A girl in a bathing suit strode rapidly across the pink world. More girls inhabited its steps now, and they fixed their perfect unmoving heads in the direction of those three men who leaned and drummed and worried about prices. Whenever the girls sat down, they arranged their hair, tucked their skirts up to show a little knee, worshipped compacts, licked lips, then became mannequins. In Thailand were people acquainted with the adamantine heads and shoulders which we call tombstones?
When the women came down from the elevators alone they always looked happy. They gave little slips of paper to the barman to write on and file, and then they went back down the hall of mildew. The boy in the necktie stood in front of the oval windows and added up profits aloud, smiling. (His favorite thing was to go dancing. But whenever other boys asked him how often he went, he'd hang his head as if caught in some lie.)
And he, the traveller and erstwhile weary watcher, thought: This is not the train station or airport, where travellers pass and go, but a hot round world of women going round and round. Only the men disappear.
But then another woman was finished for the day; she smiled and departed, under over somewhere nowhere.
He exulted, and said to himself: Yes, we'll all disappear at last. We have that to hope for. — He'd become a Buddhist like them.
And so he was permitted one more memory which had to do with waiting, a good one this time, because in the belly of a golden tower, Buddha's plump white red-lipped face hid itself, floating above gold robes and white hands and folded knees on shelves of fishy silver, waiting, not watching, willing to let itself be seen but not displaying itself; and in a niche beside it a woman offered fresh leaves and stood praying while another girl sat with her feet tucked behind her and leftward. After many long moments of gazing downward and ahead she pivoted on one of those two crossed feet, pushed with her toes to lean forward, bowed, and bowed again. Then she vanished.
Now he too would disappear. He was going to travel to the world's edge (which lies in Canada), and he was happy.
They came to a wide, still, blue-gray lake, a river with tree-islands perfectly oval like lily-pads. His joy was strong and wide like the ferns around the trunks of birches. Those ferns resembled immense pale green lichens. Every place seemed a luscious place to spend a summer or a life, remote and serene like those sticks almost sunken in weedy water. There was no flaw in this landscape, because it was full of nature and loneliness.
'Tis purty in here, he heard a boy say. All the trees an' stuff.
His joy deepened like black bogs and black pools in the grass.
Clouds of pale leaves and dark needles swirled by. Sumacs, buttercups, ferns, dandelions gone to seed, grand beech trees, two chrysanthemums in a pot on the topmost strand of a barbed wire fence, forget-me-nots, daisies, reddish boulders gaping out of the softness in the little towns where washing hung between spruce trees like sails too bright and perfect for the whitish plain of water — it was all home even though he'd never seen it before.
The people that are in the sleepers are really nice, but the people that work there are snooty, a little girl said.
The train curved like a silver river.
They were playing cards in the observation car, making fans of their red-backed cards, passing and bidding and drinking Molson in cans as they rode high over so many rock-lipped black pools in the moss, all those ancient folks doing crossword puzzles and showing off pocket knives and laughing and saying: We all gonna get old sometime, but not yet! and everyone happy. — What's trumps? Hearts is trumps.
He remembered Mount Aetna's broad white fang floating in blueness:
