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single new character, a man whom I brought into the story
to be
a stranger, and I was to keep out of his mind, too. I had double-locked the doors behind me.
    It would have been for nothing had the original impulse behind the story not proved itself alive; it now took on new energy. That country—that once-submerged, strange land of “south from South”—which had so stamped itself upon my imagination put in an unmistakable claim now as the very image of the story’s predicament. It pointed out to me at the same time where the real point of view belonged. Once I’d escaped those characters’ minds, I saw it was outside them—suspended, hung in the air between two people, fished alive from the surrounding scene. As I wrote further into the story, something more real, more essential, than the characters were on their own was revealing itself. In effect, though the characters numbered only two, there had come to be a sort of third character along on the ride—the presence of a relationship between the two. It was what grew up between them meeting as strangers,went on the excursion with them, nodded back and forth from one to the other—listening, watching, persuading or denying them, enlarging or diminishing them, forgetful sometimes of who they were or what they were doing here—in its domain—and helping or betraying them along.
    (Here I think it perhaps should be remembered that characters in a short story have not the size and importance and capacity for development they have in a novel, but are subservient altogether to the story as a whole.)
    This third character’s role was that of hypnosis—it was what a relationship
can do
, be it however brief, tentative, potential, happy or sinister, ordinary or extraordinary. I wanted to suggest that its being took shape as the strange, compulsive journey itself, was palpable as its climate and mood, the heat of the day—but was its spirit too, a spirit that held territory, that which is seen fleeting past by two vulnerable people who might seize hands on the run. There are moments in the story when I say neither “she felt” nor “he felt” but “they felt.”
    This is to grant that I rode out of the old story on the back of the girl and then threw away the girl; but I saved my story, for, entirely different as the second version was, it was what I wanted to tell. Now my subject was out in the open, provided at the same time with a place to happen and a way to say it was happening. All I had to do was recognize it, which I did a little late.
    Anyone who has visited the actual scene of this story will possibly recognize it when he meets it here, for the story is visual and the place is out of the ordinary. The connection between a story and its setting may not always be so plain. For no matter whether the “likeness” is therefor all to see or not, the place, once entered into the writer’s mind in a story, is, in the course of writing the story,
functional
.
    Thus I wanted to make seen and believed what was to me, in my story’s grip, literally apparent—that secret and shadow are taken away in this country by the merciless light that prevails there, by the river that is like an exposed vein of ore, the road that descends as one with the heat—its nerve (these are all terms in the story), and that the heat is also a visual illusion, shimmering and dancing over the waste that stretches ahead. I was writing of a real place, but doing so in order to write about my subject. I was writing of exposure, and the shock of the world; in the end I tried to make the story’s inside outside and then leave the shell behind.
    The vain courting of imperviousness in the face of exposure is this little story’s plot. Deliver us all from the naked in heart, the girl thinks (this is what I kept of her). “So strangeness gently steels us,” I read today in a poem of Richard Wilbur’s. Riding down together into strange country is danger, a play at danger, secretly poetic, and