Then I am, and time begins, retroactive, is was and will be. Then I was and so I am not and so time never existed. It was like the instant of virginity, it was the instant of virginity: that condition, fact, that does not actually exist except during the instant you know you are losing it; it lasted as long as it did because I was too old, I waited too long; twenty-seven is too long to wait to get out of your system what you should have rid yourself of at fourteen or fifteen or maybe even younger—the messy wild hurried fumbling of two panting amateurs beneath the front steps or in an afternoon hayloft.
You remember: the precipice, the dark precipice; all mankind before you went over it and lived and all after you will but that means nothing to you because they cant tell you, forewarn you, what to do in order to survive. It’s the solitude, you see. You must do it in solitude and you can bear just so much solitude and still live, like electricity. And for this one or two seconds you will be absolutely alone: not before you were and not after you are not, because you are never alone then; in either case you are secure and companioned in a myriad and inextricable anonymity: in the one, dust from dust; in the other, seething worms to seething worms. But now you are going to be alone, you must, you know it, it must be, so be it; you herd the beast you have ridden all your life, the old familiar well-broken nag, up to the precipice—”
“There’s the damned horse,” McCord said. “I’ve been waiting for it. After ten minutes we sound like Bit and Spur. We dont talk, we moralise at each other like two circuit-riding parsons travelling the same country lane.”
“—Maybe you thought all the time that when the moment came you could rein back, save something, maybe not, the instant comes and you know you cannot, know you knew all the time you could not, and you cannot; you are one single abnegant affirmation, one single fluxive Yes out of the terror in which you surrender volition, hope, all—the darkness, the falling, the thunder of solitude, the shock, the death, the moment when, stopped physically by the ponderable clay, you yet feel all your life rush out of you into the pervading immemorial blind receptive matrix, the hot fluid blind foundation—grave-womb or womb-grave, it’s all one.
But you return; maybe you knew that all the time, but you return, maybe you even live out your three score and ten or whatever it is but forever afterward you will know that forever more you have lost some of it, that for that one second or two seconds you were present in space but not in time, that you are not the three score and ten they have credited you with and that you will have to discharge someday to make the books balance, but three score and nine and three hundred and sixty-four and twenty-three and fifty-eight—”
“Sweet Jesus,” McCord said. “Holy choriated cherubim. If I am ever unlucky enough to have a son, I’m going to take him to a nice clean whore-house myself on his tenth birthday.”
“So that’s what happened to me,” Wilbourne said. “I waited too long. What would have been two seconds at fourteen or fifteen was eight months at twenty-seven. I was in eclipse, and we almost scraped bottom on that snow-bound Wisconsin lake with nine dollars and twenty cents’ worth of food between us and starving. I beat that, I thought I did.
I believed I waked up in time and beat that; we came back here and I thought we were going great guns, until that night before Christmas when she told me about the store and I realised what we had got into, that the starving was nothing, it could have done nothing but kill us, while this was worse than death or division even: it was the mausoleum of love, it was the stinking catafalque of the dead corpse borne between the olfactoryless walking shapes of the immortal unsentient demanding ancient meat.” The loudspeaker spoke again; they made to rise at the same time; at the same moment the waiter materialised and McCord paid him. “So I am afraid,” Wilbourne said. “I wasn’t afraid then because I was in eclipse but I am awake now and I can be afraid now, thank God.
Because this Anno Domini 1938 has no place in it for love. They used money against me while I was asleep because I was vulnerable in money. Then I waked up and rectified the money and I thought I had beat Them until that night when I found out They had used respectability on me and that it was harder to beat than money. So I am vulnerable in neither money nor respectability now and so They will have to find something else to force us to conform to the pattern of human life which has now evolved to do without love—to conform, or die.”
They entered the train shed—the cavernous gloom in which the constant electricity which knew no day from night burned wanly on toward the iron winter dawn among wisps of steam, in which the long motionless line of darkened Pullmans seemed to stand knee-deep, bedded and fixed forever in concrete. They passed the soot-dulled steel walls, the serried cubicles filled with snoring, to the open vestibule. “So I am afraid. Because They are smart, shrewd, They will have to be; if They were to let us beat Them, it would be like unchecked murder and robbery. Of course we cant beat Them; we are doomed of course; that’s why I am afraid. And not for me: do you remember that night at the lake when you said I was an old woman being led across the street by a policeman or a boy scout, and that when the drunken car came it would not be the old lady, it would—”
“But why go to Utah in February to beat it? And if you cant beat it, why in hell go to Utah?”
“Because I—” Steam, air, hissed behind them in a long sigh; the porter appeared suddenly from nowhere as the waiter had done.
“All right, gentlemen,” he said. “We’re going.”
Wilbourne and McCord shook hands. “Maybe I’ll write you,” Wilbourne said. “Charlotte probably will, anyway. She’s a better gentleman than I am, too.” He stepped into the vestibule and turned, the porter behind him, his hand on the door knob, waiting; he and McCord looked at each other, the two speeches unspoken between them, each knowing they would not be spoken: I wont see you again and No. You wont see us again. “Because crows and sparrows get shot out of trees or drowned by floods or killed by hurricanes and fires, but not hawks.
And maybe I can be the consort of a falcon, even if I am a sparrow.” The train gathered itself, the first, the beginning of motion, departure came back car by car and passed under his feet. “And something I told myself up there at the lake,” he said. “That there is something in me she is not mistress to but mother. Well, I have gone a step farther.” The train moved, he leaned out, McCord moving too to keep pace with him. “That there is something in me you and she parented between you, that you are father of. Give me your blessing.”
“Take my curse,” McCord said.
Chapter VI Old Man
As the short convict had testified, the tall one, when he returned to the surface, still retained what the short one called the paddle. He clung to it, not instinctively against the time when he would be back inside the boat and would need it, because for a time he did not believe he would ever regain the skiff or anything else that would support him, but because he did not have time to think about turning it loose.
Things had moved too fast for him. He had not been warned, he had felt the first snatching tug of the current, he had seen the skiff begin to spin and his companion vanish violently upward like in a translation out of Isaiah, then he himself was in the water, struggling against the drag of the paddle which he did not know he still held each time he fought back to the surface and grasped at the spinning skiff which at one instant was ten feet away and the next poised above his head as though about to brain him, until at last he grasped the stern, the drag of his body becoming a rudder to the skiff, the two of them, man and boat and with the paddle perpendicular above them like a jackstaff, vanishing from the view of the short convict (who had vanished from that of the tall one with the same celerity though in a vertical direction) like a tableau snatched offstage intact with violent and incredible speed.
He was now in the channel of a slough, a bayou, in which until today no current had run probably since the old subterranean outrage which had created the country. There was plenty of current in it now though; from his trough behind the stern he seemed to see
