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  This trip to Lourdes is the second trip I’ve taken since then. First we went—the three of us, my husband and I and our son—to Lake Powell.

  The hospital doors sighed open and my little boy wheeled me across the rubber divide to the car all packed and waiting. “Southward ho!” my husband said, as I waved up to the smoked glass of Oncology. My son was marching stiff-necked with the thrill of missing a week of kindergarten and Rafe. For him kindergarten has been embodied from the start in the narrow-headed little boy with the buzz cut who glared at him from the next chair. Some of the mothers say the haircut was a practical measure. Rafe’s own mother was afraid to wash his hair. She is his stepmother, actually, and she can’t stand him, it is said. All she wanted was the father. I don’t want to think about this. Stepmothers.

  Rafe, a name breathed every night at our dinner table: one of those children who start school already old in the ways of power. After difficulties in another kindergarten he came to St. Joseph’s three days into the first week. Not a bully, exactly. His crimes were against property, a dogged wrecking of the bright room, or his part of it, the part where he lurked like a rook—the border, the lanes between respectful groups.

  “Rafe,” my son ventures, “cut the cat’s ear with scissors,” looking away in case our faces confirm his suspicions about the place where he lives his days.

  At the hospital there was a party for the two of us who had completed our treatment. We were all saying good-bye at the nursing station when a cart rolled down the hall, with an ice swan on a bed of ferns. “From your sweeties!” the nurses chorused, calling the husbands out of hiding in the railed bathroom where so recently my roommate Tracey and I had been sliding down the wall in a sweat.

  “She thought you meant Charlie,” my husband grumbled to the nurses, who had been making much of his jealousy of my boss.

  This was the end of chemo for both Tracey and me—whatever happened after this, chemo was, as they said, no longer an option. The swan was in honor of the Birds in History show I had finished taping just before I came in. The nurses ate the delicacies and we all admired the magnificent glistening bird being trundled up and down by Tracey’s twins, three-year-olds who got their fingers and tongues stuck on the ice while my son watched.

  My husband had gone to a lot of trouble to find a maker of ice swans. It wasn’t just a shape, the feathers were etched in perfectly, the eye was an elongated half-closed Buddha-eye, sleepy and benevolent, and the beak had a little nostril. It was a pleasure to see this life-size, realistic bird, after all the angels. Angel cards and angel calendars and angel balloons festooned the whole hospital. When people look back, these huge broody men-women will be the macramé of this period, says Charlie. “Looks like the millennium in here,” he says, batting a string of them out of the way. “Never, never will we do a show on angels.” Of course there have been requests. He found me Nabokov’s story in which a huge moulting angel, all brown fur and steaming chicken-flesh, flies through a window and crashes in a hotel room. To mark its place he stuck in a card showing an angel on a rotisserie. “Like rattlesnake,” the man with the baster is saying.

  Tracey was way ahead of me in the chemo protocol and that is not good unless you are getting well. When we met we lifted up our gowns and compared our scars. There are good scars and bad scars: hers was bad, formed of shiny blebs as if a red-hot choke-chain had been slung at her chest and fused with the skin. Her disease was bilateral and had reached her bones; she had lost her body fat and was down to membranes and big fruit-bat eyes, a praying, drifting, cloud-woman of the New Age, whose palm was always blossoming open to show me a pink crystal, a vial of aromatic oil, a spirit stone. She was twenty-seven; everybody loved her and her bearded husband and her curly-headed twins, who burst out of the elevator every afternoon and campaigned down our ward scattering action figures and jouncing the vials on trolleys.

  The same height at five as they were at three, and rashy, tongue-tied, thin: that was our son, a daydreamer, quietly keyed up at finding himself present at the twins’ adventures.

  I used to dream our son would fall off something, lose a limb, choke, drown. He had yet to let go of the edge of the pool and swim. Tracey comforted me; she guessed before I said so that the terror of the coming swimming lesson caused his afternoon vomiting. Of course I never told him of what kept befalling him in my dreams, but the psychiatric nurse would say he knew. This woman knew better than to give me Love, Medicine and Miracles to read but she did give me a book I couldn’t stand, The Problem of Pain. Tracey didn’t mind her, but the ones I liked brought us It and Pet Sematary from the nurses’ station. “That Tracey is a living doll,” my favorite one would say whenever Tracey had been lifted onto the gurney and taken away.

  For a while I thought of doing a program on living dolls. “Think of consciousness—” Tracey would pant when she came back, joggled by the burrowing twins so that she had to hold up her arms on the IV boards (she had declined the portacath)—“as a cupboard. All you know and feel is in there!” With Tracey, knowing and feeling had the nature of a bestowal, on the order of musical ability. “But you don’t know what else is in there! What I did yesterday”—she showed the twins with a roll of her shoulders—“was I got up onto a different shelf. And I know,” she smiled, “I was still way down low!”

  There is a tribe that bestows the name “Sky” on a woman who gives birth to twins. She is a blessing to all; her twins are thought to influence the weather.

  “Don’t forget,” Tracey said as she hugged me from her wheelchair. That could have been about the cupboard of consciousness, or it could have been about the Hopi kachina she gave me, Pour-Water-Woman, who waters the heads of children to make them grow, or she could have meant the Chinese grocery where she had her fortifying teas made up.

  From our bulletin board with all the angel cards, her husband unpinned only his snapshot of the real Tracey, wearing feather earrings on her trip to blessed ground in Arizona, long-haired and wide-hipped in a pueblo doorway. Shyly he parted the tissue paper to show me his present: the pale pink boa that would float out behind Tracey as her chair skidded to the elevator with a twin pumping on either side.

  I had thought I wanted to see what it was like to get behind the wheel again but we agreed I would conserve the energy. Down I-5 we flew, toward Utah.

  In all the preparations, we had done something inexcusable: we had forgotten about Lake Powell. My fault; I am supposed to be on top of such things. It’s just the kind of program I used to do: environmentocide, the intentional flooding of a proud and ancient desert canyon.

  We forgot everything; we only knew we were driving south to get on a houseboat and drift for a few days in the sun. Heal. That’s what the ad said, in Sunset. “Sunset,” my husband said one day in the hospital, absently picking it up in his despair, “the magazine of the radiology waiting room.”

  I had a mental picture of a houseboat—something between a raft and a gondola, with a deck chair on it, brushing along the reeds. You could pluck a desert bloom with your lazy fingers as you went, in my preview, as you covered over the nasty record of the last year until it was completely crosshatched—the way we used to do segues on TV—obliterated by the new scene of desert sunshine, fish in hazel water, eagles, canyon swifts. It is swifts who are said to sleep in flight, so high in the vault of heaven that if they fall they will have time to wake up. “How would anyone know?” Charlie said.

  Charlie found the poem that opened the show: “On a Bird Singing in Its Sleep.” A bird half wakened in the lunar noon / Sang half way through its little inborn tune . . . This bird of Frost’s had “the inspiration to desist” when it was fully awake, and that was what Charlie liked, “the inspiration to desist.”

  The program became a favorite at the station and went into two parts, though I haven’t heard how it came out with all the twitters and caws and screeches Charlie dug up, helping me because I don’t even like birds.

  We began with ancient Rome and the priest-a
ugurs. “Augury was the reading of events in the behavior of birds. In their cloudy retreats, the augurs . . .” and so on; we painted them in, hunkering, shy, receptive men, self-trusting as prophets must be, watching the sky. Later I read that half the augury was accomplished on birds heading left instead of right when they scratched in the dirt.

  In the course of this show, which had started out with endangered birds as its subject, in particular the little spotted owl of our own woods, we branched out, seduced by the oddness of birds, their dependable, vestigial peculiarity, no more in the reputation for cursing ships and causing headaches (if they weave a hair from your head into their nests) than in any number of real behaviors that must have made for puzzling prophecies: gaping and dancing and chaperoning and adoption and fratricide. We left these subjects to TV, though we interviewed an ornithologist. We’ll hear from bird watchers, the kind of call we get after every show no matter how humbly I introduce myself as a dilettante. The auspices are never good when we get into people’s hobbies. Auspice means bird observation.

  Lake Powell. The “lake” is a vast system of canyons into which river water has been forced by damming: a huge, walled kingdom of rock and sand, first seen by the colonizers in 1776, when two lost Franciscans—Franciscans!—ate their packhorses while exploring it for Spain. The walls of Padres Butte, above the now-submerged Crossing of the Fathers, gaze somberly down upon your water-flea, your “houseboat.” This is a camper on pontoons, if a camper responded to your steering late by so many seconds and wide by so many degrees.

  Off the main gorge with its massive buttes are an endless number of subsidiary canyons, into which you can “cruise” to “explore,” each with its own coves and caverns, and its chimney or arch that you are supposed to look for, sticking up out of the water like the stone arm or leg of its own drowned spirit, not the primary canyon-spirit but some underling, some kitchen girl buried with the pharaoh.

  Once, all of this arid land was under water anyway, argued the dammers, who were just people like so many now, “like all of us, perhaps,” I’ll say if I do the show, people with no inspiration to desist. It was an ocean: sea creatures are embedded in its red walls.

  Tour boats the size of ocean liners are afloat on this map of water, these hundreds of miles of “waterway,” between the walls of rock with you and your houseboat. One of them meets you, passes, heaves at you a continent of wake. You smack into the wake if you have not swerved into position to “step” your craft across it as the sheet of instructions says to do. Inside or underneath your boat something slides, cracks, makes the noise of a spade pounding. The aft floor with just a railing around it dips under. The rented sleeping bags roll in inches of water.

  Imagine you are weak and hairless. You have a taste in your mouth—oh, a diluted chlorine-vapor—and a little hole in your chest like a gas cap for receiving liquids through a hose, and strip-mined patches on your arms where the skin leached chemicals from a puncture. You are an entity now. Your husband does not know this, though when your child looks at you, you feel him suspecting it. You have a tape recorder with you, of all things, to record impressions of this vacation for use in a program!

  In a bracket on the bow the two of them have installed a little flag they bought in the souvenir shop. All at once you hear the cloth beating, beating. The water is a blackening green. The wind—the wind has kicked up a bit: that’s what your husband says, planting his feet wide apart on the deck. Your son is in his arms, thin legs dangling, turning the wheel, but now your husband sets him down. Waves erupt against the sheer walls and toss the whole channel up like water in a tub.

  You must have known, and he too—he must have known when he looked up at the disorganized, silently colliding masses of cloud pouring into each other through downspouts and funnels. Now they are coursing heavily west. The water looks exactly like the writhing sea as you once filmed it for a story called “Tender: The Peacetime Navy,” safe on a submarine tender in the Pacific.

  You are not too disoriented to see that this is not—it is not—in the brochure. To your own surprise and disgust you begin your weak hospital whine. Your husband laughs, with a note of uncertainty that only you can hear, and he and your little chortling son agree to confine you to your quarters so that you will not get in the way of the nautical affairs.

  Now the wind seems to have scented something on the floor of the canyon that it once casually uprooted but now cannot reach. As it vacuums furiously along the water the sun goes out, the little hoofbeats of the flag speed up. Your son looks up quickly with his nostrils flared, like an animal. The temperature falls. “The mercury plummeted,” you would say, if you could get off the bolted-down bench where you are curled and find the recorder. “The barometer bottomed out so fast our ears popped.”

  Your husband has given up wrestling the bizarre delayed steering against the wind and has finally run at dusk, disobeying a red buoy, deep into one of the branches of a side canyon and up onto a sandbar. “How will we find our way back?” you whispered as he was wrenching the craft into the first wide turn. “Honey . . .” he said, opening his palm to show a compass.

  Some time ago he and your son went over the side and down the ladder and waded onto the beach, where hordes of a dry thorny weed pulled loose by the wind are blowing at a furious rate against their legs. They are in the matching red bathing suits bought for this trip. Long ago in all of your minds there was, incredibly, the idea of going swimming. In a transparent inlet, the two of you demonstrating to your son how it is that lazy circles with the arms easily hold the body up in water.

  No one swims here in March. You would have known that if you had been thinking, any of you.

  They must make a wide V with the ropes and plant the two anchors in the sand, but they can’t get it done. The stern of the flat ungainly vehicle is tossing and dragging too heavily. The engine has stalled twice. “Bring her in if she breaks free!” Could he have yelled that? Each time they stomp one anchor into the sand the other pulls loose, causing the boat to rear back like a horse on one rein.

  It is so dark, the air so full of cold, flying sand, that you can hardly see them. You can see your son’s white running legs and his arms bent like hospital straws, sticking out of the life preserver that is mandatory for children every minute they spend on this lake. You can’t hear them, though once the wind brings you his voice over the sound of your chattering teeth, piping thinly to his father about the stinging weed. He is not crying, though. You are crying.

  What are you afraid of? What could possibly frighten you now?

  The boat is going to tear loose and spin out of the cove to dash itself to splinters on the red walls of the canyon. Man and boy will be left on this fragment of surviving desert, actually the flank of one of the lower mountains of rock, where the temperature plunges at night in this month, March.

  No one told you not to come to this place in March. No one told you not ever, ever to come. You should have known that. Only now do you begin to see it, and only an edge of it, beyond the reach of your trained curiosity, your facts and film and tape—and not just you, anyone, anyone who would even listen to you, any tourist of knowledge: it, the water-carved, the sheer-walled, ancient grounds, now defiled, of the unpermitted.

  In the morning you will be dead, washing along the canyon floor with the Cretaceous sharks and the cacti, your frantic spirit seeking to drag another houseboat off its course into this tiny canyon to rescue your husband and son. One may come, or one may not. There are ninety-six canyons.

  I HAVE hair now, very short, chic. With a lot of makeup on I am charming again. Going up and down the aisles I could get twenty good stories if I wanted to, but we like to say three are better than twenty. A good half of the passengers are caretakers, like the nun in our aisle—one of many on this flight, I’m sure, though few others display the little headband scarf and the suit of a vaguely official off-blue—who guards the woman to my right. The nun’s liver-spotted, wedding-ringed hand lies ever on the sick
woman’s coat sleeve.

  I came alone. All this has made my husband tired, willing to stay home with our son, who is not allowed to leave kindergarten. His teacher Ms. Lemoine put her foot down: your son has had his special houseboat trip; he must have stability now. He must be provided with structure, continuity. These are the wicks around which candles will form to light his way. Those are not her words; she said, “Let us take care of everything, Mom.” Only three of us are Mom to her, the mothers of her favorites. Ms. Lemoine is young, right out of school herself, and a convert; she had two dozen five-year-olds making the sign of the cross and droning the tunes of the St. Louis Jesuits before they could trace their hands. Not that we aren’t secretly grateful that she has her clear favorites: the weak ones.

  We’re in the air. We’re going by night, over the pole to Paris. “The Eiffel Tower!” says a little wraith in front of us to her mother.

  “Would you consider letting me interview you?” I ask the old man on my left.

  “I’ll certainly consider it.” He winks. He got on late, climbing over the woman on that aisle who had already begun to pray with her eyes closed or else gone to sleep. “Pardon me, pardon me, ladies—!” He bowed to her and then to the rest of us, and smacked his crutches one at a time into the hands of the flight attendant, a slight young man with large ears, who looked familiar to me.

  The old man has more hair in his white eyebrows than on his lean crinkled head and he’s done up in sharp pleats, heavy cotton, silk. Wingtips. One of those prosperous old guys who genuflect like Fred Astaire. He’s ready without any urging and has no idea that despite his promising Chicago accent, on tape he will prove to be what we call a boulder. Boulders are usually men—though a woman can be one—who have sunk into position in themselves, and can never be jostled loose by an interviewer. You may circle and pester them all day, you may scratch your questions on them, they will not budge. They may have sought to be interviewed and looked forward to it, but it turns out they can’t explain; they don’t intend to.