Part I: Iridium

Part I: Iridium

1. Iridium
2. Dead Clod Walking
3. Recess Appointment
4. Blitz
5. Mother Tongue
6. First Person Plural
7. Child Bride I

Iridium

Contents — Part I  «  Iridium  »  Dead Clod Walking

Dense is the stone and rare that marks the line between death and life.

I have been a miner for a lode of iridium. Neither platinum nor palladium exceeds iridium's capacity to resist corrosion, and not even aqua regia can melt it. Indeed, iridium and its near cousin osmium made themselves known to humanity when these metals emerged from the sludge of crude platinum dissolved in a royal bath of hydrochloric and nitric acid. Spark plugs, compass bearings, and supercolliders put iridium to work. Long ago pen manufacturers put iridium in their nibs, and finely powdered iridium black painted many a piece of porcelain. But none of iridium's practical purposes interest me. I think of it solely as evidence, as memento mori and a marker at the greatest boundary the mind can comprehend.

Element 77 is the rarest nonradioactive metal in the earth's crust; only osmium, number 76, might be denser. When the earth was young and hot, these elements dove toward the core. Despite their simplicity, some metals love others in a fashion even the living can imagine, and iridium, osmium, and their alloys love iron, especially in its molten state. These siderophile metals followed iron as it sank. One streak straddles the globe near its surface, and iridium in the crust guards the frontier between the penultimate great dying and the present day.

Read the rest of this chapter . . . .Smaller bodies in space are friendlier to iridium. Chondritic meteorites and asteroids contain iridium at concentrations three orders of magnitude greater than the metal's concentration in the earth's crust. But not in one layer of clay, dated 65 million years ago. Relatively ample iridium in that layer accompanies other telltale constituents of the soil, especially granules of shocked quartz. Something big, something not native to this planet, struck earth those millions of years ago. Father and son, physicist and geologist, Luis and Walter Alvarez inferred that iridium anomalies bear indisputable witness to a bolide strike. Natural historians treat that extended moment as the boundary between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods of geologic time. Ordinary people know the K-T boundary as the twilight of the dinosaurs.

I found myself a solitary pledge of a fraternity uniting the world's deepest seekers of historic curiosity. Hail iridium, and curtains on the Cretaceous. In one sense, the most obvious way to start — and to finish — crossing the K-T boundary is to visit the craters left by the objects thought to be responsible for mass extinctions that marked the close of the Cretaceous. Lesser sites such as Silverpit, Boltysh, and Shiva notwithstanding, this way of thinking leads directly to Chicxulub Crater in the Yucatán. "The devil's tail" is nothing short of ground zero on the geologic day when the heavens dropped destruction on the surface and the deep, when the sky rained death from the clouds on clade after clade.

Going first to Chicxulub, however, seems oddly out of order. Forensic geology turned its attention to Chicxulub only after the earth's iridium signature at the K-T boundary suggested an extraterrestrial cause for the great dying. In strictly historical terms, of course, the craters preceded the iridium streak. First impact, then the slow settling of the resulting shower of alien metal and shocked quartz. As a matter of human knowledge, though, iridium came first. The geophysicist who first found the Chicxulub Crater was looking for oil; investigations into the formation's historic significance began only after the iridium anomaly at the K-T boundary had come to light. Anyone who finds the truth knows that the moment of recognition — εὑρηκα! — precedes in psychological time and perhaps in emotional weight the historical events that the seeker of truth has tried to reveal. Iridium is to impact as realization is to reality.

The K-T boundary is far more mysterious than it is elusive. The hundred-odd known outcroppings of iridium-rich clay marking the dawn of the Tertiary have not hidden themselves from visitors, serious or frivolous. The true wonders in this world, after all, do not hide. Rather, they wait in plain sight, obscured not so much by ice or vegetation as by the shades we draw across our eyes. Most of geologic history belongs in this category of true wonders. Terrestrial history accretes at rates too slow for any mortal observer to notice. But it leaves records in the form of rocks and soils and layers.

On extremely rare occasions, the chroniclers of geologic time pause to pick one fragment of one organism — a leaf, a wing, a shell, a bone — and enshrine it in some durable medium. The imprints of Carboniferous ferns, horsetails, and club mosses, insects in amber, the barely perceptible bas-relief of a mollusk, cliffs colored by coccolithophorid shells, even the hydrocarbon relics of ancient plant life that humans so casually burn and polymerize — all these bear mute testimony to worlds long past. What humanity, in its phanerozoic fascination with visible life, calls the fossil record strongly favors organisms with hard parts. Calcium indeed does a body good, especially if that body wants admirers millions of years beyond its death. Calcium, as in chalk, is known to the Greeks as κρητίδα, and the echoes of that word in Latin creta and German Kreide reverberate in English Cretaceous. (We shall not speak of κιμωλία, which is what schoolteachers might use to sketch lessons in classrooms on κρήτα.)

The iridium layer belongs to a less spectacular but arguably more revealing and therefore more truly wonderful part of natural history. Fossils aside, the chronicles of earth sweep indiscriminately across the chemical record of the planet, at each stage of its slowly unfolding life. All matter, biotic and abiotic, is recorded in the outermost layers of earth's crust. Iridium plays no biological function; no organism ever specialized in transforming it into a pheromone or a venom. The wonder of the iridium layer is precisely the opposite of the wonder of a fossil. The hadrosaur bone speaks of life long ago, the momentary triumph of an individual, a taxon, a clade in a long evolutionary parade. Every fossil, so to speak, tells an individual story. Iridium, by contrast, settled alongside the other detritus of the end-Cretaceous bolide strike. That collision laid waste on a global scale, and their calling cards — tektite, shocked quartz, element 77 — recount the epic of entire races extinguished in the blink of a geologic eye. Iridium marks but one layer, a dazzling layer, in a languid progression of unforgiving, unromantic layers of rock and soil marking the hours of a planetary clock.

And on occasion, ordinary forces conspire to reveal layers of geologic history for immediate inspection. The Colorado River carved the Grand Canyon through a spectacular cross-section of geologic history; lesser acts of erosion leave geologic works of art worthy of admiration in their own right, such as the Ordovician and Devonian palisades that preside over Garrard County, Kentucky. Water and wind are the chisels by which earth reveals its past for current consumption.

In North America alone, casual tourists can reach K-T boundary exposures with relative ease. The uppermost (and therefore most readily exposed) strata of the Hell Creek Formation in Montana unfurls the iridium-enriched boundary between the Cretaceous and the Tertiary, between the Mesozoic and the Cenozoic, in thin streaks as distinct as they are discontinuous. That formation reaches as far north as Drumheller, Alberta, where bands of iridium-rich soil run through nearby badlands. You can see the K-T boundary, passing by at 75 miles per hour, along Interstate 25 in Colorado, near Raton Pass. From there it is a very short drive to Lake Trinidad State Park, home to many open views of the iridium layer, lying like a garter belt on the scandalously exposed thigh of Mother Earth.

But these sites would not do. If I would join the cult of iridium, no place but one would suffice for my initiation. Gubbio, an Umbrian town near Assisi, lies near the exposure where Luis and Walter Alvarez unlocked the mystery of the end-Cretaceous in an otherwise routine geologic survey of the Apennines. And so I found myself during that summer of regret and remembrance on a slow route to Gubbio, determined that the beginning of all my exploring would be to arrive where we heard the voices of the dying and knew the place for the first time.

---

I set out for Gubbio by a deliberately slow and tortuous path. I had waited years to set out for "the K-T," as I called the Alvarezes' outcropping in rhyming tribute to real hikers' nickname for the Appalachian Trail, and I felt no need to rush. I spent several days in Paris, as indistinct as they were leisurely, before boarding a TGV heading south across les grands champs de la République. Traveling by train between Paris and Gubbio realistically demands two days. I planned to split those two days with hiking along the Ligurian coast in anticipation of traveling south by southeast for a date with iridium.

The Cinque Terre — the "five lands" of Riomaggiore, Manarola, Corniglia, Vernazza, and Monterosso — are not served by Italian rail's intercity trains. My itinerary from Paris required a change of trains in Lyon and again in Turin. I could not have arrived early enough in the day to book a room in any of the towns of the Cinque Terre. Instead I stopped in La Spezia, a gritty port town just east of the five seaside villages.

By daybreak I set out for Corniglia, the third village. Alone among the Cinque Terre, Corniglia stands high above its train station. I discovered this distinction as I stood on the platform. I had a reservation for a matrimoniale at the Ostello di Corniglia, which I accepted over the phone as soon as it was offered. Better to overpay to sleep alone, I thought, than to negotiate in any tongue not native to the land I was visiting. And at that moment I made my second decision in an hour to favor hard work over lazy tourism: electing to forgo a cab ride from the station, I would climb the staircase to town.

Corniglia's distance from its train station induces stair-climbing by tourists who would otherwise refuse strenuous exercise while on vacation. Americans, as a rule, are a fat and lazy race; we bypass stairs whenever elevators beckon. But Americans on the move are more obsessive than they are slothful, and the desire to visit all five towns of the Cinque Terre drives many visitors from the United States straight up Corniglia's staircase. Out of a mixture of necessity, enthusiasm, and patriotic obligation, I began climbing.

The legendary Orfeo, as he is known in Liguria, famously glimpsed Euridice for a fleeting second as he looked back down a dark staircase. That morning I found myself staring at Beatrice made incarnate as I ascended Corniglia's steps.

Halfway to town I spotted a pair of women looking intently out to sea. "Buongiorno," I said.

"You're not Italian," said the older woman. "Speak to us in English."

"Fair enough, ma'am," I said. My name's Ray Kuo. I'm on my way to town. It's my first full day in Italy."

I heard the younger woman mutter, no word more distinct than "Mother." Mom smiled, grateful for a chance to greet a countryman.

"Well, take pity on people who've been running all over the country. Don't race past them on the steepest outdoor staircase in Italy. I'm Shelley Harrelson, from Fort Worth, Texas, and this is my daughter, Reena."

The trip from Paris must have affected me more than I had anticipated, because I realized in that moment that I had focused entirely on Shelley and had somehow failed to notice her daughter. Something lyrical in Shelley's voice drew me toward her. At the word Reena, her voice released me. Granted leave to look, I found myself staring straight into the displeased face of Shelley's daughter. Reena Harrelson had not quite forgiven her mother for engaging a stranger in conversation.

Of a sudden sweat burst from my hairline and collected behind the dam of my eyebrows. Half a peninsula away from the Uffizi, I felt as though I had crossed a museum barricade and gotten an illicit look at The Birth of Venus. Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern. By the morning's light I could not decide whether I would classify Reena's hair as pale red or simply blonde. Perhaps it was the mist, borne by wind from the sea and not yet burned away by the rising sun, or perhaps it was the faintest hint of sweat on her hair. I looked quickly side to side and hoped that Reena would not notice the to and fro of my eyes. Metal glimmered near her neck as she refocused her gaze from the sea behind me. Reena brushed aside a strand of hair that had blown into her face. She relaxed her shoulders. I exhaled.

"Pleased to meet you, Reena. Ray Kuo."

"Pleased to meet you, Ray."

Those words — pleased to meet you, Ray — revealed a truth I had missed in my rush to reach town. Some span of years — thirty-five, I would eventually learn, precisely half of Shelley's traditionally allotted three score and ten — separated mother from daughter, and my brisk climb kept me from studying their faces carefully enough to spot the family resemblance. But once Shelley had ordered me to stop and to speak to her, my ears at rest realized what my eyes in motion had missed. In pitch and timbre and acoustic resonance, the Harrelson women spoke almost identically; they were tuned, as it were, to the same amply, richly modulated frequency of 220 hertz.

I looked again at Reena. Amor mi mosse, che mi fa cantare. Surely this was a musical family. On the strength of a few seconds' conversation, I was prepared to stake everything on my hunch. I had even less time to frame a strategy for proving my wager before simple politeness dictated a swift and permanent parting of ways.

"Are you living here in Italy or just traveling through?"

"Both," Shelley interjected. "I can't tell you how proud I am to be traveling through Italy on my first-ever foreign trip, and I owe it all to Reena."

Reena sighed. I got the impression that Shelley had been sharing this particular source of family pride throughout Italy. Telling the story gave her evident joy, and I had every intention of letting Shelley Harrelson indulge in this tale. For the moment the staircase to Corniglia had become the most alluring attraction in the Cinque Terre, and every word Shelley spoke would extend my time on it.

"Reena is here on a Rotary. She's been here since she graduated from TCU."

"Mother, I'm sure Ray doesn't need the whole story." Ladies, I'm sure I do. "I've been studying in Rome."

"What subject?", I asked. God almighty, I thought. All that time in law school, and I finally get to ask a question to which I already know the answer. Too bad this grade won't go on my transcript.

"Operatic singing. I'm a soprano." Her voice was not pretentious. It was musical and true. The voice, the whole recital would haunt my memory.

Your very voice is music.

"I'd like to think of myself as your perfect fan," I said. "I produce no music of any kind, none whatsoever. But not being able to sing or play hasn't kept me from listening."

Not clever enough. Try something else.

"Ladies, it occurs to me that I will get to town way before my hotel will let me check in." I gestured toward the suitcase I had dropped when Shelley first spoke to me. "If you don't mind, I'd like you to join me for breakfast, or at least coffee." Ah, coffee. I have measured out my life with coffee spoons. "I'll gladly buy in exchange for a few minutes of your company."

"We'd like that." Shelley beat Reena to the punch. I smiled. It's never a good sign when the mother likes you better, but this mother, at least, had just bought me another quarter-hour in the presence of her daughter. Grateful for the opportunity, I gestured up toward town and the top of the staircase. Shelley began climbing again, and Reena followed. Under threat of rain, we resumed our escalade, and rose toward the sunlight, into Corniglia, to drink coffee and to talk for an hour.

---

"The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience." So intoned Oliver Wendell Holmes in his 1881 magnum opus, The Common Law. "The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy, avowed or unconscious, even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow-men, have had a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed." I once spent a thousand days at Harvard, determined to follow the path Holmes had blazed. I hoped to catch an echo of the infinite, a glimpse of its unfathomable process, a hint of the universal law. And so I memorized the opening paragraph of The Common Law. "The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics."

At a coffee shop in Corniglia, the middle village of the Cinque Terre, I recalibrated Holmesian wisdom:

This is the law of male experience: the life of man is binary logic.

Stand in my shoes — as I inescapably must — on the sidewalk, in a room filled with equal numbers of distant acquaintances and rank strangers, at the threshold of a hotel bar, and let your eyes sweep across the human panorama of the moment. Woman to the left, woman to the right, standing and beckoning. My mind rides into the valley of life.

And so the cascade of binary decisions begins. Would I, could I, should I, will I? — but most of all, Would I? Moment by moment the opening verbal gambit varies. Excuse me. Simply: Hi. Perhaps: Wow. But the logic of words expelled past the rising catch in the throat arises from the same sequence of smaller judgments, all informed by lifelong experience traceable to an inexorable impulse coded well before birth. Every new girl that you meet begins anew the same exercise in binary logic: Would I if I could?

Yes.

The felt necessities of any moment, the prevalent sexual calculus, intuitions of private desire, avowed or unconscious, especially the prejudices which govern men, virtually dictate the rules by which men search for women. Life embodies the story of every species' evolution during natural history, and far too many men pursue their role in that story as if they knew only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics.

The common man, as a rule, is at once lazy and stupid in his approach to courtship. Just one look, sang the Hollies, that's all it took. The quick visual scan yields indispensable information about fertility and desirability: symmetry, hip-to-waist ratio, apparent youth. Many men make a fetish of certain visual cues: hair color, breast size, cosmetic suggestions of sexual arousal. All this counts for something, and I cannot deny the power of the visual. Neither artist nor madman, I am no creature of infinite melancholy who patrols the boundaries, the mirrory beaches and rosy rocks, of that enchanted island.

Visual evaluation is as useless as it is universal. Over the course of human evolution, billions of encounters have ensured the essential democracy of the female form. Even more egalitarian is universal command of language. And so courtship proceeds in a swift polka of spot and speak. Man spots, man speaks, woman decides. As Robert Browning might have expressed the sentiment: man proposes, woman disposes. That day in Corniglia, however, I recognized an important albeit latent corollary to the binary logic of sexual scouting. Looking helps you sort according to ordinary criteria of visual allure. But to sort according to musical intelligence, that rarest and most capriciously distributed of genetic assets, you have to listen. If you listen carefully, and you have been lucky in choosing your companion, you might find yourself transported by the alchemy of love into the presence of the scarce and splendid talent of transforming mathematics into music.

Over coffee and bread that morning in Corniglia, I listened. Reena Harrelson was the youngest in her family, separated by nearly two decades from the oldest sister and by death from her father. All five children of Frank and Shelley Harrelson showed some musical proclivity. Reena alone inherited her mother's mastery of song. Reena's command of the Baptist hymnal convinced her mother that Texas Christian University could indeed accommodate one more music major. And in the ripeness of time the Tarrant County Rotary Club was duly impressed. Reena won a scholarship to study opera for a year in Rome.

"And that is how we came to be in Italy. Reena's winding down now, and I knew I'd never get anyone else to translate for me. So what brings you here, Ray?"

I swallowed my coffee before responding. Complex answers to simple questions are anathema in courtship. This is even more true when the mother of one's intended is asking all the questions.

"I came to look for something. I'm headed for the high country in Umbria. Assisi. Definitely Gubbio. There's something east of that town, in the Bottacione Gorge, that I've waited a long time to see.

"Is this your first trip here?" Reena had elected to intervene.

"Yes."

"That seems like an odd place to go during your first trip to Italy. Unless you're making some sort of pilgrimage in honor of Saint Francis."

"More Gubbio than Assisi, and something more mystical than any saint. Umbria as a whole has a lock on the Middle Ages, both in the sense of being medieval and in the sense of being Mesozoic." I couldn't resist. Though I hadn't mentioned the K-T boundary by name, I wanted my companions — Shelley, Reena, preferably both — to take the conversational bait.

Neither did. "Wouldn't you rather see Rome? You can't come to Italy for the first time, and for all I know the last time, without seeing the capital," said Reena. "Come visit me there."

I found myself studying the card of one Corinna Anne Harrelson. In that moment I coveted no greater possession. "Okay. When?"

"Come whenever you're ready. I'm taking Mom to the airport for her flight home tomorrow afternoon. I figure you'll spend a day, maybe two, hiking the Cinque Terre. Then come see where it all began."

Where it all began. There lay the difference between Reena and me. She had clearly favored the medieval over the Mesozoic. In the course of human history, or at least of Western civilization, the fall of Rome in 476 corresponds to natural history's end-Permian extinction event. Indeed, the three most recent eras of the Phanerozoic eon correspond nicely with the tripartite understanding of ancient, medieval, and modern history. Geological time, unlike its human counterpart, is known by Greek rather than Latin names: the Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic eras comprise the whole of the Phanerozoic. Human history, however, lacks the clarity with which geological time separates the Permian from the Triassic or the Cretaceous from the Tertiary. No single moment like the K-T boundary separates the human equivalent of the Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras. To be sure, there was a great dying, among humans and nonhumans alike, triggered by European exploration and colonization. Neither natural nor human history, however, knows such a word as forever. Ruins marking the many transitions of human history are the primary objects of tourism.

In planning my trip to Italy, I had contemplated visits to those ruins as little more than incidental byproducts of a vastly deeper pilgrimage. Years of longing and anxious anticipation had preceded my journey to touch the middle ages of earth's history. Coffee in the company of Shelley and Reena Harrelson dissolved my plans to visit the iridium anomaly near Gubbio. The allure of Roman antiquity, presented by a guide I had known for scarcely an hour, had jolted my quest to see the K-T boundary.

A straightforward calculation of time dictated my decision. The global iridium anomaly, which made itself known for the first time at Gubbio, had lain in place 65 million years. Within 65 seconds I had decided that I wanted more time with Reena Harrelson. Between the staircase and coffee in Corniglia's main square, I had managed to spend roughly 65 minutes in Reena's company — just enough time, if she were so inclined, for her to reciprocate my snap judgment. And in 65 hours I would discover whether I would continue to mark time, by any measure, with Corinna Anne Harrelson, soprano and Rotary Scholar.

"I'm sure I can reach Rome in time for dinner Thursday." Those words deferred my dream of seeing the K-T boundary in Gubbio. Extinction is forever, but a romantic opportunity is evanescent to the precise extent that it is remote and implausible. I was prepared to postpone my homage to the most recent moment when all of earth experienced instant death and slow rebirth.

"Thursday in Rome, then." Reena slid her chair away from the table. "Ray, when we're done here, would you mind walking with my mother and me back to the top of the staircase? We can look at the sea together one more time before Mom and I head back down and walk to Manarola."

θαλασσα, θαλασσα. The sea itself, like Reena's voice, had awakened a sleeping desire. That seductive voice, the percussion of the waves upon the Ligurian shore, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, invited my soul out of its own abysses of solitude. In my quest for iridium, I had lost myself in mazes of inward contemplation. And now the voice before me spoke to my soul; the touch of the sensuous seaside air enfolded my body in its soft, close embrace.

Ever mindful of Orfeo, the master musician who tamed neither love nor death, I took pains to follow the Harrelsons. That perspective gave me the chance to observe Reena from an altogether different angle. Again the wind lifted her hair and obscured the contours of her face. A few drops of rain fell as we walked back toward the staircase. The air hinted of heavier showers, perhaps even a storm by noon. Reena began singing to herself, nearly sotto voce. Her song was heard, half-heard, in the stillness between two waves of the sea, but loud enough to mix memory and desire, to stir the dull roots of my yearning in the spring rain. I followed, transfixed by her veiled beauty and by a voice as rare as iridium.

Contents — Part I  «  Iridium  »  Dead Clod Walking

Dead Clod Walking

Iridium  «  Dead Clod Walking  »  Recess Appointment

People at rest, no less than objects, bear the marks of the forces that propelled them into motion. Indeed, only when people and objects come to rest can those marks be seen and interpreted. All geology represents the present-tense freeze-frame of the earth's history, condensed conveniently in the chemistry of rocks and soils. Ex libro lapidum historia mundi. Though the course of any single organism's life is infinitesimally minute by comparison with the history of the earth, only one species in the earth's parade of life — ours — has managed to crack the code. It is as though some geological variant of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle prevents observation over a more meaningful time span. Any organism attaining the power to unlock the earth's secrets also acquires, by that very stroke, the power to destroy the earth itself.

As with sediment, so with sentiment: Our efforts at self-understanding have no chance of overcoming the mindless buzz of being and doing. We cannot understand feelings of the moment, with deep emotional footprints and even with lasting practical consequences, until we stop acting upon those feelings and seize the opportunity to look backward, in the serenity of solitude.

So it was during the summer I set out to cross the K-T. A chance encounter on the first day of a slow crawl toward Gubbio's outcropping of iridium-rich clay diverted me toward altogether different quarry. For the next two days I dutifully hiked the cliffs connecting Corniglia with the other villages of the Cinque Terre. Rome awaited; I anticipated no encounter with greater enthusiasm than dinner alone with Reena Harrelson.

Read the rest of this chapter . . . .Boarding the train out of La Spezia, Italian rail's gateway to the Cinque Terre, eliminated any realistic prospect that I would touch the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary on this trip. Having crossed from Cisalpine Gaul into Latium, I had no feasible way to restore my original objective of visiting the Bottacione Gorge near Gubbio. Human antiquity, orders of magnitude younger than its geologic equivalent, replaced the end-Cretaceous extinction as the object of my radically altered excursion. I found myself alone in Rome, charged with no mission more elaborate than to stroll the streets. The Forum, the Colosseum, the Spanish Steps, the Trevi Fountain, the Pantheon, and the Vatican all beckoned.

Of all the attractions in la città eterna, I found myself inexorably and morbidly drawn toward la cripta dei Cappuccini, the crypt beneath the Capuchin monastery at La Chiesa della Santa Maria della Concezione on Via Veneto. For three and a half centuries the Capuchins collected the bones of their brothers and of poor Romans who came to die among them. In one of the most spectacular displays of the Catholic world's obsession with tangible evidence of the dead and with palpable hints of the resurrection of the body in a world yet to come, the Capuchins of Rome arranged their bones with extraordinary care in a crypt beneath the Church of Saint Mary of the Immaculate Conception. I visited crypt after crypt — le cripte della resurrezione, dei teschi, dei bacini, e delle tibie e dei femori. After dedicating an entranceway to the Resurrection and depicting the central mystery of Christianity with relics of the dead, the Capuchins separated skulls, pelvises, tibias, and femors into rooms of their own. I stepped from chamber to chamber, where the dead men lost their bones.

And then I walked, wholly unprepared, into la cripta dei tre scheletri: the crypt of the three skeletons. La cripta dei tre scheletri is somewhat misleadingly named, for two of the three skeletons scarcely warrant mention by comparison with the centerpiece of this room and indeed of the entire Capuchin monastery. Two smaller skeletons flanked a complete and magnificent skeleton surrounded by the circle of life. In its right hand, this personification of death held a bony scythe, symbol of the reaper that claims all life. The skeleton's left hand held a balance, also made from bones, intended to represent the divine judgment that would be rendered in God's great and horrible day of reckoning.

So delicately poised as if it were ready to reclaim its flesh and thereby to rejoin the living, the main skeleton stood as prominently as any representation of the crucified Christ, flanked by the two thieves that Pontius Pilate saw fit to execute alongside Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. That skeleton whispered the message that echoed throughout the Capuchin monastery and the Church of the Immaculate. Death marks the boundary between the known life and eternity. Though there is no proof (or disproof) of life everlasting, this much unites believer and skeptic: Death is forever. A placard at the exit of the Capuchin crypt reminds all visitors who can read at least one of the five languages on display: What you are now, we used to be. What we are now, you will be.

From the Capuchin crypt I rose to greet once again the living city of Rome, a surreal city under the fading light of a summer evening. A crowd flowed through Piazza Barberini, so many. I had not thought death would claim so many.

The visual memory of the Capuchin cemetery haunted me. As a child I feared skeletons above all other representations of death, of the underworld, of monsters patrolling the darkest corners of my nightmares. Vampires and werewolves and zombies are demonstrably unreal, and that realization enables the conscious eye to tame the frightened imagination. But skeletons — invariably half-eaten skeletons of birds and rodents still clad in tattered feathers and skin — affront any child who has explored forests, fields, or even city sidewalks. Skeletons are as real as they are dead, and the infantile brain translates with ease the message borne by bones on the ground: You too shall be stripped of all flesh, for the pine trees that flank you now in life will surround you, in their death as in yours, to no avail. Your guts shall be food for worms, and your bones alone shall bear mute testimony that you ever stood and walked and talked. Consider Phlebas the Phoenician, who was once handsome and tall as you. In the streets of Rome, the fear I felt in my youth returned to me. And I trembled.

In a feeble effort to deflect these fears, my mind conjured the image of another set of bones. Wegen und gegen Tod in Rom erinnerte ich das ROM. I recalled a visit long ago to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, which houses a diverse and fascinating stash of artifacts in its own right but is strictly sterile by comparison to the Capuchin crypt. The Royal Ontario Museum's collection includes a complete skeleton of a hadrosaur. Saurian skeletons, unlike their human counterparts, have a strangely soothing effect. The terrible lizards and falcons of the Mesozoic satisfy our atavistic fascination with serpents and dragons, while we sit safely behind the reassuring aegis of extinction. Their bones testify to a lost race of veritable monsters, whose reduction to skeletal form proclaims the impossibility that dinosaurs might return and reclaim our world for their own.

The Capuchin crypt and the typical dinosaur exhibit rest heavily on the public display of bones, but the resemblance ends there. The Royal Ontario Museum strives to portray the hadrosaur as it might have looked in life, albeit for the purpose of stressing how the entire superorder died out and will not return. By contrast, the Capuchins make surreal art of their brothers' bones in furtherance of an altogether different aesthetic and moral aim. Within Christianity, especially the Catholic variation on that theme, death represents the threshold of a different eternity. The dinosaur fossil on display looks alive and real so that museumgoers will know of its death in the past. The skeleton in the Catholic crypt stresses its death so that believers will aspire to a future life whose promise lies in its very invisibility.

Remembering Ontario's hadrosaur brought me no comfort. This duck-billed theropod figures prominently in the skeptical chronicles of the geological transition between Cretaceous and Tertiary time. If indeed some nonavian dinosaurs survived the event that deposited death and iridium at the close of the Mesozoic, evidence that some dinosaurs stumbled into the Paleocene comes from fossils above the K-T boundary in Montana's Hell Creek Formation. Distance above the K-T boundary translates readily into time, and four feet above the iridium layer suggests a geologically significant span of 40,000 years.


Hadrosaurs are the Elvis Presleys of natural history. Casual outsiders might be forgiven for imagining that waves of paleontologists seeking fame (or at least tenure) keep finding hadrosaur fossils in Cenozoic soil. Pollen samples near a fossilized femur found in Ojo Alamo Sandstone at the San Juan River in Utah suggest that at least one hadrosaurid species lived a million years beyond the K-T boundary, even more firmly in Tertiary times. If these fragments of the fossil record are to be believed, especially by their position relative to the iridium layer, then at least one branch of the saurian clade penetrated the Paleocene. Skeptical paleontologists argue that these fossils worked their way into the Tertiary by virtue of later abiotic forces. Hadrosaur fossils above the K-T boundary are fascinating, even shocking, but not if their presence in recent geologic time is attributable to everyday erosion rather than the survival of one or more saurian species beyond the great dying that ended Middle Earth.

As I trained my thoughts on Ontario's hadrosaur in a futile attempt to neutralize the terror of the Capuchin crypt, an even deeper source of fear gripped me. What if the dinosaur fossils found above the K-T boundary were not reworked by erosion into Paleocene sediments? What indeed if those relics do in fact testify to the temporary survival of this species? I recalled the work of David Jablonski, a paleontologist whose survey of marine invertebrates found a significant number of mollusk species that survived mass extinctions, only to succumb shortly thereafter or to remain forever stunted in population and diversity. Perhaps mass extinction events change physical environments in ways that doom certain survivors. Or perhaps the ecosystems that emerge as the earth as a whole recovers from mass extinctions disfavor those survivors. Whatever the reason, geologic time is studded with instances of "dead clades walking" — species that survive catastrophic events on strictly borrowed time and are destined, as an only slightly extended consequence of those disasters, to join other victims in the gallery of extinction.

The loudest hour of the day had come, the hour before dusk, when the city groans under foot and wheel. A waxing crescent moon hung low; its thin copper sickle scraped the western skies over Trastevere. The breeze of passing traffic swept my trembling hand, and I lifted my eyes unto the hills of Rome as I made my way toward Il Campo dei Fiori.

---

"The field of flowers," said Reena when we parted in Corniglia, "is the place where you'll find me. You just have to look for it by the name the Romans use."

Clever girl. On the basis of an hour's exposure to me, Reena recognized that I could not resist a linguistic puzzle. Ten minutes before the time designated for our rendezvous, I strolled into Il Campo dei Fiori, knowing she could be nowhere else.

Reena had also come early. She showed me something different than either my shadow at morning striding behind me, or my shadow at evening rising to meet me. She showed me yearning in that moment of lust. By the street lamps I could see her approaching the square. She wore a dress of solid red, cinched at the waist. The slits in the skirt matched her décolletage, as if to spell A-V-A, a symbol of primal womanhood. Have. Have Ava. Have her. Hava. Above her breast she had pinned a golden dragonfly with black trim. She stopped sharply, one precise arm's length before me, and flicked her hair to the right as she stood. In a summertime field of geraniums, pansies, and begonias, Reena Harrelson presented herself as the finest, rarest poppy in Rome. I gasped. A hint of opium, the suggestion of instant addiction, passed over my lips, and I stood speechless.

"Hi Ray." Reena mercifully broke the silence. "I'm sure you're hungry. There must be something you want around here."

"Wherever you go, I'll go too." Where you stay, I too will stay, and your people will be my people. "It's your Field of Flowers. I'm just passing through."

"You can't go wrong looking at Romans walking by. Over there." Reena pointed toward the last open sidewalk table at the nearest restaurant. "Let's sit. Then you can tell me what you want to see in town."

"Really, Reena, anything I see in Rome will be far beyond what I came to see in all of Italy. And I've seen precisely what I came to see in Rome. From this point forward, everything is a bonus."

But Reena was adamant. She laid out an itinerary more akin to a plan for conquest than a tourbook. She omitted no traditional tourist destination in Rome. She took pains to stress her favorite spots. The Sistine chapel. Ed anche La Pietà, in a room where women come and go, talking of Michelangelo. The mural outside the Forum showing the growth of Rome from a city-state to master of the Punic seas and ruler of the known world. Most temptingly, spots along the Tiber suited for bottled tea and uncorked conversation.

"You'll help me remember it all," she said. "Wherever I have my next adventure, I can think, 'Ray Kuo came to Rome and helped me celebrate my last days there.'"

As I scrambled to find some subtle way to communicate my willingness to join that "next adventure," our waiter appeared. Reena ordered filetto di salmone alla griglia. I ordered ossobuco.

That momentary return into halting Italian reminded me of Shelley Harrelson, whose insistence on linguistic comfort and congruence had triggered this entire adventure. "Reena, I hope your mother enjoyed her visit."

"Mother had a great time, thanks. That reminds me, Ray. There is one thing she wanted me to ask you." I nodded; Reena continued. "Why aren't you married?"

I swallowed hard. My conversational gambit could not have backfired harder. "I was."

"I don't mean to pry," Reena said. "And neither did Mother. She has a hard time imagining nice boys — or girls, for that matter — staying single for long. Her generation did things differently, I guess."

"I don't begrudge her, or you, an answer," I replied. "I am older than you after all, and that alone puts me closer toward understanding what your mother means by posing that question. You might say that I know the ways of old, ways of renown."

"The short version of the story, Reena, is this: Yes, I've been married. I no longer am. I've never been divorced."

"Oh. She died." Silence hung between us, as if hooked on the street lamps on the perimeter of Il Campo dei Fiori. "I'm sorry."

"It's fine. You shouldn't imagine that I found and then lost the love of my life. That adventure, I would like to think . . . no, I need to know it will happen yet. I need to know that I will find at least one great love in my life. Somewhere. Some time."

Right here. Right now. Please.

"But you don't need to worry. Cassandra died years ago. All the while, the world has moved on. As if I had any choice in the matter, so have I.

"What I'm about to say might sound cruel, but I hope you will not think of it, or me, that way. I loved Cassandra, as you would hope I did, and I had to watch her die. And as time passed, things found their way back to the place they might have been had I never known her. The world was mostly unchanged, and so was I, just a few years older."

To no god in particular, I prayed that Reena did not catch me in my lie.

"Time for mourning passed long ago. The Ray you know is the Ray who is ready to help you enjoy your final adventure in Rome. If we were still in Cinque Terre, I'd invite you to join me on the beach, to hear the mermaids singing."

"You do appreciate music," Reena replied. "I like that."

Voices musical and true. At her own mention of the word music, Reena began singing at a volume almost imperceptible to anyone besides herself, as she did the day I met her and her mother on the staircase to Corniglia. The making of this new musical moment reminded me of another voice, one falling far short of perfection in pitch, yet at once warm and terrifying as it echoed in my memory.

Despite straining, I could not remember the precise timbre of Cassandra's voice.

Between the soft melody of Reena's singing and the indifferent disharmony of other diners' streetside conversation, I shuffled frantically through the aural records of my mind. I recalled hearing Cassandra's voice, completely by surprise, on a tape some weeks after her death. I suddenly remembered every other detail of that evening — how I neglected to return to the dinner I had laid out for myself, how my home's heating system clicked off as the tape ended and cold crept across my carpet and over my feet, how I lay alone crying in bed till sleep overtook me and new light, as cruel as it was inevitable, forced me into a conscious confrontation with the following day. No feeding, no heating, no breeding. Cassandra had died, but her voice lingered on tape. Her death, the utter finality of her death, had changed the entire world in ways detectable by me alone, and a lonely, skeletal phonorecord of her voice built the sole bridge back across time, to a place where she was still alive and her breath, no matter how feeble, represented the possibility, no matter how remote, that I might yet redeem both life and love. The very strength of the memory of that evening shocked me all the more as I struggled to replay that tape — any metaphorical tape — of Cassandra's voice.

Reena continued to sing. In the desperation of my silent memory I heard her voice, passing effortlessly through paragraph upon paragraph of well rehearsed arias. I stabbed my meal. The knife struck the impenetrable center of the veal shank before me and slid with such force that it cracked the enamel of the plate below.

My surprised grunt broke the conversational stalemate. "Here in Rome, though, we're far from anything resembling a beach. Let's go tour the Forum tomorrow, to see the bleached bones left behind by the capital of the Republic or even of the young Empire."

"Good choice," Reena said. She resumed her singing; a single, clear note punctuated her approval.

The normal progression of dinner resumed. We spoke no more of Cassandra. And once I had chosen the Forum as the starting point for the final adventure Reena was determined to enjoy in Rome before her return stateside, we spoke no more of tourism. Two cups of espresso and the dinner check arrived; I slid one cup toward Reena and swept everything else toward my edge of the table. The time had come, our conscious wishes notwithstanding, to speak of life after Reena's stay in Rome.

Reena's musical training in Rome, it soon became clear, had yielded professional fruit. She praised her agent, who evidently had begun identifying auditions and even securing contracts. Reena lamented the need to fulfill a two-month tour of duty on the entertainment staff of a cruise ship, arranged shortly before she had won her Rotary scholarship. But that stint was all that stood between her evacuation from Rome and another excursion with her mother to New York. "Since I'm her youngest," Reena explained, "Mom wants to make one last trip so that she can help her baby set up shop. I don't know what she can do to help me find a day job and a place to live, but at the very worst I can take her sightseeing.

"You already know how she is about climbing stairs."

I smiled, recalling our encounter in Corniglia. "If it would help at all," I said, "I can come to New York and take your mother around town while you run practical errands. New York is far from home, but a lot closer and a lot more familiar than Italy."

"If she ever hears that suggestion, my mother will insist on it." Reena laughed. "She can't understand how I could possibly prefer the company of foreigners, bohemians and such to that of ambitious young Americans."

Having no answer I wished to offer, I instead stretched my eyelids to their limit. Reena continued speaking. "Surely you understand. You came here, too, to see exotic people in a beautiful place."

"Actually, Reena, you have that right, only in reverse. I came to see ancient natural history buried in obscurity beneath the glory of modern human culture. But I put that aside when I met a beautiful person in an exotic place."

A shadow fell between Reena and me. "Allora, Fabrizzio, come stai?" Reena spoke as she looked toward the center of Il Campo dei Fiori and addressed the man who had stopped between our table and the edge of the sidewalk.

Reena and Fabrizzio spoke at some length. Or so it seemed, as I suspended all efforts I might otherwise have invested in studying a conversation between an American and an Italian, the better to decipher the oral Rosetta stone presented by a dialogue between a native speaker and a determined, reasonably educated foreigner. As their exchange continued, Fabrizzio seemed as demonstrative as Reena seemed distracted.

Despite my efforts to maintain some distance from Reena and Fabrizzio, I inferred something singularly curious about their obvious familiarity. He called her by her full first name. Corinna.

Reena locked eyes with me, as if to convey her desire to interrupt her conversation with Fabrizzio. "Excuse me, Ray, I'm sorry." She raised a palm to Fabrizzio, as though to set a momentary conversational boundary separating him from Reena and from me. This is Fabrizzio. He builds stage sets; we met soon after I began singing for a light opera company near the Circo Massimo. As you can see, on his account I've learned a lot of Italian. But he knows he's losing me as soon as I leave Rome, and he wonders when we'll be done so that he and I might share a drink on one of my last nights here."

Ecco, il miglior Fabrizzio. "May I ask Fabrizzio a simple question?", I asked Reena.

"You might be better off asking me to ask him," she answered. "I haven't exactly taught him any English."

"I think I can manage this one. Fabrizzio, come sta? Canta lei? Canta lei bene, come Corinna?"

Fabrizzio laughed. His choking gesture confirmed what I could infer, only imperfectly, from his actual words. Having answered my question, he redirected his gaze at Reena and resumed their conversation.

"Più tarde, Fabrizzio. Ciao!" Reena gestured Fabrizzio back into the street and did not spin back toward me until she was sure that he had left. Her mouth hung open as she started speaking with me again. "Ray, I'm sorry."

"What could you possibly be apologizing for?" I exhaled before continuing. "He seemed really eager to talk to you."

"You could join us for that drink. I can call some other friends, and we'll make a party of it. Maybe even some of the other singers from the opera where I met Fabrizzio."

"Thanks. Truth be told, we have a long day ahead. I've really enjoyed dinner, and now I think it makes sense to rest. I'll see you tomorrow morning at the entrance to the Forum. I can't wait to see Roman history in its bleached splendor. With you."

"Okay." Reena opened her purse, reapplied lipstick, and resumed singing. Throughout the entire evening, she had maintained the same melody.

The sound of distant thunder overtook both Reena's singing and the ambient sounds of street life in Il Campo dei Fiori. A light mist descended. The sun had set long ago; even its two handmaidens that evening, Venus and the waxing crescent moon, had retreated beneath the western horizon. Brilliant evening star, whose beauty is fleeting as it is bright, that never reaches the zenith.

In the suddenly Stygian darkness I took stock of my abortive quest to reach Gubbio and the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary. I realized that I had erred in several crucial respects. My mistakes were not strictly geographic, though I found myself miles from my original objective and out of time and will to reverse course. Rather, I had made fatal errors in reconciling mythological and personal narratives with the geographic circumstances and emotional imperatives before me, in harmonizing the felt necessities of this moment with my intuitions of private desire.

In Corniglia I had taken pains not to look back at the sea as I escorted Reena Harrelson and her mother up a staircase. I fancied myself Orfeo, master of the voice and the lyre and by sheer willpower a would-be conqueror of death. In Rome, by contrast, a faraway storm rumbled, and its front edge shrouded the city in nighttime fog. The late summer heat gathered in the asphalt and the cobblestones of Rome vaporized the rain as it fell, and warm steam rose to meet the brooding omnipresence of that evening's mist.

A brief window to Tarturus had opened, and I looked through it seeking alternate sources of mythological inspiration. Orfeo, after all, merely visited Hades, long enough to plead his case, with ultimately devastating success, before the god of the underworld and his consort. To truly understand Tarturus, you must consult its permanent inmates. This is no easy feat: the dead yield no secrets, even less so those who lived solely in a mythological world, unless you conjure them back into reality by the sheer intensity of your imagination. And so I contemplated Sisifo, as Romans would call him, with all my strength. Sisifo also heard the sound of thunder, albeit beneath his feet rather than over his head, each time his stone escaped his grasp at the top of his hill in Tarturus. I too stood, momentarily immobile in Rome, as I watched my own version of Sisifo's Rock of Ages roll back toward its origin. Among rare earths, I have no doubt, Sisifo would choose tantalum — ductile, conductive, and fabulously unresponsive to the inorganic world's reactive temptations. Surely Sisifo by this choice, one of the few afforded to the residents of the underworld, would honor his equally proud and deceitful fellow Tarturan inmate. My choice, in spite of — indeed, because of — all that had happened on my way to Gubbio, remained iridium. Rare, dense, and richly evocative of worlds past and lost.

I tried my hardest to imagine Sisifo happy. An Italian expedition that had begun as anabasis in Liguria had ended, for essential emotional purposes, as katabasis in Lazio. Looking skyward once again, I reminded myself that each return to the struggle toward the heights, no matter how futile, no matter how doomed to repetitive failure, was enough to fill and sustain my heart. But Rome remained shrouded in clouds, and no stars returned my gaze.

I straightened my focus back toward earth in time to see Reena Harrelson walking away. She blew me a kiss as she stepped back into the street. The clack of her heels punctuated the grinding rumble surrounding Il Campo Dei Fiori. That evening I heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me. I stood perfectly still as I watched Reena fade into the Roman night. I stayed till I could hear no further trace of her voice. The streetlamps and storefronts returned my gaze as moisture gathered on my face, and I beheld the city through a curtain of miniature rainbows.

Iridium  «  Dead Clod Walking  »  Recess Appointment

Recess Appointment

Dead Clod Walking  «  Recess Appointment  »  Blitz

By arc or by whole, the rainbow reveals refracted truth. Nearby rain and distant mist have equal power to vaporize visible light into bands of color. A single sheet of water, slicing through sunlight, projects the full spectrum against the sky's inverted bowl. If you are lucky enough to be standing far enough from the point where solar brilliance meets suspended water, you will see sunlight scattered into a full ring of color.

Like metaphorical truth, visible light rarely reveals its constituent parts so regularly and so predictably. Depart ever so modestly from the axis on which truth or light turns, and your eyes will no longer honor one focus. And if you should look instead at an object propelled through the sky, gravity's rainbow will no longer appear to you in closed form. It will rise — and fall — according to a trajectory that will never connect the beginning of truth with its end.

Pivotal events therefore mark the sections of our lives, slicing at particular points of time through the whole of the truth and leaving us no more enlightened than the objects we trace across our field of vision at speeds well below that of light. Catch them, and you will be rewarded momentarily by the mirage of control. Miss them altogether, and you will rue forever the path that both of you, protagonist and projectile, must follow.

Read the rest of this chapter . . . .

---

Sunrise brought an abrupt end to my Roman holiday. Having failed to reach Gubbio by a circuitous route, I set straight for home. Morning overrode my memory of Reena Harrelson long enough for me to order a cab for the airport. The well rehearsed ritual of international travel detained me no longer than usual, and I boarded a plane for Atlanta.

My plane retreated from its gate just far enough to deny boarding to late-arriving passengers. The pilot, evidently awaiting instructions from the control tower, held the plane still. After sprinting half the length of Italy, I had come to rest, however briefly, on the tarmac at Aeroporto Leonardo da Vinci di Fiumicino.

I found myself at a point of eerie stillness in the river of time. At Dante's proverbial mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, I had traveled to Italy in search of the line between the dead and the quick. My quest, so I had believed, would lead directly to Gubbio's iridium exposure. But no reach back into ancient natural history can resist the temptation of the near emotional future. You will believe in that orgiastic future no matter how badly the recent personal past distorts your view of current global reality. It eluded you then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow you will run faster, stretch out your arms further. And if you are lucky enough to have noticed the trompe-l'œil of your own creation, you will realize this truth: No amount of traversing the ancient and the modern, the personal and the global, will separate fear from desire. At any scale the topology of anxiety and longing dictates an invariable outcome. Such is the manifold destiny of the searching soul. Equal and opposite emotions, one and inseparable, comprise a single surface in the Klein bottle of the human heart in conflict with itself.

My quest that summer, as the union of love and lust inevitably commands, slipped along the Möbius strip of ancient regret and present ambition. The slightest hint of something alive, the palpable stir of sex and salvation in Reena's voice, diverted me from the frontier of the Cenozoic to the relics of ancient Rome. That shift from geologic modernity to human antiquity exposed me to the most treacherous trick of light and sound, the double deception that awaits time's pilgrim.

No less than their sensory counterparts, the waves of personal remembrance obey Doppler's law. The mind in motion never quite perceives what passes before the mind at rest. Emotional recall obeys the forces that bend the peal of a passing bell and warp the color of distant stars. Race toward the past if you will; yesterday recedes faster than your memory can recall. As you reel backward, redshift stretches memory beyond your field of perception, till truth dissipates in spasms of invisible heat. Race instead toward the future, and impatient anticipation crashes against the the invariant pace at which tomorrow arrives. Against that blackness you will see no more than purple tendrils not quite taking full form, the fleeting projections of things yet to come.

Takeoff and thrust gave way to the drone of engines at cruising altitude, and through scattered clouds I saw the curvature of the earth.

Though I cannot remember the precise moment, the fundamental theorem of the calculus dictates that some point — multiple points, perhaps, but in no event fewer than one — on my flight path would reflect precisely the trajectory of the flight as a whole. World enough and time fell in equal hemispheres on either side of my plane's pursuit of the sun. The Great Circle gave rise to the Great Sleep. Westward travel between continents creates the illusion of suspended time. Conventional aircraft can approach the linear speed of earth's rotation, especially on great circle routes skirting the Arctic. Near 64 degrees north, roughly the latitude of Reykjavík, a commercial airliner effectively matches the speed at which that strip of the world spins. Traveling at 540 miles per hour carries real, practical consequences. An airplane passenger from Europe to America feels as though the day of transit has been extended by five, six, eight hours. Despite most airlines' best efforts to disrupt the trip with food service and in-flight entertainment, a sufficiently determined or exhausted passenger can squeeze the equivalent of an extra night's sleep from a transatlantic crossing.

And so I slept.

My mind's eye in slumber at once retreated and remembered. As my plane tracked the geodesic connecting FCO to ATL, my memory retraced two decades. Eight to ten hours aloft offer the willing mind ample opportunity to retrace twenty elliptical revolutions of the earth. Memory, so poets would have us believe, is both misty and mystical. It resembles nothing so much as the arc of contrails left by a plane in flight, diffuse from its inception and easily dispersed by the wind. The jetliner's drone eased me into a deep sleep. I do not recall with any precision what I dreamed. I shall never forget what I saw when I awoke.

As my plane descended, I lifted the plastic windowshade on which I had slept. I surveyed the landscape. Scattered trees broke a terrain consisting mostly of roads, cars, and buildings hastily thrown across north Georgia. Where grass had failed to take full root, patches of clay emerged. I saw my home state's signature red earth, and I wept.

Its agrarian history notwithstanding, Georgia is not particularly blessed with rich soil. If anything, the state's poor soil nursed slavery and fed the curse that struck the American Republic in its infancy. Farmers saddled with poor soil need more of it to make a living. The cheaper the eyes assigned to work those acres, the greater the profit. Southern farmers historically favored cotton and tobacco — crops much more readily traded for cash than consumed on the farm or fed to animals — over field crops and other edible commodities.

Clay reaches its reddest in the southern Piedmont of northern Georgia. Outcroppings of granite and gneiss paint in vivid grayscale the history of the state's natural infertility. Unrelenting heat and water strip those rocks of alkalais and organic matter. The material that remains expresses a siderophilia of a sort altogether different from that of iridium and its kindred metals. Iron, plentiful and pedestrian and practical, rivals gold in its historic impact on Georgia. To be sure, gold in them thar hills ended one nation and built the empire that replaced it. Unlike gold, iron rarely meets the human eye in its pure metallic form; it reacts too readily in the presence of water and air. The same reaction that ignites the God of War in the evening sky also produces the signature color of Georgia's native soil. Iron in its refined form upholds the arrogant edifices of Atlanta. As hemoglobin it courses in the veins of mortal Georgians. But most of all iron permeates north Georgia's soil in the form of unhydrated oxides. The chromatic tone struck by those compounds is red.

A native of Eatonton once said that it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it. That same God must have set out to stupefy Alice Walker's fellow Georgians. Spend enough summers in Georgia, and you will forget — assuming you ever learned in the first place — that few landscapes elsewhere resemble the ruddy landscape of Mars, capped by blue skies instead of pink and interrupted by streaks and stalks of green. But I had trekked far enough afield, in search of iridium, to forget the look of iron in my native soil.

From my plane I stepped into the airport's freon-conditioned interior. I decided to end my flight in Atlanta and forfeit the final leg of my itinerary. Having failed to reach Gubbio and its iridium exposure, I chose instead to revisit the figurative Chicxulub of my childhood. Passport control, customs, and the rental car counter detained me just long enough for me to frame my plan. I would find by car and by foot what I had only glimpsed by air. The eyes of bureaucrats, vendors, and other strangers passed as meaninglessly as airport gates and their numbers. No, I don't need a map — I know exactly where I'm going. I paused only when the metallic chill of the key in my hand met the incandescent orange heat of Georgia summer.

I had found my designated car in the rental lot. The searing afternoon sun played yet another trick of the light. Though water hung palpably in the air, it had been suspended in particles too small to refract the passing light. My eyes, which I had averted to avoid the blinding glare, traced instead a distended, featureless projection of myself. My body as gnomon, cast as translucent black on speckled gray, aligned in that moment with the compass I longed most to follow. My shadow divined the way home, and I followed.

---

I de dager var kjempene på jorden. The land of one's childhood, no matter its physical location, marks the same place on every person's emotional map. In those days there were giants in the earth, and the sons of God came unto the daughters of men. And in turn those daughters bore children who became mighty men of old, men of renown. If asked to find the land of giants, my memory will reply: 34 north, 84 west, give or take a few minutes. There the warriors stood taller, whether they swung bats or wore plastic armor beneath their jerseys. The preachers spoke with greater authority, sometimes of heaven but mostly of hell. And above all the daughters of men have no greater beauty than those you first meet in that never-forgotten land. So struck will you be by your realization, your terrible and thrilling discovery that you want one and all of them at once and forever, that you will spend the balance of your days searching for one to compare with the girls you recall from the founding of the kingdom of giants.

For every sacred place there is a ritual; for every territory, the faith of its founders and the creed of the land. Georgia is said to lie squarely within America's Bible Belt. This I will not deny, as long as you confess that the region's deepest spiritual commitment is football. The Baptist revival tent is not without passion, and Southerners have consummated the marriage of politics and religion in ways too grotesque for their fellow Americans to imagine. But true belief, manifested through the disposal of disposal income as through personal presence at weekly services, is reserved for sport. And among pursuits commanding athletic allegiance in the South, football reigns supreme. Though baseball claims its own cadre of adherents, those believers live inside a single cathedral. The Church of Baseball is an orderly, patient congregation whose members commit standings, statistics, and even individual strikes and balls to loving memory.

Football, by contrast, is far more visceral and democratic. It does not depend on repeated head-to-head struggles between masters of two physically improbable skills. For young men not quite prepared to hurl dozens of pitches on demand, or to lay good wood on those pitches, football awaits. The sheer number and variety of positions entice a far deeper pool of aspiring players.

By early evening I reached my intended destination. On the silent grounds of Canaan High School I would conduct my private vespers and feel again the power and the terror of youth. Twenty summers before, I had spent each afternoon of a single week at the beginning of the school year in fruitless pursuit of a place on the junior varsity. In later years I would pursue many other weeklong quests, with no greater success. As a college senior, I would learn that a single week separates tantalizing anticipation from agonizing defeat before the committee that chooses Rhodes Scholars. And one week — most recently the days between my first encounter with Reena Harrelson in Corniglia to our dinner in Rome — marks the typical distance between initial infatuation and emotional disconnect. Academic encomium, incipient romance, and athletic victory share this much: in the same handful of days during which winners emerge, the eventual losers enjoy an equal opportunity to be tantalized by the prospect of success. Until the fateful week ends, every suitor imagines himself in the arms of his intended. Every warrior imagines himself the victory of his struggle.

At age 15, I wanted nothing more fervently than a chance to wear the gold and green of Canaan High's Rams. Junior varsity football tryouts gave me the chance to wear at least the gold practice apron, on alternate drills, before the coach announced his first round of cuts. Two decades later, I had taken pains to return to Canaan, primarily to remember the last of those drills, and perhaps to glimpse some way that I might recover from that fateful day's final collision.

---

Within the full breadth of the electromagnetic spectrum, visible light represents a mere snippet. The human eye naturally privileges this band of radiation, and perhaps the most soothing of the colors in that expanse lies at dead center. Modern culture, alas, has cheapened the ancient currency inherent in the color of chlorophyll. The civilized eye, having lost its innate love of diversity, has come to treat the monoculture of grass as the emblem of pastoral or athletic idyll. Green, uniform in hue and texture as far as the eye can see, has become in some corners of urban society the aesthetic standard of outdoor bliss.

In truth the practice fields at Canaan High, during the summer I tried to make the junior varsity, displayed no hint of green. Georgia summers abuse high school fields coming and going. The weather is hotter and drier, and no one is around to turn on the sprinklers. Canaan's practice fields had become a graveyard of flaxen, almost ghostly white clumps. Collectively those clumps barely concealed a bed of cracked red clay. Football drills stripped the few remaining blades of living grass. Vultures passing overhead offered fleeting shade.

Visions of glory in green and gold nevertheless persisted. The Rams' uniforms, by coincidence rather than design, exaggerated the dominant colors of our town's central athletic ritual. Our kelly green jerseys shone bright, even against the lushest grass carpets of richer schools' stadiums. Our golden pants reflected gametime sun. In the mind of an aspiring athlete, the realistic chances of making the team have never mattered. The very act of trying out for the junior varsity effects a transformation in the mind of the high school freshman. The practice fields, no matter how scorched, how stripped by cleats and blocking gear, looked no less glamorous than County Stadium itself. Rivals in reality, teammates in a collective fantasy, my classmates joined me in viewing late summer through glasses of gold and green, colors reserved for the real Rams. Mentre che la speranza ha fior del verde.

The more primitive senses of smell and taste, however, were not so readily fooled. By the fifth day of drills, my beaten body knew that it could not possibly keep pace with stronger, faster players. The taste of iron and acid and animal exhaustion flooded my mouth. I had never imagined breathing that hard. Pride prevented me from quitting, though, and I drove myself to show enough will on the final day to earn my way onto the team. Deep on the bench and deeper still on the coach's chart, but a spot in the roster and in uniform regardless.

Coach Haynes Yeager followed a tradition of his own making. On the fifth and final afternoon of tryouts, he relaxed his otherwise religious devotion to raw athleticism. Catechisms forged in speed and strength gave way to a few final hours devoted instead to cunning, craft, and exploited hope. The coach divided some players into a makeshift defense and offense. We would run a few plays and thereby enjoy the illusion of gametime significance. Years later I learned that Coach Yeager had no intention of letting potential starters run those mock plays. He had already seen enough of our strength, speed, and conditioning to make most of his athletic judgments. But he did not hesitate to give marginal players a final glimmer of hope, in exchange for a standout performance that warranted at least another week on the squad.

Chief among the emotional hallmarks of youth is the irrepressible ability to weave even a shred of hope into an elaborate tapestry of future fantasy made present reality. Coach Yeager ordered twenty-two players to form one squad each, offense and defense, for the purpose of emulating a goal line stand. First and goal from the nine, time expiring, and a deficit of five. Score and win; fail and lose. "Kuo, fullback!"

I confess that I remember almost nothing of first, second, and third downs, except that I surged as quickly off the snap as I could, the better to block any defensive player who slipped past the offensive line. My task was simple: make clear the path of the halfback, sparing no effort to stop any defensive player who was lunging in the opposite direction. Each play ended with a crush of bodies and the body of a halfback stopped well short of paydirt.

With each down the fantasy grew in its intensity and perceived reality. Players at rest gathered on three sides of the end zone. At the very frontiers of my field of vision, a glint of gold suddenly appeared. The presence of girls, absent all week, had suddenly become plausible. The mere suggestion of the sweep of skirts completed the fantastic circle: the squad on the field, for all that mattered in that moment, was playing in a real game at County Stadium. Everything hinged on a single play. From the huddle I looked past my provisional teammates and contemplated the glory of scoring an actual touchdown.

The defensemen came down like the wolf on the fold, and their jerseys were gleaming in kelly and gold; and the sheen of their eyes was like stars on the sea, when the crowd and its passion blow cheers through the trees. And the daughters of Canaan are loud in their wail, for the tackles and guards have fulfilled their detail, and the rush of the Rams, the team's sack-seeking horde, has scattered like raindrops along a taut cord.

Fourth and goal from the five. Three halfback dives had covered less than half the distance to the goal. Coach Yeager had given us no plays; he left us to improvise anything that would get the ball over for six. In our huddle we scraped together a play that had, in retrospect, no realistic chance of success. The quarterback would fake an apparent fourth halfback dive. The tight end, lined up on the right, would run a quick out toward the near pylon. The flanker and the split end would each run slants from left to right. The entire flow of the play favored the right side of the field, the better to allow our right-handed quarterback to roll in that direction off the play-action fake.

My task was simple. I was to cover the quarterback's blind side, in case a rusher slipped past the left tackle.

In later years I would dwell on the oddity of the fullback's function in that play-action sequence. Everyone else on the team would have committed to a right-flowing sequence designed to give a complete set of options to the quarterback on a rollout. True, the halfback was but a decoy — though quite useful in that role, given how he had carried the ball on first, second, and third downs. But I alone had been assigned to face left, on the remote chance that the defense would flood the weak side with rushers. I alone had been asked to hold my ground, to level any intruders who might trail the play.

But the defense fully anticipated our offensive treachery. All three layers — line, linebackers, and secondary — anticipated the play-action. Ignoring the empty-handed halfback, the entire defense shuffled along with the quarterback. I followed my orders: I spun left and awaited a rush that never came.

Though I had shuffled in precisely the opposite direction from the rest of the offensive squad, I became suddenly and sharply aware of my teammates' movement. I noticed a slowing in the quarterback's gait. He had glided toward the right half of our offensive line, and the entire play had moved with him.

I decided in that moment to sprint hard in the opposite direction. If only the ball could find me — in my mind's eye nothing stood between my and the pylon but a smooth green carpet of grass. The quarterback likewise saw the opportunity. He tossed a fade as I begin sprinting left.

[Strobe-light vision.]

---

T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.

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