They left the ship for a ragged time in the late morning light. It was a Mexican place, not an Indian one, not indigenous, but filled with the music of the tourist, the permanent loud laughing of the tourists and the language of blood was left to dry about the market place, and she saw the shiny ruby plates all about the square, on the knives and the huevos and the little decorated platos with child drawings on the edges.

The dock was full of people already sweating, and the smell of them and the food and the fish made her unable to walk. She and the child had slept naked beneath one sheet, and the ocean had cooed them and petted them with wet rasping and far away bells, until she felt themselves slowly returning into humanity again.

Armed strangers had stripped mother and eaten child, had humiliated their father before he was killed, had taken away everything and sold it to a Church. God had bought it for his home, never questioning it's origins. Her child mind knew that if God had it, then it was God's, and that was all anyone should know or needed to know. And God knew that all of the universes were turning for God, and so all things were prayers to God, and God loved the wailing child, the whispering of cruelty in its little spasms, and God loved the shivering tree, and the power saw, and the movies about power saws, and the chilies and garlic hanging from the wooden beams, and the mariachi on Sunday afternoons, and the pretty pink prayers worn by the brown skinned virgins, whose brothers were leading them to the cool shady trees.

And God hummed along with this music, and the people heard his humming, and knew that God must love all things that happened on the plaza, and even though people spoke to one another sins and punishment, they also heard God humming along with the words of the prayers, and so knew they could get away with anything and still be able to come home at the end of the story.

Boxes piled on the docks, someone had painted a single slice of color across each one, and a single woman dressed in crisp white stood leaning against the sun, pressing herself upon the light, leaning just lightly, so that if one had noticed her, man or woman, one would have wanted to be the sun. One would have, for a moment, been the part of the universe that does not wander, because if anything in all time has ever belonged, it was the sun, at that moment, to the woman on the dock where the boxes had rested in color and shade.

And he would always know these things about her, no matter how far the boat took her, no matter how deep into the jungle he had had to return to meet her again. And when they made love, he made this love out of her feet, and where they pointed, and her sleeves, and her breasts, big trees of breasts, changing colors in the autumn, bruised and willowy, with too much fruit all at once, the rotten smell on the ground, the sweet smell in the leaves.

Up until now they had been careful not to speak with any voices they were not made of. When they were together she peered into his eyes, looking carefully under lid of a box left here long ago. He offered his eyes in return, and this simple act of looking back at her made her blush with such desire that she would say something or other until the sea could drive the heat from her face.

They could drive north or east or south. But there was only one direction for them to go - the direction of the moon. And the sun will follow their voice.

And if the machine is our messenger, how will we translate ourselves into all these pleasures carved out of away, Will we be bombarded with the past? Will we be dissuaded by the present?

Let us go then, in the direction of the machine.

rlj