Wonderland

Author's Note

Some of the characters in this novel are entirely fictional, a good number of the events are fictional, and all the settings—especially Lockport, New York; Ann Arbor, Michigan; and Toronto, Ontario—are fictional. Any resemblance to reality is accidental and should be resisted.

Excerpt

Jesse stands there.
The blood smells so sweet, it is like summer; it rises to him in a cloud, blotching his sight. The whimpering from another room is sweet because it is so muffled. Why did he lock the dog up? Jesse asks lightly. The words whirl in his head, lightly, like snow.
His father's footsteps on the driveway outside, the quick crunching steps.
Jesse stands there, not thinking. His face is hot with the welcome air of the house. His brain has dissolved in this warmth, this sweetness, and he looks around at these dead people as if to figure them out—is it a joke, are they playing a game? He looks carefully at Jean, who might jump up to tease him. But everyone is so quiet!
His father opens the kitchen door.
Jesse steps forward suddenly into the blood. Through the blood. His feet carry him through it and something is knocked over—a splintering crash—and Jesse is at the bedroom door now and fumbling with the doorknob, getting it open. Jesse pays no attention to the yipping dog crouched in a corner of the room, but throws himself against the window. Everything bursts—it gives way—comes apart as if in a dream. Jesse falls through the window, covering his face with his hands, and then he is outside and running.
The shotgun blasts behind him.

Awards

• National Book Award finalist

Notes

Book 4 of The Wonderland Quartet

Working Title: The Madness of Crowds

Afterword

Wonderland Revisited

So much of a novelist's writing takes place in the unconscious; in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them.

—Graham Greene

We are led to value highest that which has cost us the most. Of my early novels, Wonderland, the fifth to be published, obviously the most bizarre and obsessive, stands out in my memory as having been the most painful to write. The most painful in conception and in execution. The most painful even in retrospect. For it was evidently so mesmerizing, so haunting, so exhausting an effort, I must have willed it to be completed before, in that regulatory limbo of the unconscious to which we have no direct access, it was ready to be completed. As Graham Greene so eloquently says, we remember the details of our story, we do not invent them. When I reread Wonderland after its hardcover publication I knew that the ending I'd written was not the true ending; in the months between finishing the manuscript, and seeing it published, I had continued to be haunted by it, "dreaming" its truer trajectory. I knew then that I had to recast the ending, at least for the paperback edition and subsequent reprints. The original ending, and a brief hallucinatory prologue that framed the thirty years of the novel, were jettisoned, and the "true" ending supplied. Wonderland could not end with a small boat drifting out helplessly to sea (specifically, Lake Ontario); it had to end with a gesture of demonic-paternal control. This was the tragedy of America in the 1960s, the story of a man who becomes the very figure he has been fleeing since boyhood: a son of the devouring Cronus who, unknowingly, becomes Cronus himself.

My practice as a novelist up to and including the composition of the similarly obsessive Son of the Morning, published in 1978, was to write a complete first draft in one long head-on plunge; by which, though this was perhaps not my conscious choice, I would be nearly as immersed in my characters' experiences as they themselves were. The first draft completed, I would be exhausted; often, overcome by a sense of psychic derailment; my graphic vision of the runaway Shelley, wasted and ungendered and sickly-yellow with jaundice at Wonderland's end, is an exaggerated self-portrait, meant perhaps to exert authorial control over the torrential experience of novel-writing—which is the formal, daylight discipline of which novel-imagining is the passion. Once the first draft was completed, I would put it away for some weeks or months, and, after an interregnum during which I took on more finite projects, including, for who knows what restoration of the soul, the intensive reading and writing of poetry, I would systematically rewrite the entire manuscript, first word to last. And this was the triumph of art, it seemed to me: the re-writing, the re-casting, the re-imagining of what had been a sustained ecstatic plunge. A novel is prose artfully structured, structure imposed upon prose. Control imposed upon passion. Wonderland's theme of a protagonist who seems without identity ("You do not exist," Dr. Pedersen tells Jesse) unless deeply involved in meaningful experience (who is more qualified than a neurologist to determine where brain and spirit fuse?) is an oblique portrait of the novelist as well.

This book is for all of us who pursue the phantasmagoria of personality —how boldly, how trustingly, Wonderland's dedication exposes its secret heart! In the broadest terms, literature is of two distinct types: that which offers us a distillation of experience, and that which offers us experience itself. My method of composition in those years was ideally suited for my goal—that of offering, so far as literature may be said to offer anything palpable, tangible, "real," at all, not a cool, intellectualized distillation of fictitious characters' experiences, but experience itself, mediated by language and form. Instead of exploring the "phantasmagoria of personality" (the mystery of our selfness within our species-hood) obliquely, which is the more navigable way, Wonderland, from its first sentence to its last, plunges us into the vortex of being: we begin with a terrified fourteen-year-old boy who "knows" something terrible is going to happen to him, or has indeed already happened and is awaiting him at home; and we continue with him, adding on, as if in psychic replication, his wife and younger daughter, all of them caught up in this vortex of being as it confronts non-being—for that is the secret horror inside the costly microscope Dr. Cady has given his son-in-law Jesse. Do we exist? What is "personality"? Is it permanent, is it ephemeral?—can it be destroyed as easily as Dr. Perrault boasts, "with a tiny pin in my fingers"?

Because such questions are the novel's heart, its deep verticality and inwardness is driven by convulsive narrative leaps: months and even years pass, but only those actions possessing psychic significance are dramatized. Opening with an act of despair that seems to us so tragically American—the slaughter of a family by its "head," who then kills himself—Wonderland moves from the Depression through World War II through the Korean War and the "Cold War" and the Vietnam War and the turbulent years of that decade (approximately 1963-1973: from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy to the end of the Vietnam War) known as The Sixties. Background is foreground, in a sense, only in terms of the Depression, which has devastated Jesse Harte's father; the assassination of Kennedy, which is experienced by the Vogel family at a crucial time in their lives; and the grimly self-destructive yet intermittently radiant visions of The Sixties, to which both Jesse's mock-brother Trick Monk and his daughter Shelley fall victim. Like virtually all of my novels, Wonderland is political in genesis, however individualized its characters and settings. It could not have been conceived, still less written, at any other time than in post-1967 America, when divisive hatreds between the generations, over the war in Vietnam, and what was called, perhaps optimistically, the "counterculture," raged daily. (So too them, the novel immediately preceding Wonderland, could not have been written before the "long, hot summer" of urban race riots of 1967.) How specifically rooted in time and place Wonderland is, from the meticulously observed view of the Erie Canal, its cascading waterfalls and locks seen by Jesse from the perspective of a certain bridge in Lockport, to the demoralized street scene in Toronto, thirty years later, where the drug-addicted young, moribund, unsexed, affectless, begging from strangers, have "the appearance of victims of war, photographed to illustrate the anonymity of war." (Yes, that was Yonge Street, Toronto, in those days. A "street of the young" in any large North American city, in those days.)

For Wonderland, as a title, refers to both America, as a region of wonders, and the human brain, as a region of wonders. And "wonders" can be both dream and nightmare.

After rewriting the ending of Wonderland for its paperback reprinting in 1972, I ceased thinking about it; I did not want to think about it; of my early novels, it was the one of which readers sometimes spoke in odd, rapturous-accusatory terms—"I was eighteen years old, my roommate at college gave it to me to read, I was up all night, I couldn't put it down. Why don't you write novels like that any longer?" I did not want to write novels quite like that any longer, nor even to reread this specific one, the very thought of which made me feel faint, as if in recollection of some close call, some old, survived danger. (Perhaps I should mention parenthetically that my interest in neurology, so evident in Wonderland's long speculative middle section, was the consequence of an apparent medical condition, which necessitated one or more tips to a neurologist in Windsor, Ontario, where my husband and I lived at the time: but the "condition" turned out to be, not physical, or in any case not seriously physical, but a temporary confluence of symptoms caused by what is today called, so commonly, "stress.") Approaching the novel now, a cavernous twenty-two years after its composition, I am probably most struck by what might be called its kinetic exuberance. I mean it as a purely neutral expression—neither laudatory nor condemnatory—to say that, both in its epic conception and its execution, Wonderland leaves me a bit breathless: as the narrative itself seems breathless, caught up in that vortex of being that is our human predicament.

Indeed, so fueled by energy was Wonderland, it spilled over into a play, Ontological Proof of My Existence, a dramatization and expansion of Jesse's visit to Toronto, to win, or buy, his daughter back from her drug-dispenser lover; and into such short stories of that time as "How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction, and Began My Life Over Again," an analogue of Shelley's experience as a runaway to Toledo. (In retrospect, it seems that Shelley Vogel was crying out for a novel of her own, a story that was not a mere appendage of her father's; but this was a novel that I could not, or would not write. The material was simply too devastating.)

Much in Wonderland has to do with memory. The escape from memory, the surrender to memory. Theories of memory. The "invention" of memory. Of all art-forms, the novel is the most indigenously equipped to take its populace through a delimited space of time, shoring up memory in both characters and readers; at a certain point, as if by magic, the memory of the novel is shared by both characters and readers. So, in Wonderland, when the adult Jesse remembers, or fails to remember, the attentive reader is a part of his consciousness; we sense the onset of his breakdown when isolated figures and memory—shards out of his deeply suppressed past begin to intrude into his rigidly controlled present. No other art-form so builds upon memory so necessarily, as the novel: in this it mimics, as Dr. Cady suggests, personality itself. (For there can be no person without memory.) And no other art-form is so dependent upon and so infatuated with memory, as the novel: the novelist might be defined as one who, in the guise of fiction, is involved in a ceaseless memorialization of the past. (Wonderland includes a postmodernist snapshot of a kind, when, in the concluding pages of the first section, the beleaguered Jesse, pausing in his desperate drive from Lockport to Buffalo, spies upon a young family in a green swing behind a farmhouse—Carolina and Frederic Oates and their three-year-old daughter Joyce.) The uses we make of our homesickness!

For the melancholy we feel when completing a novel is akin to the melancholy we feel when, by the inexorable process of time, we are expelled forever from home.

Joyce Carol Oates
January, 1992

Reviews

• Library Journal, August 1971, p2545
• Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 1971, p831
• Publishers Weekly, August 2, 1971, p62
• Saturday Review, October 9, 1971, p38
• Washington Post Book World, October 10, 1971, p4
• Newsweek, October 11, 1971, p96+
• New York Times, October 16, 1971, p29
• Time, October 18, 1971, p89-90
• New York Review of Books, October 21, 1971, p3+
• New York Times Book Review, October 24, 1971, p5
• Atlantic, November 1971, p148-150
• Booklist, December 1, 1971, p319
• Life, December 3, 1971, p18
• North American Review, Winter 1971, p67-70
• Partisan Review, 1972, p124-127
• Commonweal, February 11, 1972, p449-450
• Hudson Review, Spring 1972, p168
• Mediterranean Review, Spring 1972, p50-54
• Listener, June 15, 1972, p797
• Observer, June 18, 1972, p32
• Guardian Weekly, June 24, 1972, p23
• Times Literary Supplement, July 7, 1972, p765
• Books and Bookmen, August 1972, p72
• Bestsellers, March 1, 1973, p550

Other Editions

Epigraphs

Wonderland

the spheres are whirling without sound inside
spheres
deft as ivory
tails of vertebrae interlock
hard as ivory and ice
it is a miniature sun frozen hollow

tails like the finest bodies
of fossils
are locked together
beneath the grainy surface of skin
as the surfaces circle their surfaces

a ball of air circling itself
slicing the air slowly in its circling
daylight emerges as a small hole
an eye that achieves and iris
the collapsible space begins to breathe
the vertebrae lengthen into life

this sunless ether is silent
in every dimension
the sphere turns
I make my way up through layers of old bone
the ivory fossils of old blood
clenched fists of babies softened and unborn

coils are revolving
the hot fluorescent center of the globe vibrates
the speechless muscle of the brain spins slowly
slicing the air
continents shaping like raised welts
on the skin
the space between the ribs glows iridescent
warm as the most intimate mucus
of the soul

the eye widens
the iris becomes an eye
intestines shape themselves fine as silk
I make my way up through marrow
through my own heavy blood
my eyes eager as thumbs
entering my own history like a tear
balanced on the outermost edge
of the eyelid

—T.W. Monk

We . . . have dreamt the world. We have dreamt it as firm, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and durable in time; but in its architecture we have allowed tenuous and eternal crevices of unreason which tell us it is false.

—Borges, Labyrinths


Knowledge increases unreality.

—Yeats

Original Ending

Last paragraph in common with both versions:

Jesse held Shelley with one hand and with the other reached for the pistol. He was utterly calm, triumphant. He had won. Hatred rose warmly in him and swelled the cords of his neck, all the vessels of his proud manly body—just to pull the trigger, to shoot that man in the face! What joy, to shoot him in the face! But Shelley leaned against him so passively, like the child she had been years ago, and Noel himself now looked so defeated, his lips damp with saliva, that Jesse paused out of pity. . . . If he shot this man, this stranger, what then? A corpse. What then? A pool of blood draining out from the smashed face. What then? What then?

The two versions diverge here:

"How much do you want?" Jesse said.

". . . what?" said Noel.

"How much money do you want?"

Noel stared, blinking. He inclined his head as if to hear more clearly.

"I'll give you five hundred dollars," said Jesse.

"Five hundred dollars," Noel said blankly. His face was damp with perspiration but he made no move to wipe it off. "Five hundred dollars . . . for my bride, my sweet little Angel . . . my Shell. . . . Five hundred dollars is what they pay you for your cadaver at the medical schools; they tattoo your big toe to claim you. . . . Is that right, Doctor? Five hundred dollars for my bride's cadaver. . . ?"

"Five hundred dollars," Jesse said.

Noel stood panting. He had been holding his arms out as if to defend himself, and now he lowered them slowly. His face looked both barbaric and weary. "This is the end, then . . . ? The end of my bride and me . . . ?"

"Yes, it's the end," Jesse said.

"When you barged in here, Doctor," Noel said softly, "I thought you were handing me a deal. Yes. I thought you had a nice surprise for me because it was time I was rewarded, my luck has been down for so long . . . and there is something pure in your face . . . so good . . . you're like an angel yourself, one of those ancient angels that were so strong.... I could love you the way I can't love your daughter. You're a prophet, I look at you and know that I love mankind, I love America and want to go back . . . I want to go back to my home again...."

"I'll give you the money to go back," Jesse said.

He took the wadded bills out of his pocket. His heart was pounding quickly and joyfully. He had won. He counted out five hundred-dollar bills, which he might have brought along just for this purpose, to hand over to Noel. He felt intoxicated, merry, like a bridegroom.

"Shelley . . . ?" Noel whispered.

She said nothing.

"Shelley, is this the end? Do you want it to be the end? The end?" Noel said.

Shelley said nothing.

"Yes, it's the end," Jesse said.

Noel approached him cautiously and accepted the money. His eyes were bloodshot. His skin, though pale, had a dull, dead, parchment-like tone to it; there were small ripples and threads of dirt on his neck. "She was the mother of all of us. The little mother," he said. "Now we've lost her, now she's going to disappear.... She started disappearing when a friend of ours died the other day. My head is like a bell, the inside of a bell clanging. A church bell clanging. You are her father. I understand that. I know all about you, everything about you, you're in my head too . . . and I wanted you to die just as she did ... but now, now.... Now ... I could show you where there is a bathtub. And some water. Some warm water and some soap...."

"Yes. Good," said Jesse.

He led Jesse and Shelley into the kitchen and then out into the hall and down to another room. Here there was a bathtub in the kitchen, as in Monk's little room; no one was around. "They must have all run out, hearing you," Noel said. "They're always afraid of the end of the world." He turned on the faucets and water splashed loudly into the tub. He reached down to wipe some dirt away with the side of his hand. "It would be nice for her to bathe in hot soapy water, it would do her good, she is such an angel," Noel murmured. "Here. There's even some soap. It used to be in the form of a heart, this soap, a lovely perfumed pink heart, but now it's worn down . . . but it's still good, isn't it?"

Jesse felt with a kind of intoxicated pleasure the steamy heat that rose from the tub. His eyes welled with tears. Shelley stood leaning against him, unprotesting, weak, her body light as a child's. "We have to undress her," Noel said hesitantly.

They stripped her and she was revealed as a small, sexless child— her skin a ghastly yellow, almost pumpkin-colored. Her ribs seemed to move frantically beneath the fine skin. There were reddened bites or sores on her arms and body—from insects, from many jabs of a needle? Jesse blinked hard to keep tears out of his eyes. He had to see. Couldn't give in, when he had come so far....

Shelley's knees buckled as she was lowered into the tub.

"Is it too hot for you? Is it too hot?" Noel asked, bending over her.

Shelley lay back in the tub, her head striking the rim.

"Got to wash her and prepare her for the trip home," Noel said. He smiled vaguely. His hair fell forward into his eyes and he smiled, like a man in a dream. "You could wait outside for her. That would be nice. Then you could take her home."

Jesse was reluctant to leave. He stared down at the body in the tub—the child sitting in a few inches of rust-colored water—a child of his own? His child? Shelley lay there, motionless, and allowed Noel to wash her shoulders and chest.

"You could wait for us outside," Noel said softly.

Jesse went out into the corridor to wait. To wait. To wait for his daughter to be bathed. He could hear the splashing of the water and Noel's voice, the murmur of his voice, lowered as if for a child's ears. For a while he heard nothing; then, at last, Noel called out for him to return.

"Dr. Vogel, all right now! All right!"

He opened the door and there Shelley stood, shaky but on her feet, dressed again in that filthy T-shirt and jeans. Her arms and feet were still dirty. Her face was flushed and she seemed to be breathing with difficulty, almost gasping for air.

"She was my wife. My little wife. My bride. She claimed me, you know, one day a long time ago. Walked up to me and put her hand on me, just a little girl, a beautiful little girl . . . ," Noel said. "I didn't steal her away. She stole me. She put her claim on me. She said she would go with me anywhere, anywhere; if I didn't take her with me she would throw herself off a bridge and die.... I had to take her. I loved her. For a long while I loved her. But now it's the end."

Shelley said nothing. She allowed herself to be delivered over to Jesse, who gripped her by the upper arm and walked her away. Out into the drafty corridor, to the stairs. Down to the landing and to the next flight of stairs, murmuring to her, whispering, ''Shelley? Are you all right? Can you walk?" Jesse's senses swirled. He could smell a sweet, sickish odor about her, the odor of soap and sickness. Shelley. His daughter. He had found her, had recognized her, and now he was bringing her home.

"Good-by!" Noel cried from the landing above.

Neither Jesse nor Shelley glanced up.

He led her down, down to the street. All the pores of his body broke out with painful little clots of sweat. Poisonous salt. Pain. Shelley shivered. "I knew I would find you. I knew I would save you," Jesse said. He was surprised at the gloating sound in his voice. Outside, the young people who had been sitting on the stoop had gone, but others were milling around. They glanced at Jesse and his daughter. No recognition. Not much interest.

He was dressed in a dark blue pullover shirt and cheap trousers; he was holding Shelley by the arm, guiding her, whispering to her. She did not resist. He said, "They've worn you out, exhausted you. All those men. You'll forget them though. You won't remember any of this. You will wake up back home and you won't remember any of this life." Did she understand? Was enough left of her brain for her to understand? He loved her, loved her, even the stench of her sick body and her stale, dry mouth.... He walked her along the street as fast as he could manage her. She stumbled once or twice and he kept her upright. They turned onto a side street where the crowds had thinned out. Jesse had no idea of where he was, but he didn't want Shelley to sense any hesitancy on his part—that would frighten her—he didn't want to frighten her. "Never again in your life are you going to be frightened," he promised. But he had to get her somewhere, back to his car, he had to walk fast yet without exhausting her—she was breathing so hard, so hard—he had to take her away from the terrible danger behind her—He possessed her now, he had saved her. He would never lose her again. "You won't remember any of the things they did to you," he murmured. Shelley moaned lightly, as if through clenched teeth. "It will all disappear. You weren't really married. No, not to anyone. Not to anyone. Not to him. He gave you up, he sold you—he didn't love you—he sold you—that is proof that he didn't love you—"

Shelley pushed against him suddenly.

"I hate you!" she cried.

Before Jesse knew what she was doing, she broke away from him. He was astonished at the strength in that little body—

She ran down the street. He ran after her. "Shelley—" he cried. She crossed another street—no traffic here—and down an alley on the far side of the street, crouching, running like an animal. Jesse ran after her, stunned. He was panting with surprise, like an animal himself; he saw her turn a corner but when he got there he had lost sight of her—then he saw her, down by a fence, a wire fence that blocked off the alley from an expressway. So she was trapped. "Shelley! Come here!" he cried. She clutched at the wire fence, her fingers grasping the wire, her arms raised above her head as if she were about to climb—but she hadn't enough strength to climb up the fence and she fell back weakly—for an instant Jesse thought the fence might be electrified, her body jerked so violently, with such surprise—

"You can't get away. You're coming home with me!" he said.

She began screaming. Yelling something down at the traffic.

"Shelley—"

"I have children—" she cried.

Jesse grabbed hold of her.

"I have children for all of you—"

She seemed to have gone berserk, threshing from side to side. She threw her head back, striking her forehead against the fence.

"I have children—"

Jesse slapped her, to silence her. She screamed. He struck her again. She would die, she was killing herself—she would die in his arms—

"Stop! Stop! Stop!" Jesse cried.

Her fingers gave way and she fell back, exhausted.

He lifted her. Could she walk? Was she already dying? He began to stroke her as if stroking life into her; if he could open her chest, massage her heart.... But she needed blood. She needed blood and fluids pumped into her. Blood, yes. He would save her.

He walked her up the incline, the two of them stumbling. He had begun to cry. He did not know where he was, even the name of the city he was in, he did not know where he was leading her. He gripped her body tightly, lifted it, forced it to walk. What a miracle, that those legs could still move.... The small head rolled back against his shoulder, the eyes showed white. Who had cut her hair so short? Who had made her so ugly? She was wizened and dwarfish and aged, but still he loved her, he murmured to her to keep walking, only a little farther, only a little farther. He loved her so much. . . . She was not going to die: he was not going to let her die.

His senses moved in a fierce, raging radiance, like flames. He looked up and saw that he had brought her to the edge of something.... Water lapped nearby. The smell of water nearby. They were on a dock, a pier . . . he led her forward again and her legs obeyed . . . as if a small convulsion were beginning in her, as in him, driving her forward, forward, a surprise to both of them, that she should be alive after so much! He would save her yet. They stumbled along the dock and Jesse paused at a small boat, a bobbing white boat about fifteen feet long. The boat was tied to the dock. No one was around. Jesse helped Shelley over into it, down into the boat, where she lost her footing and fell clumsily, moaning. "Are you all right? Are you all right?" he asked. He climbed down into the boat himself carefully. A hazy moon illuminated as much as he wanted to see. Bobbing, jerking. He pulled Shelley up, held her face in his hands, felt the cool, dry skin of her cheeks, wondered if he might breathe life into her.

With his jackknife he undid a thick knotted rope, slashing and prying at it. It took some time. The boat bobbed free, jerked, swayed. And then it was free, the little boat bobbing free in the rough current of a river or a lake, he did not know which, he did not know the name of this water or where it might lead him....

"Don't be afraid, Shelley," he whispered. He threw the knife and the pistol into the water.

She moaned and seemed to be lifting her arms to him. The boat began to drift. Waves lifted it, drove it out. Water on all sides seemed to darken. Jesse climbed awkwardly into the front seat of the boat, where Shelley lay, and gathered her into his arms. He could not stop weeping. Why was he weeping after he had come so far, why was he sobbing so bitterly? She could not escape him any longer. And yet she kept moaning as if in pain, in a delirium, her hands light as moths against the side of his face, beating him away or caressing him, he could not tell. "You won't remember any of the things they did to you," he whispered. His tongue felt swollen and blistered. Shelley's lips were cracked. Caked with something sour. She was sick, dying, he could smell the stench of death about her, and panic rose in him at the thought of her escaping again, her eluding him forever—

"Why are you dying? Why are you going away?" he whispered.

The boat bounced and shuddered.

"Why are you going away from me, all of you, going away one by one . . ." he said, clutching at her, feeling her heat, her dryness, her incredible dryness, the dryness of this body that was straining to get loose from him and to fly out of the world entirely: straining to break its orbit and elude him forever. Where were they all going, these people who abandoned him?—one by one, going away, abandoning him? Was there a universe of broken people, flung out of their orbits but still living, was there perhaps a Jesse there already in that void, the true, pure, undefiled Jesse, who watched this struggling Jesse with pity?

"All of you ... everyone ... all my life, everyone.... Always you are going away from me and you don't come back to explain . . . ," Jesse wept.

He embraced her. He clutched at her thighs, her emaciated thighs, her legs. He pressed his face against her knees, weeping.

The boat drifted most of the night. Near dawn it was picked up by a large handsome cruiser, a Royal Mounted Police boat, a dazzling sight with its polished wood and metal and its trim of gold and blue.