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stay. As if to trumpet out “Enjoy! Whatever you have in your hands, in front of your eyes, will be taken away in 30 hours … ”
    Like their whole visit was cursed, under some evil spell.
    Past the old Oaxaca Fire-God with its 18 little circles in each earring which proclaimed that the shriveled-up, beak-nosed old man god who looked like an old Jew (or Lebanese), was really a sun-god because if you took 18 and multiplied it by 20, the number of your fingers and toes, you came out with 360, the closest you could get to the number of days in a 365 day solar year (without fractions) … something he’d never noticed the whole time he was growing up in Chicago until once, what, fifteen years earlier, he’d been in Chicago for a literary convention, and he’d come over here with Diane Kruchkow, his old poet-editor pal from Maine, and she’d asked him, “What’s that statue all about?” and he’d actually looked at it and seen the eighteen circles in each earring, and his brain had started to turn like a squeaky water wheel, every letter in Hebrew has a number value, and the number value for the two letters in C HAI (Life) add up to 18 … so that L IFE becomes the number for the solar year which is the life of the universe …
    Past the Ryerson Library, which they had radically spiffed up.
    â€œWhere I wrote my M.A. thesis,” he reminded her.
    Looking in. The same old green library lights, but everything else cosmeticized, brightened up. He’d liked it “contracted” and old looking.
    â€œI remember,” she said.
    Title of his thesis: “Rediscovering the Greeks—Classical Studies During the Renaissance.”
    Which was kind of weird for an M.A. in the English department, but his advisor was a frustrated classicist, Father Edward Surtz S.J., specialist in Sir (Saint) Thomas More, Henry the Eighth’s Number One Man in government, and when Morehad disagreed with Henry’s divorces, it was OFF WITH HIS HEAD.
    Bluebeard.
    Behind all myths always …
    Remembering all the hours, days, months he’d spent in the library there slaving away. Supermotivated. After all after he’d just flunked out of Medicine and he’d come home every day and his mother would greet him with “Hiya, flunkie, I hope you worked hard, flunkie, flunkie, flunkie … ”
    Forced into Medicine by his M.D. father. Hated it. And now that he was married to an M.D. understanding why he hated it, in all the multiple ramifications of his hatred …
    Wanting to go back into the library and sit down and let the Past crowd in around him, wanting there to be a door somewhere that you opened with a glowing, radioactive key, and you could walk in and there would be the entirety of the Past unchanged, and you yourself unchanged, back to the wildly dedicated, optimistic maniac you were, when every day flamed up around you like a bonfire and you yourself were filled with the holy fire of belief in a sacred singing, ringing Future.
    Only now that he was in that Future, that Expanded Moment of Perpetual Fulfillment seemed to be even further away, always elusively around one more bend, on the other side of one more hill….the closest he came to it just being HERE among the old familiar (albeit refurbished) items, old fire gods and old Maya/Thai letters, old green library lamps like sacred relics that you felt that if you touched, your spirit would be whole again, always that apocalyptic implication of resurrection, the last seal opened and, whoosh! … the word was beatitude … what wasHeaven like? Neither up nor down, forward or backward, no going toward but totally already there, like a peacock’s tail spread out iridescently into the air of total fulfillment, all shadows gone.
    â€œIt’s so crazy,” he said as they walked past the Neolithic Chinese pots that always reminded him so much of South American pottery of the same time-frame, all