Adam died a year ago today. Today I am reborn.

Four months have I wandered the United States on Feltheart’s back, searching openly and solitarily for whatever might cross my path. This is a frightful and fulfilling way of living, one whose fruits I’ll relate to you.

I turned Feltheart north just as I had written I would. The timing and intention behind it are not lost on me and yet I don’t regret my decision. I was a man outside of the illusion, stuck in a limbo between the world and the mind, unable to fully reconnect to reality. I had no way, yet still I was lost. The days stretched and melted into each other, my sleep became irregular and came in short, infrequent bursts. The only difference between day and night was whether I lit a lamp to light my way. I must have stolen the lamp; I don’t recall. I can’t have bought it.

The world around me seemed a combination of discordant fractions instead of a whole. I saw each piece by itself, each a dream in itself, and I saw how I could have created them, the founding ideas behind them all. I looked down at Feltheart with a clear sense of the path that created him, the tuning over untold millennia leading to this, the perfect mount. All the death, the error, the love which paved his ancestors’ road, I could see it all. I had no control over it. In this lies the fun of the game. I set off the chain and see where it leads, learning all the way. I had chosen to forget, to make the game and be able to play it, too. Some part of me is allowing me this last respite, I know because, for all of my imaginings, for all of my postulation based on what I’ve been told, I haven’t remembered. I am still Charles Duval, the character. It is for this reason alone that I continue on, for if I’m allowing myself this character, then the character must still have a part in the play. I have to keep going until I find it. It’s as simple as examining all the pieces long enough to see the whole again. This was my mission, traveling along the Pacific coast to find the whole, closely observing all the pieces I could find.

I remember a bridge. There’s no time or space for this memory, at least none more precise than California or Oregon in the last four months. It was a stone bridge, no longer than twenty meters, but over a river whose floodbanks were dry for lack of rain. Feltheart could have stepped over it without wetting his hooves, and the bridge was a good ways away, yet I decided to take it anyway. What made me do it? What possessed me to detour a good two hundred feet to take a bridge over a dry river? It was simple. I saw each stone being planned, quarried, then placed according to the will and work of men I’d never met, perhaps men long dead, whose only remaining mark on the world laid before me, two hundred feet ahead. Who am I to deny those men their glory? What hardship is it to trot a horse across a riverbank to cross an unnecessary bridge? Nothing. Nothing at all, when compared to the hardship of admitting that legacy is unworthy of being remembered if it crosses the line of slightest inconvenience.

How long does it take for a man’s greatest work to be forgotten? Better yet, how long does it take for it to be remembered, seen, yet completely ignored? Who was I to say their time was up? I want to believe something I do will be used this way, used after it has become inconvenient to be used, the second there appears to be any other way. I would be a hypocrite not to take the bridge.

Another piece came on a secluded forest trail some time after I had crossed into the land for which I had no map at all, northern California or Oregon is my guess. I walked Feltheart through the woods, cicadas chirping all around, without so much as a compass to guide me. It was noon. The sun shone high through the parting of the branches above me, little more than a waving sliver among the evergreen needles. The air was heavy with pine, a deep, green smell I don’t know the equal of. Hell, I can’t even think of a substitute.

Alone we trekked through the endless forest, the ferns beneath twisting onto the path so that Feltheart had to pay special attention to each step. The road was slow and unsteady. One gets used to a smell after a while, if kept in the same place for long enough; it fades from the nose, it becomes background noise. A man can never do so with pine. The smell of pine needles is so pure and of such incredible simplicity that it brings nothing else to mind. Absolutely nothing. I can only come to the conclusion that pine is one of those foundational points from which the world was made, so essential in material and spirit that it’s undividable, that is, fundamental to the world. There are few things like this. There are fewer still more precious to me than the smell of pine. I believe Feltheart likes it, too. He stops frequently whenever near pine to sniff at the air, to draw his full attention to it. This is an honorable way to live, I think, to experience the fundamental pieces with complete attention as often as possible. Were Feltheart and I to abandon this philosophy the journey would have been half as long and twice as dull. Life is not a thing to be crammed. It seems to me everything worth finding out is obtainable through finding and combining the simplest experiences one can get, the fundamental pieces.

The world is a better place with the sea. The sea is at once completely unknowable and irrefutably fundamental. There is something special about the sea. You stick your feet in at the coast, where the water reaches not even to your knees, and suddenly you feel the whole immensity of the ocean flowing about you, every distant wave, every rippled fin, all whale songs and seaweed bulbs and seafoam bubbles enveloping you. There is only one sea, you see, and at any point you step into it you are connected to all the others. Somewhere, out in the deepest, darkest reaches of the ocean lies some beast of unknown proportion and temperament, one who torments the creatures around him, creatures who pass down tales to their children of the great ender, devourer of all, the undefeatable monster feared by all. This beast, at the very moment you step into the sea, shares its water with you. Similarly, there may be some individual creature of one of the races tormented by this beast who, through frustration and weariness of his elders’ stories, finds it within himself to face the beast head on, to no longer live in fear, but to face death, to look it in the eye. Somewhere, perhaps, he has faced the beast and vanquished him. He, too, shares your water. In a way you, too, share his. Look in from far enough and any story seems as large as this. Any creature, every creature, is faced with a beast to kill, each more invincible than the last. The world is full of beasts, yet not so full as it is of their prey.

It’s said the Romans made their slaves wear plain clothes in the city so that they might not realize they outnumbered their masters five to one. It is only for their fear that the prey appear so small. It is only power that makes the beast.

I met a woman in a saloon. Highwayman type. Skull was her name, I think, something like that. Skull Jenny, that was it. She wore a scarf wrapped too many times around her neck; the thing made her look like a bulldog, the meat of her neck pushed up and all. She had this peculiar way of speaking, as if she’s running over each word in her head before she says it. Slow, stilted. She had an American accent, but she could have been learning English then and there. Her eyes swiped across the ceiling as if she were reading the words one at a time on opposite sides of it, her head rocking back and forth like a Moorish snake charmer.

Skull Jenny sat a few seats down the bar, downing shots of something brown. I remember thinking I should switch the pocket the diary was in to get it farther away from her. Strange thought. She hadn’t paid me any mind up to that point, so I had no reason to think it. My instincts told me bulldog-faced people were not to be trusted. I don’t see many of them, so the chances any one of them could be related to the pug-nosed Ashcroft are high. I fidgeted in my seat, trying to ride the diary up on top of my thigh, instead of on the side, where it would be an inch or two farther from her. I still had the unconscious idea of secrecy lodged in my head somewhere and it called me out for not being careful enough. You can imagine my reaction when she stood and took the seat next to mine, mere feet from my pocket. I tried not to shiver.

“You ever think about cutting your hair, mister?” My hair was near touching my shoulders by then for lack of attention. I hadn’t thought much about it.

“You ever think about cutting yours?” Not a pretty thing to say to a woman, but chivalry died in the Polytechnic basement. She laughed at me. Her breath stank of whiskey.

“How’s a frog like you got in a place like this?”

“What do you mean?”

“Earth, Frenchy. How the hell are you alive?”

“Never got around to dying.”

She laughed again. “Someday someone’ll hear that accent of yours and shoot your ass back to Paris.”

“What,” I said, waving the barkeep down, “you’re not planning on doing it yourself? I’ll have what she’s got.”

“Why the hell would I do that?” she asked, and held two fingers up to him. “You got a death wish, friend?”

“Sure I do, but not for myself.”

“Who for, then? Got an enemy?”

“Nothing but.”

“Gimme one, guy. Gimme a name and I’ll tell you if I know him.”

“I’ll put ten dollars on the bar says you could pick him out of a photograph.” The barkeep gave me a shot of the same gutshot she was drinking. It was no Bordeaux, but then again there probably isn’t any Bordeaux left on the planet.

“I don’t take losing bets if I can help it. Who is it, frog? Mayor? President?”

“John Ashcroft.”

She laughed again. “Well, shit, I’m glad I didn’t take that bet. I could’ve told you that, Frenchy. Saying Ashcroft’s your enemy’s like saying the devil’s mine.”

“A devil’s out to get me, too, now that you mention it.”

“Oh, yeah? Which one’s that?”

“You wouldn’t know her.” I flagged the tender down for another two.

“Try me,” Jenny said, scowling. “I’ve met ‘em all and most of ‘em are still here,” she said, tapping on her temple. “Ashcroft! Ha! What a pull.” She took a shot.

“I have personal business with him. Killed my brother. Killed him with his own two hands.”

“Your brother French, too?”

“Sure.”

“Johnny hates you people. I don’t get it. I’d ask him why, if I ever met him. You ever meet him?”

“Not yet.”

“You planning on meeting him?”

“Maybe.”

“What kind of answer is maybe? Will you, or won’t you, kill him? Simple question, simple answer.”

“I was. I was on the road there before I turned back and landed here. Yes, I was planning on killing him.”

“Hell, I would, too! Bet you’d have a bounty the size of Eugene waiting for you if you did. You ever meet any Frenchies out here, anyone to pay out if you went to give the kraut a fourth breathing hole?”

“Not yet.”

“You better keep looking. I’d be red-faced if I couldn’t find another American round. Hell, I’d start shooting every German I saw if I were you. Would I want to be you, mister? Does that sound like a fair trade?”

“Not for you.” I downed both shots and felt a second heart form in my stomach. “Pick anyone in this building and you’d have a better trade.”

“Woe is you, Frenchy. Poor, lonely frog. Why don’t you sail over to Berlin and shoot the bastard in the eye? You don’t have anything to lose, do you? That’s how you’re talking, anyway.”

“I have myself and I quite like being alive, thank you.”

“You’re not alive! You’re at a saloon talking to me! You know the kind of people who talk to me? The kind with no soul behind the eyes. Dead men walking. You’re one of them.”

“No, I came back. I was, and then I came back.”

“Never heard of such a thing before, ‘cept for on Easter Sunday. You’re not Jesus, are you?”

“If I’m Jesus then I’m asleep on the cross and you’re a cross dream.”

“Or I’m the thief. You saving me, mister?”

“I’m not saving anyone, that includes myself.”

She raised her glass. “I’ll drink to that!”

I called for another shot and joined her. I only saw her the one time. I was gone in the morning, on Feltheart with a limp back and a stomach with two open ends. He didn’t seem to mind.

I saw a cloud on a windy day. A big, white, fluffy cloud like a cotton ball had forgotten gravity. It was a sunny day and the sky was all but clear, save this one cloud. I happened to be travelling in the direction it was headed so I had a front-facing view of it for the better part of a day. I watched it morph and split and reconvene more times than I can recount; I saw the edges ruffle in the same wind that ruffled my hair, saw the bulbs at the top flatten and elongate with the forward movement. We travelled together that day, swept north by the warm wind, not knowing the destination.

All the time I had the sense that Feltheart and I had found a third, that the cloud had joined us on our aimless journey. I imagined how the inside of the cloud would look, peaceful away from the turbulent shifting of the outside. I saw myself sitting on a white throne, admiring a cavern of formless fluff to be molded at my whimsy. I would make a little cabin to sleep in, hollow it out and leave a bed in one corner to sleep on. I could shape a tree outside, a white, gleaming tree with the highest reaching branches of them all. I spent the whole day enjoying these ideas, the world inside I would never see, and reckoned myself lucky to have encountered the beautiful thing. So, too, did I see the blessing of my imagination, the place I’d spent the day in, playing with the cloud. What fun, I thought, to be able to create within your own mind, where no one can tell you to change your creation, or try to put you down for it. What a blessing, to imagine.

There was a point in my childhood when I first told someone else something I had imagined. I don’t remember who it was or when, but there must have been a first time, when my imagination made its debut on the world stage. The moment I told someone else, it felt as if the imagining was less real than the person I was telling it to. I had misinterpreted it with my words, for no words could ever do. Perhaps, by accident, they imagined the same thing I did, but it was through no success of my own. How hard is it to communicate an idea to someone who’s never imagined it? In my mind there’s nothing harder. Still, there exists that small chance they’ve had the same thought, and by communicating it to them in the right way, one can give them the pathway to reimagine it, to tell them they are not alone, that we are one.

Have you ever dreamt of living in a cloud? I hope you have. If not, I hope you will.

The child and I parted ways somewhere along the road. I know this only because I have memories with and without her, though I have lost the middle. Somehow I think it’s better this way. No good can come from carrying a broken dream, even one as sweet as Alice.

I met a man today. He reminded me of a great many things, including my need to write in this diary, though he did it indirectly. He reminded me of Mary and her warmth, of Otto, and strangely enough of Renoir’s painting of the railbridge, of home. His twirling moustache has piqued my jealousy and his knack for the refined has dulled none, even here in Hood River, just south of the Washington border, where I arrived earlier this afternoon. He had gone by Marcel, but his name is Otto.

I sat by the fireplace in the lobby of the Hood River Hotel, warming myself with fire and Dewar’s, when a strange man walked through the door. He wore a black and white suit in the style of a Parisian ball-goer, with tufts of collar poking out from his neck, a tail running down his legs. His raven black hair was combed and slicked back into straight rows along his head leading away from his fair, angled face. His eyes nearly made me laugh all by themselves. He peered out of them with such disdain for the lobby’s plain outfitting that I thought he might burst a vein.

He walked with estimated, artificially graceful steps to the front counter, where I heard a similarly hilarious attempt at concealing a French accent with a poor American one, which only made him all the more conspicuous. As if he couldn’t have drawn more attention to himself, he then started at the concierge with a vigor which wouldn’t be misplaced in the mouth of a criminal lawyer.

“Have you any rooms available?” he asked, reaching for a pipe inside his jacket’s inner pocket. He lit it as the concierge answered.

“Plenty, sir. Please don’t smoke here, you’ll have to go by the fire.”

“The faster you find me a room the faster I’ll find somewhere else to smoke.” He took a puff over the desk.

“Really, sir,” the concierge said, coughing, “I’ll have to ask you to smoke elsewhere.”

“Are you going to fix me a room or not?” It took all I had not to laugh at his attempt at an Americanism.

“The smoke irritates my throat, sir. You’ll have to smoke over on that side of the lobby or not at all.”

He huffed at that. Turning on his heel, he marched to the fireplace, smoke still wisping from his pipe, and sat a chair down from me. He turned his attention to me. I can’t blame him, me having shamelessly watched him the whole way over.

“They call this service,” he scoffed. “Ridiculous.”

“What’s ridiculous is that fake American accent of yours, friend. Don’t you have any pride?”

His face turned red.

“Not all of us are so willing to throw down our lives,” he said in his full nobility. “You must be the only Frenchman in any room you enter, for all others are invisible by comparison!”

“I’m not afraid of Ashcroft, your highness.”

He gasped. “Why, that only makes you a fool.”

“It makes me French. What makes you French, your majesty? Your fear? Your tuxedo?”

“I fought Ashcroft myself. I have earned the right to hide, if it means living.”

“Where did you fight Ashcroft that you sit here talking to me, alive and well? It was my impression that all soldiers were killed.”

“Not all,” he laughed. “Most, but not all.” He sucked on his pipe. “I saw him with my own eyes.”

Some part of me knew, but then I was all but certain.

“The 93rd?”

He hoisted his hands violently up to the armrests, jolting himself up out of the seat, nearly dropping his pipe in the process. “The 93rd? How?”

I smirked in my private knowledge. Perhaps I would keep him there, unknowing, vulnerable. Still, he was a friend of Otto’s.

“My brother spoke highly of you. I can’t see how.”

“Ah!” He pointed his pipe at me. “You’re Charles-”

“Blake,” I interrupted. “I’m Charles Blake now, but yes, brother to Otto.”

Marcel took the chair next to me, mouth agape. “Do you have a room here, a room where we can talk?”

“I do. You’ll have to follow me past the poor concierge. Do you think you can handle it?”

“I tamed the trenches,” he said, tapping his ash. “I can handle it.”

We moved to my room at the back of the hotel. The windows faced north over the town and out to the Columbia River, which flowed steadily by, the water’s surface rippling with the summer wind. Beyond the northern border was Washington, the forest thick and alive in the breeze, a green deeper than any I’d seen. Deep greens and blues, the colors of life, under a pale blue and open sky. We sat opposite each other in two wooden chairs, the windows beside us. Marcel opened his window to smoke. Over the tobacco I could still smell the pine. Somewhere, many miles west, I could smell where the river met the sea.

“He was a child,” he said. “A child.” We spoke in French.

“Seventeen. Too young for the army, if you’re asking my thoughts.”

“There were younger, even from Tulle. Otto looked almost military age next to them, but I could tell. It was his temperance; he had the curiosity of a child, the spirit, but his eyes, Charles.”

“What of his eyes?”

“His eyes were dead.” His chest stuttered as he blew a cloud out the window. “It was as if there was nothing there at all. I saw too much of that in the trench, but he never changed. He went in like that.”

“Why did he admire you so? He writes as if you were a great friend of his.”

“I had no choice, really,” he said. “What kind of man would refuse him? I would feel the same kicking a puppy in the street as telling Otto off, even for all our differences. He was a child in deep need of a friend, and he found one.”

“Were you his friend, truly?”

“Of course. If he wasn’t a friend of mine, then I’ve never had one. He helped with the spices. He swept the storage. He polished his helmet, same as myself, without my asking, simply for the fact that I said it was a good idea. Could you call someone like that anything but a friend?”

“No. I suppose not.”

The weight of the conversation hit me all at once. Here before me was Marcel, a character of the diary, come to life. There was never any shock. The whole thing was fate. As a good friend of mine was like to say, nothing is left to chance.

“You have the diary, don’t you?” The question hung in the air with the tobacco wisps, floating between us. The time had come.

I pulled it from my pocket with some resistance, the fabric having molded to it after months of keeping its station. I drew a little table between us and threw the little book onto it.

“I’ve been writing in it.”

“I can’t say I blame you,” he said, leaning in. “Had I kept it I would’ve done the same.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“You were his family, I had no right taking it.” Smoke ran through his mouth as he spoke.

“That’s not all, though, is it? You felt something, didn’t you?”

“Felt what, exactly?”

“It’s a boule in the sinuses, a rock in the stomach. You sensed something in the diary besides Otto’s writing, something beyond your understanding.”

“If I felt anything I wasn’t conscious of it.”

“But now you realize it, don’t you?” I pushed myself off the chair with a grunt and picked it up with both hands gripped tight. “There’s something wrong with it, isn’t there? You can feel it again, I know it because I do, too. It never leaves me. It follows me like a shadow, hollowing my thoughts, emptying my emotions. Take it. See for yourself.”

Marcel stood with a start, knocking the chair down behind him, and backed away toward the corner.

“I don’t need to take it,” he said, the facade of his royalty in waste. “I don’t want it. I don’t want it!” He flattened against the wall, arms locked at angles, hands pressed against the wood. His mouth quivered on the verge of tears. I threw the book to the other side of the room with a heavy thud and sat. He untensed, if only slightly.

“I’m not your enemy, Marcel,” I said. “I wouldn’t be the least bit shocked if we were the only two Frenchmen in Oregon now, yet we’ve found each other. I need your help, Marcel. Sit, please. I beg you.”

Marcel’s eyes lowered wearily, his neat hair suddenly askew, his suit furrowed and loose. One side of his moustache had unfurled. He twisted it back into place with all the splintered dignity he could gather. He sat without a sound and stared at me, eyes narrowed.

“You have one chance to convince me, Charles. One chance and I’m gone.”

I understand why Otto liked him so much. We are uncannily alike.

“Paris is still there. The Champs-Élysées, the Seine, the trees, Marcel! Don’t you remember the apple blossoms? Even the Germans wouldn’t chop down a chestnut tree just to spite us, it’s all still there!”

“I believe you.” He crossed his arms.

“Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Paris is still there. I understand.”

“Paris is there and the French aren’t. I can’t use the diary, even with Paris at stake. I can’t stop them. I don’t own it.”

“I suppose you think I do.”

“My name isn’t Otto. You took it from him and kept it until after he was dead. It’s yours, and so is the curse.”

His breathing was steady. His face was stone.

“You need to cut your hair.”

“So you’ll do it?”

“I’m not cutting anything, farmer. Cut it yourself, it’s your hair.”

“It’s your book.”

I stood again and walked to it. It was open to a page of mine. You’re French, aren’t you, Charles? Why, what gave it away? I picked it up and read, back turned to him.

“You need to break the line, Marcel. Find somewhere no one will ever find you and die. You owe it to us.”

“I don’t owe anyone anything. I risked my life trying to save him, your brother.”

I laughed. “You risked your life stopping him from destroying it. You owe it to us.”

Silence. Wind blew through the pines. My heart thumped. Marcel tapped his fingers on the table. I stood firm in my body.

“I owe it to Paris.”

“You owe it to us. You’ll do it?”

“I’ll do it.”

This is my final entry. I am free. I’ll pass this book to Marcel in the morning and leave for San Francisco shortly thereafter, riding Feltheart and only Feltheart all the way. Perhaps I’ll take a main road this time. I need to see about Miss Coen, if she’s still there, and about the Duvals and Ed. I suspect all will be well when we meet again, without our shadow hanging over us. The sky is clear and the air is sweet. Feltheart waits for me.

I hope I’ve done well by you all, and I hope the character Charles Duval was a success. One day I will forget the painting once more, rejoin the interpretation, walk down Duchamp’s staircase one stair at a time. There will be no surprise when I join you, in my heart I always knew.

Until we meet again, Adam, Bavarian, little one, keep your eyes on the borders. There may be something yet to read.