From "Orphans"

Alan sits out on a bench down by the saw mill. He is watching the long line of cars from the shift change make their bull-like way out into the street, pressing for left turns...horns honking. The sky is lightly overcast, white-grey. Gulls circle squalling ove the massive piles of ceder and pine. Alan likes to look at the piles of wood, to smell the mix of pine tar and oil, like a black adhesive acrylic smeared on the wood.
In an hour Alan is due at the frame shop. He likes the work, so different from painting, and yet so similar in terms of focus. It’s like balancing a light workout with a heavy one. Working on the frames, his mind has time to wander as it never does when he paints, time for strange connections and memories to assert themselves.
He likes the juxtaposition of the smooth wood and detailed judgement with these airy condensations; its as if he had caught sight of the double-sidedness of the world, and, rather than pulling the two sides apart, rather than burying one or the other, had rather waited for a moment and allowed the possibility of co-existence to flower, he had endured this, felt a poise in motion, the true artifice of life. Worlds combine and do not collide, the doubling like a roiling, chaining kiss, a breath that doubled condenses as the hour.
He can almost taste the clear air pregnant with possibility, sometimes wants to push his hands into the surface of it to seize peaches, fruit, fish. Later he will try to stretch what he’s feeling over his canvass, but its hard. He is always hungry after work, spends far to much money at the gourmet Natural Foods store, buying with his eyes, and afterwards, he is often dissatisfied with the food. The apples are hard, or the bagel more yeasty than he had been thinking, than he wished.
On the bench beside him is a folded newspaper, just the sports section, and an empty paper cup with coffee stains. These have been forgotten, as many things are, have begun to slip out and away like blowing ash. Even Alan, who pays attention to the vast detail of life, can’t check the constant tendency for things to lapse into brooding shadows; its as if he, like anyone, is falling asleep constantly, as if there were a vast narcalepsy stirred by words, sleepwalk words sent out to stalk what has gone.
Alan is looking at the sky, trying to forget the visions that have surfaced around him, into which he has been thrown. He strains against them just as he strains against the social memories inscribed on billboards and TV images, as if he had ever sat at a table looking at a goddess wearing a diamond necklace, or had swept away through a European city in a long luxury car, as if his life had the banal narrative crises of a sit-com. He strains against them out of a habit adopted after his 300th bus ride between the North End and Cambridge, out of the instinctive reaction to protect himself by imagining himself somewhere else. He strains against them just as he strains against his own eyes and hands, the eyes that see the skeleton poverty and blasted, crumbling, facades of 1930’s buildings vanishing from sight like the buffalo, the eyes that see clusters of black men in coarse clothes in front of buildings with plywood doors, the hands that feel the vibration of the bus as it stumbles across Longfellow Bridge over cracked concrete and the subway depths and deep channels and sewers and deeper water table, a surface of pipes and decayed bricks laid down fifty, a hundred years ago, and already turning to marshy, thick substances some future race might use for oil in a far distant time. Its too much to see and feel this, so he’s got a habit of sitting and looking at the sky as if he wasn’t taking all that in, as if it weren’t turning his sky grey, as if it weren’t rising like a cloud of grackles around him cawing and scratching, this New Jerusalem America with its black face shuffle, saying, “nothing happ’nin’ here, boss, don’t blame me, I just work here.”
Alan is so busy looking at the sky and the wood and waiting for the hour to pass, he doesn’t notice a woman sit next to him. She’s dressed in a short brown dress, its made out of a muslin, and she’s got a page-boy cut, dark brown hair that’s thin and’ll fly in the wind. Her face is gaunt, but she’s got bright black eyes, and she stares at him fiercely.
When Alan notices her, what he notices first is that her bones are thin, that she has retained the bird-like proportions of early adolescence. There’s an almost serene and supple quality to her skin. But when he catches her eyes, he stops short with what he later knows as fear, for her eyes reflect layers of intrigue, as if she and no one else had been watching as the sad ports and cities of America lurched out of the middle of the century like battleships so quick into obsolescence, as if the days were pages rifled by a breeze, shifting back and forth in the liquid dream of her gaze.
She nods at his recognition and then says sweetly, “We’ve been watching you, Alan. Watching a long time.”
His heart jumps at the familiarity, the implied comfort of long aquaintence. To have been watched, and by her, by Them! He knows the moment she says this that it is true.
“It is time for you to come with me.”
Alan is thinking about an old patchwork quilt he had when he was a child, the mix of fabrics and prints. He suddenly remembers how it felt when his legs only stretched halfway down the bed, how it felt to go to sleep. His hand is in hers and they are walking back up from the sawmill towards downtown. She dances lightly as she steps like a cat. And then, like a car, she suddenly pulls Alan down an ally. Its a narrow ally between a warehouse and a large apartment house. The walls are high and the shadows deep. They come on an old rail spur that ends abruptly beside a concrete pier. Alan steps up onto one rail and begins to walk along balancing. He can see now that at the end there is a tunnel of some kind where the rails ran under a road. It is into this tunnel that she leads him, hand in hand.
The tunnel is short, only fifty yards, but when they come out Alan finds he is disoriented. He is no longer anywhere near the sawmill, not even in Washington State maybe. He looks up at the sky which is a clear bluebird blue. They are on an urban street, it looks like Cambridge, and she is hurrying him towards a small wooden building at the corner of a small square. There is an old weathered sign that reads, “The Red-Star Bookstore”, but the windows are dark. If there were ever stores here they are now gone, though the square might once have been full of stalls and local produce.
When she reaches the door, a tall black oak door, she stops and touches his hand, as if to see if he was with her. And indeed, he is suddenly alarmed, as if just then it had struck him that he had no idea how to find his way back to the sawmills of Bellingham.
“Wait,” he says, “What’s your name?”
She smiles like an emperess, and touches him on the brow, “I am Lady Liberty, Alan. Come, do not be afraid.”
Alan is still caught up by her recognition, but when she says her name, he suddenly is aware of some contradiction, as if she had other names, a discrete history in another life, a place where he would not be recognized.

She has opened the door and over her shoulder Alan can see a vast hall, far larger than the small wooden shop. As he steps across the threshold behind her, Alan suddenly catches the faint scent of olives and thyme as if blown from Portugal.
The space is huge. Alan cannot see the far walls, and in the distance he can see what look like rolling hills. The floor is earthen and even close at hand there are small gardens and many paths crossing and turning. The roof towers some thrity stories above them and is made of stained glass, and there are long cathedral windows the stretch down the near walls letting in a diffuse yellow-grey light and sometimes the sun in spectacular angled rays.
Alan stops to look up at the stained-glass ceiling. He is first struck by the pure colors, then begins to notice the images—women kneeling beside river banks with laundry, the black-tar rooftops of an American city stretching away into 1940’s distance, and then a white country church with a preacher standing on the lawn, his hand laid on the nose of a large brown bear, his coat a straight black line, his pink face smiling the hopeful, sturdy charity of doing good works. And then Alan’s perspective shifts and he suddenly sees that all these images, and countless more are like a patchwork pattern making up the long gown of a woman whose body stretches out over them as if she had been flying, but had turned to see them standing down below. And then Alan sees that the pictures change, that the gown ripples as if in a wind, and when he tries to catch sight of her face again, it is turned away pointed out into the vast reaches of the room.
When Alan looks down he sees Lady Liberty has gone on into the room, down a short flight of stone steps. Her muslim wrap stretches and slides as she walks, and she brushes small shrubs, tapestries, a small end table as she passes. Her hand lingers across a book case, a steam radiator with flecking peach-colored and selant green paint, a hot plate, french windows. She stops, one hand against these, waiting for him to hurry close before stepping out into a small garden. They are closer to the nearest wall now and Alan can see out through one of the great windows. He sees an oily black horizon with distant scaffolds, and closer wheeling gulls. The sky is an urban brown-blue like old yellowed napkins and stained. Night might be coming.
Lady Liberty sees where he is looking and lightly points over a series of walls—lamposts, canopies, small flowering trees, lampshades—towards the next great window. Alan immediately sees that it is night out that window. He can make out Orion’s belt and a thin moon.
Lady Liberty begins to climb over a wooden rail fence when Alan finds his voice, “Wait.”
She turns her eyes back on him, “I always wait.”
“Where are we going?”
“To the zoo.”
“But...”
“Alan, you understand all this, you couldn’t be here if you didn’t.” She sits on a steamer trunk plastered with pennants and decals. “But we can sit a moment if you wish.” She looks up at the ceiling as if checking the position of the sun. “We’re a bit early.”
After a moment, Alan asks, “What is this place? Its like...like Wonderland.” He does not say, “and like a cathedral too”, but he is looking up at the vaulted ceiling and the great windows, and this thought is in his mind.
“This is my land, Alan.” Lady Liberty pulls a small cigar from the pocket of her wrap and carefully lights it, puffing at it until she is content it is lit. Then she waves her hand, about the space so that the glowing end makes a brief circle. “See the things of the world—the darkness beneath beds, the way the soft lamp lights a corner, a set of french doors from a house in Omaha...so many things...and hills, lakes, delicate flowers, words, books, handshakes...a rail fence from a suburban yard that a young boy and his friend used as a horse when playing cowboys...the corner of a grarage where a large black radio stood...but here things are taken for themselves and find their own order.” She adds almost immodestly, “There is no economy in this land.”
“Like Plato...”
She turns so quick towards him with a cuff at his shoulder he almost falls over. “No. not like Plato at all...it’s not that what you see are the essences of things or their true forms...its not this at all. The brush you painted with yesterday is here somewhere, out there, the half painted picture, those awful men and their charts...all of this is here somewhere. The doubling of worlds does not add a whit to the stuff of worlds. But where they touch there are veils. Here you are inside the veils.”
She is silent a moment, smokes her cigar with relish, then laughs, “Inside the veils at last, Alan. Better hold on to the skirts!”
Alan is so caught up he doesn’t notice the jab. There’s something else he is wondering, so he asks, “What did you mean by having watched me? Why did you do that?”
He’s really asking, incredulously, “Do you really love me?” and Lady Liberty can see that sure as she sees every reason anyone’s ever had for doing anything. She likes to say, “When the will condenses you can always see the hand.” But its not time to talk of love, certainly not time to say it is a constant asking, or to explain the way liberty and love twine about each other but never touch. And so she answers from a different perspective.
“We watch for signs of doubling, Alan. I have no effect on the day and night save when there is a doubling, and where there is a doubling there is a door I can go through. You’ve been doubling Alan, doubling for some time. And so we watched you.”
“Doubling...?”
“You will see that you know. This is why we must go to the zoo. Come, we can sit no longer.” With this, Lady Liberty carefully tapped the cigar out and wrapped it in a clothe before placing it again in her pocket. Then she sprang from the trunk and over the rail fence in a single lithe movement, dropping lightly to the grass beyond, and, for a moment, Alan felt as if he were six, playing in the yard with a friend in the grass and towering sky. But then it passed, and he leapt after her, already disappearing down a hallway, now a shadow outlined among the red geese on a Japanese screen.