But every letter has two times, that of its writing and that of its reading, which may be so separated, even when the post office does its job, that very little of what obtained when the writer wrote will still when the reader reads. And to the units of epistolary fictions yet a third time is added: the actual date of composition, which will not likely correspond to the letterhead date, a function more of plot or form than of history. It is not March 2, 1969: when I began this letter it was October 30, 1973: an inclement Tuesday morning in Baltimore, Maryland. The Viet Nam War was “over”; its peacemakers were honored with the Nobel Prize; the latest Arab-Israeli war, likewise “over,” had preempted our attention, even more so the “energy crisis” it occasioned, and the Watergate scandals and presidential-impeachment moves — from which neither of those other crises perfectly diverted us. The campuses were quiet; the peacetime draft had ended; détente had been declared with Russia and proposed with China — unthinkable in 1969!—but the American defense budget was more enormous than ever. In Northern Ireland the terrorism continued; the generals had taken over in Greece and Chile, and Juan Peron was back in Argentina; Sirhan Sirhan and James Earl Ray were still in jail, joined by Charles Manson and Lieutenant Galley of the My Lai massacre. The Apollo space program was finished; there would not likely be another human being on the moon in this century. We were anticipating the arrival of the newly discovered comet Kohoutek, which promised to be the most spectacular sight in the sky for many decades. Meanwhile the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down all antiabortion laws but retreated from its liberal position on pornography, and the retrials of the Chicago Seven had begun. The prime interest rate was up to 10 %, the Dow-Jones Industrial Average, after a bad year, up to 980, first-class postage up to eight cents an ounce. Airport security measures had virtually eliminated skyjacking except by Palestinian terrorists; the “fuel shortage,” in turn, was occasioning the elimination of many airline flights. Plans for the 1976 U.S. Bicentennial were floundering.

Now it’s not 10/30/73 any longer, either. In the time between my first setting down “March 2, 1969” and now, “now” has become January 1974. Nixon won’t go away; neither will the “energy crisis” or inflation-plus-recession or the dreadfulnesses of nations and their ongoing history. The other astronomical flop, Kohoutek, will, to return in 75,000 years, as may we all. By the time I reach Yours Truly…

The plan of LETTERS calls for a second Letter to the Reader at the end of the manuscript, by when what I’ve “now” recorded will seem already as remote as “March 2, 1969.” By the time LETTERS is in print, ditto for what shall be recorded in that final letter. And — to come at last to the last of a letter’s times — by the time your eyes, Reader, review these epistolary fictive a’s-to-z’s, the “United States of America” may be setting about its Tri- or Quadricentennial, or be still floundering through its Bi-, or be a mere memory (may it have become again, in that case, like the first half of one’s life, at least a pleasant memory). Its citizens and the planet’s, not excepting yourself and me, may all be mainly just a few years older. Or perhaps you’re yet to have been conceived, and by the “now” your eyes read now, every person now alive upon the earth will be no longer, most certainly not excepting

Yours truly,

I: The Author to Whom It May Concern. Three concentric dreams of waking.

3/9/69: I woke half tranced, understanding where I was but not at once who, or why I was there, or for how long I’d slept. By the sun — and my watch, when I thought to check it — it was yet midsummer midafternoon, a few hours into Cancer, hotter and hazier than when I’d dozed off. The slack tide had turned, was just commencing its second flow; but the marsh was still in full siesta, breathless. Two turkey buzzards circled high over a stand of loblolly pines across the creek from those in whose steaming shade I lay. The only other sign of life, besides the silent files of spartina grass, was the hum of millions upon millions of insects — assassin flies, arthropods, bees above all, and beetles, dragonflies, mosquitoes — going about their business, which, in the case of one Aedes sollicitans, involved drawing blood from the back of my right hand until I killed her.

The movement woke me further: I recognized that before consulting my wristwatch I’d felt for a pocketwatch — a silver Breguet with “barleycorn” engine-turning on the case, steel moon hands, and a white enameled face with the seconds dial offset at the VII, the maker’s name engraved in secret cursive under the XII, and my father’s monogram, HB, similarly scribed before the appropriate Roman numeral IV — a watch which I did not possess, had never possessed, which could not with that monogram be my father’s, which did not so far as I know exist! Reached for it (in the watch pocket of the vest I didn’t wear, didn’t own) with more reflexive a motion than then turned my left wrist. I’d perspired in my sleep, whereinto I’d fallen (whence such locutions in — what year was it?) in midst… in midst of revisiting the Maryland marshes at the midpoint of my life; perspired the more now, more awake, at feeling one foot still in distant time or dreams.

I knew “myself,” come briefly down under Mason and Dixon’s to visit certain cattailed, blue-crabbed, oystered haunts of — aye, there was the rub: I had been going to say “my youth,” but what that term referred to, like dim stars and ghost crabs, I could not resolve when I looked straight at it. And when I looked away — at a periwinkle, say, self-encapsulated on a nearby reed — from my mind’s eye-corner I could just perceive, not one, but several “youths,” all leading — but by different paths, in different ages! — to this point of high ground between two creeklets where I lay, stiff as if I’d slept for twenty decades or centuries instead of minutes. There was the neutral, sleep-wrapped, most familiar youth, neither happy nor unhappy, begun in Gemini 1930, raised up in sunny ignorance through Great Depression, Second War, and small-town Southern public schools. I knew that chap, all right: dreamer of sub-sea-level dreams from the shores of high transmontane lakes; his was the history most contiguous with the hour I’d waked to.

But beside it, like a still-sleeping leg that its wakened twin can recognize, was another history, a prior youth, to whom that pocket-watch and vest and a brave biography belonged. They shared one name’s initial: bee-beta-beth, the Kabbalist’s letter of Creation, whence derived, like life itself from the marsh primordial, both the alphabet and the universe it described by its recombinations. Beyond that, and their confluence in the onstreaming Now, they had little in common, for this youth’s youth was all bravura, intrigue and derring-do, sophistication and disguise. Coeval of the nation in whose founding his father had played a certain role, he had grown up between its two wars of independence, come to disbelieve in both father and fatherland, striven to disunite the but slightly united states — and then (a lurid memory here of bomb burst, rocket glare: not the clearest of illuminations) at the midpoint of his wayward life had seen a different pattern in the past, changed heart again, retreated from fatherland to Mother Marsh in vast perplexity to sort things out, dozed off for a moment in the resinous shade…

Then what was this third, faint-bumbling B, most shadowy of all, but obscured more by mythic leagues of time than by self-effacement or disguise? And not retreated to the midday marsh, but fallen into it as though from heaven, become a blind, lame, vatic figure afloat on the tepid tide, reciting a suspect version of his history, dozing off in midexposition…?