The march lasted only a minute and a half but how dark and strong, what fatedness in the rolling brass, and then there was a long silence and a white screen and finally a face that transfigures itself in a series of multiple-exposure shots, losing its goiters and gnarls, a seamed eye reopening, and it was awfully mawkish, okay, but wonderful also, a sequence that occurred outside the action proper, a distinct and visible wish connecting you directly to the mind of the film, and the man sheds his marks and scars and seems to grow younger and paler until the face finally dissolves into landscape.

The orchestra began to rise into the pit and the music now was Shostakovich, you are sure of this, how spacious and skysome, lyrically wheeling, bird-wheeling over the wide plain.

Then it ended. It didn't end, it just stopped dead. A landscape of foreground dogs and distant figures leaning to their march. Klara remained in her seat, you all did, and she felt a curious loss, that thing you used to feel as a child when you walked out of a movie house in the middle of the day and the streets were all agitation and nasty glare, every surface intense and jarring, people in loud clothing that did not fit.

Miles showed up and they went to a bar that Jack knew. Jack knew all the midtown bars, he knew the steak houses and the best cheesecake and where you got onion soup that makes you think you're in Les Halles and he told funny stories about his early days in the theater district, flacking shows up and down the street, but Klara wasn't listening.

The film was printed on her mind in jits and weaves. She felt she was wearing the film instead of a skirt and blouse. She heard Esther laugh and it sounded like someone in a room three rooms away. Miles told a story that required her to join in but she couldn't get the details straight. She smiled and drank her wine. The conversation was over there somewhere. She kept seeing snatched fragments. She saw the marked faces in the great landscape. She had the movie all around her, sitting in a bar under walls of white neon beating in the Broadway heat.

4

In cities you build a language of circumspection and tact, a thousand little intimations, the nuance that has a shimmer of rubbed bronze. Then you go to the wilderness and become undone, lapsing into babble, eating mushroom caps that implode your brain, that make you preternaturally aware and afraid, turn you into an Aztec bird.

Matt Shay sat in the terminal at the airport in Tucson and listened to announcements bouncing off the walls.

He was thinking about his paranoid episode at the bombhead party the night before. He felt he'd glimpsed some horrific system of connections in which you can't tell the difference between one thing and another, between a soup can and a car bomb, because they are made by the same people in the same way and ultimately refer to the same thing.

There was a garbage strike in New York.

There was a man being paged known only as Jack.

A woman with an accent said to someone seated next to her, "I so-call fell in love with him the day he paint my walls."

There was a man in a wheelchair eating a burrito.

He sat waiting for Janet's plane to be announced. He wondered if this might be a good time to call his brother. Nick was living in Phoenix now, doing some vague consulting work and teaching Latin once a week at a junior college.

When Nick dies a team of metaphysicians will examine the black box, the personal flight recorder that's designed to tell them how his mind worked and why he did what he did and what he thought about it all, but there's no guarantee they'll find the slightest clue.

Reciting Latin epigrams to business majors in a place called Paradise Valley.

Matt took off his glasses and blew on the lenses, his mouth worked into a whispery ellipse, and then he ran his handkerchief over the steamy surface and held the glasses to the light.

Whenever the ambient voice asked someone to pick up the white courtesy phone, a small girl made a fist and spoke into it.

He put his glasses on. Janet came out of the gate and he laughed when he saw her. Laughed in sheer and healthy delight, in relief that she was finally here and in physical anticipation as well, and he laughed at the shambles they were going to make of the camping trip they were taking and he laughed in the end because he couldn't help it. He was woozy from the long day's drive and didn't have the strength to keep from laughing.

Janet walked briskly toward him wearing a slightly twisted grin, the one that meant she wasn't completely sure what she was doing here.

"The captain said it's a hundred and four."

"Should I call Nick?"

"What for? It was seventy-two in Boston."

"He's right up the road. It seems dumb not to call."

"There's a garbage strike in New York," she said.

He was woozy from driving and she was numbed by confinement and engine noise. They went to the parking area and crammed her bags into the jeep. The jeep was brimful, a consumer cartoon bulging with equipment, clothing, luggage and books,

"Tell me again where we're going," she said.

They spent the night at the edge of an Indian reservation, in an old adobe lodge with a teenage girl eating popcorn at the desk and the white dome of an observatory visible from their bed.

It was a fine beamed room with creepy suburban furniture and they were shy because they hadn't seen or touched each other in a long time and Janet had to get used to this. They'd only slept together several times, planned always in advance. They didn't have a set of understandings, a pace and glance, the whole hushed protocol of wishes and hints, bodies lightly brushing in the elevator. There was no elevator here. And Janet was a little unsure of herself in a strange room. It wasn't really her, was it?

Another woman might feel the lure of anonymity. Meeting a man in a room of a thousand previous men and women. Shedding the personal past in a faceless sort of motel abandon. But this wasn't a motel and at least there was that to be thankful for.

She was nervous, standing by the window in her jeans and bra. They'd gotten only as far as the bra. That's when she paused to talk, to let him know how she felt. She was not sexually anxious. She was sexually anxious, yes, but mainly unsure in a general way, she said, because it did not seem completely comfortable, meeting a man in a setting that had predetermined expectations-a strange bed in the middle of nowhere. She had a way of seeing herself, a wariness about things that didn't feel right. The place wasn't particularly clean for one thing. The girl downstairs for another, cross-eyed or walleyed, whatever. She talked to him honestly, in her small voice, slightly piping, and he lay in bed and listened, waiting for her to get used to the idea, a flight across country that ends in a random sort of room, making her feel isolated from everything that's familiar.

He listened and waited and finally understood that some of the things she was saying about herself were also true of him. He understood this the way you sneak up on things you've always sort of known.

She stood by the window. Over her shoulder he could see the observatory dome washed in last light at the top of the mountain.

There were men who walked these deserts a hundred years ago, the penitentes, chanting and fasting, scourging themselves with hemp whips, or whips made from the braided fiber of the yucca plant, or cord whips, la cuerda, a small whip of tightly knotted wool.

Janet didn't know how to look at the desert. She seemed to resent it in some obscure personal way. It was too big, too empty, it had the audacity to be real.

They drove and talked.

"Tell me again why we're going there."

"It's a wildlife preserve and gunnery range."