I.

Maybe he would never leave. Now there was, certainly, little sign of his rising. It seemed, after she had held his hands between hers, that he might get up from the armchair, but that moment was past. And Past was Past, as she had learned by heart. He maybe needed help. Water, an aspirin, whatever it was that he wasn't saying. It was time enough already. Mister Ted Clitos was expected.

That he hadn't been making the least amount of sense was why she had pressed his hands together in the first place. Doing so had brought everything to a stop. All you could hear while he collected himself was the aviary out in the park somewhere. Some birds sounded as if barking. Come to think now, had whatever he had been saying even been expressed in words? It seemed like an instinct, what she had done. There was a rightness to her hands that his had lacked in waving around as they had. When she finally let them go, he left them in the wedge they had assumed and drove it into his lap as if they were cold. Due to his foreign blood, as he often said, he was not one of those who could speak without his hands sparrowing about.

"Mister Ted Clitos will be here in a moment," she said. "And then I will go downstairs, allow him to hold the door for me, and I will get into his Buick or Chevrolet and I will unlock his door from inside so he doesn't have to fumble." She knew her voice was too loud for the room. It didn't matter. "And, listen, we are only going to a documentary. And we aren't going to learn anything you don't already know by heart." She pulled her socks up. "And I'm not going, for your information, simply because he asked me in his native language." She had the look of someone hunting for keys. "Do you want an aspirin while I'm up?"

It would have been better if he were holding a glass of water, sipping, flicking the tumbler rim, doing something that made him move, but not enough to let him claw another speech from the blue yonder.

"So that's the story," she said, "The End."

It had taken her a long time to say all this. She wanted to just keep saying things as they occurred.

"And every word I say is true," she said.

This was a favorite expression of his.

Whatever he had been doing--there is no other word for it but murmuring--she guessed it hadn't run its course. Perhaps he was now thinking, now phrasing things over, daydreaming in little swoops of his so-called Italian. She put her cup in the sink, stepped out of her slippers and into her black and white shoes. Whatever he had said, it wasn't something a person could rightly respond to--he began and stopped and began again--and so you see. He still hadn't left the armchair.

"I'm not leaving a key because you won't need one." She had not relinquished the tone one uses to address a true foreigner or a child. "Be certain that you give it a good pull, a real good one, because it isn't always closed even when it seems to be."

This was a new act of his, silence. There must have been something beyond hello. Certainly he had refused tea softly, had taken no water even. And it seemed he had been making plain sense while she fussed over tea. The afternoon hauling his desk into the right spot, the park, the walk over, she guessed--or somesuch all the while she was wiping out the cup. He had used a funny expression or perhaps she was now imagining. (A car horn had honked while she was filling the pot and emptied everything from her head). The park, the walk past the aviary, the other zoo sounds--no she couldn't remember what he had been going on about. If she could remember what his hands had been doing, she could remember the rest. Birds and lions or both. Mud flats crossed in the dark he made believable by the footprints he had left on the doormat. Feathering his new nest, that's how he had put it--the way he said everything had to be within arms' reach. Did he say he now consider himself brother to the Mandarin Duck, magisterial, or simply imperious? Impervious? It was no use. What he said about the Mandarin Duck remained a mystery and he still held his hands the same. He had been sitting there in the armchair since the modern era began.

"Don't feel funny about the bed. I want you to lie down if you like. There are biscuits and there is half a pie and who knows what in the freezer. And change the sheets in the bedroom if you would," she said. She drew the shades. "Why don't you go lie down?"

It was funny. Now that she had been speaking so slowly, so loudly, really sounding off into her own echo, it was as if he had never said word one. There was nothing, even, on the table to argue that he was in the room, no keys, not his feet, the geographic magazines would need no rearrangement. The small footprints on the doormat were the same size as the ones she might have left had she just slogged across the ladies' tee. It took a moment to recall the sound of his voice, but here it was beginning, stopping with the hand held aloft, then beginning again in all that clattering glory of his. It all had the quality of, say, water at a rolling boil set aside, then replaced on the element, set aside again on second thought to avoid a mess.

She would have been surprised had he spoken while she was pressing out a blackhead in the mirror. "It isn't as if we were going to a feature," she said. "Because we're going to a documentary on the history of film itself. And I'm not exactly ga-ga over the prospect of Mister Ted Clitos nor am I entirely dead to the idea of him, either. Film on Film. Ha. Ha. 'Dancing about architecture,' as I think you once put it."

It had been the door, a knock again while she was pulling at the knob, an embrace perhaps, maybe it was a peck. (Now her nose stung). She had brought his hands together for him because there seemed to be no prospect of going on sensibly. That was it, maybe the only time they had touched that evening. "Do you want me to put the radio on?" she said.

The widnowshades lit up with headlights. She rubbed her nose into her palm.

"Okay. That's it," she said. "That's Mister you-know-who. So. Mi casa es su casa." She put the radio on. In African News they were changing the name of the Congo again.

"Let's be clear, okay?" She was standing at the door in her black and white shoes. Furthermore, she was standing in the footprints he had left on the doormat.

"Have a nap, like I said. Then strip the sheets, okay? But don't get the idea I'm asking you to set up camp," she said.

Walking across the park he had steered by the zoo sounds, the birds sounding off against the roar of what could only be lions. Then he had let the light from her windows draw him across the golf course. Crossing the ladies' tee, probably, he had picked up the mud.

She pulled the door closed. It didn't latch and, when she pulled again, it was as eye-opening as a shot.

II.

He heard the power locks. Now he listened for all the car sounds. He could smell that the stove had been left on after a while. He grasped his knees. The pot was beginning to scorch and the Congo was coming apart at the seams. So he stepped into her slippers that, just last year had been his, and filled the pot with new water, set it aside.

"Congo, Conga, Congalizez," he said to nobody in particular, in time with the BBC march, directing the canned orchestra with his free hand. He killed the element, intending to stare it black, but held his hand above the dying coil instead and began to speak in the time-announcer's tone:

"The world as portrayed in the films of Buster Keaton is both silent and adversarial. The characters he plays manage their difficulties by, number one, his famous stoicism, and failing that, number two, flight. In one film entitled--"

He put the element on again because the heat helped. Now that she had rumbled off in Mister you-know-who's Buick or Chevrolet, he could hear the lions clearly, the rattle of the birds above them.

"In one film entitled--" he continued, "'Congo, Congas, Congamos'" Buster is in flight from-- Whom? Enemy One: the evil cowboys. Enemy Two: from the producers of a documentary on the subject of the flight response in common mammals."

He changed hands over the element.

"Anyway, Scott-San," he said to himself, "Keaton is running down a barren hill somewhere in the deserts of the Congo, displacing many Congolese stones as he goes. Which stones roll down with him, the small ones in turn displacing larger ones, until the original human pursuers have become displaced by more abstract, mineral ones."

He put the water on for tea, raised the windowshades, looked across the park, through the noise thrown up by the entire zoo, found the dark dormers that told him he was not at home. He knew exactly when the timer would put his lamps on. It didn't happen as he watched. "I could still be anywhere," he said. He raised the shades and counted Buicks and Chevrolets until there were too many.

"In this famous, classic, seminal scene--which is essential to include in every documentary of every garden-variety human endeavor, Keaton--himself called the Great Stoneface--in finding himself pursued by the rocks themselves, falls in his haste and rolls downhill, face first, like a boulder himself, yadda, yaddae, yadderunt."

The kettle won the race with his desklamp. First, steam lept. Second, light. For a moment he couldn't place the whistle. Then someone seemed to sit down at his desk across the park. He remembered in whose rooms he was.

"In the best of Keaton's scenes what counts is the ferocity of his mathematics. The worked-out quality, the equivalencies that he forges between foreign objects allow us to forget the whole world of evil cowboys and shit-heel, would-be documentarians from shit-heel Estonia, and all this adversarialism is simply free to become a kind of dance."

He made tea in her dirty cup. Then he turned the radio off. "These dances, for reasons we will go into later--if Signor Ted Clitos will be good enough to hold his questions," he said while watching the sugar cubes go nothingward, "were only made possible by the scoreless silent era."

He had been wondering who had made off with his mother's teaspoons. They hadn't made the move. Now he knew. He ladled out the bag.

"Anyway," he said, "that's my argument, since we're arguing."