Lancelot

She had not come home and I had not visited her. I knew because all at once I remembered the summer of ’68. The courts had just caught up with Feliciana Parish and a few of us moderate and peace-loving persons of good will of both races had our own workshops, with the schoolboard and teachers and PTA’s, so people wouldn’t get killed when school opened. We succeeded. Nobody got killed. On the contrary. New life was conceived.
    Siobhan then was conceived on or about July 15, 1968, give or take a few days. How many days? a week? ten days? two weeks? As Royal said, biology is not an exact science but a matter of averages and probabilities. So put July 15 at the summit of a probability curve and add or subtract two weeks in either direction along the x axis and, as I discovered later, the curve is so flat and close to the axis that breathing under it is difficult and conception damn near impossible.
    A fact then: Siobhan was fathered in Texas in July 1968 and not by me.
    The thunder machine started and stopped again. Someone was tinkering with it. A door slammed, the heavy front door of Belle Isle. I looked down through a pigeonhole. Margot and Jacoby and Merlin got in the station wagon and drove away. I’d have known it was Margot by the way she drove. Her hand made an arc through the green windshield. She turned the car like a man, or a Texas girl, not push-pulling with two hands but palming the wheel around with one hand. Looking down into the car from the pigeon roost, I could see her bare knees. When she got into a car she hiked up her dress like a man does his pants. They were headed, I knew, for the Holiday Inn on I-10 where the film company stayed and the manager let them have a conference room so Merlin could view the rushes.
    The three of them sat on the front seat. Merlin in the middle next to Margot. Merlin was one of the few men I ever knew who couldn’t drive. There used to be more such people when I was a child, often quite gifted, intelligent men. Especially creative people. Picasso and Einstein never learned to drive, did they?
    The girl in the next room and I communicated yesterday! She has not said a word for months, not since her terrible experience, but we communicated!
    At six o’clock, when they brought us coffee, I knocked once as usual: good morning! To my astonishment, after a minute or two there came a timid little knock back: good morning.
    I could not believe my ears. Perhaps it was not a reply at all. Perhaps she had turned over her chair.
    So I knocked again. It was a tentative knock, a knock with a question mark. In thirty seconds, it came back. Knock. No mistake.
    Yet was it a communication? If so, what kind? Two chimpanzees could do as well.
    Still the question: Is that communication or imitation? Monkey see, monkey do. Perhaps the girl is lying there, a hopeless idiot, her eyes vacant, her knuckles straying against the wall, like a two-year-old child lying in bed.
    So I tried the simplest code of all: One knock = A, two = B, and so on.
    But how to propose it to her as a code? Not as easy as you might think. I spent the morning thinking it over. It became clear that the only way to avoid imitation is to ask a question and the only way to establish a code is repetition. After all, we have all the time in the world.
    It is very awkward, of course. For example, my question began with a W , which requires twenty-three knocks. But no matter. Once the idea of a code is established, once she catches on, we can simplify.
    I sent this message: 23 knocks pause 8 pause 15 double pause 1 pause 18 pause 5 double pause 25 pause 15 pause 21.
    Who are you?
    I knocked at about a one-second rhythm knowing she wouldn’t get it at first but thinking she might catch on and get a pencil and start counting.
    No reply.
    Repeat.
    No reply.
    Repeat.
    No reply.
    I tried ten times and quit.
    Ah well. Tomorrow I will try again.
    I must communicate with her. According to my theory, she may be a prototype of the New Woman. It is no longer possible to “fall in love.” But in the future and with the New Woman it will be.
    You’re curious, I see. I haven’t told you my sexual theory of history? You smile. No, I’m serious. It applies to both the individual and mankind.
    First there was a Romantic Period when one “fell in love.”
    Next follows a sexual period such as we live in now where men and women cohabit as indiscriminately as in a baboon colony—or in a