Elvissey Read Free

stayed with him;
couldn't abandon, felt compelled to accompany, wherever
he went.
    "Why, then-"
    Whenever he went.
    "Why, then, with all this strength," the voice said: Eisenhower's voice. President there too, we induced, and sounding enough like ours as to chill; again I remembered what
was first told, that their world was no less real, nor more
unreal, than ours. "Why should we be worrying at times
about what the world is doing to us?"
    Worry, rather, about what we'd allowed it to do. John
continued to regard Jakeisms; I vizzed the page he studied,
saw its single printed line: Sharpest knives leave sweetest
wounds.
    "-this increase of power from the mere musket and the
little cannon," their Ike went on, "to the hydrogen bomb in
a single lifetime is indicative of the things that have happened to us."
    What wounds had we inflicted upon ourselves that we
didn't even feel? Which had we asked for? Which, wanted?
Which, needed? Which, deserved?
    "They indicate, rather, how far the advances of science
have outraced our social conscience."
    Many moments lately passed when I dreamed of conclusion so immediate, and so thorough, as John desired. His pain destroyed us-my pain destroyed us-and all I could
do in response was love: but love didn't limit darkness,
wouldn't shape shadow. Our world shrifted love, ran screaming from its presence, at night turned from its light to fasten
gaze upon the dark, lonely bed. We favored a notion so free
of science as a history class: that the other world held the
answer we needed, if not the one we wanted; that, smashing
through our looking-glass, we might on the other side see
ourselves true, neither as we wished nor as we feared we
were, and so be able to decide, at last, whether we should
disunite.

    "-solution to the Negro problem cannot be found in
legislation, but in the minds-"
    Static exploded, shattering their world; all silenced, as if
it'd never been. Mora stroked his machine to a stop.
    "At that point the device was apparently observed. Expected response surely ensued. Prospects," Mora summed,
"fascinate."
    Not always sure I'd had one, I wanted life; John felt sentenced to his. As we sat there, while Mora gathered his
papers, I saw John reread the book's closure, a quote attributed to John Donne. Once I'd been to London, and in
St. Paul's seen the preacher's statue, his image sculpted as
he'd desired: wrapped within windings, eyeshut as if asleep,
smiling as if dreaming of every funeral followed; foreseeing
his own, mayhap-the end of a long trial, with the outcome
of the appeal ahead assured.
    I run to death, and death meets me as fast,
and all my pleasures are like yesterday.
    Jake's deconstruction followed; succincted. When time
comes, he'd writ, act.

    Class ended; before homing we descended into the crypt of
Columbia's St. Paul's to attend an artshow. A marble spiral
led to the display; at stairfoot stood artists, smoking and
drinking cups of wine, chatting technik. By their abdominal
convexities I gathered that they endeavored new projects
even while conversing. The other designers, including the
woman I'd earlier spotted, had galleried, hovering round
their containers. Their sculptures, too, were tabletopped;
among them were interspersed bowls of ikebana, lending
color no less artificial, however natural.
    "Ugly," an appreciator noted to his companion. Their
first date, I inferred; each wore a forced disinterest in any-
one's affairs other than their own.
    "Art," she replied, ecstasized.
    Background essentials: inbody pregnancy, when accidental, was inevitably if circumventially terminated; regooding
upheld the edicts forbidding the wombed from being untimely ripped, amniotic forecast irregarded. Only through
tubed cultures, suitably outbodied, was birthed perfection
assured. Mutative nature's inescapables-chemical rain rich
with acid and deviant ray, unseeables in food and drink, our
radium-blue heaven-certified that trad gestation