Nowhere is Now Here   

19,929 wds              

Chapter 1         The Automobile Must Die

      One afternoon the artist who lived with his wife in one of the small houses at the end of Apricot Lane sold a work of art. It sold out of a graduate student show at the 1807 E Main St. gallery and was called a 'whimsical piece,' by one critic. 

There was general amazement that anything from this show sold; the opening was sparsely attended, the radio and newspaper ads and reviews were worse than usual and most of all, art critic, agent and gallery scout Vinton Hickson had recently paused in Rosehill to inspire numerous youthful if not young talents with work on hand to withhold it from the public eye at present so it might be better loved elsewhere, like New York. It was agreed, the quality of expression was low fhat night at 1807. To this must be added, if only to illustrate the accidental nature of art/business, that the artist who painted this lone canvas, Felix Bolling, was not then nor had he ever been a graduate student. His work was admitted to the show from a desperate need for enough art to cover the walls. 

Additionally, the canvas Felix Bolling hung in this show was his least favorite, not alone because it was purely representational. It was also overtly sexual and Felix was sexually conservative. Besides his wife, he had never had sex with anyone else he loved, his only other partner being a woman of professional standing in the sex trade. What he derived from this interaction was merely instructional. As for what the woman herself felt or thought? It might be assumed that for her to feel deeply for any particular customer would be an occupational hazard.  It could be necessary in her work to quickly forget clients, treating each one as no more than an exercise in fluid extraction. If she were to feel the high level of passion true lovers feel at each encounter she would be spreading her feelings very thin. Could any customer be more important to her than any one car of the millions rolling off an assembly line may be to the average assembly line worker? 

A man enjoyed the square of canvas Felix covered with paint enough to pay a large sum for it. To this buyer it was not large. He was used to dealing in such sums. An impulsive, middle-aged man with a heavy mustache and keen intelligence which, Felix noted immediately, he hid beneath a stream of irrelevant conversation, he invited Felix to come to his office and see the painting hung and at that time  said he would place in the artist's hand an enormous check. Of course the simple, unpainted lath edging around the stretcher would have to be replaced with a proper frame – enameled metal, chrome, would be best, matching the purpose and décor of the office as well as the theme of the piece. Felix agreed. For years he had a line ready in case he should sell a work of art.  Now he delivered it. 

“The work is no longer mine. It is no longer me." he said. " Now it is you.”

At this moment ~ a connection ~ the man looked at Felix and all frivolity left his face.  He knew a connection when one hit him. Those in his party, knowing this look meant he was going to say something important, fell into 

watchful silence.  His reply shocked Felix. “I’m familiar with that notion, young man,” he said. “ I sell cars.”

Felix was moved, but didn’t want to admit it. He felt the weight of an idea had traveled from core to core, but he hated the substance. Buyer and seller stood before the canvas hanging on the gallery wall, the tide of conversation surged up again and the man said, “I hope no one will think this is about me and my favorite customer!” and the seller of cars laughed loudest of all. To Felix those around him "seemed to wait, poised in nice clothing, eyes gleaming with cunning, perfect hair and lustrous smiles."

Thus Felix later described it in a journal he lengthened each day. At the gallery he was thrilled, later his disgust revived. He began to write an angry sketch of the event and from the moment he began a new feeling stirred in him, of power and importance. He had moved them. True or false? And how would he ever know? They had come unto his light and found him good. He could do it again. Like many another conservative he looked ahead immediately for an infallible system through which he could produce an appealing and saleable work before the money from his latest is spent. He had pleased them and they had appealed to him. They were unified and moved gracefully in unity. He was still outside, but could flash a message to them. 

At home and working, Felix felt this power, then descended into the miasma of conceiving an image he knew he would hate. Nightmare! First, an enormous pile of cash hit him. As soon as he could part the bills, pushing them aside as one would  open an immense vulva, all he could see was blood and sex, a heaving suppurate stinking mass, glossy and fuzzy with the old nature raping bone nosing in just below the surface, ready to release its flood upon the crucified virgin. People Art! Sunsets and seashores! Pastels and muted antique blah! All of it thinly covering a growing cancerous cyst, ready to burst!

Felix did not make People Art, he made Real Art. If one can look upon the work and say, “Art rhymes with fart,” and the thing on the wall still moves, there is Real Art. Real Art is seldom purchased because it is sincere and more worthy of thought or emotion or anything else that happens when standing or sitting or laying around near it, living with it. It is rooted in time, place and material. It is mortal, it might die suddenly, but it doesn't. As long as it lives the risk of dying lives with it. One might dream of this art with ease, depending on how dream forces interact, and one may thereby grow mute in understanding. Language is outside of  it.  Real Art does not inspire talk, it makes people shut up. 

Why is this art so seldom sold? Few understand why immediately. A curious change effects the unprepared mind upon a first encounter. As at other times and places, the eye moves shapes and colors to the brain which mixes them, dilutes them with well or badly defined emotion, adds the wine and cheese of memory, some of it excessively aged, plus physical variables like pinched feet, falling hair or failing sexual potency, indigestion, general joint pain, an unenthusiastic or unfaithful spouse and at the end of all this, if no easy meaning is found, if no clear portent, appeal or power unsheathed, the work itself is completely forgotten. The eye still rests on it, but no further information is sent 

brainward because the mind  is completely consumed with numerical calculation. This calculation is a variable shade of green. The mind moves from the abstraction of art, now secondary, to another complete abstraction, money. Most often one question arises, Is this junk a good investment?”

Real Art requires persistence, patience and more from the viewer. The artist must have these qualities as well, plus an independent means of physical support, for not only must the art be made, it must be explained promoted and placed in the way of the public. This is very difficult if, for the best part of the day the artist must wear an apron, a carpenter’s nail belt or a company uniform. 

The day job Felix held to sustain his life and art was at the university where he had earned a degree in fine arts five years before. He worked in the Physical Plant,’ doing routine maintenance. He liked the job because he didn’t have to think about it. At first he thought about his job, but soon encountered a mental chock or bulkhead and saw nothing beyond it. This made him comfortable. He accepted his job as merely healthy physical activity that resulted in a paycheck. 

After receiving his degree from the university Felix didn’t move to New York like many others in his class. They left to endure the fire, run the gauntlet, reign supreme or die. Felix would not force out his best, his best would evolve naturally. “I’ll know my song well before I start singing,” warbled the poet and Felix agreed. Sell his art? His art would sell itself! Then he might move there.

Another stone in the foundation of his beliefs was that his personality alone must shape his art. To attribute time and external, random events to the shaping of expressions he thought illegitimate. This was why he disliked the canvas he sold out of the graduate student show; he had painted it in a spasm of fear and anger after almost being run over by a car. The driver of the car forced Felix on his bike off the street, though all taxpayers are supposed to own these by ways equally, and he hit the curb and flew over the handlebars onto the sidewalk. His final resting place was between two trees and a low brick wall retaining the slope of a lawn. Only his emotions were seriously injured. The driver of the car did not stop. Felix wondered if the driver was aware of what he, or she, had done. As he flew over the handlebars of his bike Felix neglected to read the license plate of the car. What could he do if he had read and remembered it? He was physically uninjured. 

Effie Bolling, his wife, recognized her face in the painting, one of two faces there, and asked Felix to change it. Felix hadn’t consciously painted her into it, but it was her. He changed the woman’s hair color and shape, her eyebrows (her eyes were not visible, as they were squinted shut), and made the ears stick out more. But it was the nose which was distinctly her own. He promptly changed the nose and in doing so destroyed all his meager affection for the work. Felix was very fond of his wife’s nose and, discovering this, he launched into painting a series of nasal portraits, but no one who saw them was impressed. The viewers of his work were more interested in the whole woman. So he painted a portrait of Effie with a hole in her face, a neat, bloodless, nose shaped hole filled with blue sky, and  removed the nose to float in the sky beside the face. It took him two weeks to decide on and paint her eyes looking at the nose, her lips slightly smiling, wisely. It was Felix’s personal Mona Lisa, but it was too derivative. Nobody liked it.

But that was not the painting he sold from the graduate student art show, the only work sold, which fetched him that large check. 

As for this particular piece of art, Felix believed there was little to recommend it. Assuming it still exists, it is real space, color and time, and this alone would makes it People Art. Yet there are differences. It is mildly pornographic, which shifts interest to the physical side so purely intellectual aspects may get screwed. The canvass is five by five feet, the image composed of a woman’s face, arms and chest, naked, and behind her a man’s face and part of his torso. They are making love, one knows, though no part of their genitalia are visible. Their facial expressions are extreme. To express a duality in the situation ~ pain and pleasure mixed ~ Felix painted one of the man’s eyes smiling and the other grim. To add interest and create irony or tension and, ‘to drop a chestnut,’ as those in the verbal arts express it, Felix had clinched, between the woman’s tight teeth, a black leather key holder with dangling silver and brass car keys. 

A title for the piece would not come to him, so he left it untitled, but this would not do for the buyer, whose voice when he said, “I must have a title for it, “ carried a tone of indisputable command. This annoyed Felix, who showed his annoyance by sending the man a  list of titles, about eight hundred of them, which he had collected in a special file in case a title all by itself, unrelated to any subject, would produce an idea. Two days later the buyer called. He had looked over the list of titles Felix had sent and begged to be allowed to reject them all. He had his own title. Would Felix mind if he used his own title?   

“What is it?”

“I’d want to call it The Automobile Must Die.  Like it?” 

Felix was silent for perhaps a moment too long so the buyer continued, “You know  Shakespeare used the word die to refer to the sexual climax.” 

Felix thought a moment and said, “I do like it,” and he did. The reference to Shakespeare helped but mostly he was impressed that such a subversive notion would come from automobile dealer. 

“Come on down to my lot and see it hanging, the painting, I mean, “ the salesman said with a laugh that made Felix reach down to make sure his fly was zipped up. 

On the day he called the buyer's office, Felix wrote down the directions and the name of the office manager who took his call and would direct him to the private office where the art hung. He always asked clerks and secretaries their names, believing this made them feel important. When Felix arrived he would also take possession of his fee. For so much money ~ he and Effie could live on it for more than a year~ Felix was glad to oblige, even though it meant borrowing a bicycle (he didn’t think his old wreck would make it that far) and pedaling twenty-five miles each way. It was a journey that gave him time to think and his thoughts became by turns general and specific and detached. 

Felix did not believe in the Art Race.  Being in a Rat Race is better because there no one defeats anyone loved. Plus, you know who the rat is; everyone is. Another good thing about the Rat Race is that no one argues about the beauty of money. The beauty and value of art is open to interpretation, so the value constantly shifts. The struggle to get into shows and the self-aggrandizement some artists feel is necessary was a waste of his time, Felix thought.  His self-determination and self-motivation made him seem ill-tempered and snobbish to some, like a boy who doesn’t want to get fat so he turns down a third helping of Gramma’s shit on a shingle. Gramma is offended, as are those in the Art Race unengaged by Felix . He had his home, his wife, his habits, why compromise? Compromise pollutes integrity and strength. Felix always walked with integrity, he never wobbled, at least that was his goal and Montaigne suggests that we should judge men not by their success or failure, but by their intentions, as many uncontrollable, unforeseen forces may defeat us. His thinking and way of life had developed through his persistence in maintaining a detached point of view, but another almost as powerful influence was his wife. 

Felix was mildly unaware and content,  feeling the influence of her love. Effie had integrity without doubt or effort and she expected this level of dedication from him. His thoughts and feelings had become so connected with her that he could have no fresh idea that did not reflect her light. Among the artists in their age group – who graduated that year and who I knew, anyway – there could not be found two people more conservative in nature and more liberal in ideals than Felix and Effie Bolling. I loved them for who they were and admired them for having played the game of Austerity so long and so well. 

Before they met way back before the discovery of fire or the invention of the wheel they had played the game of Austerity very well, separately. As a team they were unbeatable. 

Austerity is a game that reflects life without ornament to an astonishing degree. It is often played by those attempting to make a career and a living from the sale of their talent as musicians, writers and artists. The rules are simple.

First, get a job that pays a wage allowing one to live while expending a minimum of time and energy on the employment. The time and energy saved can then be spent on the as yet non-paying creative effort. Move to a poor neighborhood, live on air, go to parties where plenty of nutritious hors d’oevres are served, exchange things or work for rent, turn off all lights, unplug appliances and clocks, get up early enough to take advantage of natural light, shop at thrift stores, go to the library and free concerts. Second, under no circumstances does one beg or steal, not even from parents, if still living and friendly. Begging and stealing may force Austerity on others and the main point is to owe nothing, to shine with an unblemished spirit. . 

If you are caught stealing, moreover, you may go into Forced Austerity and you and your work might thereafter be considered as derived from a Prison Art Program. This is not an advantage. These programs may be therapeutic and fun,  but they are not respected. It is generally believed an artist will do two things in jail; avoid being raped and doodle. 

If you lose a job and get so fed up with the whole mess you swear by all the gods and devils of Real Art that you will live by your true work or die, you pass into Double Austerity at which it is very hard to win, that is, stay alive and healthy, but truly bliss if possible. 

After selling the canvas to the middle-aged car salesman Felix was tempted to completely reject the process and persons involved in the sale by which he could gain so much time, quit his job at the Physical Plant  and leap into Double Austerity. His conservative nature restrained him. No one has successfully demonstrated that artists who work slowly and steadily and are recognized later in life and live to be very old are better off than those who spend themselves completely, often fatally, caring nothing for health, home, hygiene or ordinary happiness (bunnies,  the aroma of flowers, languorous afternoons full of gentle touching, laughter and so on) or which of these is driven by a superior integrity and if the source of it is internal or external. The question is vital,  for if a purpose or force is external it may well lack originality, and if exclusively internal may be too individualistic and obscure. 

This question of external/internal forces affecting art moves or remains fixed in place by the artist’s personality. One key element in all the arts, spirit, often thought too deeply mysterious, enters or is muted by the artistic personality as one would open or close a window to regulate the level of light. Felix believed himself to be one who could tear down the curtains and shade, plant a bomb on the sill and blow a hole in the wall to let in more sun and by these means force open the sleepy or unwilling eye. Incorrect. His father had told him, “The greatest in value is that which is freely summoned and freely given.”

As he pedaled eagerly toward meeting the car dealer this is what he thought, and more. 

The sale of the painting profoundly shocked Felix.  As he pondered the implications of it he felt, without putting his feelings into words, that his inner life may be blown open. He was exposed, profoundly disrupted, stunned and for comfort and security turned to a review of his artistic principles.

His highest standard was Truth, pure and simple, or Truth pure and complex. But how to get to it, and once achieved, how to keep it? In addition to this, could an untested truth be valid? He would know, but it would take time. This is how it is made, by a slow building up to it. The between times, the minor details not thought of as important unless seen as a prelude are the foundation   of the spark, the climax. The dull, slow times are just as necessary as when the fireworks go off. Time leads up to it. You can think around and through  and live even in these vacant zones with an intensity of awareness, making use of the silence. The actual selling of the art and the attention was a sudden light. He hated it, but it appealed to him, it was power, it was new, full of possibilities, but it was not his art. The strange feel of it consumed Felix and this reaction was completely unexpected. Suddenly he was known, spoken of, suddenly he no longer had to play Austerity. He did not want these riches to appeal to him.

Felix had dedicated his life ~ what he knew of life at age twenty-six ~ to an organized, consistent search for patterns beyond language that would exist and represent human truth for as long as possible. The concept of money is now thought to be universal and there is no way of knowing how long this illusion might last. The mind functions on the basis of one item having more value than another based on the often inaccurately imposed standard of price, abstract and external to the object for sale. Calculating the monetary value of anything itself might pass away before art perished. I hope so. Felix was certain only that the key ingredients of Real Art are sincerity and truth, and when the illusion, the abstraction of money is abundant sincerity and truth are scarce. 

Complicating difficulties further is the high level of material waste produced by a culture whose main goal is acquiring money by making things most of which lack these values. Pollution is created in making the items, they are put to use until they are thrown away or break, become waste and are therefore categorized as useless. This means that ultimately the entire process of creating anything that will wear out and become inoperable or fail to retain the interest of an owner is waste. If it is known to be mortal when it is made it is garbage the moment it is made. The only benefit from the creation of garbage is to keep someone busy making it, selling it and picking it up. This activity is a waste of time, to say the least. 

In this situation, how long can anything of value that will continue to operate, puzzle or soothe the mind, endure undiminished? In the fervor of regularly acquiring the new and throwing away the old,  sincerity and truth will be cast aside. When throwing away stuff becomes a habit, the best goes out with the worst.   

Felix had pondered this for years, he was obsessed with quality. His goal was to look so far into quality and truth that death vanishes, at least in the imagination. He wanted to create what is too true to die. At the end of his thinking he found his desire similar to those who struggle for material gain, for sophistication and knowledge. The spring, the wedge, the driving fire that compels accumulation of objects spread out at home and called private property, is untrue, an illusion, a distraction, an attempt to destroy death and decay. This is also at the core of Real Art. 

We live amid determined decadence, Felix believed, so he searched for ways to lodge quality, sincerity and truth somewhere in the machinery of this monster so when it fell and rusted the seed would sink into the earth and, in the measureless orchard of time, again bear fruit.  

After many hours of dodging traffic, pausing to rest, taking a few notes or sketching out passing impressions,  Felix found the car lot and the office. It was easy, the place might have covered a square mile. He didn’t want to feel as he did, but felt like he had traveled through a foreign country and was now home. The man led him into his office, saying, “I’m not here much, I do most of my work on the floor. This is where I come to get away from people and think. That’s why I hung it here. Ah, isn’t it lovely?”

And there it was, art by the hand of Felix Bolling hung tastefully on a light wall amid dark trim. The room was shaped like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle piece 

with nooks on each side of the square, making the room seem labyrinthine, like the mind of a skillful salesman. For all the stupid things the man was capable ofsaying, Felix remembered only his intelligence.

Hanging above the end of the long table, placed across the centerline of the room on a diagonal from one corner to the opposite, the pained, ecstatic faces Felix had created were lit just well enough to be seen with the implied motion of their act  intruding. Felix wondered if it was placed so that after a deal was struck at the table and the papers signed the unfortunate client, customer, victim, could see what had just happened to them.

Felix was musing on this notion when the car dealer said, “It’s just visible enough to remind me of what happened when I gave up my musical career.”

“You’re a musician?”

"Yes, I was. I was a good one, too, I thought. " He paused, perhaps expecting a question from the painter. "I had to do it. I started a family." 

“But did you have to give it up?”

  “Most people ~ I’m one of them ~ can’t do two things at once.”

“I’m sorry for you.  I can‘t do two things at once either.”

“It‘s not so bad. I’m very comfortable.  I like people, I get people together and watch them mix it around and since I’m not practicing, I can listen. Just like that! “ He clapped his hands twice loudly and music filled the air suddenly from all sides, warm, friendly, tribal.  They listened without speaking for more than a minute.

“That sounds very good, where does it comes from? “ He meant where in the room the speakers might be.

“The music is from Senegal. I recorded it from the radio. A lot of great music is coming out of Africa now, old tribal tunes influenced by guess what? The blues, rock and roll! I guess we're sending it home to them." 

“Do you play at all now, yourself?”

“Some, not much,” said the car salesman. “ I have a very nice piano in my house but I use it mostly to stack papers on. Sometimes I get inspired and sweep them off on the floor and rip out a tune. As much as I love it, I don’t know if I could go back to it. For one thing it would be so lonely. Practice, practice, practice. You have to be so into the music if someone shoots you in the head you play right on. The artist is a solitary heart full of love for others but unable to physically make contact with them. The artist is the ultimate in alienation. I don’t know why. I spread myself out among people and I like it, so besides not being solitary by nature, did you know that one out of five new cars in this state are sold through one of my dealerships, or one I started? Do you know what that means? This might sound like bragging to you, but I’m sitting on an empire. I made it, my creative spirit runs through it and if I chucked it and retired internal forces in the management would tear it all apart and the whole shithouse come right down!” He slapped his hands together just once and then made a broad gesture toward a curtained wall of the room and as his strong, stout fingered hand arced across the span three curtains withdrew, first one, then the next, each opening until a vast field of parked cars was revealed beyond the spotlesswindow. Felix felt like Jesus tempted in the desert by Satan. The automobiles stretched to the horizon as once the buffalo covered the plains, but this was a visual feast of metal, glass and plastic with red white and blue triangular flags on lines dividing the air above them.  

“I think I know what you mean,”  Felix said, "People are probably a lot harder to manage than art. But this doesn‘t look like a shithouse to me. "      

In a lower tone the man said, “Well, it’s not a shithouse now, and I intend to keep it from becoming one.” 

“We all must feel trapped once and awhile,” said Felix. “You have a very comfortable cage here. If there are prison bars I don’t see them so your 

distraction should be cozy all the way to the end."

“It is that, comfortable is a good word for it, most of the time.”

As he rode the borrowed bike back to his neighborhood, the check hot in his pocket and his thoughts entwined with visions of his own, brand new bike made possible by the man who sold cars, it began to rain. Sunny when he left home, Felix had neglected to bring his rain poncho and caught a very bad cold. He spent the next three days in bed. 

The creation of the work and sale of it no longer disgusted Felix. That giant check warmed him, but not as much as the honesty and openness of the man who gave it to him. Felix didn't expect to find honesty, craft yes, sincerity, no. He was a type of citizen Felix had previously held in contempt and had plenty of theories on why. His emotions had been stirred up and felt raw and exposed. Maybe this was why he got sick. Maybe he was running away from something.  It was an automobile that did this to him. An automobile bumper somewhere had his name and date of death on it. An automobile was going to climb into bed with him and suck his blood, crush his skull. He felt feverish rushes that indicated an automobile he couldn’t see or hear was relentlessly rolling over his body, first from head to toes and back, then crossways. And he was not alone. He had clear moments when he was sure the automobile had done more to degrade society and destroy community than any other mechanical invention. An automobile is the chariot of Satan.

He lay in bed, body doped and exhausted, a battle ground of microlife, while his mind ranged over his polluted fleshscape like a rampant vehicle. In a lucid moment he wanted and planned to make use of this time in bed to  meditate on Caravaggio and Hockney. Somehow he got stuck on Ford and Chrysler. 

Those early days of the auto craze were innocent! “Get a horse!” They of the shoe and hoof cried to the rut stuck motorized buggies. Many small companies sprung up like roadside thistles ~ the originators ~ eventually bought out and gathered into the Big Three; Ford, brilliant engineer and original American, Chrysler, the irresistible salesman, the voice of luxury and the good life, and General Motors, the spirit of efficiency, of Corporate Consolidation. That was all you could say about General Motors, persistent and consistent, but so are dandelions. They were the cowboys who won the west and ground the Indian bones to bake their bread. “What’s good for General Motors is good for the USA.” Was that in a musical?
His childhood reading the American Heritage History of the United States returned to Felix in his sickbed; how the automobile shaped the nation, brought it into the twentieth century, the age of motion, as if the changes were there for the people to discover instead of creating them. Was it intended, or an accident? If anyone had known how much the automobile would cost in medical bills and lives, how the land would be paved and vast ugly sinkholes of commerce destroy millions of acres of woodlands and how much it all would cost in time and labor, would they have chosen it? Why did the plan not mention millions of lives literally crushed in the flying steel, the diminishment of the human/horse relationship ( useful as well as loving, unlike that goofy dog/man malarkey), the impoverishment and enslaving of a culture and people by cutting off their feet?  

Then Felix clearly heard, “An automobile will kill me,” and it wasn’t he who spoke. The voice was familiar, it came from the inside his head, though it was not his. 

Asphalt is made from oil. Stop lights change us, stop us from wandering like dogs on a scent. Now green means go, not the stop, take to the root of springtime growth.  Red means stop, no matter how passionate you feel. A person within these limits might drive through a hundred cities and not think of it once; the electric heartbeat, the pounding engine, and not step on dirt once, never feel dirt under the shoes, or feel the sublime delight of mud oozing through toes. Two hundred years ago when the continent was covered with forest it was said a squirrel could travel from tree to tree, leaping from limb to limb all the way across the continent without touching the ground. Now a person in a car can 

cross the continent and the tires of the car, never mind feet, need never touch dirt, unless one drives though Chicago which is mostly like driving through a series of giant holes. 

Yes, father.

So it was his father speaking, as clearly as though he stood in the room. Felix tried to catch the voice and hold it, but  it slipped away. He woke from a dream of his father, dead ten years, and when he looked around the room his father’s face faded into the spines of books and stacked papers on a bookshelf. The dream, the light faded. With machines his father had been very patient. He avoided them, but in the end it didn’t do him any good. He capsized in his sailboat and drowned. Something smacked him on the side of the head as thevessel went over. He was alone on the water so no conclusion was made as to which item might have been the fatal instrument. The police said it was 

something, not someone, that was all that mattered. They had other crimes to investigate, it was an accident, not a homicide, so it didn’t matter. But it did matter to Felix. He wanted to hold the guilty object in his hand. 

Effie nursed  Felix. She slept on the couch just beyond the door in the living room and was there for him. She didn’t go to work, she waited.  He didn’t 

vomit very much, just felt weak and delirious, drifting bodiless. She read to him from John Ruskin, Goethe’s Italian Journal and works full of light and shapes, visual ideas. Yet all Felix could think of was what kind of vehicles they drove around in. At the end of the third day he felt the warring forces inside him subside and a cleansing fluid washed his blood. 

Effie had been sleeping and she came into the room where she thought he was asleep. She undressed before the tall wardrobe with mirrored doors that stood beside the bed. He saw the backs of her thighs, the gentle curve of her buttocks, her bumpy line of spine and smooth back turning and flexing as she looked for a robe. He touched her. 

“Oh, you’re better,” she said.

“You’re beautiful.”

“I’m glad you’re better.”

He threw off the blanket and bed sheet under which he lay naked and his musty illness dispersed and vanished in the air. He said, “ Look what I have, what do you think of it?”

“Oh, yes, you’re much better. Wait a minute, I need to wash up. I’ll be right back.” She quickly left the room and he listened to her washing in the bath.

When she returned he lay on the cool, clean, unused side of the bed, the side she had not slept on and he had not invaded, scrupulous as he was even sick for three days. He drank the glass of water she gave him and she covered him with her body.  Even then, with her over him, his smile was reserved, careful. She lay on him gently and moved above him, careful not to bounce him too hard. 

“This is our baby?” she asked. He nodded and she swiveled and swayed and felt him flowing into her, the living river. Without even saying it to herself she knew it would happen, this time. It had happened a few times before when they felt like this but it didn’t catch. Now it will. She kept his squirming seeds of life inside her. This time it would take root. We love each other, let it go which way it will.

Effie fell into sleep and dreams, for now her tasks and troubles were done with or delayed. Felix had rested and filled with worries.  He suffered a type of emotional cardiac arrest. I need a car. I don’t want a car. I’m being eaten by  thisunwanted need; it made me sick and now it’s making me crazy. I will have to buy an automobile. How else will I get my child to school?

Felix lay wide awake into the dawn, aware of the sun rising. I’m going to buy a car, not a bicycle, and I’ll have to buy it from that ex-musician in love with people, that nice man who ignored his talent and loves fun more than solitude, because now is the best time to get a deal on wheels. He buys culture, I buy chariot. I have to do it. I hate it. I hate the whole corrupt mess, a mound of sludge, a stink hole into which I cast my heart. Everyone will snicker; sold art, bought car. The process does not flow back into strengthening itself. The money, time and energy flows outward and, diluted, buys waste, decay, rust. And that guy will cheat me. He’s got to be good at that, you don’t get to the top in business through saintly behavior. Saintly behavior is for the next world. In this world Mr. Lucre and Lucifer rule. Crooks selling broken down junk, they do anything to get ahead. I won’t do it. 

Go on, automobile, I’ll catch up later. After you run out of gas we’ll walk together and speak of important things.

Now I need to think. I don’t want to be cheated, so I’ll have to learn something about all this. I have to learn something about cars!

Dawn lightened the windows as he lay thinking. Effie my love, my wife with child and the child also our love! He felt her near, asleep, slim, chaotic, inwardly furiously building, preparing to blossom. Every cell of him called to her, so certain, familiar, new. He thought the heat of his emotions might wake her and she needed rest. He couldn’t stay in bed. His love, his energy burst outward into the quiet morning. 

Chapter 2   The Toy Watch

October 7 ~  Everyone should ask this question; “Besides for money, why do I work?” If they are more devoted to their jobs than the money they earn, if they feel they are improving their community or the world or if they produce apparently worthless art and spend years doing it, being paid little or nothing but giving the world their open hearts and sincere experience ~ they are incredibly lucky.                                                                

                  from the journal of Felix Bolling 

     Felix lived with Effie in a forest at the end of Apricot Lane. Except for a short, dead end alley behind it, the small rented house was completely surrounded by trees. It had a living room, bedroom, kitchen, small bath, a narrow back yard and a leaking roof. They loved the place. Effie grew  flowers along one side of the back yard, the only place the sun came through the limbs and on special nights Felix wore a fresh flower in a button hole or pinned to his shirt. He always carried a small memo pad for ideas so he always wore button down shirts to have a front pocket for the pad and pencil. Even with such discipline, his life was most often fresh as a new cut flower. 

There was one other house at the end of Apricot Lane, beyond the home of Felix and Effie Bolling, but it was so deep in the trees it was barely visible. 

Socially, Felix and Effie belonged to a group of artists, musicians and writers too quiet or poor to show up on anyone’s register. Their friends thought 

Felix and Effie’s love as deep and unruffled, as quiet and unique as their house in the woods. There were few rumors of any quarrels and a public fight was so 

hard to imagine it was considered impossible. 

Felix and Effie never made a show of themselves, not even for the sake of art. One could almost say they were snobbishly reserved, but for Felix’s habit of shyly looking aside, unexpectedly exposing a portion of white throat, or Effie’s passion for putting her guests at ease; making sure they had a good cushion, were comfortable with the light, had a drink or something to eat. The couple was reserved, but almost begged their guests to stay.

They had lived in the house on Apricot Ln. for five years. Effie was a seamstress and enjoyed the work because she chose her hours, the pay was  adequate, she could bicycle or walk to work and with this job she acquired an inexpensive and elegant wardrobe. 

Effie was a musician only at home. She played Ravel’s ‘Song for a Dead Princess ' with so much heart tears came to the eyes. However, from a practical, professional point of view, her music was moving only in these inner circles. She did nothing to promote herself so no one in the music industry sought a recording contract with her. They didn't know her talent existed. As good as she knew she was, nothing compelled Effie to leap into fame, to seek public adulation. 

Felix had a similar approach to his vocation as a painter in oils. He painted the canvasses, it wasn’t up to him to distribute them. How could he? He was busy painting them! If someone wanted him to be in a show, fine, he almost always responded, but they had to come to him as an old school friend had done a year ago. He had sold a painting form that show for a lot of money.  That money was still in the bank, waiting for the dire need of it. Since he graduated from college he had been in several shows but this was the only work that sold. He had no business sense, he disliked the highbrow or lowbrow, thinking both essentially false attitudes, and that critics and dealers and most business people were insensitive and narrowly focused. Will it last, will it retain it’s investment value? This question was in their eyes. Love it and it will retain it’s value, if only for you alone, he felt like telling them. Or Felix thought it might be necessary to pour salt in his coffee, drop a woman’s earring into the brew and drink it all down with one gulp, thus echoing Salvadore Dali’s definition of surrealism. The action nicely defined the young artist’s general feelings about selling anything. 

Felix also had an ordinary occupation; the university employed him as a grounds keeper and maintenance man in their biggest storage facility. He had held this position since he graduated from that same institution. Before beginning his studies, paid for by loans, his parents supported him. So, surprising as this might sound, the job Felix held at the university (which he got through the intercession of one of his professors) was the only job he ever had.At no other time in his life had this man of twenty-six years worked for any other citizen or institution. More surprisingly, Felix had never noticed that this record of employment was unusual or limited. None of his friends noticed it ~ they had no opportunity or reason to look over his job record and since he didn’t care  himself he never mentioned it. He did not think it odd or abnormal so he did not seek out  a more interesting job. He had two interests; art and Effie. He lived with Effie and created art. What more could he need?

For Felix and Effie each day was like the last and the days to come would mirror the past.

October 7 continued ~  At work today I was thinking this; “Why do I work, if not for money? I remembered the guy who tried to throw a piece of carrot into the blades of the 3rd story fan. This is a giant fan that ventilates the whole floor of the building. This guy reached under the mesh covering of the fan and gave his carrot nub a flip into the blades. He was playing around, joking, he was 

impulsive. The carrot nub was suddenly tossed right back at him, bounced off the screen and wedged on the motor beside the spinning belt that ran from the 

motor up around the axle of the fan and back to the motor, like the fan belt on a car. You could see the carrot end all over the shop, a big orange dot on the 

motor. We all started laughing. One of the guys, Willy, a small guy with a small brain, always trying to be intimidating, said,” You better move that carrot before the foreman sees it, or your ass will be out on the street!” 

The guy took Willy seriously, he was so afraid of losing his job. He reached in to remove that piece of vegetable and caught his first two fingers in the belt. His arm was jerked up and his first two fingers caught between the belt and the pulley and went around with the force of the motor. And this is a big 

three inch wide belt! He did scream, he could probably be plainly heard to scream all the way to Alaska. The belt ripped the skin and muscle off his two fingers, skinned them to the bone, both of them. His blood shot out and his finger bones stuck out like sticks of chalk. 

We subdued the dummy and sent for help, wrapped up his hand and talked to him to keep him calm, but it all seemed funny to me, once the shock of all that blood wore off. What would we tell the foreman, that he screwed up his hand going after a scrap of produce? 

Besides this, I think he did it for fun, I mean flipping the carrot in there, then he got worried and did something stupid and paid for it, scared to lose his job, and money. Why can’t people take it light at work? Why punish those who have fun, who amuse themselves? I want to make work into play so I can come home and do true work on art. That’s the way it should be, we should play for money and work for who and what we love. 

Felix stopped writing. He felt he wrote something foolish and didn’t want to reread it. So he continued, turning as he often did, to the practical problems of producing the physical dimension of his art.

I’ve been thinking of that guy and his fingers for  long time. Every time I walk by the fan I think about it. I can paint it realistically and get every weird detail into it, just for a change from the old abstract expressionist routine. 

Again he stopped, uneasy. He visualized his co-worker with the mutilated fingers again, but this time the image returned reversed. Instead of a mere subject for interpretation, an image he could master and then cast aside, he saw the event happening to himself. What would he do them? Smashed fingers don’t just disappear, not even on someone else, and he had been foolish enough in the past to risk hurting himself that badly, even to kill himself. One chilly afternoon he rode twenty-five miles on a bike in a vicious rain storm, and he could have gotten a ride home snug and warm but the man who offered him the ride was a car dealer and Felix hated automobiles. Since then he had softened in his opinion and had found the idea of owning a car more acceptable, though buying one was still just an idea.  Now he reread all he had written and none of it was to the point. He had expressed himself badly and for Felix and his wife that was the worst thing to do. He also avoided thinking about his biggest problem. 

I’m going to get down to what this is all about. I got laid off today. I don’t know why I’m taking it so hard, I never cared about the job, it just made money for me. It feels like everything is coming down on me hard. I feel like my emotional fingers are caught in a fan. Nothing solid seems to come of my art work. My work at the Physical Plant is silly, of course, anyone can do it. I’ve been plodding along in the same rut too long, I need to live off my art. 

Why me? Apparently the university is having a hard time paying their board of directors a  yearly bonus and they don’t need me to fix leaking pipes and roofs or trim the lawn along the student union sidewalk anymore. Now the friend of a cousin of the director, a private contractor, can do the work at twice the cost, since the university will no longer have to insure us. I asked them to call if the position comes open again and they said they were doing away with the position entirely. They suggested I apply at the campus employment office. Great, that place is a zoo. Every place is a zoo. I went to bed last night and when I woke up the world had turned into a zoo. I better hide this, I don’t want Effie to know just yet.

Effie read his journal whenever she wanted to. If he wanted to keep his thoughts private he shelved the notebook. If he had thoughts to share he left the 

journal open and as soon as she wandered through their house playing her recorder or flute she would stop and play as she read. When Felix saw her playing and reading it warmed him to think she was caressing his thoughts, lovingly touching them with music. Sometimes she stopped and wrote her own impressions. Thus they shared insights. 

Tonight he returned the notebook to the shelf and stacked books on it. He wanted to put his confused thoughts behind him and concentrate on making some realistic drawings of the guy with the smashed fingers, or something else. He took out his pencils and paper. Every day when he finished working on his art, always at the same time, he would put paper and writing utensils back in the drawer. His work space was always clear. 

Having brought out his materials, Felix, without thinking, drew a circle on the top sheet. It was a large circle. He looked at it awhile, then divided it in half with a centered, vertical line. This he studied, wondering what he was doing. Then he severed the circle again horizontally, the line centered. What is this all about? He wondered. It is an exercise, he told himself, a Basic Forms exercise. Have I done this before? Yes, very often it is good to begin with basic forms. 

Before a clear answer came to him he saw his hand writing EFFIE in bold letters in one square of the quartered circle, then again in another and another until each quarter of the circle bore the name EFFIE and his mind drifted away to kissing her, how her lips were so careful on him and how when he was sick about a year ago she seemed to kiss him back to life, to call him to her with her lean form, back to an emboldened spirit. She was there and that’s what gave him strength. They thought they would have a child then, but it didn’t happen. It could have been his fault. The thought stabbed him so deeply he set down his pencil, closed his eyes and tried to calm his mind. Yes, she is very bright and understanding and so important, but how strong is she?

He couldn’t sit still. He paced the room. Effie came in the house and called to him. Suddenly he knew he couldn’t face her. For the same reason he hid his journal he wanted to avoid talking to her. He couldn’t hide anything from her, he had to think this thing out, alone.

"Felix!” Her gentle voice filled the calm air. 

Felix left quickly and quietly by the back door.

Leaving the light on was normal for Felix, it was his one bad habit (he was an artist, a lover of light),  but leaving pencils, pens and drawing paper out on 

his desk was not. Before he was halfway across the yard, sneaking from bar-b-que pit to flower bed to the gate, he heard Effie’s flute weaving a fine thread of sound toward him and he felt a pain; she was calling him, wanting him,. But his courage failed at that moment and he turned away.  

The back gate had long ago grown closed with vines, they so rarely left their house through the back yard, so Felix leaped to the top rail of the fence. Balanced atop the shaky row of boards and wire, he glanced back at the house. The sun below the trees beyond the low roof, Effie’s music fluid on the cool evening air, the sweet flowers and the figure of the woman he loved moving past the bedroom window were shaded with a feeling of eternity, as if preserved under a flawless sepia tone or amber wash.

Felix walked quickly along the street. His step was surprisingly determined for one who had not yet decided where he was going. He had forgotten his coat, the warm wool coat Effie had given him, and the night was unexpectedly cold. He had left his notebook and stub of pencil on his desk, but he had remembered his wallet and money and had folded the piece of paper on which he had drawn the circle and written EFFIE four times and put it in his pocket. 

He wanted to sit somewhere alone and think, or not think. He walked faster. The nearest bar was at Apricot and Blueberry, ten blocks away. 

There amid the murmur of music and strangers at the bar, scratching the label off his beer bottle, an old friend from art school approached him. 

“Felix! Felix Bolling!” he shouted. “How the hell are you?”

“Jack! I’m doing okay,” he said before he could stop the lie.

“Have a beer on me!”

“I can do that. What’s the occasion?” Jack’s enthusiasm sparked in the air. 

“The occasion,” Jack said with his hand on the shoulder of Felix and his eyes looking deep into his face, “is my marriage.”

“Marriage! Congratulations! So you and Claire finally decided to tie the knot!"

“Oh, no, not Claire. Doris. Doris is my new ball and chain. Did you know her in school?”

“I think so,” said Felix, though right at that moment he did not.  “So when’s the big hitch?”

“Two months, old buddy.”

“Congratulations.”

“We made the commitment just last night. Felix, I really feel great!”

They shook hands and Jack’s face, briefly lit by a flashing light, startled Felix; the once pale, grayish cheeks had grown round, suggesting afternoons by 

a swimming pool or a backyard grill. Since Felix had seen him last, more than a year ago, Jack had gained twenty pounds.

The bartender placed two fresh bottles of beer in front of them and Felix listened to a barrage of plans; house buying, honeymoon hideaways, wedding arrangements and expenses and

“ . . . .  Doris is great, she’ll be working too, even though she’s kind of like, a little bit pregnant.”

This story was familiar to Felix. He said, “ Wow, married and a dad, all at once. Have you been painting?” 

Jack’s round face straightened. He paused for a  long moment and then said, “ Oh, well, no, I’m out of the art business for now.”

He looked away suddenly, as if guilty of betraying a secret trust; the pursuit of Truth, or had it degenerated into the pursuit of Fame and withered away?

“No, I haven’t painted in a year, “ Jack said. Felix had fallen silent and busied himself with scraping the label off his bottle. He felt ashamed.

Then Felix felt good. Someone else was disrupted and being denied the time to dream, imagine, create. Sympathy rose in him. He had marked this as the day he discovered a harsh truth about modern life; any freedom is permitted as long as it takes no time to exercise it. Now he had found a brother to share his misery. 

“Jack, it happens to everybody.” The tone Felix used expressed more than his words. It said, “you and me too, pal,” and they looked at each other and 

felt their common experience. 

Felix had written in his journal on this very point; Men don’t need to verbally express all or most of what they think because they know and are ‘in the 

loop ‘ in a way women are not, consequently women must over-talk a subject in order to get a grip on it.  Near this Effie had written; Too simple, but I’m glad 

you’re quiet so I can talk!”

Jack smiled knowingly and his voice was solid with knowledge of the real world, the payment of dues. “The way I see it, “ he said, “I can’t support a wife and kids on art. What I decided was to get into something interesting that I really like to do for money and make art on the side. As the money comes in and the job gets easier and easier, I’m making more art and eventually that’s what I do all the time. In a few years I’ll be set up and it’s full steam ahead, I die with a paint brush in my hand. “

“That’s the way to do it, fall with your weapon in your hand,” said Felix. This did in fact remind Felix of the parachutist who thought he could cut his parachute smaller and smaller after each jump untilhe could jump with a chute the size of a handkerchief. 

“Art is impractical, “ said Felix, “It’s not the kind of activity a man should get into. That’s why I like it so much.”

They laughed. They both felt like losers, after all, what else could they do but laugh? It was good fortune for them to meet again. Both wanted to talk; Jack about his marriage, an event no one can feel perfectly sure of, and Felix about his lost job, which had slowly come to mean the loss of his freedom to paint, for a long time, steadily, yet now he could live off his money in the bank and during this period perhaps win fame and prosperity enough to be only an artist. In public, in the eye of society, the plan sounded reasonable and Felix began to think he might pursue this goal with sincerity.  

Felix and Jack talked over a lot of other subjects and both in their private thoughts reached conclusions they may not have reached alone. When they staggered from the bar early in the morning, promising to talk at the wedding, if not sooner, Felix said, “If I can’t make the wedding for some impossible reason, what’s your number?”

“Here’s my card,” Jack said, and Felix, impressed with the practiced rhythm of the gesture with which he handed it to him, snatched the card between his fingers and without looking at it slipped it into his shirt pocket. As he did so his fingertips brushed the folded paper on which Felix had drawn a quartered circle with Effie's name in each section. 

"Well here you go, Jack," Felix said, removing the sheet and unfolding it. "This is my latest work."  He handed the paper to Jack. 

Jack looked it over seriously and slowly nodded. 

"That's fantastic, Felix, it really is, " he said. 

They stood on the sidewalk awhile longer, talking, reluctant to part ways, but it was cold and it soon became obvious they should say good night or go back in the bar and continue drinking. Felix had to end it, he was out of money.

“Been good to see you, Jack.”

“Same here , Felix. By the way, do you still spell your name P-h-e-l-i-x-?” 

It was an old joke and they both laughed.  Felix said, "I only did that once, and all it did was distract the viewers."

“Yeah, just another art stunt. See you at the wedding, if not before,”  Jack said, walking backwards.

“Sure thing.”

Some people from the bar, the point persons of a crowd now emerging, came out and separated them. 

“Say hello to Effie for me.”

“Yeah, say hi to Doris,” Felix shouted over the space of ten yards, over the heads of a small crowd, vaguely conscious that he and Jack were buddies and he wanted them to know it and don’t mess with us.

In the cone of light and the buzzing of a street-lamp a block away Felix stopped to look at Jack's business card. The raised blue lettering and modest logo in one corner were well composed and in good taste. The card read; Benwood Motel, Jack Hansen, manager. Following this was the address, phone numbers night and day, fax number and e-mail address. 

Felix shivered as he put the card back in his pocket. Jack has worked there a long time, he thought,  while we were in school he worked there, that’s why he would come to parties sober, because he had just got off the night shift. He might need a grounds keeper or a desk clerk, that would be good. I should have asked him.

Felix walked on, thinking of working at a motel desk at night, dealing with drunks and prostitutes, dangerous people. One would shoot him in the head for twenty dollars from the cash register. People did that kind of thing. His thoughts sunk deeper into an unlit, unexplored chasm. Never before had he felt so low. Where will I go, what will I do? he wondered, and the warm glow of drinking with Jack faded behind him as did the lights of the busy street at the edge of the neighborhood. The last six hours of sitting in a bar drinking began to descend on him. In the bar, talking to Jack, he could stay alert and concentrate. Now his conscious mind was slipping away from him. By turns he was concerned or didn't care at all.

     He was close to home. Effie would be worried. As drunk as he was, she would still be there for him, they would talk, or would they? Time and events were out of whack, he had lost his job, he had violated the pattern of their marriage, a large part of his past, financial security,  had disappeared and though he remembered it he was no longer connected to it. All that experience, work and time, lost! That was what concerned him most, his lost time.

He crossed the street. As Felix stepped up on the opposite sidewalk he crushed an object under his foot. Round, it was not a rock, it was perfectly round and he could feel it round through the bottom of his shoe. He looked down and saw there a small yellow wafer, with a strap. He picked it up. It was a toy watch made of soft plastic and the plastic crystal over the clock face had shattered. It was meant for a child’s wrist, a prize from a package of gum or cereal. The clock arms would turn, but there was no mechanism in the body to keep moving time.

Felix glanced at his own, real time-telling watch. Secretly he had resented this gift from Effie, hammering his wrist, imposing a foreign order from outside. Now what he saw shocked him. The hands of the watch on his wrist and those of the toy watch were in exactly the same position! Both read a few minutes after one am. Felix looked again.

It was a fact. Somehow he had come along and stepped on the toy at precisely the right moment. There was a connection. It had to do with the nature 

of time. Time is man made, for a rock or a cloud or a river takes no notice of it. Art truly made does not see time. Art is a rock we place in the river of time. 

He edged and pried the remaining plastic of the crystal out with his thumbnail. He looked around. No one was in sight, no one in any of the cars parked along the street. It had to be a coincidence. No one had planted the toy as a joke, for a stranger named Felix to find, how would they adjust the time and keep it right? This was not a joke or an artistic statement. It was an omen.

He now looked at his own watch. The hands had turned. He read the toy watch, the hands were motionless, stuck, though he could turn them with his thumb. This watch Effie gave me is useless, he thought. 

A feeling of displacement overwhelmed Felix so much that he felt unsure of the solidity of the concrete beneath his feet. Stepping on the toy watch became more significant, as though by doing so he had passed through a membrane into a place of special light. Was he dreaming? Was he drugged? Certainly so, with alcohol, but he thought he could handle that. Or was he carried to another planet to live under a dome of mysterious stars? But then again, what could be more mysterious than the stars in his own sky? He had never been to them either!

Violently, he shook himself. “I have got to get home, I’m way too drunk to be here. I’ve got to talk to Effie, she’ll know, we’ll figure it out.” 

He followed the sidewalk moving toward the dark trees that sheltered his home. All the alcohol he had drunk took a firm grasp on his mind and body, spread through him, its weight descending on him. With his right hand around the toy in his pocket he made a slight adjustment with his thumb. Holding the body of the watch securely, he gave the hands several counter-clockwise turns.  This eased his mind. The instrument now read the time as being a few hours earlier. 

Felix thought. Good, much better, I've made it all much better. Now I have time.                                                                                

Chapter 3  The Spotlight

Of the two houses at the end of Apricot Lane where it curved into a forest and ended no one was certain who lived in the second house. In the first house lived Felix and Effie Bolling, who heard their neighbors music. Most of the time it came as a soft throb through the trees. The residents of this second house varied so widely even the man whose name should be on a rental agreement, had there been one, could not say who they were. This did not trouble him. He was a musician, he let the rest of the universe come and go as it pleased.

In the first house, at this moment, Effie Bolling was asleep on the couch. Felix Bolling was stumbling home, very drunk and fumbling in his pocket with a toy watch he had found. He was an artist who felt like he had run out of time, then found it again with the watch whose hands he could easily move. When he fled from the house earlier in the evening he avoided Effie, not wanting to tell her he had lost his job. Now he was returning home in triumph and would soon hold her and love her if he could get his legs to bend right and keep both of them going in the same direction. 

Effie had come home from her job at a dress shop, walked into the house and called Felix. He would say something after finishing his thought, if he hadone at the moment. She heard no response. It must be a long thought. A light was on in the back room, his studio.  Looking in, she saw his normally clean desk with the lamp holding a cone of light on some papers and his pencil tray out of the drawer. She felt Felix was at home, not alone because he was usually there at that time. They had been together so long and were so similar they had grown into a psychic connection. And just at the time she knew he was home she also knew he was leaving. Only the desk top was in disarray, nothing else was 

out of place. In their small house she could see this at a glance. Felix was in trouble, he was fleeing and she knew it was not his fault. Felix did not make trouble. From the other house at the end of Apricot Lane music began to play. Here was a coincidence; at the moment she knew her husband was in trouble and had fled, the neighbor's music struck the air. Was it meant to inform her? Was it drawing Felix away?

Some people are more observant than others and have excellent memories  This was a blessing and a curse for Effie Bolling. She could walk or ride her bicycle (they had, as yet, no automobile and she was glad they didn't because they go too fast and you can't see anything from them) along a street and remember  every face, advertisement, or music she heard, the way the sun and the air feel, and clothing worn by others, though she had difficulty recalling the clothing on mannequins. She rarely stopped long enough to examine mannequins, thinking them ugly, inhuman, an impossible ideal. Why couldn’t these stores get together and hire the millions of sculptors with degrees in the fine arts and out of work to sculpt real looking people to show off that clothing? Impossible, said Felix, if all the regular people got up in the store windows all the people on the street would have to get skinny and perfect, they would have to become mannequins! It’s about balance. Effie’s memory linked clothing to the people wearing it. The statues in windows were all the same so she didn’t remember them. In remembering names and faces of real people she needed no memory tricks, she saw, heard and remembered without effort. 

With this talent for absorbing her surroundings so completely it is surprising Effie did not unload information constantly, growing verbally ferocious and spicing her talk with appropriate hand and facial gestures.  Effie was not frantic. If she did unload on any listener it was from  a concern to put them at ease, to make them feel welcome. On the rare occasions when she argued, her store of data was so vast little imagination in the employment of it was necessary and she won most of her cases. Those who suspected her of reconstructing the past to suit the present to get her way were disappointed. In every major and most minor ways Effie was honest. Thus far, with twenty-six years of experience and learning, she didn’t have to lie about anything.

She worked as a seamstress and kept their house tolerably clean. Felix was helpful in doing this kind of work. She and her husband were devoted to a life of simplicity, they loved to do without what most others craved and threw away very quickly. Their house in the forest on the edge of the neighborhood was flanked by a cemetery on the west and empty, overgrown lots on the east.The river was south, over the trees down a hill and across railroad tracks. To the north was the rest of their neighborhood and the University where they had both received degrees in the fine arts five years before. Their roof leaked and the plumbing talked but the rent was low and they had lived there for many years with only minor troubles. 

  Felix Bolling had been a maintenance man at the university. That job was now in the past. At quitting time that day Felix had been terminated from employment and given severance compensation equal to two weeks regular wages. He was told that the university was not required to give him the severance package. He knew he could do nothing about the situation so, after a long look into the building and a job he had devotedly performed since his graduation, he accepted what he was given and left. He had never used his degree in fine arts except to work at home on his own art. Almost all of his friends had done the same and almost all of them had studios in their homes. Felix worked mornings and evenings in a room at the rear of his house. It was really a shared room, like all of them. Effie could play music and he could work anywhere in the house and often did to capture the varieties of the light.  

    Effie’s musical work was strictly personal, for now. It didn’t matter to her who heard her. According to her friends she played the recorder very well and the flute exceptionally well, but Effie was uneasy with compliments. She felt they required more and continued performance from her. Most of us can say thank you and let it rest there, Effie thought she had to play until they told her to stop or she was depriving her audience and being unkind. Some thought she was snobby for not playing for a lot of people. If she played for more than a few she felt exposed and in danger, polluted, insincere.

Effie was not quite as slim as a mannequin and had dark hair cut short so it barely curled under her ears. Her eyes were light gray and her features very well proportioned except for the wide and prominent bridge of her nose. It looked like she had been hit between the eyes and the wound, though not discolored, was still swollen. A long time ago someone suggested she had a Marlon Brando look and she got in the habit of parodying the tough guy. For those who knew of her gentleness, this role was a very sharp contrast. 

Playing her recorder, her favorite instrument, did not chase off the gloom or illuminate the darkness of her mood. The empty house and Felix leaving as she came in was at the core of her unease and she would have to wait for him to return and explain. She wanted comfort, she wanted to know, now.

She thought of rearranging the furniture. Was the job too big for her alone? He favorite rug lay beneath her feet, she had bought it for five dollars at a yard sale, it was her most spectacular coup. The man who had the sale came out on his front porch in the blazing sun, wearing only short pants, his naked torso and heavy belly gleaming with lotion and sweat. By noon he was drunk and sold the giant hand hooked rug with a big laugh, to get rid of it. The credit card company he worked for was transferring him so, “Sun City here I come!”  His accent was heavily southern,  but he didn't look like he spent much time in the Nowhere Is Now Here sun. Effie asked him, “Are you leaving the bijou for the beach?” and he loved it. She got the rug with her last five dollars. When the man took the money he said, “If you ever sell it, don’t take less than a thousand for it.”

Effie usually returned home before Felix, but not tonight. She stayed to finish the bright yellow dress she wore. Now she played her recorder, the furniture could wait, she needed to be calmed immediately, she needed to search through the music for an answer. A stranger to music or a  person without imagination might find the concept odd, but Effie believed she could draw a distant person to her or at least soothe that person wherever they were, by sending her tones and melody out to them. Through music one can discover what happened, music becomes what the dreamer has yet to wake to. She 

brought back her father this way. He was clever and wise, but he died ~ it wasn’t his fault. He didn’t want to die. She never saw his gentle gray eyes again. The shriveled yellow man in the box was not him, so she looked for him. One day she found him  in Ravel’s Song For A Dead Princess and it carried away her grief; his laughter was in the plucked harmonies, the long surge and sweep of it his consistent, unfailing love and when the melody returned a second time he went away with it, for she could only hold him briefly now. Others were saddened by 

the song, not Effie. ‘I must be from another planet,’ she thought and found the idea pleasing. Ravel’s song and others that made her feel connected to a lost world gave her rest and protection. In a living crowd she was lost, drowned by faces. Alone, with Felix or a few others she could express herself with confidence and certainty. In their house in the woods she felt a comfortable distance, secure from the human race. 

Now Felix was gone, had broken their routine and she knew it was not his fault and knew he was unhappily struggling somewhere. They had made love the night before, twice, for an unusually long time. She knew by the depth of his sleep afterwards how content he was. When he left the house that morning he was easy in his heart. Something had happened today, it was not a thing building up in him suppressed and recently released.  It had come from outside of him, suddenly.

  She walked around their house playing a popular song by Stevie Wonder, happy remembering him inside her. In his studio, where he usually left his journal open for her to read, the journal was under a pile of books. This meant he didn't want her to read it. She passed it by and opened the back door, returning to the music right on the beat and playing into the darkening yard. It was growing cold and she shivered, her sudden movement causing a rill to spiculate her melody now smoothed by her delicate fingers. A movement on the narrow path beyond the collapsing fence could have been a prowler. She slowly backed up, closed the door with her toe and played her way back through the studio.

There was no prowler beyond her fence. It was a dog on the scent of a friendly human. The friendly human was someone like her husband, Felix, who had petted this dog briefly about ten minutes before Effie looked out their back door. The dog tried to follow Felix and receive a little more affection and then Felix shooed it away. It was a smart dog and followed the scent of Felix to his back yard fence and saw Effie open the door and heard the recorder, then the female human closed the door. There would be no kindness from that direction. 

Effie pulled the kitchen curtains closed. One set opened onto the south, where a party was beginning in the house on the other side of a shallow, wooded gulch. She felt warm thinking she might watch, but first, a cup of tea.

For this reason she was glad Felix was not at home. Soon she could watch what might happen under the neighbor's spotlight. The mystery was that her husband did not know about the spotlight and more of a mystery to Effie why she didn't tell him about it. It was the one secret she kept from him. Or maybe he had looked out the window when a party was roaring and knew of the spotlight and never told her he knew, keeping his own secret, the same one she kept from him. To her it seemed impossible. For a few years she had made a game of watching the people appear under the spotlight, sometimes women as well as men.

The owner of the house was a tall man, said to be wealthy, who stood straight and was polite even when drinking. It was also said he kept the place 

occupied by people unlike himself so when he felt the need for social readjustment he could escape into this 'mundo negro' as he called it.

Over the years the man noticed that partiers would follow a path out to the woods when the water was turned off or the toilet clogged. This path led to a triangular level place among the oak trees on the edge of the defile that divided the woods and ran down through a culvert under Apricot Ln. It was a peeing perch where the fluid flowed away or was absorbed. Though on some nights a considerable stream flowed,  the wind or stagnant heat of summer had never brought the odors up to Effie's windows. This may be why Felix had never seen 

the spotlight; he studied the woods only in daylight. 

The spotlight was a sparkling example of the owner's humor. Having noticed his guests using the area to relieve themselves, he had lights mounted on the trees fixed with a motion detector switch timed for a slight delay, just enough time for the victim to get well started before the lights blazed on, catching the prey in a net of light. To increase the fun the trees limbs were trimmed so this zone of respite was clearly visible from the second floor deck of the house. When a crowd was on deck and the spotlight went on a cheer went up.

Maybe the owner had wondered if the light could be seen from Felix and Effie's house, but probably not, knowing there are worse things to look at than urination. One night Effie played her instrument while looking out the kitchen window and saw the light catch several unsuspecting guests. Now they were her guests. Some of them joyfully exposed the functioning of their gear, others cowered, covered themselves and slunk away. These must  not have had enough to drink yet, she thought. This was one way to judge a person; how well they behaved urinating under a spotlight. She had seen men and women cry out and pee all over themselves, she had seen rage and joy and she had seen some so numb or stupid they did nothing at all. Some knew about the spotlight and beneath it played bold or played it easy. Some began to sing. 

There were parties every weekend in the Spring and Summer, all the nights of the weekend and sometimes into the week. In Fall and Winter the level of celebration declined and only a dedicated few remained in the house. The tall man went to the Caribbean every winter and provided no heat so the pipes froze.  The most frequent resident was the owner's friend, a rock and roll musician who was used to the cold. The one time Felix and Effie spoke to him about the rough conditions in the house the musician said, "If my guitar is cool, I'm cool." Effie said, "Yes, especially in winter." Her effort to be perky and bright as a counterbalance to his mordant dedication to darkness did not change his expression. He only looked at her suddenly, his eyes alight, the rest of his face flat. He did nod. Did he really get her point or had she missed something? He had been many years in California, they knew, and although she had never been there herself she had been told that Californians have evolved a unique form of communication. This form is nonverbal, which she understood, being a musician. She followed her thoughts to the conclusion that here was the modern form of communication generally, the tacit agreement that there was now, or had been,  communication in some form. If no information had moved from one side to the other it didn't matter. Maybe the next generation will understand by way of anostalgia fad. Today what each might draw from it alone is important. Art is made by the alone, for the alone, according to the architect La Corbusier. It was like any of the modern arts, the totality of the meaning was not very clear, the critics had not yet caught up to it and defined it so you might not want to see it looking up at you from your coffee table, if you have one. Did the musician understand this? How could she verbally ask him? 

"I don't think so, " said Felix. "He is his music and his music is him. Beyond this, nothing exists. He gave up everything for his art. He has nothing else,  his focus is total. If you want to talk to him you have to play your instrument or sing. It's the only form he understands."

"How do you know this?"

"I know him by knowing myself. I would be just like him if not for you. I'm glad you love me and I'm in love with you or I would never get a break from 

myself."

They discussed all this in their living room after returning from one of the parties, the music still vibrating through the forest and touching the walls of their home. They agreed that it was entertaining the first time, but it would be much different if they went back. It might even be dull and vicious.  It felt like people feeding, for the party was inhabited by people who appeared desperate for drink and talk and the faces of strangers. At that party a lot of guys wearing the same expression and type of shirt shouted a question at  Effie; would she squeeze a 

Redskin, the Washington type? The Redskins had won the Superbowl the previous January and the fans were still celebrating. For a reason that remained a mystery much speculation was wasted on the sex lives of the players. These fans were harmless, but Effie soon began to see slabs of raw meat rotting on stones in the desert. They had to leave. The music was so loud they couldn't hear it anyway. 

Now alone at home  Effie drank her tea and listened to the sounds of the party build in the darkening evening. This expanding, pulsing dome of sound music and voices occasionally released a womanly shriek. The sound gained speed as well as volume. Effie would have more fun watching them than being among them. It would be better if I was in the middle of the crowd, she thought, and they were all listening to me very intently, but could that ever happen?

It was still early. They were having fun, but the fun would not reach a high pitch for a few hours more.

Effie lay down in the dark on her living room couch. Only the kitchen light fell through the door onto the bright rug. This was truly Effie's best buy ever. It was a twenty-two by sixteen foot oval, hand-hooked rug with a floral pattern that grew outward, on a spiral of woolen ridges. It was worth over a thousand dollars, according to the man who sold it to her for five. She smiled when she 

remembered him.

He wore no shirt. He stood on the steps of his porch, his pink torso quivering in the sun, a fine mat of red-blonde hair gleaming with oil around his bulging navel. His naval horrified her,  a pit of flesh she looked right into owing to his elevated position on the steps. The loud man'stomach looked like his cheeks, split vertically as his face was split horizontally, tiny droplets of spit springing forth as he spoke. Even though she was sickened by him, she stood on the sidewalk with her eyes level with that jiggling second butt and did business.

She felt the down pillow on the couch, the quilt under her body, all second-hand, all high quality. She knew when to buy and when to leave it alone, she felt the mood of the seller and swung on the mood, followed it and caught it and this is how she furnished their house. She was always appropriately dressed in a mixture of fashions, one part could be very old, another very new. Her style could span a century. Her well-collected fashion ensemble was unified by her presence, her calm intelligence. She was fair to look upon and her voice was "ever soft and low." Felix had said that to her.

As she lay on the couch she played a simple tune. Her fingers were tired from holding a needle and somehow the tune got mixed with a dream and she slept. Again she saw the foolish, pitiful man on the porch. By the look of his white skin, he hadn't seen the sun in years. He flapped his soft and bulging arms around at the customers in his front yard, a thin strip of grass, pointing to the various pieces of furniture, tapes and records, books, and clothing. He was almost giving it away.

After making the sale he asked her if she needed help moving the rug. His grin was too sly, she said no, do you have a phone? Then she waited by the phone, but Felix didn't return her call. The man was drinking and selling and the day grew dark and no one she knew with a car or truck called her back. She told the man she would move the rug on her bicycle if she had to and he laughed. She didn't like the laugh and she waited. When the crowd had gone with the sun she came outside and found he had boosted the rug onto his car. 

"There, just tell me your address and I'll be there," he said.

Effie was exhausted and did as she was told. When she arrived home he was waiting there and Felix was standing beside him, drinking champagne out of 

a long stemmed glass. 

"You live here?" the man said. His tone was jolly. Thank god Felix was there and Felix was smiling. He and the man unloaded and unrolled the rug and the man carried in a big box and set it in the middle of her new purchase. He slowly opened the box, grinning.

"Congratulations!" he cried, pulled forth a bottle, unwired and released the cork. The cork popped and hit the clock above the door. They laughed. Next came a crystal, stemmed glass for Effie and they all toasted the deal. The box also contained a large silver bucket, with ice. Effie and Felix were not used to drinking and neither had eaten since noon. 

About halfway between here and there the man made a phone call and in an undetermined but short amount of time a man and a woman arrived with a 

table and spread out a dinner of shrimp and roasted asparagras in lemon sauce. They were introduced, and the man who had brought the table and food said, “Howard, you sure know a lot of people and places.” Effie asked the man if he had ever seen a “better appointed habitation, look closely.” and the man, after a short tour, had to admit the style and quality were indeed deliberate and very fine. The man and woman didn’t eat. They made polite conversation awhile and soon left. Effie was glowing. Just two  glasses of champagne were enough for 

her and she drank more than two. 

Felix had to help her to bed. She wanted to dance but could only remember the melody, not how to get her arms and legs to move right. She cared less and less about anything and wanted to sing but forgot the words. She was forgetting how to talk at all and by the time she remembered how to talk or the words of the song she couldn’t find the melody. 

The man’s voice came to her from somewhere, had she been asleep? He was sitting in the kitchen with Felix and someone else, talking. Someone was crying. She wanted to get up and help but she couldn’t move. She had hated him at first, all the way up to the moment she saw his car parked in the driveway of their house with the rug on it, then she was so glad to see him. Then he called that couple to visit and she didn’t know if they were sincere about her house or not and she was angry with him.  Felix liked him, was uncharacteristically merry. She didn’t know how to tell this man to stop, that his open, give all to anyone attitude disgusted her. When he confessed to feeling miserable with his life and wanting to leave it, get rid of it all and get back to a simple way, “like this”, he said and waved his hand in a general way to indicate the house and life of Effie and Felix Bolling, she felt sorry for him, even liked him.  But she couldn’t figure out what to say to him.

He sat in the kitchen complaining about how his company was unfair in transferring him and she listened from the bedroom wanting the bed to stop moving. He hated to leave town and go to a dry, treeless place without shade or history, just Gila monsters and sun. “Do I look like a lizard?” he cried. Finally Effie slept and didn’t know anything more until the morning.

She was thoroughly sick, it took her thirty minutes to relearn how to walk. There were many bottles and boxes she didn’t remember seeing the night before. The man had given them a lot of things, stuff that he couldn’t sell, Felix told her, because he wanted these items to “have a good home.” Two weeks later Felix received a credit card with his name on it in the mail; he could now 

borrow ten thousand dollars. It was time to move up! She remembered the man mentioning something like this. The next image instantly sprung into memory, was the flash of scissors as Felix cut the card in half. God bless him!

The interior of the house was a work of art Effie often rearranged. In every window she set an object of metal or glass that would catch the light and send it back into the room at a new angle. A glass lampshade caught the morning sun and a brass samovar glowed in the evening, sending varying shafts across the room. Between the windows her books were arranged where the sun would never fall on them and fade them and she had read all of them. Except for a few reference books Effie did not display a book she and not read and knew well. The books she had not read were boxed up in her closet. Since she spoke no other language except English with complete fluency she never used even the most common foreign phrase or word. 

The inside of her house was like the inside of her head, her personal space-works, inner and outer, and in her house even the stains on the walls in a storage room that were made by a roof leak and flowed in abstract shapes down the lapped boards were studied and well known. She had studied them while she played music and wove a memory around them.

Sometimes Effie would sit in a chair in this room. It smelled of tar from the roof leak. There was a small window opening onto the south and her neighbor’s house and she would play a soothing melody for that tormented rock and roller. Once you start rolling you have to die to stop, someone told her once. She pitied him. How could he hear his music with so much noise going on? With a gentle air, a waltz, jig or reel she might bring him quiet and ease. He must not sleep much, must live on potato chips and sardines.  He tried to practice, she heard 

him in the brief time when there was no party, between when he woke up in the late afternoon and the beginning of the party a few hours later. As soon as he got well started someone would arrive and interrupt him. They both had the same reasons for living in those houses in the woods, it was about cheap rent, but she imagined he paid too much in his struggle for solitude. But did he want solitude? Maybe he thrived on a constant stream of people looking for fun.

Tonight, as Effie slept on her couch and dreamed of her artful home and neighbor, Felix was very drunk.  He had never been so drunk, as drunk as Effie had been on the night she bought that rug. The man who sold it to her and delivered it brought enough champagne to refloat the Titanic, but the man sank anyway. Felix tried hard  but didn’t understand him. He was wailing about how unjust his company was for sending him to a part of the country where, according to the advertisements, the temperature never came close to freezing, fresh fruit hung from the trees most of the year and the women were all young, shapely and wore bikinis. But his tears were real, his feelings had been severely punctured. Effie understood. She told Felix how she had hated the man, then when she learned the depth of his sadness she loved him but either way, she couldn’t help him. That’s the way it is with some people. All you can do is watch them being washed away.

For now, pausing to lean against a tree, Felix was concerned only with getting home and into Effie’s tender care. He would tell her everything; how he lost his job, how sad and angry and confused he was. She would be missing him. Earlier he had run away from her and now knew it for a mistake. He started to walk again and forgot everything. Here he was in his neighborhood, yes, I live here, he thought, what a strange place. And then the effort of walking would steal his thoughts away. Walking took so much concentration!

When he was in the bar drinking with his old friend Jack, his mind was clear. As long as he could talk he wasn’t drunk or sober either, only on the way, moving, excited, on a track. Out here in the air, having to operate the complex ligamentation of his legs, he was overwhelmed. How am I expected to think and walk at the same time? he thought when he paused again. He kept checking his pockets for house key and wallet, found himself standing in one place for a long time, looking up at the streetlight and the ridged glass the light shone through and the fronts of the buildings and the light which came from within. People moved beyond those windows. He studied them, then raced ahead afraid he had lost time, trying to catch up to where he should be. But he didn’t remember where he should be. Had he been walking in the daylight he might know.  A strange yellow, that light, he would stop and wonder what hue of paint could catch it. His legs were so loose he thought if he put his foot down wrong his knee would bend sideways, so he concentrated for a long stretch on making his legs go forward and bend strictly front to back. A dog growled and slowly approached the fence he was passing. He suddenly growled back and the brute started barking very loudly. Felix hurried on. What was that joke someone told him, about a dog? What do you when a dog humps your leg? No, a big dog, a mastiff or guard dog, what do you do? You send flowers, pet him, ask for a ring, a number, what? Jack told him that joke, now what was the punch line?.

Two men in leather approached him. One spoke to him as the other lit a cigarette, stylishly striking the match and profiling for Felix. His act was a flawless display of theatrical skill. The other said, “It’s straight down and through the trees, on the left. Can’t miss it.”

Felix said, “Okay, thanks, “ and walked on, wondering why the stranger had given him directions to his own house.

He knew all about that place, he and Effie had lived there for more than five years. He always thought of himself as a good man, his only drawback, perhaps, was dryness. That was not a problem tonight. He might be, at times, boring and heavy, but he was predictable, he was devoted to his wife and his art. Effie was not foolish, she was not curious to find out which of them -- his wife or his art -- he was devoted to the most. He loved them both well enough for her, she would not test him. One night she got a fairly good idea how he felt about her when a man squeezed her in a theater lobby. In the middle of a crowd this man placed a hand on her butt and squeezed! Felix saw it from several steps away and stepped right up to the man and hit him so hard on the side of the head he fell to the ground. Cups of drinks flew, popcorn was scattered. The stranger lay bent and senseless, folded up on the floor. Everyone looked at him 

laying on the floor and no one went to him, he had been alone in that crowd. Felix was cooling off when the manager came up and kicked them out, without 

refunding their tickets. “This is not civilized behavior!” the manager said more than once. A guard was there, nervous, saying the same thing over and over. Felix and Effie never went back to that theater. They talked it over and agreed that it didn’t seem to matter that the film they were there to see was rated according to the number of bodies the good guy or gal could pile up, quickly, using all the latest weapons, and the film by this standard was rated very high. This kind of thing was supposed to happen on the movie screen, not in the theater lobby. They had gone to see the film because it was the newest thing and they felt an impulse to catch up with modern life. After that they had no interest in the newest thing.

Felix had reacted so instantly, without concern for himself, that she was certain of his love and relished the memory of his rage, he who normally remained so calm and said he disliked violence, calling it ‘useless.’ 

  She knew she was lucky. Some women followed their husbands around, made excuses for them, pretended the man's  trivial and inane ideas were magnificent, making themselves little to boost them, or they did the opposite, wounding them to death and feeding, emotionally, on the corpse. Effie thanked God or the Good Lord Luck she had Felix, though he could be dry!

At that moment, as Effie was home in a dream state, Felix was headed for a tree he thought he could trust. His legs wanted to go sideways again and had been moving that way for some time and he had to keep telling them to go forward. He wanted to stop and look at a street sign, to make sure he was on the right street, but his legs had continued walking so he missed the sign. The street looked familiar and then it didn’t. At last he arrived at the tree but it moved out of his way and let him fall onto the brick sidewalk. He noted with pleasure as he 

often did in daylight and sober that the herringbone brick pattern of the sidewalk was more interesting than concrete and put out his hands just in time to stop his face from hitting it.

It was good to lay down now and cast his burden aside. Felix was comfortable until a face with a voice coming out of it appeared above him.

“Hey, man, you awright? You resting good?”

Felix said, “Yeah, man, it’s break time.”

“Don’t let nobody step on you.”

After a time of rest Felix struggled on, refreshed, knowing Effie was home playing music or listening to it. Someone might have come to visit and he could burst in with the news. “I lost my job! I’m very drunk!”

Now I can go get a real job! he thought. Those fools at the Physical Plant, anyone can do that job. That guy that stuck his hand in the fan that time and had his fingers shredded, there’s just one example of that moron show. I’m getting a better job! I’m getting out in the sun!

As his thoughts straightened along purposeful lines so did his legs and he marched south on Apricot Ln. He had sobered, the night air refreshed him and his mood brightened as he passed the entrance to Hollyknock cemetery. Old Massa Hollyknock of the original plantation, dead now a hundred and fifty years; he used to grow tobacco and now they’ve sown his vales and gentle slopes with the Confederate dead and high society of Rosehill, and wouldn’t the old Massa flinch if he knew even some of the granchillen of his former slaves now rested with the quality folk?

Passing the cemetery often put Felix in a peculiar mood. Several years before his friend James, a fellow artist, was in his studio across the street applying oil to canvas when someone walked into his house and shot him numerous times in the head. James was buried in Hollyknock cemetery. If one could hover a hundred feet over the house where James lived, which is now a vacant lot, one could look through the limbs and leaves of the trees and see his gravestone, facing the place where he was killed. This closeness made Felix feel an immediate need to make an artistic statement, but all he had tried with James in mind went hollow. 

The house where this artist had been killed was torn down, not because James had died there but because it was too expensive to fix it up and too dangerous to continue renting to anyone. Now the empty lot was someone or some company’s investment. The murderer of James was never brought to justice. Someone had wanted to kill someone and someone was killed. To Felix this indicated that justice was flawed, that crime did pay. Knowing the same thing could happen to him made Felix stronger and more direct. These murderers are 

roaming around throughout society. The lie that complete security is possible was also roaming, as in our blood and tissues doctors tell us we have numerous ‘free radicals’ that might at any time take hold and start the long or short process of creating a tumor which then becomes cancerous and there is nothing anyone can do about it. Except to live, thought Felix, to push up into the air and shine. But that was hollow, too.

He thought this at the time and knew the analogy was inappropriate at a funeral. Everyone who had been close to James felt low for a long time. None of them had ever known a murder victim before. It took awhile for some of them to shake loose of the shock. Living two blocks from the dead man’s studio/home and his final resting place, Felix recovered, that is to say, put enough interesting stuff between himself and the killing to be able to push away the memory of James more slowly. But he recovered and now the contemplation of the death of 

James had the distance of history and since James was laid to rest in a cemetery also occupied by a lot of Confederate generals and notables involved in the cause of Southern Independence, his remembrance was even more honorable, as is said in these parts. This history spurred Felix to a new dedication to finishing his work. Sometimes he worked all night and went to work the next day without sleep. Now he had no work to go to without sleep. Ah well, life is change as death is change. 

Suddenly he was home. A party next door dominated the woods. His home was dark. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his watch. When he had picked it up it read one pm, the exact time the watch on his wrist had read. He had turned the hands of the toy back to give himself time. Now he turned them back even more, to have time to go to the party. If life is change, if death is change, our course must lie forward into it! 

Suddenly he was in a crowd of men in a house and they were all talking loud and with great authority. He was confused, the music was loud and everyone was shouting over the sound of it at the same time.

     “Who is Effie? She your old lady?” someone asked. Felix nodded, wondering how this stranger knew his wife’s name. He then saw the piece of paper in the man’s hand. To Felix the mystery was how that guy got the piece of paper on which, earlier in the evening he had drawn a circle, then crossed it horizontally and vertically to form within the circle four quarters of roughly the same shape and volume. In each quarter, which in the past he once wrote heart, spirit, body or intellect, he had this night written Effie, Effie, Effie and Effie. 

A number of men and one women looked at the paper over the stranger’s shoulder. 

Their comments;

“That’s art, I don’t give a goddam what else you got to say, that’s art.”

“He’s right, it’s simple, you know what the shit’s about, not like this other shit .”

“What? How can you call this art? There’s no mystery! It’s just his old lady’s name, it’s just love, no mystery. You got to have mystery to have art.”

“To hell with mystery, say it straight out or shut up, that’s what I think.”

"I think it's sweet."

A husky man in a uniform with a name, Jeff,  in an oval above his left breast pocket grinned at Felix. “I’m an artist, too, “ he said. “I work in the cemetery yonder running the backhoe, digging holes.”

“That’s right, his work is holy, they plant crosses over it.”

Felix looked at his hand and saw a glass in it. In the glass was a clear fluid, ice, a slim plastic skewer with several olives punctured by it and on top of the shaft a round, orange dot with two spots (representing eyes) and an upwardly curving line below them (representing a mout), a smiling face.  

A clatter and a roar woke Effie, she was shaken awake. Had the house moved? She sat up, wondering where Felix might be. Had he slammed the door as he came in? One glance determined this was not so, all was in place, the clamor was from the party at the other house in the woods. 

Where was Felix? It might soon be time to read his journal entry no matter what he wanted and figure out what had gone wrong.

Effie was refreshed by her sleep and alert now. The face of the clock above the hearth which was reasonably accurate read 1:30. 

No Felix, but the time had not come to panic. It was time to think calmly. He was in trouble, certainly, but where? Let me ponder this for the time it takes to brew another cup of tea, then I’ll read his journal and if that’s not enough I’ll call the police. 

As she sat with her tea by the table, feeling the beat of the music from her neighbor's house in the walls and floor of her own, her faith in Felix and understanding of his ways compelled her to reaffirm that what had happened to him was no fault of his. The injury came from outside of him. The possibilities were difficult to number. Many things can happen. Someone had done something to him. She remembered James, their friend who lived a few blocks up the street and how he now lay buried, gone away very young, across the street from his house.

Should she call the police now? What would they know about anything and how many layers of people would she have to wade through? 

Instead, she decided to call Logan. Logan worked with Felix, was a nice man and his phone number was easily available. She picked up her phone and punched in his number, but just as her forefinger pushed in the last digit and she heard the beep in her ear and noted the pitch was slightly lower than the previous number she set the phone down. 

No, I can't call him, it's after one thirty in the morning! He must be in bedby now, he's over forty!

And so as in the past, having run out of choices, she picked up her recorder and began to play, thinking of Felix and sending the music out to him, wherever he was. She felt he was close, but strangely out of reach. This contrariness puzzled her and she sent her melody into it. As she felt it was unyielding, she played more vigorously, to drive it from its mossy cranny.

As she played she stood up and walked, passing the window that looked out onto the woods and the house rocking among the trees. The spotlight was off just now. She walked on, playing.

When she returned the spotlight was on and men were under it. With her mind and fingers on her tune, her eyes found the men and examined them. One of them held out his arms, straight out, as if crucified on an imaginary cross while he peed into the darkness. He was embracing all this strangeness, or his spirit was pinioned and flayed as of one under torture, she could not tell. Curiously enough, he wore a shirt she had given to Felix.

She stopped and looked closer. That was no stranger, that was Felix, right there in the light! It was him! She felt so weak she almost fell over.

Felix was not alone. There were other men with him; a man with a cap, a big fat guy in a uniform with an oval over his pocket who stood talking close to his ear with one hand on her husband's shoulder and the other on his own flowing organ, his face aglow with what must have been immeasurable pride as he looked down upon the work-in-progress. Several others, all aslant or weaving, stood in the line creating their luminous arcs.  One other man raised his arms like Felix to greet the coming of the light, of the release, or did he merely acknowledge the cheering and accolades from the second floor deck of the house behind them?

Effie suddenly noticed she wasn't playing her instrument. The air was blown and shaken by the rock and roll and its power struck her. It formed a funnel in her mind with a silence at the core of it. She woke to this silence and tried to put a melody into it. She didn't consciously choose, her fingers did the walking and out came a surprising hornpipe;

         What will we do with the drunken sailor?

         What will we do with the drunken sailor?

Again she looked at Felix in the spotlight. He had finished and was smiling and the fat man pounded him on the back. She turned from the window. The light falling through the window was an odd gray. She looked again and the man was still hitting her husband on the back. Was that really Felix being burped by that guy? The men turned after shaking their gear and stowing it and went back toward the house. They stumbled and grabbed at tree trunks, limbs and branches to steady themselves going along the path. She saw their backs and although Felix wore that shirt she stitched up and gave him for his birthday, now she was unsure of her own eyes. Was that really him? The spotlight went out.

Her lips closed around the mouth of the recorder and a thoughtless breath sounded a note, a tuneless wheezing.

   Surprised, she looked up. That sckreezing sound, was that the hinges of the front door? She turned and looked in the direction of the front door, which she couldn't see beyond the kitchen door. It was him! He was home! The guy under the spotlight was only wearing his shirt. She wanted it to be Felix so badly she believed it was him and said, "It's you! It's my Felix!" When she saw that guy who looked like Felix under the spotlight she had been sleepy, dizzy, starved for oxygen.  Now she was awake. Now he was home and she was so happy she stood up and began to play a tune she knew he favored so very well;

      I just called to say

                     I love you.

      I just called to say

                   how much I care

as she walked into the living room to greet him. 

   We see only surfaces and reluctantly accept changes in them.

end of “Nowhere is Now Here”               

One tends to overpraise a big book because one has got through it. E.M. Forster