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By Root 14464 0

where you come, after you have crossed oceans and eaten stale biscuits while prisoned forty days and nights in a storm-tossed rat-trap, after you have sweated in the greenery and heard the savage whoop, after you have built cabins and cities and bridged rivers, after you have lain with women and scattered children like millet seed in a high wind, after you have composed resonant documents, made noble speeches, and bathed your arms in blood to the elbows, after you have shaken with malaria in the marshes and in the icy wind across the high plains. That is where you come, to lie alone on a bed in a hotel room in Long Beach, California. Where I lay, while outside my window a neon sign flickered on and off to the time of my heart, systole and diastole, flushing and flushing again the gray sea mist with a tint like blood.

I lay there, having drowned in West, my body having drifted down to lie there in the comforting, subliminal ooze of the sea floor of History. Lying there, I had what I thought then was a fine perspective on my own history, and saw that the girl I had known that summer a long time back hadn’t been beautiful and charming but had merely been smooth-faced and healthy, and though she had sung songs to Jackie-Bird while she cradled his head on her breast, she hadn’t loved him, but had merely had a mysterious itch in the blood and he was handy and the word love was a word for the mysterious itch. And that she had been tormented by the mysterious itch and torn between its impulse and fear, and that all her withholdments and hesitations had not been prompted by some dream of making “love mean something” and making me understand that dream but that they had been prompted by all the fears which the leaning, sibilant, sour-breathed old dough-faces of conventional society had whispered into her ear like fairy godmothers while she lay in her cradle, and that those withholdments and hesitations were no better or worse than the hottest surrender nor better or worse than those withholdments practiced by Lois for other ends. And in the end you could not tell Anne Stanton from Lois Seager, for they were alike, and though the mad poet William Blake wrote a poem to tell the Adversary who is Prince of This World that He could not ever change Kate into Nan, or if indeed the Prince couldn’t change Kate into Nan it was only because Kate and Nan were exactly alike to begin with and were, in fact, the same with only the illusory difference of name, which meant nothing, for names meant nothing and all the words we speak meant nothing and there was only the pulse in the blood and the twitch of the nerve, like a dead frog’s leg in the experiment when the electric current goes through. So when I lay there on the bed in Long Beach, and shut my eyes, I saw in the inward darkness as in mire the vast heave and contortion of numberless bodies, and limbs detached from bodies, sweating and perhaps bleeding from inexhaustible wounds. But finally this spectacle, which I could summon up by the mere act of closing my eyes, seemed merely funny to me. So I laughed out loud.

I laughed out loud, and then after watching for some time the rhythmic flushing of the sea mist by the neon sign, I went to sleep. When I woke up I made ready to go back to the place and the things I had come.

Years before, a young girl had lain there naked on the iron bed in my room with her eyes closed and her hands folded over her breast, and I had been so struck by the pathos of her submissiveness and her trust in me and of the moment which would plunge her into the full, dark stream of the world that I had hesitated before laying my hand upon her and had, without understanding myself, called out her name. At that time I had had no words for what I felt, and now, too, it is difficult to find them. But lying there, she had seemed to be again the little girl who had, on the day of the picnic, floated on the waters of the bay, with her eyes closed under the stormy and grape-purple sky and the single white gull passing over, very high. As she lay there that image came into my head,