1. The widow on Long Island turning a spoon in her cup.
2. The gospel singer named Prestigious Booker who kept a baseball in an urn that held her lover's ashes.
3. The ship on the dock in San Francisco-don't even bring it up.
4. The man in his car in Deaf Smith County, Texas, the original middle of nowhere.
5. A whole generation of Jesus faces. Young men everywhere bearded and sandaled, bearded and barefoot-little peeky spectacles with wire frames.
6. Marvin's sense of being lost in America, wandering through cities with no downtowns.
7. The woman on Long Island, what's-her-name, whose husband was at the game-she served instant coffee in cups from a doll museum.
8. The Coptic family in Detroit-never mind, it's too complicated, riots and fires in the distance, tanks in the streets.
9. The detailed confusion of Marvin's narrative, people's memories mixed with his own, shaped to bending time.
10. A tornado touching down, skipping along the treetops in an evil weave, the whole sky filthy with flung debris.
11. Whose husband was in the footage Marvin analyzed, scrambling for the baseball, and all she had in the house was instant.
12. Riding up the side of a building in an elevator that's transparent.
13. The ship on the dock-please not now.
14. What a mystery all around him, every street deep in some radiant amaze.
Brian listened to all this and he heard the music end and begin again, the same piano piece, and this was not the second time he was hearing it but maybe the eighth or ninth, and he listened to Marvin's dot theory of reality and felt an underlying force in this theme of the relentless photographic search, some prototype he could not bring into tight definition.
"A thousand times I said. How long do I look? Why do I want it? Where is it?"
He advertised for amateur film footage of the game and acquired a few minutes of crude action that showed a massive pulsing blur above the left-field wall shot by a man in the bleachers. He brought in an optical printer. He rephotographed the footage. He enlarged, reposi-tioned, analyzed. He step-framed the action to slow it down, to combine several seconds of film into one image. He examined the sprocket areas of the film searching for a speck of data, a minim of missing imagery. It was work of Talmudic refinement, zooming in and fading out, trying to bring a man's face into definition, read a woman's ankle bracelet engraved with a name.
Brian was shamed by other men's obsessions. They exposed his own middling drift, the voice he heard, soft, faint and faraway, that told him not to bother.
Marvin's wife and child came home and went away again. The house had become a booby hatch of looming images. The isolated grimace, the hair that juts from the mole on the old man's chin. Every image teeming with crystalized dots. A photograph is a universe of dots. The grain, the halide, the little silver things clumped in the emulsion. Once you get inside a dot, you gain access to hidden information, you slide inside the smallest event.
This is what technology does. It peels back the shadows and redeems the dazed and rambling past. It makes reality come true.
Marvin Lundy opened the trunk.
The baseball was wrapped in tissue paper inside an old red-and-white Spalding box. There were deep stacks of photographs and correspondence and other material related to the search. Birth certificates, passports, affidavits, handwritten wills, detailed lists of people's possessions, there were bloodstained garments in Ziploc bags.
He took some still frames out of a manila envelope and showed them to Brian.
This was a sequence that involved the scramble for the ball, people in bevies, Marvin said, scratching and grabbing, and a man in the last photo standing starkly alone, white-shirted, looking down at the exit ramp, looking hard, glaring at someone, probably at the person who'd come away with the ball, but Marvin could not find a way, for all his mastery of the dots, to rotate the heads of the people on the ramp so he could see the face of the individual in question.
"But you identified the man in the white shirt."
"From running the picture in the back of magazines where they did waterbeds and dirty personals."
"And you went to see the wife."
"This is many years after the game. What happened he died. The widow sits in a cold house turning a spoon in her tiny cup. I try to find out what he might have said to her about the game, the ball, anything. What game, she says. I try to explain the extenuations of the thing. But it's more than twenty years later. What game, what ball?"
A woman came down the stairs carrying coffee and cheesecake on a tray. She seemed to issue from Marvin's story, a recollected figure taking material form. Marvin shut the trunk so she could place the tray on top. She was his daughter, Clarice, determined to tend to dad whatever his objections.
"I didn't hear you come in. She comes in like she's Chinese, with muffled feet."
"You were talking. I could be an armed robbery in progress, you wouldn't hear a thing."
She was in her late twenties, blondish and gym-fit. She told Brian she lived ten minutes away by car and worked as a court stenographer. He thought he could easily fall in love with the sitcom tilt in her voice and the swerve of her thigh lines under the linen skirt.
"We're almost finished here, Clarice."
"In a hundred grueling hours. Your guest may have other things he needs to do."
"What could he have?"
"It'll be dark soon."
"Dark, light. These are words."
The baseball box was on its side among scattered photographs on the floor and the ball had dribbled out, still crinkled in tissue. Clarice pulled up a chair and she and Marvin finished the story, more or less, through mouthfuls of cheesecake.
"For how many years, Clarice, I'm looking for a man named Jackson orjudson?"
"Get to the point," she said.
"Because there were roundabout hints that pointed to him as someone I should be interested in. And the ball has a history by this time that I've been inching along, where different things match and join. But I can't locate the man or even-what?"
"Ascertain," Brian said.
"His correct name. By this time, forget the footage-I'm using rumors and dreams. There's an ESP of baseball, an underground what, a consciousness, and I'm hearing it in my sleep."
"Faster, daddy, faster."
"Meanwhile there's this woman. I'm trying to find Judson Jackson Johnson and there's this woman who got my name from the memorabilia market and she's been calling me long-distance collect day and night. She says she used to own the thing I'm looking for. Mysteriously missing for years, she says, from the little locked box where she used to keep it."
"Genevieve Rauch."
"Whose name I can never."
"Genevieve Rauch," his daughter said. 'And the two of them try to establish the basic, you know."
"Indicators," Brian said.
"That would make her baseball at least a remote possibility."
"The marks and scratches," Marvin said. "The trademark if it's correct. The signature of the league president who was in office at the time. Her memory is iffy. I make some leeway, then she talks about something else. This is a woman she has an extra chromosome for changing the subject. A thousand times I'm tempted to hang up the phone."
"Then it happens," Clarice said.
"A man in his car."
"A man's driving along in his car, someone shoots him dead. Turns out the victim is the long-lost former husband of Genevieve Rauch. Turns out further his name is Juddy Rauch, Judson Rauch. So the two rivers meet. Took a homicide to reveal the connection."
Marvin lowered his head to the trunk top to sip his coffee and Brian stared into the weave of his woeful toupee.