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By Root 302 0

’s one of those bottomless plummets, the kind into which he falls some nights, legs jerking convulsively as he wakes in his bed, saving himself, saving himself from falling through himself, through her. Because that’s what’s happening now, he’s falling through a woman’s vastness: storms and oceans, a desert, a mountain, a field in bloom, the wind moving in loops and arcs and great gusting sighs, the breath of God, in out in out, God exhaling clouds of geese, and Bigelow in his tower, watching. On the bluff, over the creek, on Cook Inlet, in the territory of Alaska, vast and austere, possessing a beauty that cares nothing for the attentions of men, who crawl like ants on her face, at her feet; Bigelow watches himself drawing a map, tracing lines that only he can see, lines that give him the power to predict.

But how amazing to have found a way inside a girl that has nothing to do with fucking. Five glasses of something that looks like water, that closes the cracks in the dance floor, ices them over and lets him slide.

The launch stays the night, waiting out the ebb tide, so Bigelow comes home at sunrise, sore-footed, mosquito-bitten, puking bootleg, and considering the torment worthwhile. Here’s another thing he’s never done before—danced all night with a gap-toothed girl. Still young enough to keep a mental notch of experience, stuff he’s collecting.

A gap-toothed, pickpocketing girl, he’s forced to conclude when he doesn’t have the fare back home, but still, no regrets. The captain laughs as if Bigelow’s hardly the first to be fleeced in this manner. In lieu of a ticket, he accepts the promise of one dollar within an hour of disembarking.

It’s not a pleasant walk to the station and back—Bigelow has to go much more briskly than he’d choose in his eviscerated condition—but Anchorage isn’t big enough to allow for anonymous deceit. He returns to the muddy dock with the dollar, and then, cursing himself—how can he have been so stupid as to neglect to read his instruments?—he has to go back to the station before he can cable the bureau.

Home again, and the effort of another mile walked in the sudden heat, of straining to interpret cruelly tiny lines through a buzz of insects, brings on dry heaves and cold sweats, but still, he’s not sorry. There must be a price, after all, for revelation.

For slipping inside a woman and seeing what’s there.

IT COMES TO HIM SUDDENLY, like a message traveling down the taut line of the kite, making it tremble with the knowledge. The Aleut left because she was pregnant.

He’s sure, he knows, that she went off to have a child, his child. The two of them alone, away from him. But his, they are his.

And how far from him can they be? Not so far that their very breath doesn’t, by the action of the wind, blow past, touching him.

Standing on the bluff, wind whipping tears from his eyes, he sees her navel unwind with the swelling of the flesh around it.

Then again, he thinks, back in the station house, eating undercooked beans and washing each mouthful down with a swig of boiled creek water, this is just the kind of fantasy to which loneliness makes a person prey.

All those hot baths afterward, her legs crossed, open, his seed leaking out.

HEARTS IN EXILE, and he’s seen it twice before, he can’t afford to part with another nickel; and yet there he is, one buttock tingling, the other already asleep. Ten to a bench, lice strolling from one host to the next, Bigelow leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees, hoping to keep his head out of the path of infestation. The film is projected onto an old sheet and he wonders, as he did during the previous week’s showing, from whose bed the screen has been taken, from whose body flowed the now dry and ghostly stains. Not sweat, and not blood, and not urine either. Seven overlapping outlines in the center of the screen, each about the circumference of a saucer. Bigelow waits for outdoor scenes, for patches of pale sky, blank fields of snow, and, memorably, the sequence in Moscow’s slum in which the heroine’s white apron is sullied by the seven evocative