He takes our hands; makes the slightest bow. André’s bald spot; A. B. Cook’s salt-and-pepper hair. Moustache rather like André’s, but no beard. André’s dentures, possibly, but no eyeglasses. Contact lenses, I believe, can be tinted? Ambrose squeezes my arm. No action, no reaction; what a slow movie it’s going to be! I begin to mumble something like Thanks for the nice letters and My but isn’t Guy Fawkes Day early this year when Boom comes the third explosion, so deep and quiet I don’t even hear it. A plain-faced sharp-jawed firm-voiced (trim-figured) middle-thirtied woman stands nearby: Horner’s? Casteene’s (she could be the sister of that blank-phizzed unreceptionist chez Cook at Chautaugua)? Morgan’s perhaps, if her incongruous Indian headband means anything (otherwise she looks about as Indian as the woman on the Land O Lakes butter box)? No: plainly her own woman, this “Pocahontas”—so “Casteene” introduces her, with the smiling flourish of a magician introducing his assistant — though from the particularly disagreeable smirk with which she appraises me, and from Ambrose’s sudden lividity, his appalled, exasperated “Jesus Christ,” I begin to infer that she once was
Bang bang bang. Observe that I do not whimper; I merely report the news from across the Peace Bridge. It is now three days later, Saturday morning, 14 June, today. My inseminator scratches away at his tale of Perseus and Andromeda’s failed marriage, the problem of addressing the “Second Cycle” of one’s life. My Toronto newspaper reports Nixon’s claim to broad new “bugging privileges” against political radicals; also that the sinking of the U.S. destroyer Evans by collision with an Australian aircraft carrier was not the Australian skipper’s fault, and that Thor Heyerdahl’s Ra is still seaworthy despite an unexpected waterlogging to starboard. What are you up to over there this mild muggy morning, I wonder, and where are you up to it? It is “Jacob Horner,” no doubt, from whom I have this almaniacal reflex: he has apprised me that the steamy St Barnabas evening aforereported — Kamehameha holiday in Hawaii, birthday of John Constable, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Richard Strauss, and Mrs Humphry Ward — when I re-met Messieurs Morgan and Casteene, and my would-be impregnator re-met his ex-wife Marsha Blank, was the 198th anniversary of the day when Goethe’s young Werther first met his Charlotte at the hunting lodge in Wahlheim.
The debris from those three explosions is still falling; Damage Control has yet to complete the assessment of our condition, but all the evidence is that we are sinking fast. On Thursday 12th, John L. Lewis died and the Niagara Falls shutoff was completed; convinced though he is that Reg Prinz knew in advance “Pocahontas’s” identity and “set him up” for that dismaying surprise (duly filmed, of course), Ambrose “kept his cool”: one would never have guessed, from his energetic flirtations with “Bibi” as the Baratarians filmed the unfailing Falls (at whose base one well-rinsed human skeleton has been discovered), that he had spent the night pounding the mattress in his rage at “them”—Mr Prinz, Ms Blank — and at his incomprehension of their motives and connexions. No good my advising him, from my rich experience of Them, that there is no They, only a He: André/Andrew Burlingame/Cook/Castine, whose motive, while doubtless unknowable, certainly looked a lot like plain old sadism, wouldn’t he say? It was too much, he exploded (the last detonation of that day): all those people in one place! Horner (A. knew him in graduate school days, hadn’t seen him since)! Morgan (What in the world had flipped him out so?)! Castine (I really couldn’t tell? A third half-brother, maybe?)! And Marsha (Jee-sus)! Put it in a novel, your editor would throw the script back over the transom! Where was Giles the Goat-Boy, whilst They were at it? Where were my long-lost son and Ambrose’s old high school English teacher, if Prinz was going to play This Is Your Life?
