She frowned. “I don’t follow.”
“When I knew him before there was a tension. That’s gone now,” Mr. Ichino said. “Before, he was always looking for something. Some answer.”
“Has he found it?”
Mr. Ichino’s face relaxed, became smooth and unwrinkled about the eyes.
“I think he has found that the looking is better than the finding,” he said.
The frosted land yields itself to him, a clear washed tapestry. He exhales a cloud of smoke into it. Snow crunches, crisp air cuts in his throat, joyful singing love forever, leaping soaring flying dying, he cracks the crusted snow at every footfall, sinking into the cottony embrace below, the supple world obligingly lowering him to itself at the completion of each step, homeward, toward the center of the forgiving earth.
trickle of stinging warm sweat down his wrinkled neck the sun burning behind the veiled sky
a vast blue ocean alive with flapping bird life
—pours over and through him—
“I’m worried for him,” Nikka said. Her knotted hands on the table trembled.
“Don’t be,” Mr. Ichino said. “You’ve already told me that Nigel has done things no one else could fathom. He decoded the star chart. He can see into the patterns that others—”
“Yes, yes. If I could only be sure he is all right.” “You know, Nikka, when I was a boy I had a two-stroke scooter. My parents gave it to me. I needed it to get to school.”
“Yes?”
“There is a point to this.” He put out a comforting hand to her. Through the hazed window he saw Nigel hefting the ax and plodding through the deep late-winter snow toward the wood pile. The square window framed it like a depthless Sumaro woodblock print.
“I waited a week before I used it,” he went on. “I was that afraid of the thing. It had 150 cc’s and I was very surprised when I jumped on the kick starter and it chugged into life, the first time. I jumped on and rode proudly up and down my home street, waving at my parents, waving at my neighbors. Then the engine died. I couldn’t restart it for the life of me. I had to wheel it home.”
He lifts the ax and brings it down swack clean and true biting into the sectioned log. The wood splinters, splits, and Nigel feels his taut muscles come to completion in the act, converging on the downward curve of his back as he follows through and the blade bites deep toward the singing earth, pins him loving to the day.
It melts.
And he stands on the high shelf, a ledge of folded and grainy rock. Watches the pounding dance of hairy forms in the valley below as the booming cadence coils up to him enfolding him and at once he dances, splitting wood with a glinting piercing ax and coming down into a rhythmic hammering of leaping soaring flying dying, primor-dial plane of wood crashing down as he feels in this one passing instant the connection of the act and the origin of that tensing pleasure at sheer physical work, the joy of movement—
—he lifts the ax, the thunk of yielding wood still in his ears and he is into another instant—
It melts.
“So I checked to be sure fuel was reaching the carburetor and the spark plug was working okay. I cleaned the jets and kicked the starter and she took off again, with a nice sputtering roar. So obviously I’d gotten a piece of fluff, from a cleaning rag or something, into a narrow fuel passage.”
Nikka nodded.
“So I took her out again and after about two minutes she sputtered and coughed and stopped again.”
—and yet, and yet he sees that this howling dance and muscular ecstasy is a piece but not all that he is and drawing back on the ax, feeling it loft high into the gravitational potential well of the consuming earth he remembers work of long ago in remote, gray England, erewhonderful isle, of flexing rhythms set up amid the coal gangs who loaded tan sacks of it on chilly bleak mornings, a thin dusting of snow on the immense black piles of coal being gnawed by trucks and men, Nigel working for money alone, to buy him the rare serenity of hours at home, warm and reading in the yellowish light as the brittle mathematics unfolded before him, a fresh tongue with a promise of lifting him up into a new continent of Euclidean joy, the transcendent wedding of economical and clean thought to the underlying rhythms of the world, distilling order from the rough jumble of life, yet in that spinning instant to merge with life, not split the world into subject and object but to clasp it, merge, the ax hyperbolically propelled by the atoms of skin on his hands as they sink into the molecular lattice of the wooden handle, all essences extracted out of the same finespun stuff, no interface, the old dualities lapping aimlessly at the granite mass of the yea verily one self-consistent mathematical solution that gives the universe, joyful singing love forever, and through this lens he sees the desert, the Snark riding back behind his pressing eyes and opening him to a fraction of this but poor dim dead Snark not merging it, not simmering in it, no, only frags, splinters knifing through the sea of categories that was the old Boojum Snark and pinned it forever to the pigeonholed world of subjectobjectlivingdying—
“I had a similar thing once,” Nikka said. “Did you check for water in the fuel?”
Mr. Ichino nodded and lifted his lukewarm cup, the coffee swaying like a black coin within it. “I rechecked everything and then set her against the alley wall and fired her up. She ran smoothly for as long as I’d wait. So I jumped on and went two blocks and she throttled down and died on me again.”
“Irritating.”
“Yes. There’s that old joke—‘Assembly of Japanese bicycle require great peace of mind.’ So did this.”
“You looked for an intermittent electrical fault?” “Yes, all the conventional diagnostics.”
“And?”
“It wasn’t any of them.”
—yet Snark had a piece of it, they all had a sliver of detail seven blind men and a melting elephant Snark must’ve known in ancient ferrite cores that he/it/she came from the computer civilizations that smashed the Icarus vessel, broke the eggshell now lying in Marginis, cut off that attempt to transfer knowledge to the beings that would/could become man. Those ancient living beings who made the Marginis wreck and Icarus—flitting image of reptiles, of gleaming claws that closed like hands—did they collapse into war? Were their home worlds destroyed by the machine intelligences? Life swarmed in the galaxy. The computer civilizations could not wipe out all biospheres, they must’ve triggered an inherent instability, something that reached to this outpost swinging around Sol and snuffed out Icarus, immense starship, ponderous and certain, and the Marginis wreck, all when the reptiles were so close, so near to some connection with Bigfoot. So the machine societies knew the ancient reptilian call signals, felt the tremor that the Icarus hulk spewed out, its death rattle triggered by bumbling Nigel, Snark arrowing in on the electromagnetic scream, its circuits only numbly remembering what to look for, perhaps a dim wanting to erase Icarus and the moon wreck, but the Snark was confused deep within, whimpering in that great night that enclosed it, a wolf let in from the cold swinging in for a pass by the moon to drop a fusion capsule, make a fresh sun bloom over Marginis if the wreck responded, but then unable to approach, Nigel a gnat in its eye, Nigel dumb to eternity washing up a gray sea on the lunar shore—
He pauses. Sinks the blade into a securing log and turns, walks to the bare hillside nearby, lungs whooshing the dry air, legs clenching snow crunching prickly pine scent tickling at his nose as enameled light flickers through tall evergreens, trees stretched tall by cruel competition, a thin whisper of a breeze churning them and stirring a tiny whirlwind a few meters away, a circular presence outlined by its cargo of whirled bits, dirt, flakes, a swirl of ice. It sucked at the ground and he entered it, felt the brush of its wind and by so measuring its tiny world destroyed it, churned it forever into minor eddies, the circle consumed and reborn.
At the brow of the hill he felt the full chilling lance of the wind and abruptly, across the crystal gap of the valley, caught a microscopic movement in a far clearing, a dark dot framed in the ellipse of trees, the speck now freezing as he watched, head turning, the two of them pinned to each other along the line of sight as across the millennia an eternal wash of light encased them and fleeting dabs of perception spattered over him, of rank fresh clods of dirt on forest floors, of hymns sung below the edge of human hearing amid the cathedral trees, a grunting ample life plucked from the flooding embracing forest, and through it the curve of the newborn moon speaking of other underlying senses, the same framing order as darted into being along the descending parabolic lines of a tossed stone, of flickering emerging structure that, seen for an instant, ached inside and thrust Bigfoot forward into man, and as this spark passed between them the shaggy troubled dot raised a hand, hesitantly groping upward in the layered air and paused, the timid fears seeping back into the gesture, for one suspended moment, the hand came down and the old being skittered away, angling into the sheltering tree line, Nigel’s filmed eyes following the shadow and knowing this new facet and face of the world—
—which, now absorbed and altering him— —melted—
“In time I eventually understood,” Mr. Ichino said. “The seat had springs under it for cushioning. The springs were too soft. They let the seat ride down too far. The rubber fuel line was under it, on top of the carburetor. By sitting on the seat, I pressed the fuel line down and kinked it off, eventually.”
“With no fuel the cycle stopped,” Nikka concluded. “Yes. There wasn’t anything wrong with the cycle itself—only in my relation to it.”
Nikka furrowed her brow.
“The same is true of the way most of us look at the world,” Mr. Ichino went on. “We can’t solve problems because we are disconnected from the world, always manipulating it as though we were using tongs to stir a fire.”
“And you think what’s happened to Nigel…”
