This was hectic ego work. The train along the Rhine took Mason's vermin-breath and held it somewhere inside. Snow covered hibernating vineyards and the torrid castles up the hillsides matched his own desperate frost… Then he arrived at the dreamy (deceptively quiet?) little city of Aachen… In the night he slept through the gunfire of his own plot: Clarence Mckay was after him, and this time, jack, with cannons and machine guns! Mason couldn't find a rock to hide behind. In his hasty flight he bumped into William Carlos Williams, on a beach somewhere. Bill grabbed the shaking man by his shoulders and spat these words into his face: “Nine-tenths of our lives is well forgotten in the living. Of the part that is remembered, the most had better not be told… / We always try to hide the secret of our lives from the general stare. What I believe to be the hidden core of my life will not easily be deciphered.” Doc's speech only made matters worse. Despite Mason's respect for the poet. His plot still had him in a fit. It wasn't simply that he was not achieving what Public Enemy “told him to do, he hadn't even yet embarked on the discovery of the basis for his complex identity. Well, he might be able to fly again but he'd have to swim, like Shine, to Greece, to find parts of the puzzle, then, surely to Africa for the other parts. France wasn't enough. England? Forget slavery. Germany was as useless as his “false” past. And, hell, he had to do something about his own paranoia! Everybody wasn't an enemy!… He lost himself in a network of beach rocks. True, he wasn't driven to avenge himself any longer. No need. Since leaving the states he knew he'd changed. His needs were now different. How? Well, he got up from sleep. But it didn't make any difference. He sat in the dark and looked into a patchy bed of lights from beyond the Gaestehaus window. One had to become Somebody or Nobody. Odysseus? Since arriving in Europe hadn't he reached a murky point? He couldn't go back. He was now assigned by desperation and the sense of urgency he felt always to go on, to discover the Whole Picture. The parts were everywhere. That was too bad. Their discovery though was his only hope of building a Self firm enough to withstand the threat of “The Other.” The Other? One was driven for reasons other than one's shortcomings, one's mirror. The more he thought of it the more convinced he was that Africa would offer a way in. Why not Italy and Greece, too. Anyway, keep moving! He made up his mind to plunge, to swim… Without turning on the bedside light, Mason began work on his novel-in-progress. In the morning at the Technische Hochschule he wanted to give those bright German kids the best prose he could produce. The quality of his life depended on it. It was no longer just the blank page he had to face:
“… He was born in, I think, red-dirt Georgia, grew up, maybe, in hog-butcher Chicago, had many thick-headed problems in elementary and high and was a hardcore dropout… got into trouble in the Air Force… He's got something against all of us: was busted for possession… served time in Attica from 1977 to 1978; while there he was betrayed by a guy who claimed to be… this other so-called writer was receiving grant money due him, the real writer… the Foundation had gained a reputation for giving such awards to ‘people of talent and accomplishment’ who had not been widely recognized for their professional efforts… Victim he surely was… It's true he'd been a fart and a troublemaker from day one, he'd fathered — in and out of unholy wedlock — possibly as many as fifty kids, certainly a minimum of thirty-five… Before going into the joint he'd come through, so they say, many failed marriages… Though there were those who protested his right to everything, even his birth, he insisted he was born December thirty-first, 1936 in Georgia at Grady with wristband number 105847 clamped tightly to his little red arm… He was taken home to six-o-seven McGrader Street, South East, by his parents… so how did he find himself years later in Amesville, ready one fine day to step down from a John Deere and set out to reclaim his identity?… Well, parole ended: that was certainly a factor plus a private detective in New York had agreed to find the culprit… But, Jez, it was like coming out of amnesia with a sudden cold memory of endless dark tunnels of the past… Walking away from that tractor, he looked up at the pancake in the Sherwood Anderson sky and took a Saroyan-breath, exhaled it… Minimum wage was chicken, no birdshit… He stepped through freshly turned earth till he gained a road then the highway… Beat his blunt toetips on concrete… He stopped in the city of Amesville for a cup of coffee… A yellow-white cat with one green eye, one blue, leaped onto his lap… He rested his elbows on the red-dotted plastic tablecloth… Cat refused a sip of the brew… Clock on wall reminded him of something: what was it: gave him an awful feeling of anxiety… clocks were always running: warning you of the thing you didn't want: that magnetic force: hands without fingers: radium into visible light… He had to move on: it was urgent… He though the cat was… he set her down… He didn't have much faith in his luck to thumb a ride so he began walking… His mudfrog, a birthmark on his right forearm, itched horribly… Ass still sore from the tractor seat… He stopped to rest under a tree: turned out to be Joyce Kilmer's… Quick! a train was coming along the tracks only a few feet from the tree… Was he dreaming? A woman was tied to the tracks where another set crossed… He got to her in time: untied her and threw himself and her into the ditch as the iron beast shot by… she was nutmeg color: a dark beauty and spoke in a musical and mysterious voice… said she was from a reservation in New Mexico, had worked the canteen circuit, made movies, danced professionally, hung out with gangsters, but was now seeking a new life… She told him her name was Painted Turtle… He was heading for New York and she, well, she'd go there just as soon as she'd go anywhere… ”