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bed. Why don’t you go down to Puerto Vallarta or Acapulco and find her? I’ll take care of things for a couple of weeks.”
    “Mexico?” I groaned. “Yes, maybe you’re right. Maybe this whole thing is crazy.”
    “It’s been so foggy,” she shivered. “You know you get depressed every summer when the weather’s like this.”
    I pictured a beach in Zihautanejo—a beach and a woman I sometimes dreamt about. “Casey, you should’ve been a doctor,” I sighed. “That’s probably just what I need!”
    “Look,” she said. “Call up the airline now! And after you do that I’ll tell you my problems—with that goddamned Thurston manuscript.”
    “What’s wrong with it?”
    “Do you actually think anyone will buy it? Haven’t we had enough books lately on levitation and human salamanders? I mean every bookstore in town is flooded with this occult junk.”
    The book in question was entitled The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism. It had been written by a Jesuit named Thurston in the 1930s and had been out of print for years. I had discovered it while writing my own book.
    “Let me take another look,” I said. “Maybe this whole obsession of mine is nuts.”
    “No, it’s not. It’s the way you’re living. You’ve got to find a woman and learn to eat right. And then publish the god-damned thing. It’s all this dithering, all this waiting around . . .” She waved her hand impatiently. “All this waiting around for Godot, or Jacob Atabet. ”
    “You’re probably right,” I said. “Let me think it over. If it seems right in the morning, I’ll go down to Zihautanejo. But you say you’ve never heard of him? I find that hard to believe.”
    “No, I haven’t. Never. And I haven’t seen any of his paintings. Darwin, forget it! The guy sounds awfully suspicious.”
    We talked a few minutes more and she urged me to have a nap and sauna. I went down the stairs to the street. As usual, the sidewalk was filled with bodies laid waste by drugs and malnutrition. On this bleak afternoon, Grant Avenue was a pageant of a vision gone sour.
    But that night I decided there would be no peace or pleasure in Mexico. I would wait out Atabet’s silence for another few days. Entries from my diary that night and the following morning give a sense of my mood.
    June 23
    Eight days now since giving him the book. Cannot concentrate on work at all. Talked to Casey. She still doesn’t recall him, though they both have lived in this neighborhood for over 20 years. Talked about artists and writers she has known: Duncan, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac, and the artistic movements that have come and gone in San Francisco. Morris Sills killed himself, she says, because “there was no discipline under his religious vision.” Said she saw the same kind of spiritual rise and collapse all during the Summer of Love. San Francisco is still full of the casualties.
    Kept thinking all day about Armen Cross’s statement: “Your book proves there’s no such thing as a completely provable metaphysical system. You have written a philosophical equivalent of Godel’s Theorem!”
    Will Atabet think the “metaphysical” part is too abstract?—or beside the point? When we talked about the book I didn‘t want to mention it.
    June 24
    Last night a terrible dream: a scene underwater and an image of a beating heart. A raw and bloody heart. Reminded me of his paintings somehow. I went out on the streets and ran for an hour.
    And what does my book finally prove? That a new vision of human nature and destiny is emerging?—one that was not possible until this moment in time? It is a poor version of a good story, I think, finally a very dull song in praise of God’s evolution. In his cynical way, Armen Cross is right: such a system must be incomplete. Human speech cannot hope to express all the connections the loom of the brain will spin. The whole project might be hopeless. ”Life is a conspiracy against any foreclosure on our larger destiny.”