I send the message to Mimi, lock up the place, and get back in the car. Hamlet is pouting, wedged betweeen a couple of paddles, lying on his paws on top of a drybag.

“Let’s get the hell out of here, boy!”

That cheers him up. I don’t care now, about anything. The island seems like the only place I can get any peace of mind at this point. That’s why I want it--right now--nothing else--nothing else at all.

I see the early crocuses blooming, little purple signs of spring, scattered snow drops, daffodils ready to burst forth, a million tiny points of life, being green, just being alive on the near-frozen mud of March. Hamlet is halfway out the window, smelling all the things I’m seeing. This moment is all right. If I just don’t think, if I can totally inhabit my senses, forget about my mind, let the present in, commune with the natural world--instead of giving in to the maelstrom of thoughts and emotions I know are churning up, waiting to mess up my day--I’ll be fine.

I can even let myself think about what I don’t want to overwhelm me--Keith, KHaring, Dawn, Mimi, the stuff that’s been consuming me--without giving in to dwelling on it, wallowing in it.

We, me and Hamlet. Sheila was right, I don’t feel alone, Hamlet is with me. We get to the drop-off point and unload the equipment. I park the car. Hamlet waits, guarding our gear. He gets so excited when he figures out we’re going for a boat ride, I waited until now to confirm it. I say just two words, “boat ride,” to him and he is squealing with more desire and anticipation than he can contain.

“This is it, boy. We’re going for a... BOAT RIDE!”

Down the hill with the equipment and we’re ready to push off. As soon as the raft is in the water, Hamlet is in the raft, muddying it up. He eyeballs the island and leans over the side of the boat, waiting with his tongue hanging out, nearly hyperventilating. The last gallon of water is loaded into the craft. I shove it over a sand bar and we’re gliding on the gray-green glassy pool separating the shore from Turtle Isle. Since I’m planning a long stay, I slip the raft down the left channel, pass by the island and catch the eddy at it’s tip to nudge us back toward the last good landing site.

Before I can say, “We’re here, boy!” Hamlet is out of the boat, splashing through the water and up on the shore, barking like a jackal. I throw out the anchor, hug a tree, and then Hamlet comes over to collect his own hug.

Within the hour, our gear is lined up against the tent and I have a fire started. I found four marbles on my search for firewood. By the third one, I couldn’t keep thoughts of Dawn out of my head. Finding marbles on our secret hideaway--it was our little pleasure and now it’s a sad reminder that I can’t ignore what’s been in the back of my mind any longer. By the fourth marble, my eyes were tearing, maybe it was the smoke from the fire. Hamlet comes by for reassurance, which I’m happy to offer. It feels good having him to hug, like a warm teddy bear. I’ll be OK. I just need to keep busy.

Supper is simple, jerky for me, dogfood and a bit of jerky for Hamlet. I set out a couple of fishing lines, lie back and wait for the sun to set and for the comet to appear. This year’s comet is turning out to be a stunner. Out here, away from city lights, it should be a magnificent sight to behold.

Lying here, my back to the earth, wrapped in my extra sleeping bag, I imagine the rest of the world spinning by. I can barely hear a sound above the rushing rapids lining both sides of the island. Every once in a while, a car backfires, its driver downshifting a bit too late on the steep grade that connects Route 724 to the 422 bypass. The nearest road is basically a shortcut, taken by locals looking to shave a few precious minutes off their daily commute, or boom-boxers in sleek low cars, the ‘90s equivalent of hot-rodders, or else guys and girls who love to push their imported beauties up and down the Appalachian hills, feeling empowered, feeling free.

Then there’s the recurrent sound of long freight trains skirting the mountains on a pair of three inch rails. The screech and howl starts at Clapperthal Junction. Cars start clattering around the river’s big “S” curve. Banging to a halt begins on the next hill downstream. All that tonnage squeezes through the single-track bridge about a hundred yards from here. It sounds like hell.

I never mind the sound of the trains, though. It is after all, the sound of my artwork. It’s also the sound of Reading, the city wher I was born. I’ve recorded, sampled, and orchestrated the sounds of the trains for years. It’s a familiar soundtrack for my consciousness. I’d wonder where I am without it.

The sun is setting and I let my mind wander for the first time since this morning. Instantaneously, the thoughts rush in, tumbling like waves from a dam release. Mimi’s message echoes soundlessly.

“Dawn is KHaring !!!”

Incredible... All this time she’s been sending, receiving messages as Keith! What a mind fuck! It’s so outrageous. It upsets me just thinking about it. It seems so deceptive, manipulative, deceitful. I start to feel real hate welling up in me.

Now in an instant, I feel differently. What if she is a clear channel, clearer than I am? How did she--could she have answered those questions? Did I tell her casually one day, details about that particular trip to New York with Keith? Should I allow for the possibility that she has telepathic powers or that Keith is actually using her to communicate with me. Some of those replies actually came before my initial messages were even sent. Precognition?

Screw it. I don’t care. I hate this whole fucking business--what it’s become, my stupid obsession with a fanatical genius, a dead gay man, a bi-sexual madwoman, everybody else in this psychic melodrama.

And fucking Mimi! What did I expect, meeting her in a fucking chatroom on fucking American Line? So I deserved what I got. What the hell. I feel like a fool every time I fall for a woman.

“Hamlet, come here, boy. You see that comet up there? That’s all there is boy--fucking space dust. A sooty snowball, heated up to glow for a few months in four-thousand years. That’s it, boy. You and me and a fucking snowball in outer space.”

It’s so cold out here, I’m shivering in my sleeping bag. I don’t know how Hamlet can take it on the back porch all winter. He comes in for food, then he’s at the door begging to go back out, afraid he might miss something--a trash pickup, or the mailman, or his nemesis, Goulash, the sheepdog.

I’m freezing but the comet is so beautiful. I don’t know. Nature is damn harsh, but it’s cut with such magnificence, such delicate perfection. It’s cruel for months, then kind for a moment, makes you crawl, then lifts you up, drops you like a rock, floats you downriver for miles, then crashes you into a boulder just when you’re starting to relax and trust it--or Her. Fucking Mother Nature....

Somehow, I fell asleep under the stars. I woke up at 3 a.m. The comet had set beneath a shimmering sky. My fingers were numb. The fire was barely glowing. I kicked the last few embers into flame, added some twigs and a big piece of driftwood. I stroked my dog, offered him a snack, and crawled into the tent. My first night on Turtle Isle. I felt like a bitter old man.

I woke up after sunrise with a single thought racing through my mind-- “The spawn never dies”. Slowly, the dream comes back into focus. I see a ring of workers tending a huge ever-expanding mushroom in a vast cavern. I recall the entire vision now, seeing Francesco’s role as the bearer of ancestral wisdom, seeing Keith as my companion in this cosmic process. All my dreams concatenate into an instant of clarity and peace. I feel connected to the past, alive in the present, seeding the future. So that’s it. The whole endless circular pathway is within me. I am in the world, seeded by the past, within the present, dreaming the future. The spawn never dies....

A cold rain is starting to fall. I let Hamlet into the tent and start writing....

I’ve spent the last week writing like a maniac. One week into my solo sojourn and I’m finally getting past my anger. There’s too much here to feel good about. This morning, I landed the biggest bass I ever caught! It was nearly four pounds and gave me food all day--a half fillet for breakfast and lunch, a whole one for dinner, breaded and fried up with beans and rice.

All week there’s been only two canoes on the river--one carrying a solitary fisherman who saw my catch, gave me two thumbs up and wished me luck, and another manned by a pair of paddlers who were scouting routes for their canoe club. I told them to avoid the fast water around the island and hoped they’d stay away. Half the pleasure of being here is the seclusion. I can share the river if I have to but I’d like the channels near my island hideaway to stay uncharted, especially by a gaggle of day-trippers from boathouse row.

The weather has been colder than normal but that’s normal--at least every other year. That’s been the pattern so long. One of these years people will just come to expect it. Then it will be a normal two-year cycle and you won’t have to act predictably surprised, just to have something to complain about.

Cold for March means cold and windy, which makes it feel colder, like winter with sun and green grass and the witheld promise of spring. Soon it will be spring by the calendar, though, and then there will be no turning back. I feel like I’m out here getting the jump on things along with the flora and fauna that use the sun’s progressively steeper angle for setting their biological clocks. Spring is around the bend damnit, by the sun if not the weather.

My manuscript is finally up to date. It took a few years to get in synch. Now that I’m writing in the present, maybe I’ll be able to see an end to it all. Sometimes, I wish I could say I don’t care about what has transpired since I began this project. I admit it, I care. But I’m still uncertain as to what I believe.

Occasionally, I just go off the deep end with it all. I feel like I’m being programmed, manipulated, jerked around by ghosts. Before I left, I filled Sheila in on every detail of the project’s past and all I could about the new version--“the millennium project.” She was wide-eyed and seemed incredulous. But she didn’t interrupt or react to my story until the end.

“OK,” she said. Then she took a deep breath and smiled an impish smile. “When do I get to ask the hundred or so questions I have?”

I put her off until my return. She’s a trooper. She just helped me load up and kept smiling and shaking her head. When the story in the Weekly World News hits the stands, things will take on a life of their own. After that, it will be a free-for-all. This thing has been concocted from scratch, and who is really responsible for it?

In a way, it’s the memory of Keith moving through those who knew him. But things, especially living things, evolve, mutate, metamorphose. Even the memory of the dead changes. It’s carried by the living through new territories, conveyed across old boundaries, seen from higher heights, taught to the young. Things change and we change with them.

I was moved by the omnipresent memory of my friend, moved by our pledges to create something new, something strong, something never before accomplished. Since then, it has nearly died, as he died. It stalled, as I stalled, hesitated, struggled to be born anew. Now it will multiply!

Along the way I have touched others and been touched by them. I’ve let out what was all inside and let the outside in. I’ve been changed in the process, changed by the process, perhaps even for the process.

I felt at the heart of it when it began. Now I feel outside again. Dawn has been guiding it, guiding me, for months. Do I trust her? Must I trust her now more than I trust myself ? Or is she a messenger? Can I just perceive the message, act on it, move it along, be a part of it without knowing the ultimate source?

I can’t deny I’m still influencing, creating even, the steps which will inevitably open it up to the world. As I examine my decisions, some were made consciously, others were conceived in dreams, came to me in flashes of insight, even perversity.

Maybe I’m just reluctant to let go. Now that I can begin to discern the rough outline of its silhouette. I can see how it will grow, expand in time, taking on a form of its own. Others will get involved. Soon many others will add their energy to the burgeoning conception I so obsessively nurtured for years, alone.

The mere idea of an open-ended project whose definition would evolve over time is what has given this thing so much momentum. With millions of people let in all at once, what will happen to it? Where will it go from here? The stage has been set by a small crew. The cast is enormous, endless. We are also its audience.

The media of the future are in place today. When Keith died, there was no World Wide Web. Now, a few individuals can institute a global process with a few keystrokes, let it simmer for a few days, stoke it with a tantalizing bit of imagination, send it on its way toward the millennium at the speed of light and thought!

There’s no going back now, anyway. I knew it when I dropped the altered image into Al’s mail slot. I knew it when the dreams came so insistently, when messages flashed, and replies came instantaneously. I knew it when I met Keith for the first time. I knew it also when my grandfather died...

Life is all there is. Living. Carrying the torch. Passing it on. The blackness of the void is illumed from within, as the darkness of our sleep is brightened by dreams.

No one returns, yet no one leaves. We are all here at once, some as bodies, some as ghosts, some in memory and some in dreams. What we do is what we are. What’s done through us and to us, what there is to do and what will be done happens, never dies. There is nothing else but life.

Today the vernal equinox will occur. The world will be in equipoise, balanced for an instant between shadow and light. The outcome is inevitable. Spring will arrive, flowers will bloom, leaves will deck the trees, animals will mate and bear their young, the land will be renewed, and this island will warm up!

The comet is a nightly reminder of the miraculous present. Its tail has grown since the beginning of the month. The shiny shaft is pale blue hazy white. Skirting the halo of the milky way, the glowing space thing points down toward Earth like a cosmic road sign, directing souls toward their destiny.

Hamlet is totally in the present, always. We are bonded, mammal to mammal, like never before. Clustered days have passed without a sighting of another human being. Except for the sounds of road and track, the passage of the occasional aircraft, I feel like I could be ten-thousand miles from civilization. I don’t want to leave this place, ever. I fantasize about paddling out at the end of the month for supplies and paddling back in again after an hour or so on shore, replenished and ready for more time on Turtle Isle. I dream the approach of the glowing ship seen by no man, hovering there above the bridge, over the river.