Portrait of Charles Boyd

The studio had been built for a muralist. He had worked with very big cartoons. The studio was three stories high, and the black-crayon outlines of many sketches mazed the walls. In certain lights they seemed to waver and tremble; it was as if one were looking into a giant Chinese carved-ivory ball made of layer after layer of pierced walls cut by windows not quite in line with each other. The phenomenon irritated Charles Boyd. He often resolved to whitewash them over, or paint or repaper the walls. He was incapable of doing anything of the kind, and he knew it. He did not consider the man from whom he had bought the place an artist in the sense that he, Charles Boyd, was an artist, but clearly he had not been a carpenter either. He had been a creator, if in rather a limited fashion; he was a kind of artist, and Boyd's soul squirmed at the idea of obliterating lines laid down by another man. He tried not to look at the walls on certain days when the sky was thinly overcast, when, in late afternoon, the light seemed peculiarly to reach into the maze of lines.

He tried, but he could not always help himself. He was staring into a corner of the ceiling, on a November afternoon when he was, probably, between 40 and 45 years old (he was an orphan and illegitimate and had no way of knowing his exact age), trying to fix in his mind the gray-green of a lichen on a certain rock in a Vermont meadow when his eye slipped, as it were, and fell to the wall. He noticed a square of red high on the wall, a spot of red paint, it looked to be, or a piece of paper. It did not look bigger than a postage stamp. Charles Boyd was startled.

"I don't think I've ever seen that before," he said to himself, aloud.

He set his palette down on the table behind him, carefully, without looking around, and moved closer to the wall. The red mark did not, as he half thought it might, disappear. He pulled a ladder along the wall, put the brush he was carrying between his teeth and went up. The red spot was a dab of paint, and clearly it had been there a long time.

Charles Boyd came down the ladder and sat on the second rung of it, bemused, and feeling fear come up in him, a sad, sickening, slow-rising kind of fear. Be calm, he said to himself, let me think. It was a small matter, after all, to have missed seeing a spot of red not 2 inches square on a wall 20 feet high. But that wasn't at all the heart of the thing. Working in a single room for 14 years, was it possible that he would not have noticed a single blot of red on a brown wall? He knew that it was not. It was out of the question that he had not seen it. He had seen it, noticed it, remarked it, hundreds of times, must have done, had to have done. The terror was that he had forgotten seeing it, forgotten so utterly that, when he had noticed it just now, it was as if a door had been slammed or a gun fired.

A cheap foot-square mirror hung over the little washbowl. He looked into it. He saw a craggy, scarred, squared-off face, black hair, beady black eyes, an obvious desperado gripping -- like a pirate's knife between his teeth -- a number 12 red-sable brush. He grinned at himself. He opened his mouth and let the brush fall into his hand. He threw it over his shoulder.

"You want a drink, Boyd?" he asked the face in the mirror. The big head nodded ponderously. He rinsed the surface dust out of a dirty water glass and half-filled it with whiskey. He drank that, half-filled it again, ran a little water into it, holding it up to the light to watch the spiraling, oily mixing, and dropped into his chair, waiting for the whiskey to do its blessed short-circuiting. It was a bright-brown stream running down a narrow trough in the middle of his head, lapping at the bare bright wires, shorting out this one, skipping the next three, drowning the next two, running around the next four...an ugly idea, he thought, and stopped it.

He looked up at the spot. He drank half the whiskey water. He could reach his palette from the chair. He mixed up a little burnt umber and chrome yellow and zinc oxide and picked it up on a flat brush. He went briskly up the ladder and covered the red spot. Back in his chair he could pick it out only because it glistened wetly. Dry, it would be gone for good. He would put it out of his mind, too. The whiskey was running in him now and he took half of what was left in the glass. He wasn't frightened anymore. He switched around in the chair to look at the easel.

He had stretched a big canvas for this one. Lately, his stuff had been mostly very big. When he began, living in Stockholm in a small cold room -- God, how cold! -- in Akversgaten, he had rarely done anything bigger than a foot square, and it wasn't because he had no money for canvas. If he had wanted to make a big painting he'd have put it on the white plaster wall of his room. And in Paris the same thing. But lately, the last five years, six, he had used big canvases. It hadn't to do with success, either. "I don't care if it's on a rolled-up newspaper or the back of your hand," he had heard his agent say, "if I offer you a Boyd for $2500 today you'd better buy, because it'll be $3000 tomorrow."

No, it was just that he felt like big canvases lately. He had more to say. Sometimes he could feel the great weight of all he had to say rolling and bubbling and boiling inside him. He thought of it, now, as something thick like soup but in every color -- would that be possible, every color, no, there was no such concept as every color -- but in, say, a thousand million colors, bubbling, spilling over, over what, well, spilling over what it was in, he thought of his own skull, but 20 feet across and sawed off evenly on top, a great seething caldron, but that put his face in the fire under it, he didn't like that idea. It broke the train of his thought. He got up for more whiskey.

This painting, now, was ten feet by eight, that's to say ten feet long by eight high. Boyd had been working on it for 32 days. He was a slow painter, and also he was fussy about the ground. He prepared a canvas very carefully. He set it up to last. He did not intend that paintings of his should be crazing and cracking and flaking in 100 years.

A landscape, most viewers would say about this latest Boyd, a valley in the foreground and hills behind rising to a violet sky. Some might move on, having seen nothing more, but there was more to see. For one thing, a foremost, there was the so-called "Boyd veil." The critic Hugelet first called it that, the extension of the backlight up, across the roof of the scene, as it were, and down, hanging like a gauzy curtain in front of the painting, although it was the painting...he had begun doing this weird thing in 1950. It was not a trick or a stunt, it was merely light. Some people did not notice the Boyd veil until they had been shown it, and some of them then would stare for a long time. So there was that to see. And much more. A landscape? Boyd looked at it through the brown whiskey. A clod might say so. But a wise man, now, whether seeing the painting suddenly, booming, as a whole, or, beginning at the lower left corner and following the cunning spiral path that wove through it to the top, a wise man would know that the painting spoke of love, love from the very ape men chittering at each other across their dripping caves, past love of man for woman, for justice, for country, to the love of love itself, love of the unseen gods for men centuries dead, love of the living for the yet unborn and the never-to-be-born, and, as was natural, in this painting Boyd spoke of profane love as well. Near the corner of the woods in the middle ground, just past a stunted ash tree, in the daisies of the meadow, there would be, if you looked carefully, first, one bare foot in an odd attitude, then, just a fingertip's width to the left...Boyd smiled. His own vision was freakish, probably past 10/20, and he could see that little bare foot from the chair, though it wasn't an eighth of an inch long. He looked at the ash tree, and then to the right, it was there, or a shade higher, or lower, or to the left. Odd. He lifted himself out of the chair, careful not to spill the whiskey. He moved to the painting. There was no little foot, not by the ash tree, not in the daisies, nothing of that sort anywhere near. He set the whiskey on the floor, and squatted. No. Nothing. Where, then? Nowhere. He went over the painting inch by inch, grunting and whuffling as the breath whistled in and out of him. The two little naked people that he knew he had hidden just past the ash tree were not there. He pulled a drawer out of the taboret and grabbed a six-inch magnifying glass and with it held to his face he moved up and down and across the whole canvas one more time. No.

He looked to the wall where the little red spot had been. It was not there and he knew why it was not. He could remember what he had done about it. He had painted it over. Where then were the two little people in the high grass? Had he painted them over? He grabbed the magnifying glass again, squeezing the handle in his short thick fingers and looked for thickened paint, for an outline. No, nothing.

He sank to his heels and sat on the floor. I will do the calm thing, he said to himself. It is much like getting lost in the woods, and that is when you must do the calm thing. So. I must be thinking of some other painting, I must have something else in mind. I never put it into this one. He named to himself various paintings: the one of the three dogs, the yellow tree, the year with four summers -- he went through two dozen or more. It was perfectly obvious that the little nude figures were not in any of these paintings -- were not, that is, if he could remember them. But supposing he could not?

He scrabbled across the floor on his hands and knees -- it wasn't far enough to be worth getting up -- to the steelframed rack in which he stacked paintings for storage of for drying. There were more than fifty of them. He snatched them out one after another: a quick jerk, a short tossing motion, a catching in the middle of each riser. There was nothing to be seen in the first eleven. Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen. Fourteen. Fourteen. Fourteen wasn't his work at all. His heart jumped. He felt his brain bulge his skull wide at the temples.

"I never painted this picture!" he said aloud. "I never!"

Holding it in front of him like a mirror, he walked across the room, bellowing.

"I never!" he yelled, "I never! I never!"

His knuckles hit the far wall. He spun around. He lifted the painting over his head, to look around it. He saw the whiskey glass on the floor. He kicked it. It caromed off the wall without breaking.

"I never!" he screamed. "I never laid a brush on this goddamn picture, never, never!"

Greta came in. "Charlie, what the hell?" she said. "I can hear you in the house!"

He rushed at her and held the painting for her to see.

"Did I paint this?" he screamed. "Did I? Did I paint this?"

(continued overleaf)

She looked. A tall, calm, brown-eyed girl.

"Of course you did, darling," she said. "Last summer. You did that one in Levana."

"Bitch!" he screamed at her. "Bitch! Liar! I never painted it in my goddamn life! Some mothering son of a bitch sneaked it in here, and you know goddamn good and well!"

He scaled the taut framed canvas across the room. He spun with it, he sent it off with a savagery that unjointed the frame before it left his hand; it flew crazily into the wall, one side of the frame splintered, the canvas ballooned, buckled, slid to the floor.

Greta Boyd watched. He glared at her. He was something to frighten a brace of water-front cops; not a tall man, but 200-odd pounds formed by frantic physical exertion for four decades, he seemed to have no wrists, his forearms ran, no more tapered than bludgeons, straight to his knuckles. But Greta was not afraid of him. She knew his nature, which was that of the May lamb. There had been a time in his life when he had hurt many people and killed some of them, but it had been long ago and they were people who had gone to endless trouble to outrage him.

"Come down out of the tree, Charlie," she said. "You silly son of a bitch."

He grabbed her and threw her, backward, through the screen door. She landed, sitting, on the grass, and rolled. She looked up. He was standing in the doorway, peering through the hole in the screen like an ape through the bars of its cage. As she watched he began to cry. Greta got up, wondering if she was going to make it. She went up the three steps and across the tiny porch, marveling that she had never touched them the last time she had been that way. She opened the gaping door and reached in for him.

"Come on, Charlie," she said. "Come on. We'll put a steak on the fire."

• • •

He would not tell her what he had been looking for. He wouldn't say anything about it. In the morning he went into the studio and carefully separated his own paintings, the authentic ones, from the fakes. There were 34 real Boyds and 14 fakes. He put the fakes carefully to one side against the wall. He halfdecided to burn them. He went back to the easel and spent the morning painting in the two little people he remembered making love so happily beside the ash tree. At one o'clock Greta gave him a six-ounce martini and he ate a big lunch. Afterward he took her to bed. When he went back to the studio he felt fine and his mind was made up. He would burn the fakes. But to be certain he went over everything in the room again, the real ones and the fraudulent ones together. This time he separated out 19 frauds. Now there were 28 real Boyds and one he couldn't positively identify either way.

He fought down the idea that they had been in his studio in the night, faking his pictures again, changing them to frighten and confuse him. He knew better, and rejoiced that he knew better. He spoke to himself, slowly and carefully.

"No one has been here," he said. "No one. There is nothing to be afraid of." He thought about that for a time, a happy idea, a big, warm, brown-black, good idea, strong and sturdy, an idea like a tree. He could see himself, bare, rubbing his back against that good strong comforting idea, it was a motheridea, and indeed as he watched, the boughs at the very top of the tree parted and his mother smiled greenly and leafily at him, and he caught himself, as he thought just in time to cut off a terrible idea, a bad idea. He tried to remember what he had stopped being frightened of, and he did remember: the idea that people had been in the studio. What, then, was left to be frightened of? He knew the answer. He could see the answer, a long way off on the plain, a six-foot searchlight, pointing away from him, but slowly, slowly turning. It came around, and hit him right in the face. What was to be afraid of? That he could no longer recognize one of his own paintings, or remember why he had done a painting, if indeed he had done it, or when, or where.

He found the glass on the floor. Whiskey had dried stickily in it. He rinsed it carefully and filled it four-fifths up. He put a layer of water on the whiskey, as he thought, and drank it slowly and carefully. He half-filled it again and sat in his chair to wait the necessary two or three minutes for the chemical to start its happy work. While he was waiting he looked over at the painting on the easel. He looked for the little bare foot. This time, by God, he saw it.

"The bubble in my brain," he would say to himself, "is getting bigger." Or, it might be, he would say, "is getting smaller." He didn't know which was best, that was one odd thing about it, among the many.

• • •

He had not often been frightened in his life but now he was frightened much of the time. He could not tell when he would slip away from himself. He tried hard to discover the premonitory symptoms, but he could establish no useful pattern. When he surmised that an episode might be forming he would lock himself in the studio, but he was more often mistaken than not. Sometimes he knew that he had been, as he thought of it, out of himself, and sometimes he did not. He came to dread the most casual conversations, because he could not know when the terrible blow might fall.

"Charlie," someone would say, a good friend, perhaps, showing a tight smile, "Charlie, that was a pretty lively lunch the other day, no?"

His heart would jump, really jump in its cage of ribs, and he would say, thinking desperately, trying hard to remember, "Oh, I suppose you could say so."

"You hear anything from Tarrance?" "No, nothing." "You didn't call him?" "No."

"Jesus, Charlie, don't you think you ought to? What the hell, you did break his nose, and, honestly, Charlie, none of us could figure out what it was about. What did he do to you, anyway?"

Charles Boyd would shrug. "Long story," he'd say. He would go away, his soul screaming silently inside him. One afternoon, making love to Greta, he turned her on her side and saw a bruise, big as a saucer, low on her back. He was so startled that before he could think he asked her what had happened.

Something flashed in her eyes, but she subdued it and said, "I bumped into something. I fell."

He knew it must have been a hard punch, it must have knocked her down, and it must have hurt terribly. His right hand was just at her hip joint, he looked at it, he must have hit her with that terrible thing, a club of thick fingers and lumped knuckles. He trembled. Tiny waves ran under his skin. He closed his eyes. He could see everything leaving his body, out through the tiny baby's soft spot in the top of his skull, out, everything, in a steamy vapor, not just joy, not just passion, but his soul and with it the will to live. Greta broke the image by pulling his head down to her and kissing him. Then she began to try to bring him back and ultimately she did so, but even knowing him so well she was a long time about it.

There were bad times on the street and in his friends' homes when he went to them which was not often, and in bed, but the meanest hurts came to him in the studio. He no longer allowed himself to sort his paintings, to tell the fakes from the real ones. He tried to work faster, to get more done. When he had finished a painting he put it in the rack. He tried to keep himself from looking back over his work. When he did go back he saw terrible deterioration, every painting was inferior to the one (continued on page 142)Charles Boyd(continued from page70) before it, they said nothing anymore, they did not move him, there was no emotion, even the colors were drab and flat. But, of course, nothing was what it seemed in his life anymore, and he told himself, furiously stretching a new canvas, his hands shaking, that his recent work was very probably the best he had ever done, the best, the very best, by God! But he believed he remembered having Harry Kinsolving in the studio and showing him six or seven canvases and it seemed to him that Harry had said, "Nothing you do is uninteresting, Charles, and these are not uninteresting. You are not at a peak, perhaps, just now, this happens to everyone..."

"Greta," he said, "I was trying to remember: When was Harry Kinsolving here, what day?"

"Last week, Charlie," she said. "Wednesday? Yes, it was Wednesday, I remember now."

• • •

He thought airplane windows were always square, but this one was round. Also these engines had no propellers. A three-quarter moon was catching the sun's rays from the other side of the world, spilling them on a white cloud cover, and he could see clearly. There were two engines on the one wing, that was reasonable, but there were no propellers. He was frightened but he fought back. There was an explanation for this phenomenon, he was sure, he knew perfectly well there was, and he knew that he knew it, if only he could think of it. He closed his eyes and tried. As soon as he had shut out the wing and the engines, the moon and the clouds, a waterwall of imperative curiosities began to batter at him, so he looked again and it came to him: jets. He could even remember where the jet had originated: an Englishman had invented it. Frank Whittle of the Royal Air Force. He was pleased. He turned to the man in the seat next to him, of half a mind to tell him what he had just remembered. This was a very big man; he was looking at Charles Boyd and smiling.

"You feel OK, Mr. Boyd?" he said. "Fine, thank you," Boyd said.

"Good," the giant said, "I'm glad to hear it. Another thirty minutes we'll be at Kennedy International. We change planes there."

"We do?" Body said.

"Sure," the man said. "Another cigarette, Mr. Boyd?" He did not offer the package, he took one out of it, and as Charles Boyd tried to reach he found he couldn't move his arms. He looked down. His wrists seemed to be fastened to his belt. The man held the cigarette in front of his lips. Boyd was shaking.

"Here, take the cigarette, Mr. Boyd," the man said. "Don't let anything get you down, now. Take the cigarette. Take the cigarette. It'll make you feel good. You'll be calm, you'll relax, you'll feel good, Mr. Boyd." A lighter materialized in his hand, flamed. Another face came over the back of his seat. It spoke in a roaring whisper: "You OK, Mr. Boyd? You want me to wake up your wife? I'd rather not. She's only been asleep a little while."

Charles Boyd shook his head. He smoked. The man beside him was careful not to let the ash grow too long.

They came into Kennedy International out of the darkness. They moved stiffly down one ramp, up another, into a terminal building, into an elevator. The silent, sectioned doors opened into a hushed room, green and warm, puddled here and there with yellow light. There would be a little while to wait, Greta said. It was a room for important people. There was whiskey and ice and a silver pitcher of water.

They gave him a drink, not much of a drink. He dropped it down his throat.

"Let's go outside," he said to Greta. "It's terrible in here. Stuffy."

One of the big men opened a door. It showed a closet. He opened another and went through it, and another and they were on a long balcony. The air was cold and wet. A pink-red glow in the clouds, a long way off, marked New York. Green, purple, blue, white, yellow lights flickered on the flat black field around them. Far below, a gaggle of people waddled toward a Viscount.

Charles Boyd wore a topcoat capelike over his shoulders. Greta had buttoned one button of it, and his hands were hidden. She walked ahead of him, the two men beside him. He had to look up a little to see into their faces. They looked vaguely alike, as some brothers look alike, but there was nothing to remember in either face. They did not touch him, or even walk tight beside him. The four of them walked gravely on the balcony, a sad and pointless little procession, on a long oval course, east along the rail, west along the wall, then east, then west...Just as they came to the turning away from the rail, just before Greta, leading, turned, Charles Boyd stopped, drove hard backward against both feet. Now he was behind the two men, he turned, threw the upper half of his body forward like a sprinter toward the low rail. If his arms had been free, so that he could have swung them, he might have gained the 18 or 20 inches of ground he needed to get clean away, but his arms were not free, and the men caught him; one by each elbow, they lifted him like a child and turned him and set him down. And even then, they didn't hold him.

"That was a good try, Mr. Boyd," one of them said. "That dropping behind like that, that's not a move just anybody could think of. That was a good move. But you shouldn't have tried it. Suppose you made it, Mr. Boyd? In front of your wife? And what about us? Something like that happens, we lose our jobs, you know. You're not the kind of man, Mr. Boyd, who does a thing like that to people who are only trying to help you. Are you, now, Mr. Boyd?"

• • •

I will not quit, I am not quitting, he told himself later, the balcony, the green room, the elevator all behind him, I am not quitting. He stared out of the window, down on the dark farm fields and vineyards of the Finger Lakes country. I am not quitting, but I have got to have some time to think, I need to rest.

"Tell me," he said to the man who was, hideously, beginning to appear his only friend, "tell me, how long this time?"

"Hour and a half, Mr. Boyd," the man said. "Maybe hour, forty-five minutes, but that's at the most."

"I wish I could go to sleep," Charles Boyd said.

"You can, Mr. Boyd, you certainly can," the man said. He turned to the seat behind. "Get a glass of water, Joe?" he said. He unfolded a slip of tissue paper, held it like a little dish. Charles Boyd could see a white tablet in it. "This is a nothing pill, Mr. Boyd," he said, "it's not strong at all, but you're very tired, and the doctor said this would just do it. OK. So if you'll open your mouth." Careful not to touch it, he spilled the tablet into Boyd's mouth, and held the plastic cup of water to his lips.

"Thank you," Boyd said. "That's OK, Mr. Boyd," the man said.

• • •

After he had forgotten the airplane, the man, and even Greta, Charles Boyd could remember that plastic glass and the water in it because he so often wanted water. If he had more water, he would say to himself, he would have more spit and if he had more spit he could, perhaps, paint better. The walls were covered with a heavy fabric and it was possible, by spitting on it, and working with one's tongue, to paint. But it had to be done in a great hurry because even in a small painting the spit would dry at one end before he could finish the other.

Time moved around and past him like an endless loop of yarn. He supposed he was happy when he began to notice the difference between night and day, but on the other hand the endless string was a nice thing, too. It was most pleasant, really, but it receded as other images came forward. He found he had crayons and then pastels and then oils. He worked busily. Greta appeared now and again, and went away, and came back. One day she told him that she had been able, with difficulty, to arrange for them to be alone for a little while, that they could be lovers again. He told her, in a kindly way, that he would rather paint. He came to know various people, doctors, nurses, attendants, waiters, and so on. He kept a calendar in his room and on odd nights he would make a game of seeing how far back he could remember. He once remembered straight back 27 days. He thought it remarkable. He had never been able to remember 27 days straight back at any other time in his life. When they took him home he felt no great joy. He wasn't frightened of going, which was joy enough. A doctor whose name he knew perfectly well but did not choose to recall bade him formally goodbye.

"I wish you would stay with us another three months, Mr. Boyd," he said. "I think you should, but I am alone in this, and so I bid you goodbye, and good luck."

"Thank you," Charles Boyd said.

He could remember his studio and everything in it and he went straight to work. It was all new, all different. He used canvases perhaps two feet by three; he painted in blues, blacks, grays. Now and again, rarely, a microscopic spot of red would appear, but he touched no other color. He saw few people. He had been away, he found, for more than two years, and he felt he had all this time to make up. He worked fast and when he had 20 pieces the Deindorfers gave him a small show. It was a thorough success, not a sensation, but a solid, satisfying success.

He went to the opening, he and Greta stayed in town overnight and he stayed in the gallery the next day, listening to people talk. He had always found that a great pleasure, although now that his face was so well known he heard fewer interesting things.

He took only those two days from his work. He began another series of paintings. They went very well, and he was surprised to find himself sitting on the floor, his hands slippery and greasy with paint, torn strips of canvas all around him, broken bits of frame mixed with them. He could not remember how many paintings he had, but he could estimate, from the debris in which he squatted, that he had destroyed seven or eight pieces. At any rate, there was nothing left in the studio. It was quite dark. He turned on a droplight and as the brightness hit his hand, still touching the button, he saw that the knuckles were badly skinned. He held his hand to the light and looked carefully. It was not, he knew perfectly well, the kind of abrasion one could get by breaking up picture frames. He knew. He had hit enough people in his time to know. He looked out the window toward the house. It was lighted. He supposed it was his house and that Greta still lived there with him.

He looked for the whiskey. There wasn't any. He supposed they had taken it. He didn't care much. He stopped in the middle of the floor, his head back, staring at the ceiling, and he felt a new idea, the barest thread of a thought, tickling the back of his brain, just off to one side. It had to do with up, he kept on staring upward, then, slowly, he moved to the wall and climbed slowly up the narrow stairs to the balcony. It was only a shelf of wood six or eight feet deep, heavily braced so that it could bear the weight of the odd cupboards and shelves he had piled on it through the years. He went from one to the next, pulling out drawers and opening creaking doors. Sure enough, he found it, flat on the floor in a corner of an old bureau, hidden under a stack of tracing paper. He felt a little red glow of joy, like a fallen child lifted up and set upon its feet again. But the instant he touched the thing, hope fled from him; it was light, it was empty, a black, molded, buckled Luger holster that couldn't possibly have a pistol in it. He opened it anyway. The takedown tool was there, and, in its separate slot on the side, the extra magazine, empty. His eye ran off the holster to his hand, and the scratch, and it came to him suddenly that a gun would be a bad idea anyway. For, supposing he had, an hour past, hit Greta, and he surely had, wouldn't it be easy, and logical, for some cop to try to hang it on her? A note? He could write a note. An obscenity, and anyway notes got lost. His head lifted again, and then he saw the trap in the high ceiling. He found the cotton rope that let down the ladder. The hatch rose easily and he went out on the roof. It sloped, but not sharply, to the rear of the studio, but at the front, over the inner balcony, a flat strip lay. He went to it. I ought to think, he told himself. I ought to be calm. But he had no time to think. At any instant he might find himself spitting on the wall again, he might be running for the balcony rail, doomed never to reach it in all his life; an idea began to spin itself around that notion, like cotton candy around a cardboard cone, and he had to work hard to put it down, he almost lost everything there. No. No thinking. He didn't need to think. It was, after all, only a matter of diving, of diving carefully and accurately so as not to miss the walk. It would be important not to miss the walk, but it would be easy to hit it, it was three feet wide. In the narrowing light, under the dusk that was drifting across the world, the concrete strip of the walk gleamed wetly. It looked like water, looked as a canal might look seen from 5000 feet, and as he stared it did break and waver on its surface, the mica in the mix glittering as water will in moonlight. He curled his toes over the edge of the roof and looked down at himself. Something was wrong. He stepped back. Even strong as he was, he thought, he would be bothered, swimming, dressed so heavily. He stripped. He stacked his clothing neatly. Again he looked down. He knew peace. He heard bird song, a June sun lay lightly on him, the woods were in green bud for miles and miles and on the other side of the pool a tall girl waved and shouted something. He gave a great spring off the roof and up, hung, turned and flew, headfirst, into the welcoming water.