“A freshman.”

“Ah well.” His eyes were the kind that, in looking, seemed to have no purpose but to admit: not probers or perceivers or hunters but only portals. “Is difficult.”

“I’m taking French Poetry 330,” she said. What was she doing? “A poem of mine was published. I could show you.”

“No need, no need,” he said, and turned to go.

“I mean it,” she said, but he had thrust his hands into his overcoat pockets and was walking away. Then he stopped, and turned again to her. “What poem?” he asked.

She had to think a moment what he meant. “Well it was only published in a student book.”

“And?”

“It was called ‘May’.”

He said nothing, only regarded her, and she realized that he was waiting for her to recite it. She felt like Alice before the Caterpillar. “I don’t know if I can just. Say it.” The poem might be unretrievable, like a lot of things from the other side, from before.

“Ah,” he said, not in reproach or dismissal—those feelings were her own—and saluted her again as he turned to go.

But why had he been there anyway, in that empty field house? She was sure he hadn’t been there earlier. What was he doing there, standing by her money as though on guard, waiting to point it out to her?

“He was strange and wonderful man,” Gavriil Viktorovich said. “He had ability to appear suddenly behind or beside you when you had not seen him approach. At school forming up for exercise or games, I would be sure he was late and would receive reprimand, and a moment later he would be there, just as the roll was called, alert, calm. Where he had come from?” He looked wildly around himself to show the confusion he had felt, and lifted his hands in surrender, who knows. “I asked him how he comes by this ability to appear and to disappear, and he told me it was easy, and I could do it too: I needed only to practice invisibility, as he had.”

“Invisibility?”

“Now you must understand that in those years we all desired invisibility. We wanted above all not to be noticed. Or if noticed to be taken for standard model citizen. Our disguises did not always work very well, of course. But Falin. He was most undisguised man. His head always high and his face so, so provoking, frank and open. And yet he said to me Be invisible: and he was, and could be. I think it was because he was without fear.”

“Do you think he was?”

“Those who live on the fear of others can sense it, you know, just as predator senses prey; and since he had none, their eyes just passed over him as though he were tree or telephone pole, of no interest, not there…. One fear only he had, I think: that they would touch him, soil him—that they would find somehow means to make him one of them.”

Kit thought that if this was so then there had come a time when Falin could no longer go unseen: when he had ceased to believe, maybe, that he could. She had been with him then. And he hadn’t hid, or run away. He had stood forth.

“What was the poem he asked you to say?” Gavriil Viktorovich asked her gently.

“I could have remembered it if I’d thought a minute.”

“Of course.”

“It was a poem about my brother,” Kit said. “About my brother, come home from the army.”

4.

Because her family moved often when she was growing up, Kit and her brother Ben had grown up more intimate than most siblings. The girls she met in each new school always spoke of their older brothers in tones of profound contempt and disgust, only surpassed by how they regarded younger brothers. It was one of the small divisions that usually began opening between her and them right after the first few easy questions (What’s your name? Is that your bike?) and then widened.

It was because of her father’s job that Kit’s family moved from place to place, from seacoast to desert, sunbaked towns of new square buildings to old cities of mansions and stone churches. Ben had been able to remember a time before they began to move, several staid years spent in an Eastern college town, summer and fall and Christmas, and now and then he would be caught by the smell of blackberries or the creak of porch floorboards and say how it called forth that place, still whole within him. To Kit the places they lived were vivid, but she remembered them like scenes from novels: separate and poignant and hers, but not her.

What her father did, exactly, she never quite knew. He would joke about it, putting off questions. When Kit or Ben insisted, he would turn grave and frank and explain, in terms that explained nothing. His job was connecting one place to another, he said; he was trying to connect them by connecting their big computers with phone lines, so they could call up one another and talk. It was a network, he said, a network of electronic brains. He talked about computers as if they were a game he played for the fun of it; he collected cartoons from Look and The Saturday Evening Post showing roomfuls of great square machines covered with lights and buttons, and puzzled men in white coats who read out the paradoxical little message that popped out of a slot. It says it won’t answer till we sacrifice a goat to it.

Well then, who did he work for? The children they met wanted to know. Their fathers worked for Studebaker or Sunbeam or Bendix or they were policemen or barbers or sold cars or houses. Oh, he would say, I work for lots of people, there are getting to be a lot of computers, more every day. How many had he connected so far? Well, so far—and he solemnly held out a circle of thumb and finger that said Zero.

And when eight months or a year had passed they would pack and sell the house they had just bought (for some reason they always bought them, made money or lost it, the same money over and over) and in their big station wagon they sailed on. Sailed, skated: Kit felt she skated, over the truths her father knew or hid, the network which lay under their rapid, placid lives like the tangled duckweed and roots down in a frozen pond.

Tall house in an old downtown, a Midwestern city; bamboo-patterned wallpaper, dark polished woodwork. She was ten, her brother twelve. Before anything else, their household gods needed to be brought in, the things that had been put last into the moving van so they could be unpacked first: the percolator and its sister the toaster; their mother’s mother’s chest full of family photographs in crumbling albums, faces their mother progressively forgot the names for; their father’s shoe bag with its pockets for his wing-tips, brogues, golf shoes white and brown, each pair with its shoe trees; the chenille clothespin bag, without clothespins, wherein Kit’s eyeless and grimy stuffed white lamb always traveled, the lamb she’d had since birth, no amount of teasing would cause her to give it up; and the encyclopedia, twenty-six brown volumes to be unpacked and put in order in their own small brown bookcase: this Kit and Ben alone could do.

Maybe it began when Ben had showed her the words or letters on the back of each volume, read them aloud to her before she could read: Annu to Baltic; Baltim to Brail; Brain to Castin; Castir to Cole. See, he said: This one goes from Annu to Baltic; and she thought that they were places—that you could go from one to another—and that the heavy books detailed these journeys, the lands and peoples, delights and terrors.