Yeah, Germany was on fire. He was due back. He wanted none of it. He wanted time, time to be himself, for a week or a month, doing something useful: it would be exciting to plan a house, and he scrawled the outlines of a residence on the table cover with the handle of a spoon: a plan: when can I have a chance to plan?
For now, he had had enough of Jeannette: what help was she? Nobody was gifted at helping: the world was not geared to helping: sleep might help: it was possible to drown in sleep, under illusion and disillusion, head pillowed on hate, saying to hell with khaki, away with GI slop, the stink of another man's piss.
When the waiter tried to talk, Orville shook him off.
"Sorry," he said, and gulped his wine and stalked out.
Over there is where I attended school, that one-story building where famed New York architect learned about King Francis, Napoleon, read Victor Hugo and Villon, hated classes: see bronze tablet above the entry: what numbing sensations in that box-shaped building topped by four chimney pots.
Across the street, by those poplar trees, is her hospital: notice the calloused grey paint: some of the doors have scaled: some of the windows are blacked out. Nurses are huddled on the front porch, wrapped in coats, jackets, sweaters, scarves, relating the latest.
Out in the country I could walk for years, bumping myself against the cage of introversion. Trees are bare. Not a person is working in the fields ... maybe the fields have been deserted for years.
The walls of a bygone abbey were waiting for someone or something, a scream, a leaf. Across hedgeless fields, willows were also waiting. No machine guns.
His shoes scuffed gravel; mud took the place of gravel; he walked with his hands stuffed in his pockets. The one friendly thing was his pocket knife, given by his mother, small, agate-covered knife. Somehow, he had been able to keep it.
Something rustled alongside the road, a field mouse in a heap of leaves. Was that its home?