PNS 588     Bland found himself coming home to Beacon Hill after meetings late at night, unable to sleep.  He would lie down in his study on the davenport, not thinking about anything in particular, and come back with a jolt, his heart pounding terribly, knowing he'd just been somewhere, but unable to account for the passage of time.  The old American Empire clock beat in the resonant hallway.  The Girandole mirror, passed on by generations of Blands, gathered images in its quicksilver pool that Lyle couldn't bring himself to face.  In another room his wife, varicose and religious, groaned in her sleep.  What was happening to him?        Next meeting night, home on his back on the accustomed davenport, Wall Street Journal with nothing in it he didn't already know, Lyle Bland rose up out of his body, about a foot, face-up, realized where he was and gaahh! whoosh back in again.  He lay there, more terrified than he'd ever been, even at Bellau Wood -- not so much because he'd left his body, but because he knew that this was only  a first step.  The next step would be to roll over in mid-air and look back.  Old magic had found him.  He was off on a journey.  He knew he couldn't keep from going on with it.        It took him a month or two before he could make the turn.  When it happened, he felt it as a turn not so much in space as in his own history.  Irreversible.  The Bland who came back to rejoin the inert white container he'd seen belly-up on the sofa, thousands of years beneath him, had changed forever.        Before very long, he was spending most of is time on that davenport, and hardly any at all down on State Street.  His wife, who never questioned anything, moved vaguely through the rooms, discussing only household affairs, sometimes getting an answer if Bland happened to be inside his body, but most often not.  Odd looking people began to show up at the door, without phoning.  Creeps, foreigners with tinted, oily skin, wens, sties, cysts, wheezes, bad teeth, limps, staring or -- worse -- with Strange Faraway Smiles.  She let them in the house, all of them, and the study doors were closed gently behind them, in her face.  She could hear nothing but a murmur of voices, in what she guessed to be some foreign tongue.  They were instructing her husband in techniques of voyage.        There have happened, though rarely, in geographical space, journeys taken northward on very blue, fire-blue seas, chilled, crowded by floes, to the final walls of ice.  Our judgment lapsed, fatally: we paid more attention to the Pearys and Nansens who returned -- and worse, we named what they did "success," though they failed.  Because they came back, back to fame, to praise, they failed.  We only wept for Sir John Franklin and Salomon Andrée: mourned their cairns and bones, and missed among the poor frozen rubbish the announcements of their victory.  By the time we had the technology to make such voyages easy, we had long worded over all ability to know victory or defeat.   What did Andrée find in the polar silence: what should we have heard?       Bland, still an apprentice, hadn't yet shaken off his fondness for hallucinating.  He knows where he is when he's there, but when he comes back, he imagines that he has been journeying underneath history: that history is Earth's mind, and that there are layers, set very deep, layers of history analogous to layers of coal and oil in Earth's body.  The foreigners sit in his parlor, hissing over him, leaving offensive films of sebum on everything they touch, trying to see him through this phase, clearly impatient with what they feel are the tastes of a loafer and vulgarian.  He comes back raving about the presences he found out there, members of an astral IG, whose mission -- as indeed Rathenau implied through the medium of Peter Sachsa -- is past secular good and evil: distinctions like that are meaningless out there....      "Yess, yess," all staring at him, "but then why keep saying 'mind and body'?  Why make that distinction?"      Because it's hard to get over the wonder of finding that Earth is a living critter, after all these years of thinking about a big dumb rock to find a body and psyche, he feels like a child again, he knows that in theory he must not attach himself, but still he is in love with his sense of wonder, with having found it again, even this late, even knowing he must soon let it go. . . .  To find that Gravity, taken so for granted, is really something eerie, Messianic, extrasensory in Earth's mindbody . . . having hugged to its holy center the wastes of dead species, gathered, packed, transmuted, realigned, and rewoven molecules to be taken up again by the coal-tar Kabbalists of the other side, the ones Bland on his voyages has noted, taken boiled off, teased apart, explicated to every last permutation of useful magic, centuries past exhaustion still finding new molecular pieces, combining and recombining them into new synthetics -- "Forget them, they are no better than the Qlippoth, the shells of the dead, you must not waste your time with them...."  The rest of us, not chosen for enlightenment, left on the outside of Earth, at the mercy of a Gravity we have only begun to learn how to detect and measure, must go on blundering inside our front-brain faith in Kute Korrespondences, hoping that for each psi-synthetic taken from Earth's soul there is a molecule, secular, more or less ordinary and named, over here -- kicking endlessly among the plastic trivia, finding in each Deeper Significance and trying to string them all together like terms of a power series hoping to zero in on the tremendous and secret Function whose name, like the permuted names of God, cannot be spoken ... plastic saxophone reed sounds of unnatural timbre, shampoo bottle ego-image, cracker Jack prize one-shot amusement, home appliance casing fairing for winds of cognition, baby bottles tranquilizers, meat packages disguises of slaughter, dry-cleaning bags infant strangulation, garden hoses feeding endlessly the desert ... but to bring them together, in their slick persistence and our preterition ... to make sense out of, to find the meanest sharp sliver of truth in so much replication, so much waste....   Lucky Bland, to be free of it.  One night he called his whole family together around the davenport in the study.  Lyle, Jr., came in from Houston, shivering with first-stage grippe from contact with a world where air-conditioning is not so essential to life.  Clara drove down from Bennington and Buddy rode the MTA in from Cambridge.  "As you know," Bland announced, "I have been taking these little trips lately."  He was wearing a simple white smock, and holding a red rose.  He looked unearthly, all were later to agree: his skin and eyes had a clarity which is seldom encountered, except on certain spring days, at certain latitudes, just before sunrise.  "I have found," he continued, "that each time out, I have been traveling farther and farther.  Tonight, I am going out for good.  That is, I am not coming back.  So I wanted to say good-by to you all, and let you know that you'll be provided for."  He'd been to see his friend Coolidge ("Hot") Short, of the State Street law firm of Salitieri, Poore, Nash, De Brutus, and Short, and made sure all the family finances were in perfect order.  "I want you to know that I love you all.  I'd stay here if I could, but I have to go.  I hope you can understand."   One by one, his family came up to say good-by.  Hugs, kisses, handshakes done, Bland sank back into that davenport's last embrace, closed his eyes with a dim smile....  After a bit he felt himself beginning to rise.  Those watching disagreed about the exact moment.  Around 9:30 Buddy left to see The Bride of Frankenstein, and Mrs. Bland covered the serene face with a dusty chintz drape she'd received from a cousin who had never understood her taste.