What then? What had he found? What use had he made of his devices? (In Churchill's bright windy days, silver-brown light drained curvily in the river's tidal flats, flowers nodding their purple heads, belugas in the river like immense ivory-colored snails, birds overhead. The wheat cars were now open, a few kernels lying on the bottom. He ate them raw, crunching them in his teeth. He saw that the water in the river was the same color as the mud: not gray, not blue, but a sunny silver-blue all shimmery like the belly of a fish.) This book being a palindrome, and this tale being the central and infinitely regressive metonym thereof, one might hope by now to have established the center of our traveller's world, but the Earth itself is scarcely a sphere, only an asymmetric rotational spheroid — that is, a pear — and so the reference point, the map of magma which lies precisely halfway through our atlas, is not quite where intuition might lead us to expect. Then, too, mass displacements occur beneath our feet and no one knows their laws. But, as I've said, cannot we make our own planets wherever we go, with even our own idées fixes or lunar satellites to accompany us in orbits of measurable eccentricity? He'd once breakfasted at a café in Avignon, and the food was good so he returned the next morning, discovering himself to be at the center of a polished world of tables, those square lakes reflecting the chestnut trees' green mottlings and marblings even while shaded by snowy awnings. It was a vantage-point for gazing, as the Frenchmen did, at the sunny greater world of cars and breasty women while imbibing a café au lait so deliciously milky-bitter, the foam yellowish-brown like crème brûlée; beside it a fresh croissant half coiled itself, flanked by two thimble-sized butter dishes, a tiny ribbed cylinder of apricot preserves, and a hot chocolate like a grayish-blue cumulus cloud — everything in immaculate white china, the hot chocolate and its complementary milk in two white pitchers each of which was petite enough to close one's hand around, while the fresh orange juice existed imperially distinct in its silver-clear glass. From his table and the world of tables extended the whole world in a succession of unpredictably angled streets which were sometimes trapezoidal when two old buildings faced strangely; streets walled by ancient stone houses with lion-headed knockers, streets sometimes asphalted and sometimes cobbled, sometimes blistered with stones; some streets were long tunnels of plane or chestnut trees that ran all the way to the city wall which bent around the ends of the world. That was the world for but a day or three, and then he had to leave Avignon. His satellite followed him, revolving everywhere nowhere everywhere. His satellite was the atlas. It flapped its pages like an immense square bird, beguiling and terrifying him with its pursuit. Had he been courageous enough to leap onto the page which spoke most sweetly to his heart, the recession of that moon of his would cease; he'd be troubled no more. But he did not do it; he could not. On the lower terrace of the Cliff House in San Francisco one free spirit of an old fellow ran a strange concession whose hours depended on the weather and his own moods. The business was a giant camera obscura. It cost a dollar to go inside. Within the circular railing lay a world-bowl across which long foamy breakers kept running, tilting and curving and rotating as they ran, the birds overflying them in strange swoops because the world was slowly rolling over! In this world-sea, comber-striped like Jupiter, waves raced upside-down to spill down seal-rocks; and on the beach ceiling out-of-focus people lived feet upwards like flies. Sometimes their world was dismal gray and blurred, sometimes so bright and blue. The lens went round and round. And the people kept walking and breathing, not knowing that they were in the camera obscura's world. A little girl, rightside up now, struggled happily across the sand. Headlight-eyes sparkled like mica on the road above Ocean Beach. Spinning foam-braids brought the world time, and a concave horizon sagged sleepily in upon itself. The girl was lost. The traveller was lost. Lives sped like arrows, and the world turned upside down again with the turning of the great lens. The world was so blue and so excellent, and even though it was just outside this dark room, he could never get there. If he were to climb over the railing and lie down in that pale bowl upon which the lens projected its findings, then he could not get there, either, even though the image of that world might be tattooed upon him. The world was lost, and the more precious for being so. Was that so strange? Was it the secret at the center of the world, that the rest is lost?
