would be dinged; and to whom would she have to answer for that?
4
H uman lives are ordered in cycles of seven years, counting from the child’s first appearance on earth to the day or night on
which she departs.
Cycles
, which in sequence form a wave, a wave with its tops and bottoms, ups and downs; it can be drawn on paper, a simple sine
wave, with
x
and
y
coordinates of Time and Amplitude, peaking at seven, at fourteen, at twenty-one, at twenty-eight, at thirty-five. Halfway
through the climb to the top, we reach the horizontal coordinate that divides this rolling wave of the years into upper and
lower halves; and the year in which we pass over this line we can call the Up Passage Year. Anyway that’s what the most recent
discoverer or deviser of this cycle chose to call it.
Rose Ryder, awake but undressed, sat unmoving on the edge of her narrow bed in her cabin by the Shadow. At her feet, on the
bedroom floor, were many long sheets of paper with waves or cycles drawn on them, crossed by a median line; she had drawn
them herself, with compass and rule. They had slipped in the night from the bed where she had left them, and she looked down
at them without exactly seeing them. It was to be another perfect cloudless day, tenth in a row, heating the Faraways to summer
levels by noon.
Rose was, herself, at the threshold of an Up Passage Year, headed for the uplands of twenty-eight. Which in her own case and
for this present cycle she did not contemplate reaching. She did not know or actively imagine what would intervene to stop
the upward progress but didn’t feel, today, that she would be around to celebrate her arrival there.
Of course she knew that “up” and “down” in the system had no necessary emotional coloration, your spirits didn’t necessarily
rise on the way up nor sink on the way down. Going down around the bottom of a cycle—your old certainties in pieces, whelmed
with new data, estrangedfrom former selves and not knowing what new ones await you on the way up again—can be quite exciting and interesting. Okay,
she said to herself, or to Mike Mucho, author of the system he called Climacterics: okay, but here on the way up I should
at least feel.
Feel what?
Not disintegrating, at least; together, and moving; I should know who I am, and that I exist. At least.
Yesterday she had known who she was, and who she was going to be. She was a graduate student, American and English literature,
and she was primarily involved with language; she was a teacher, or on her way to being one. A language school in Lima was
advertising for such a person in a journal Rose found the previous week at work, and Rose had been turning into that person
ever since, a little bit every day. She spoke good Spanish (she spoke, or had spoken, college Spanish). She lived with a family,
her own room up at the top of a tall old city house, lonely and a little afraid at first, but then discovering the city and
meeting people, going to the shore and up into the mountains. In her class she taught young people who wanted to become airline
stewardesses or import-export clerks, they were mild and beautifully mannered and seemed to come from another age, or another
decade anyway. In the company of these people and the others she met she went on from adventure to adventure, feelable but
not nameable in advance, and did not come back by the same path, if she ever came back at all.
For many days the presence within her of this person warmed her, like a child growing, or as she imagined such a child would
warm a woman. And then this morning she awoke and found her gone. Dead maybe; gone certainly, a cold hollow where she had
been, the awful cold hollow that she had for a time filled. Lima seemed as remote and airless as the moon. The Xeroxed page
from the journal where she found the ad looked up at her from her bedside table, also having died, showing nothing, or a cruel
joke.
Dead.
One
4
H uman lives are ordered in cycles of seven years, counting from the child’s first appearance on earth to the day or night on
which she departs.
Cycles
, which in sequence form a wave, a wave with its tops and bottoms, ups and downs; it can be drawn on paper, a simple sine
wave, with
x
and
y
coordinates of Time and Amplitude, peaking at seven, at fourteen, at twenty-one, at twenty-eight, at thirty-five. Halfway
through the climb to the top, we reach the horizontal coordinate that divides this rolling wave of the years into upper and
lower halves; and the year in which we pass over this line we can call the Up Passage Year. Anyway that’s what the most recent
discoverer or deviser of this cycle chose to call it.
Rose Ryder, awake but undressed, sat unmoving on the edge of her narrow bed in her cabin by the Shadow. At her feet, on the
bedroom floor, were many long sheets of paper with waves or cycles drawn on them, crossed by a median line; she had drawn
them herself, with compass and rule. They had slipped in the night from the bed where she had left them, and she looked down
at them without exactly seeing them. It was to be another perfect cloudless day, tenth in a row, heating the Faraways to summer
levels by noon.
Rose was, herself, at the threshold of an Up Passage Year, headed for the uplands of twenty-eight. Which in her own case and
for this present cycle she did not contemplate reaching. She did not know or actively imagine what would intervene to stop
the upward progress but didn’t feel, today, that she would be around to celebrate her arrival there.
Of course she knew that “up” and “down” in the system had no necessary emotional coloration, your spirits didn’t necessarily
rise on the way up nor sink on the way down. Going down around the bottom of a cycle—your old certainties in pieces, whelmed
with new data, estrangedfrom former selves and not knowing what new ones await you on the way up again—can be quite exciting and interesting. Okay,
she said to herself, or to Mike Mucho, author of the system he called Climacterics: okay, but here on the way up I should
at least feel.
Feel what?
Not disintegrating, at least; together, and moving; I should know who I am, and that I exist. At least.
Yesterday she had known who she was, and who she was going to be. She was a graduate student, American and English literature,
and she was primarily involved with language; she was a teacher, or on her way to being one. A language school in Lima was
advertising for such a person in a journal Rose found the previous week at work, and Rose had been turning into that person
ever since, a little bit every day. She spoke good Spanish (she spoke, or had spoken, college Spanish). She lived with a family,
her own room up at the top of a tall old city house, lonely and a little afraid at first, but then discovering the city and
meeting people, going to the shore and up into the mountains. In her class she taught young people who wanted to become airline
stewardesses or import-export clerks, they were mild and beautifully mannered and seemed to come from another age, or another
decade anyway. In the company of these people and the others she met she went on from adventure to adventure, feelable but
not nameable in advance, and did not come back by the same path, if she ever came back at all.
For many days the presence within her of this person warmed her, like a child growing, or as she imagined such a child would
warm a woman. And then this morning she awoke and found her gone. Dead maybe; gone certainly, a cold hollow where she had
been, the awful cold hollow that she had for a time filled. Lima seemed as remote and airless as the moon. The Xeroxed page
from the journal where she found the ad looked up at her from her bedside table, also having died, showing nothing, or a cruel
joke.
Dead.
One
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