Einstein Intersection

7

Leave Crete and come to this holy temple. Sappho, "Fragment" This morning I took refuge from the thin rain in a teahouse with the dock workers.Yellow clouds moiled outside above the Bosphorus. Found one man who spoke French, two others who spoke Greek. We talked ofvoyages and warmed our fingers on glasses of tea. Between the four of us we had girdled the globe. The radio over the stove alternated repetitive Turkish modulations with Aznavour and the Beatles. Lobey starts the last leg of hisjourney. I cannot follow him here. When the rain stopped, I walked through the waterfront fish market where the silver fish had their gills pulled out and looped over their jaws so that each head was crowned with a bloody flower. A street of wooden houses wound up the hill into the city. A fire had recently raged here. Few houses had actuallyburned down, but high slabs of glittering carbon leaned over the cobbles where the children played with an orange peel in the mud. I watched some others chase a redheaded boy. His face was wet; he tripped in the mud, then fled before me. The backs had been trod down on his shoes. Perhaps on rewriting I shall change Kid Death's hair from black to red. Followed the wall of Topkapi palace, kicking away wet leaves from the pavement. I stopped in the Sultanahmet Jammi. The blue designs rose on the dome above me. It wasrestful. In a week another birthday , and I can start the meticulous process of overlaying another filigree across the novel's palimpsest. The stones were cold under my bare feet. The designs keep The EinsteinIntersection 1*9 going, taking your eyes up and out of yourself. Outside I put on my boots and started across the courtyard. In the second story of the old teahouse across the park I sat in a corner away from the stove and tried to wrestle my characters towards their endings. Soon I shall start again. Endings to be useful must be inconclusive. Writer'sJournal, Istanbul, March 1966 What are your qualifications?Dare you dwell in the East where we dwell? Are you afraid of the sun? When you hear the new violet sucking her way among the clods, shall you be resolute? Emily Dickinson, "Letter to K. S. Turner" The Pearl surprised me. A million people is too many to sort an individual from a slum. But the established classes are all the more centralized. There in the furious evening I saw the sign down the street. I looked in my purse. But Spider would have given me enough. Black doors broke under a crimson sunburst. I went up the stairs beneath the orange lights. There was perfume. There wasnoise. I held my sword tight. Tack-heads had worn away the nap of the carpet with the tugging of how many feet. Someone had painted a trompe I'oeil still life on the left wall: fruit, feathers, and surveying instruments on crumpled leather. Voices, yes. Still, at the place where the auditory nerve connects to the brain and sound becomes music, there was silence. "Lo?" inquired the dog at the head of the steps. I wasbaffled. "Lo Lobey," I told his cold face, and grinned at it. It stayed cold. And on the balcony across the crowded room where her party was,she stood up, leaned over the railing, called, "Who are you?" with contralto laughter spillingher words. She was pretty. She wore silver, a sheath V'd deeply between small breasts. Her mouth seemed used to emotions, mostly laughter I guessed. Her hair wasriotous and bright as 120 S A M U E L R. D E L A N Y Little Jon's. The person she was calling to was me. "Um-hm. You, silly. Who are you?" It had slipped my mind that when somebody speaks to you, you answer. The dog coughed, then announced. "Eh . .. Lo Lobey is here." At which point everyone in the room silenced . With the silence I learned how noisy it had been. Glasses, whispers, laughter, talk, feet on the floor, chair legs squeaking after them: I wished it would start again. In a doorway on the side of the room where two serpents twined over the transom, I saw the fat, familiar figure of the hunchback Pistol. He wasobviously coming from somewhere to see what was wrong; he saw me...