“I do?” she says. “Really?” And feels a small brass gear of consciousness engage. She’s no fool: she’s got a good voice, not a great voice, but this is her tune. Hers!

Between the old Mimi and the new Mimi lies the thinnest of membranes. It’s made out of air. It’s colorless. It’s not in the dictionary, not in the phone book, not in the bureau drawers or hall cupboard, but does this worry Mimi Cornblossom?

Of course not. She’s already slipped like a fish into Meershank’s Chapter 1, and now she’s rehearsing for Chapter 2. She’s got treasure to unearth and plot lines to bind. Suffering waits for her, and recompense too. Ending and mending, squaring and cubing. There she goes, there she goes! Eyes wide open, lurching blindly into the future.

Collision

Collision

Today the sky is solid blue. It smacks the eye. A powerful tempered ceiling stretched across mountain ranges and glittering river systems: the Saône, the Rhine, the Danube, the Drina. This unimpaired blueness sharpens the edges of the tile-roofed apartment block where Martä Gjatä lives and hardens the wing tips of the little Swiss plane that carries Malcolm Brownstone to her side. What a dense, dumb, depthless blue it is, this blue; but continually widening out and softening like a magically reversed lake without a top or bottom or a trace of habitation or a thought of what its blueness is made of or what it’s for.

But take another look. The washed clarity is deceiving, the yawning transparency is fake. What we observe belies the real nature of the earth’s atmosphere which is adrift, today as any day, with biographical debris. It’s everywhere, a thick swimmy blizzard of it, more ubiquitous by far than earthly salt or sand or humming electrons. Radio waves are routinely pelted by biography’s mad static, as Martä Gjatä, trying to tune in the Vienna Symphony, knows only too well. And small aircraft, such as the one carrying Malcolm Brownstone eastward across Europe, occasionally fall into its sudden atmospheric pockets. The continents and oceans are engulfed. We are, to speak figuratively, as we more and more do, as we more and more must do, smothering in our own narrative litter-bag.

And it keeps piling up. Where else in this closed lonely system can our creaturely dust go but up there on top of the storied slag heap? The only law of biography is that everything, every particle, must be saved. The earth is alight with it, awash with it, scoured by it, made clumsy and burnished by its steady accretion. Biography is a thrifty housewife, it’s an old miser. Martä Gjatä’s first toddling steps are preserved and her first word-the word sjaltë, which means honey-and her dead father’s coldly aimed praise-“For a girl you have sharp ways about you.”