taking evasive action. The way I had
come would be murder--out in the open, exposed, sticking
out from the flat.
The hilltop was of course unthinkable, the highest point
around. But I had seen a large stand of trees-a small
wood-at the bottom of the road beyond the hill, that might
provide some shelter, and metal or not, the bicycle was the
quickest means available, so I kept on it, in spite of the
obvious danger.
Just as I made it into the protecting woods, about a
quarter mile past the foot of the hill, tossing the wheels into a
ditch as I rushed for the cover of the trees, a deafening blast
that shook the ground like an earthquake struck, illuminating
everything around with blue and white, blinding. The lightning, I
was sure, had found the hilltop behind me not much over a
minute or two after I had left it.
I lay under a felled tree trunk, wet and muddy, until the
storm passed. Cold, drenched, I only ventured out when the
light had started to fail and the rain, although still falling, had
let up in intensity. I followed the unlit way that, after
branching several times, turned paved again, and after an hour

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or two during which I became truly lost in the dark, I finally

came onto a main road familiar to me. I was able to pedal
from there to home within the hour, as infrequent traffic
rushed past me.
Five days later I was in Los Angeles, ready to ship across
the Pacific.

I read a few weeks ago, a Gulf War veteran's interesting tale;

like each new generation of soldiers, he thought the post-
bellum alienation of his own group somehow unique. In fact,
a longer stay in gaol, in the arms of some fanatical religious
cult, or living under a totalitarian regime-any total institution,
of which the military is only one of many-leaves the victim with
a deep sense of Durkheirnian anomie.
It's not the mental damage from combat, or the de-
humanising process of submission to the will of indifferent
others that damages most, although all these help the process.
It's leaving the embrace of authority, the having to make one's
own decisions again, that is traumatic.
Being deprived of your conscience, legally, being given
the right to do things otherwise forbidden, even to kill, with
no responsibility attached is perversely liberating. The myth of
the incarcerated is that freedom is found outside. What is not
thought of, or even mentioned, is that there is no freedom
without the forced and onerous daily weight of choosing
greater or lesser evil.
So I was, those days after being demobbed, cut loose, left
suddenly to fend for myself, to decide between right and
wrong. Part of the legion of the lost who wandered, with their
increasing numbers, the streets of the city near where I grew

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up, I at times considered suicide. Such thoughts were not

uncommon amongst my peers.
You could see them everywhere-in the shops, in the
university, in bars and pubs, sitting dully on park benches, or
shuffling about listlessly, only infrequently striding with some
obscure purpose.
Common to all, other than the aimlessness coming from
the enormous burden of having to make choices, was the
wearing of some part of a uniform, be it field jacket, fatigue
shirt, or any of the odds and ends of military attire, excepting
hat or formal costume. This has probably been going on ever
since there have been armies, before any Freiko,ps looting the
backlands, before puffed silk, slashed sleeve. The remnants,
the used-up, the broken. Men, and the scraps of cloth that
once distinguished them.
It was while wearing a faded-green field shirt, badges of
rank still sewn on, that I met a young woman whom I will call
Kate. She was the receptionist and secretary of the school
from which I had graduated. Like some dog snuffling over- its
own vomit, I was revisiting former haunts, trying to pick up
loose threads, attempting to rebuild continuity. It is common
enough.
She sat at the glass-caged switchboard as I walked in. I
explained I was looking for former teachers. I didn't say I was
trying to find myself again.
These days, with office revenge and school shootings, I
would be treated as suspect from the start, especially with long
hair, unclipped for a year (another then-common post-military
response to civilian life), and the rags and tags of uniform I
wore on me. Then, however, requests like mine were classed
as usual and innocuous.
It soon became clear that most of my former teachers,
any I had felt close to, who might perhaps be able to explain
to me what I had been through, were gone over to other

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schools, moved away, or retired. That left a residue of those

to whom I was indifferent, as they were no doubt toward me.
Trying to decide what to do, feeling foolish at not having
found any real reason to contact any of the staff remaining, I
chatted idly with the woman. She had on an exceptionally
short mini-skirt that must have driven the womanless boys at
the all-male institution to distraction. Her smooth pale legs
were long and exposed, and I, thinking how they would glow
in the dark, could not help lingering, in order to glance again
at their white length whenever our little conversation was
interrupted by the telephone calls she answered.
I found myself attracted by her long chestnut hair, by her
quick comments and smart responses to my inanities. She was
tall-almost my height-slimly built, about my age, and better
still, she shared a certain commonality of attitude with me. We
both mocked the world in the same way, it seemed. I liked
her. There was, I thought, some sign of reciprocity in her eyes.
It was not long before I proposed an evening out, which, to my
surprise, she accepted.
The rendezvous turned out much better than I thought it
would, eventually with our going back to her flat for coffee,
which turned to sex. The last took some effort, in spite of
clear mutual interest. Kate was very quirky as an individual;
that quirkiness extended to her physicality, and to her habits.
She pleaded involvement with a boyfriend, all the while both
responding and initiating actions that each took us one level
deeper, one move closer, to the inevitable.
What held her back was a foible, some odd routine
without which she could not achieve her climax. Not all men
would put up with it, she said, and drunk, with most
inhibitions gone, she told me what it was. Try me, I replied,
and with that, we were on our way to becoming, as they say
these days, a number.
What ensued, over the next year plus a bit, was a

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relationship that at the time seemed ordinary, but which, with

years of embou11,eoisement, I realise now might be considered
odd. Kate, who moonlighted as a piano teacher, was loathe to
give up completely her attachment to the man she had been
with before I first met her. I saw no reason not to go along;
my attitude was that everyone lives the life they want to live,
and I could take it or leave it. The experiences in the bedroom
were exciting, almost sensational, so I took it.
That meant that I had nights off while Kate was with
Oliver, and Oliver had nights off when I was with Kate. Of
course, Kate had no nights off---or if she did, it was with
someone else unknown to Oliver or myself. It was incon-
ceivable that she would spend these alone. She was highly
imbued with her immediate urges, you see. 'When in college,
she would bring herself to satisfaction during the middle of
lectures by the mere rubbing of her legs together, whenever
she felt like doing it. That was merely one of a long catalogue
of abnormal practices she had tried.
She was capable of acting at any time, on the spur of the
moment, in outrageous fashion. Once, not too long after we
had begun, she, caught short by a momentary lack of funds,
paid the television repairman in natura, in kind. She said to
him, How embarrassing, she suddenly realised she had no
money-would he consider something else? After, I decided,
she must have known she had no money, before she had
ordered his services.
Our weekends together-she spent more of these with
me than with Oliver--consisted of visiting hypermalls on
Saturdays, then going up to her flat of the season-she was
always moving house-at late afternoon. Thereafter, a blur of
sex that would extend over the evening to the next afternoon,
punctuated only by the reading of the Sunday Times and the
Daify News, cigarettes, and the occasional improvised breakfast.
Otherwise, it was fingers into orifices, mouths around organs,

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licking, fucking, sleeping, then waking up in the middle of the

night or morning, groping, drawing the uncomplaining other
to oneself, and fucking once more. It was Say's Law all over
again.
Sometimes, we would go out for long drives. It wasn't
any death of desire; although at the burning point, the sex did
not consume itself and everything around. Rather, it only
increased the need for more. That more over time became
other activity, other things shared beyond the flesh. This came
gradually, since I had told myself from the start that I wanted
nothing other than those nights and days in bed together. Her
partly staying on with Oliver had pretty much comprised a
reciprocal statement about the nature of our relationship, and
so, unwilling to expose too much of myself, afraid of
vulnerability, I led a separate life of my own, something I
could fall back on, in case.
As we went on, this changed, as it naturally would, the
predictability not obvious only to someone like myself, iced
from the world by military years. Oliver began fading from
the picture, aside from the times Kate was bored with me, and
needed change. She began integrating me more into her life, as
I began to accommodate her into mine.
I worked at night, and went to university days. I slept
wherever and whenever I could, something learned in the
army. Kate and I, at first restricted by loyalty to our schedules,
later began to meet during the week, whenever a few minutes
were available. She would meet me at home, where I lived
with my parents. I might have had three or four hours of
sleep when she came by in the mornings. After quick sex, she
would drive me to university. I would attend lectures, then
sleep a couple of more hours before starting on the night
shift. Sometimes, if her job permitted, she met me between
classes, at the school's ivied library, a huge deserted pile
modelled after the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. There we

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would have sex standing up in some comer of the library

stacks, her back against the metal shelves.
In spite of this ever-intensifying union of the flesh, we
were very different. Kate loved language games, playing with
the sounds and structures of daily speech. For me, language
had a sacred immutability; to violate that was to invite chaos
in. She would fascinatedly warp words in a way that I
considered blasphemous, although her phonetic twists made
me laugh. She would take a familiar word or saying apart, per-
verting its sounds or meaning for the fun of it. It was as if
everything around her, the very stuff of existence, had a dis-
turbing fluidity, with nothing solid and no set boundaries. As I
said, we had a couple of laughs, but the unlawful permut-
ations made me vaguely uncomfortable.
After spending ever more time with her, I saw that the
passion she brimmed with was not sexual; this energy was
something generalised she could not contain. Every sphere of
life was an arena for giving it full play. Any situation, a venue.
Any excuse, an opportunity.
She would dare anything; it had cost her more than one
job, she told me, as we unreeled our lives' histories, bodies
melted together some night, a fly in the bedroom's stuffy
summer air, the smoke from our cigarettes doing nothing to
keep it away, attracted by the drying effluvia of our momen-
tarily faded lust.
How her passion or energy would take form was unpred-
ictable. It was like a dark black liquid under pressure in a
bucket, a closed container. It would often vent through that big
rent called sex. Other times, blocked there, it would find other
outlets. Sometimes, it was violent. I knew that she had been in
fights, and beaten at least two women badly before I had met
her.
Something small, an offhand word, say, by some in-
nocent and uncomprehending waitress, would have her burst

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 Eye of the S form

in belligerence at the presumed slight, to where I would drag

her out of a restaurant for fear of the mayhem that could
ensue. We might be in a bar, and thinking one of us was being
imposed upon, she would intimidate and perhaps even
frighten tough men by her stare alone.
Once, as I rode with her, another driver triggered Kate's
rage, and there was an accident. It was really her fault, but we
got away with it on technicalities. None of us was injured, but
I wondered how much of the incident was really accidental.
And she tried to kill me once, but I won't go into that,
only saying that we were having a discussion, no more nor less
heated than some we had had before, when she went over the
cusp, and exploding, nearly, literally, took my head off.

Having explored the other's body so thoroughly, and

afraid, perhaps, of probing psyches too deeply, we for dis-
traction's sake took to exploring the countryside-or what
was left of it, instead.
At my instigation, we would visit the Finger Lakes, the
hills above them, the gorge of the Genesee, out of state, other
places. With much of the landscape of my childhood
irreparably destroyed during my absence, we would have to go
farther afield to see some greenery not smothered by concrete
or building projects. I was trying to find something, I'm not
sure what, although I'm surer now than I was then.
Part of enlivening the routine, since I hated driving for
its own sake, was to stop in small places whenever we saw an
old cemetery. We would search out the older graves, a morbid
habit I had first acquired while in the military, out of curiosity
and boredom.
In the old days it was quite common in our rural district
for farm families to have small private burial grounds, away
from any church, enclosed by fences of pickets or wrought
iron. There would be perhaps a lone tree, or maybe two, in

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 Strange Tales

the middle of these graveyards, that were typically sited on a

mound or low spur, away from the roads, in the middle of
fields still cultivated-or more likely-falling into decrepitude.
If they were far enough away from any houses, we would
get out and take a look, see what the inscriptions had to say.
Most were of the usual 'Behold this place as you pass by ...
etc.' variety. Much more poignant, and even soul-shaking were
the early deaths engraved, of young women, children, babes
-sad traces of an era with mortality a daily and familiar
visitant.
On one of these trips we became lost. Kate was never a
great believer in cartography, since she was absolutely without
map sense. This astounded me, but I accepted it, since I in
tum was unable to read the music she would play on sight,
when, if particularly moved by some bout of inspiring sex
gone just right, she would rush down, still nude, to her piano
and pound out whatever sheet music there was resting on the
rack above the keyboard. Transcribed concerti, usually. Broken
tensions were likely to express themselves in this way.
Not having consulted any map, and not having partic-
ularly cared, she had us out somewhere between strip malls
and long rows of tacky businesses, of the type that have
become all too common along our highways. It was against
her sense of honour, however, to stop and ask somebody
where we were. That would be an admission of defeat; to
press her on it could be unpleasant.
I gave myself over, and rather than quarrel-there had
been a lot of that lately-I took the coward's way, and rested
my head in her lap while she steered. It was a habit of ours
that sometime led to sex in different forms, while she drove.
Other times it was innocent.
The day was warm, and with my head cushioned on her
thighs, very willing to let her sort it out on her own, I dozed.
\X-'hen I awoke, the car had stopped, and the motor was off.

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Sitting up, I saw that we were out in the countryside, on a dirt

road that ended in the middle of ripe fields that stretched over
rolling terrain around us. There were woods here and there, a
few hedgerows, and behind the rise below which we were
parked, a small cemetery of the type I have described, but
without trees. In back of it was a large high hill.
'I took us here', Kate said, which I interpreted as her
euphemism for our being still lost.
We got out of the car, and headed through pathless
uncut wheat waist high, over to the graves. The fence around
them had in the main fallen down, so entrance to the precinct
was without obstacle. Little could be read off the markers-
the elements had erased almost everything except the largest
letters-the family names. A few of these were still barely
legible: I seem to remember Chester, Philips, Fielding, and
perhaps Stanhope--good English names, from before the
Irish invasion that came with the Erie Canal.
The afternoon was magnificent, with a deep near-
cerulean sky, cloudless, that contrasted with the golden stalks
of late summer grain in a way reminiscent of painterly wheat
fields at Ades. There was no sign of any building nearby, no
power or telephone lines cluttering the landscape. Merely
stillness, the wide cultivated swathes with stands of woods
chequered here and there between, and the hill ahead of us.
'Let's go up there,' I said, 'look around'.
It took a few minutes for us to reach the broad top of
the place, since there was no road or path. The flat summit
was wholly covered by tall grasses that rippled like waves
under the breath of the softly pulsing breeze. We could see
for miles around; other than the road where the car stood
parked, there was no other trace of civilisation visible, apart
from the fields and the patterns they made. It was as if the
hand of man, and all the inanity of modem life had been
wiped away, only the clean slate left behind.

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 S !range Tales

It wasn't long before Kate broke the silence, with some

typical mocking crack that breached the meditative mood. She
was not up to much when it came to the non-manufactured
aspects of existence. Material girl, she had once turned up her
snub nose at my daydream of migrating to Arcadian Tasmania.
Chagrined, I moved away, physical apartness meant to
send a message, a reading of my interior state. Walking about,
with my back to her, I nearly stumbled over something large,
at the middle of the hilltop. It was the charred stump, almost
level with the ground, of a large tree trunk, hidden by the
grass.
It took time for this to register, with my thoughts
clouded by dull ire at Kate's irreverent remark. I found myself
looking slowly up, examining now for a second time, the
features in the distance around us, a vague suspicion, hard to
formulate, like some forgotten word or name, beginning
gradually to take shape in my mind.
It was there, and I almost had it, when Kate called to me.
'Tom.'
I turned reluctantly, knowing that whatever she would say
would break the mood, the concentration, and that whatever I
was about to remember would slip away irretrievably gone,
vanished.
She stood further away closer to the edge of the hilltop.
She was, of course, naked. I had never seen her before like
this, body exposed to the harsh unforgiving glare of the sun.
She had both hands slightly out, as if wordlessly implor-
ing. Her clothing was neatly stacked in a small pile, glasses on
top. As the wind gusted, her long hair, brown with russet
undertones, whisped weightlessly, floating, swirling as if
underwater. I saw that her pale small breasts, the one slightly
larger than the other, were covered with goose-flesh that
could hardly have come from cold.

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 Eye of the Sform

So I joined her, on top of a flat hot rock, and we did

things, the way they must be done.
After, I stood, dusting myself off. Kate, never one for
ceremony, always ready to shock with her directness, squatted
where we had made love, bare feet on the warm stone slab,
and pissed upon it, whistling tunelessly while staring up at me,
challenging.
I said nothing when she arose and began putting on her
clothes. I was instead looking down at the stone, where the
wetness, still steaming, had revealed chiselled letters.
FULGUM CONICIDENT is what was written, the words so
odd, I committed them to memory.

I suppose I should now make one or two observations just, let

us say, for the sake of argument.
When my father died, many years after all these events, I
helped out by going through his papers. There was a long
shallow drawer of his dresser in which he kept odds and ends,
the sort of things like sports medals, military insignia, foreign
coins, diplomas or citations, the different mementoes of the
small events and periods that mark our lives. Most men have a
box or compartment to hold such junk.
Sorting through it to see if there was anything the
siblings or my mother might want to keep, I soon enough had
emptied the contents. Removing the yellowed liner, obviously
unchanged for decades, I found underneath a small scrap of
paper, folded in on itself. Opening it, I saw pencilled in my
father's neat hand, only this: FULGUR = lightning.
I would have liked to have said that together with it was
a photographic print, in black and white. With my parents
standing together, smiling, at some gathering or picnic, in the

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 Strange Tales

middle of a crowd of people. In back, to their left side, a

group of several slim women with long hair, standing sidewise
to the lens. Their faces, because of the distance, out of focus,
and they are all tall, wearing black dresses. It would have made
things so much easier. But there was no print.
I then discreetly posed a few questions to my mother, of
the sort that would never have hinted to her what was in back
of the asking. Not much in the way of enlightenment was
forthcoming. Worse, with my mention in passing of our '47
black Ford, my mother just looked up in surprise and said 'but
Thomas-we've never owned a '47 black Ford'. We went
down the list then, of all family autos owned. Her recall was
perfect, except for that one detail; she insisted that we had a
Chrysler then, and that it was grey.

Kate had dressed, as had I, and we stood silently in the long

grass. Some high thin clouds were forming in the west.
I tried then, inarticulately, to explain what I thought
about the landscape around us, the countryside I saw spread
out beneath, about the changes taking place, about the feeling
that something irreplaceable was gone, that something new was
emerging in its turn, something I wasn't sure I liked, but I
failed. Some piece was missing. Only incoherent words from
me, about finding somewhere that maybe didn't exist. She was
sympathetic, but uncomprehending. There was no way to
explain to her.
She tried, though, to understand, and stroking my hand, a
look of concern in her brown eyes, she said, 'Don't worry-if
you really want something hard enough, if you look enough
for it, you'll find it'.

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 Eye of the Sform

She was right.

I never did find the one place.
I left her, and looked for somebody else.

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