And So, And So
···
Borrego Pass, New Mexico
1863
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And so the river is running in a smallpetty, pittering and pattering off into a yet smaller stream than ever seen and will not be seen. It is a darm-dark fomenting briny sieved-through deathly aegypti yellowplague and there is nothing than can ever live in it save for dengue nile tadpoles and mosshugging parasites that feed each other and abdicate pebbles to greater feet and worm. It is the liquid night upon night and the starless dark provides no shelter of certainty for the maladapted eyes. In this vermillion land of pallid horkes and scattered ribs and the haws of variola still extant in the pustules of rock that crowd all roads, it is here where two starved out men on the mass and back of Kit Carson and Abraham and Carleton find themselves in the business of alighting. The pustules are hardened and their contents solidified as it is the death of harvest and the greying of the mange of the American continent, how thick and unkempt it is. It is tomorrow that they will be dead from an old-fashioned obsidian through the system and in it their hearts. And for now, having whipped faster than the thread of supposed water that ran ahead, they took fire in the saxonies of covered sagebrush and rested. And their voices were each hoarser than the other with tobacco and oxidized steel in their rifles. And so.
__________________________
Enter Ivan, Montrose Sr.
IVAN
And what say you to the issue of our jammed-up gun?
MONTROSE, SR.
Your jammed up gun is the business of nobody but your own hollow-head daftness.
IVAN
And yet you are carrying nothing, so it is our gun. What are we to kill with the butt of a standard-issue flintlock, if not only those who are still and asleep like our soon selves? Puzzles me.
MONTROSE, SR.
It frightens me. I can’t do no dying out here, Judges have said so. Or the one Judge, I might say.
IVAN
Oh, and worth shit that is. You are seeing it now; there are no judges out here for you and me, and the closest thing to it is whether it can be shot or not. And it can’t be, so what is that, then?
MONTROSE, SR.
Frightening is what it is. Don’t make me say things like that. You are aware of the words’ effects.
IVAN
What a cathartick out of you with every utterance. And we can’t shoot it, what then?
MONTROSE, SR.
I don’t know what then. And do you? It is a far and vast desert we home ourselves in, one where we can go away and back in the horizon direction with the Proper country anytime
IVAN
And this is the last you will speak of such things, or promise to me I will take this rifle to you myself.
MONTROSE, SR.
And why is it rusted? Don’t tell me you hold no blame for that. It is we in Albuquerque who had to take care of it and somebody did not. Don’t tell me that you are the perfect man even then.
IVAN
Who said I was but you? I take your compliment kindly.
[What remains of Ivan’s old plantation suit draped in blue trenches and plucked out, sold buttons creases as he bows closer to the fire like a stager and an actor, his ugly and humor-filled grin illuminated with harsh spectacle.]
MONTROSE, SR.
And I saw you do it. You left the gun outside in the monsoon going into the house. I knowed it then and I know it now. And you can’t tell me you didn’t because it was clean then and the oil from the passing cars shined it down so it was bright, just setting there.
IVAN
And yet more shit. Disown it.
MONTROSE, SR.
And I can’t because I saw you, man.
IVAN
I didn’t even so much as enter a house. I slept in the stable because I am a man of my means.
MONTROSE, SR.
And yet more out of you. Don’t go talking with disownership around me—you know it why.
IVAN
I do, then? I find it hard to be told anything like that, coming from a man like you. I saw your own works in Albuquqerque—and with a child in the backwater Carolinas.
MONTROSE, SR.
My son holds nothing here. You lie, and your rank flesh only shows me so. Do not lie to me.
IVAN
Recite it, then.
MONTROSE, SR.
And what?
IVAN
Recite the task at hand in these primordial places, primitive pontificates of pious priests prancing around out here by themselves trying to tell savages and barbarians to forget themselves. You know it.
MONTROSE, SR.
And you won’t say nothing more on this?
IVAN
Nothing. It is known that the Indian is not far from the enslaved blacklings for which this union now rips itself in two, correct?
MONTROSE, SR.
And shut it. You know nothing about anything. A cabbage-chested yellowfaced degenerate is what you are, more so than me. Now I may be vulgar—this I won’t deny—but I am not to be toyed with. Look at me, ‘s-blood!
[Montrose Sr. nearly leaps his full-forced and stick-twig-branch thin body atop their fire, a not unseen wilderness festering in his eyes from incessant exposure to the bare wilderness of the North desert and its cold]
IVAN
A far mispronunciation of what I said. Don’t burn yourself now. Hold it. Strike yourself back, tied to the ground if you must. Bad work, bad work to be combusted in your own fire for such base beings.
[Ivan’s sulphur-white teeth line up in a grin. His follicles are all burnt out and he is now hairless and appears with measles and a fever in the spleen.]
MONTROSE, SR.
Throw the damned thing away if it will make you rest your lungs. ‘Tis your own fault, but we can go about not knowing it or saying it, to make you better.
IVAN
We must keep at least any thing from this excursion. Talk to me about your boy in the Carolinas.
MONTROSE, SR.
I would like that.
IVAN
Then do it, man. I am not your handler.
MONTROSE, SR.
And he is fifteen, my boy. And a nasty fifteen it has proved to be for his mother. But so was mine, and so are all. The week before I went out to Texas he submerged my loaned sums in some water he found. I asked him why and he stuttered his way out of it. My boy can’t much speak, he gets caught in the rhythm constantly, and then he is scared to go on; he retreats back to where he was in some shame. Other kids give him hell for it, but he gives it back—my boy, he is. There is a gleam around his eyes, almost yeller—though he has no fever—that shows when he has fear. He will wake up in that dark and describe our home to me: “There are…three doors and each of them a—different shade of the same tree—it is all so old. Bars are from the other continent. Don’t sell me on the chimney, too, when we burn it out with the chopped husks of our doors. I’m sick, Pa. Where is your money?” It goes much the same for a few months. But he is beautiful, my boy, and I love him. His face is my own, built out of yeast and hardened with heat, freckles of cinnamon adorn him in the Son. Patches of ringworm, too. His eyes are euhedral and cuboid in their masked luster, and they reflect anybody with good cheer, and most of all truth, as permanent as the odor of the rose, and as wild as a canker bloom. I don’t wish him sick.
IVAN
And this boy, does he go to school? Like you, in his speech, he may still become.
MONTROSE, SR.
Not now. He dun’t want to. But I have faith in him and his abilities. He may not talk but he can speak, and speak he does. He speaks to me, Ivan. Tells me I can’t abandon him in my killings, and I won’t. I won’t abandon Barley. I won’t.
IVAN
And why?
MONTROSE, SR.
Barley is beautiful in the man-o-sorrow’s desire and he is still a boy, though he doesn’t understand. He could burn the house and I would love him. He could kill the crops and I would love him, so long as he does not kill me I will yet love him. In this darkness of war there is my boy, and his mangy scrawny malaise, stuttering and sputtering frame is so loved that it is perfect.
IVAN
Aye. I myself have known nothing of the sort. Your boy has luck in him, Fate ‘as blessed him with a good man as his father. Hold that from me, of all the peoples in this blighted place.
[The both of them are creaking softly over the kurnamescent flames which grow into arborescent peaks. Ivan reaches for the gun and plugs the barell. Montrose Sr. looks up and remembers that he and his boy watch much the same night. He can see the ‘lion eyes.]
MONTROSE, SR.
Even in your meanness that leaves me so disturbed, you can relent for a half-piece.
IVAN
It may be so.
MONTROSE, SR.
How much money did you bring?
IVAN
Not enough greenbacks to buy a new rifle off the back of some greaser, if that is what you ask. Mark this, though, Montrose: I know what I have seen in Albuquerque, just as much as you do. If you think I am to give it up, you are wrong. No serenades to your boy and his mother will do it any good in my mind. Not worth anything. But there are many days a-front of us, and many opportunities for confession in each.
MONTROSE, SR.
Tell me about Polk, then. Fire’s still going, and I see that you must talk about it.
IVAN
And we derived Tyler just the other night in La Jara. Very well, we can delay things for a while longer. Just know it only grows in my mind.
MONTROSE, SR.
Get a move on.
IVAN
And Polk was the whisped-out dust-cloth of that Old Hickory. I suspect he had some kind of vampirism, for he disintegrated and died not long after departing from the role of President. Very much a blood-sucker, but one capable of doing great things. You remember the war with the Mexicans. He defended this and that and won it, including this land in which we now grovel and argue, or more so you. Texas, too. My father met him, you know. He met the president.
MONTROSE, SR.
Says you. I call another lie out of your damned mouth. Your blood would leap out of its skin out of sheer revulsion and opposition, like magnets.
IVAN
And so we are one and the same force, me and the president, if we are forced apart. I am as good as Polk or Jackson!
MONTROSE, SR.
Oh, shut up. Your ego will be the death of us all—and no, it already has been! If you just took the damn thing in, or at least admitted some fault, we could do our job.
IVAN
And what is that? You never said.
MONTROSE, SR.
Injuns. It always is.
IVAN
And you see it, don’t you? Carleton knows Lincoln and the real Union are boiling and frothing in war, and Texas is gone right out of here. What war is left for us? There is always one, and now it is the injuns. We came up with them, real good, and it was a comforting invention. Carleton is a much smarter man than Polk—should’ve been president.
MONTROSE, SR.
And so should you, I imagine where you’d take it.
IVAN
And would that do so poorly? Any man of the muck like us would do well there. That’s why Hickory, that old white lion, did so well, you saw.
MONTROSE, SR.
Davis would’ve had your head by May of ‘61—not hard to imagine that, neither. In fact, I look highly upon it like I do the Walk.
IVAN
Oh, shut yourself. And what would you do, if by some miracle you were elected?
MONTROSE, SR.
Oh, the first thing? I’d’ve put all our interests in molasses.
IVAN
Molasses?
MONTROSE, SR.
Yes, molasses is down in this country, badly. All of the cane is grown in Florida—all of it. Now it is divorced, and there is nothing. This is what we must do if we don’t want Pennsylvania to go next—and mark it, they will. Sugar is all the only thing that accounts.
IVAN
I understand the more you explicate. It is our opium, with real consideration. All great men need sugar.
MONTROSE, SR.
And it is not just the great men—not even the men. All of it. It is necessary to keep the people down and happy, and without it there is no union! It is one thing to know it, and another to think about it, and that’s what I mean: take a look at the man who has not known sugar and its taste—this is a revolutionary one.
IVAN
Aye. Perhaps it wouldn’t be terrible with you in charge. Ask me the same.
MONTROSE, SR.
Why?
IVAN
And go.
MONTROSE, SR.
What would you do if President?
IVAN
Aside from the obvious, I’d have that Davis hanging from an a sour apple tree. It is only the law of nature, really.
MONTROSE, SR.
And what of these lands and their rebels? Where do we go in the morrow?
IVAN
The only Civil War there is, the one we go to. And a dumb question it is to ask, even for you. You don’t right know what you ask.
MONTROSE, SR.
And what is this war?
[The embers are dying out, now. The wind keeps low and the thin stream goes on. They remain silent for many minutes. Montrose Sr. feels his cleaner face. In the encroaching black the rabbles of rock and sand begin to stir; the water interrupts.]
Enter Wilhelm
IVAN
Who’s there? Stand and unfold yourself.
Wilhelm
Only me. I see fit for no name to be brought upon me.
MONTROSE, SR.
My God! Is it a ghost? Don’t be it.
Wilhelm
No ghosts out here, only men. You call it Ingolstadt. And I am Wilhelm. Permit me to join your camp, and I will do so. Far more about. And do yourselves better to allow me.
IVAN
We are without choice. Step into the light. Know we have a gun, and it is situated with powder down its guzzle. We have no qualms with killing and will do it to you, too.
[Wilhelm steps closer to what is left of the retch-and-call fire, and out of the stream. He is a branch along the river, bent up and smoothed again by wind. His legs like teepees with roots, his arms their wool panels. He is without feeling, without being, so foreign to all man that he has become now unfamiliar to all but the turned back, the forgotten mountains without peaks, the vultures which pray upon the forgetful and the weary. This is not a good man—he is unknown to every nation cast upon the contorted faces of the earth. His teeth are perfect. Upon bending down, Montrose Sr. jumps.]
MONTROSE, SR.
And what are you! Not a man, certainly not. You are no man.
Wilhelm
And in the happenings of this night, there is much to do—so much to do. And you, what is your name, Ivan?
IVAN
You know nothing, demi-natured. Stay within lighting distance, and no more. You are a wretch! Your grey leaves of hair don’t fool us; you are no benign matter.
Wilhelm
Ah. And do beasts do things such as these?
[From an unseen contrivance, a divot in otherwise tattered three-quart cotton slacks that went down to the deepest profundities of Earth, Wilhelm reveals a meandering tapestry built off grey dead men’s fingers, made of flesh and not spore. They are arranged in a guiding star and with twigs through the nails and hanging pears off the ridges, all spinning and dangling off ropes and threads and hair, multitudes of it. It is pretty and much like gunpowder. All are silent for a flit. Monrose Sr. breaks it first.]
MONTROSE, SR.
And how are you here? We are in nothing, by nothing for near six hours.
Wilhelm
Know you a son?
MONTROSE, SR.
And if I did? For how long have you been near us?
Wilhelm
And possess me, O! the river. I cannot bear watching it. Watch it, now, in this night? Blasted into war we are, and it runs. I am naught. Watch the moss. It clings onto its eroded trophy, look! Mark it, it goes north, parallel to the Great River, and why? It guides, it guides, though not me it guides. O! where is gold, my Ivan, where is gold? And Barley, Mister Montrose, where is Barley? Something may move yet in the waters, and I am varicosed all the same. My lipids cling to no capsid overcoat, and winter grows closer, yet. Tell me—no, refrain it yet—of why the Navahos must be marched to?
IVAN
Carleton says so, and it will be done. Every Indian a carleton, and every Comanche a civilian, is what it is. We can’t know all the goings-ons.
Wilhelm
No, you can’t. Panic is in the economy, our minds o’erthrown, and we live. You call it Ingolstadt, I call it Bavaria. My nose, observe its curve?
MONTROSE, SR.
I mark it, and it goes left, pointing back.
IVAN
No, pardon Montrose. It goes right, it does. He is not two men, he isn’t.
MONTROSE, SR.
It shouldn’t be! Really, he exists in both our visions and he is the same! He must!
Wilhelm
And so I am different to two eyes in immediate distance—mark this? In the first fire.
IVAN
I will do no such thing to mark it, slime-filled wretch.
MONTROSE, SR.
And my son, and our names, and our exact predicament. These shadowless plains hold you, and without us knowing.
IVAN
I stand in hope of your leave, man. Speak not of your son to him, Montrose. He torments, O!—he torments.
Wilhelm
But look at me, Montrose—this alone I ask. From you it is not much labor. See my eyes and their weary cables—my optic vessels are about to snap in here.
MONTROSE, SR.
And he keeps with the speaking—don’t grow too belated in your exit, please.
Wilhelm
Please, I plead. Let me plead, plead plead. Who pleads? It is the beggar that pleads, pleads, pleads. Pluck your pleas, plead them back to me and find nothing. Find nothing where I stand, and these are my feet. Find nothing where I leer and lean like a crooning cat in this. This dark. This obsidian night. Find nothing and pour your pleads out on me, for this is what you were born to do—and to make others do so.
MONTROSE, SR.
Know you of what we do, in this flat forest rock eroded jungle?
Wilhelm
Kill Indianers. Manuelito is a stubborn one, and he’s going into the canyon. They’ve burned it down and he goes further, further.
[Wilhelm pauses.]
Wilhelm (aside)
And your worst crime is not this, so knownt.
MONTROSE, SR.
You are no multi-part man! Who could tell you of this?
Wilhelm
And do not act like you don’t know this requite. It is easy for even me to see.
[The face of the still-silent Ivan contorts around the flaps of skin and juts of hair like larches in foreign and unseen pines to these people that girdled his mandibular attachments.]
IVAN
No, no. No. I knownt. I don’t know it. He says nothing. I did not. Did not is what I did, and all I do, save for tomorrow. We aren’t slugs, Montrose, but we don’t move. And get out!
[Ivan points the flintlock at the man—Wilhelm—and with more rigor than should be expected. He won’t get very far with that is written across his bell-face. Bell-face because it’s rounding and puffing by the minute, red with rust and hot blood. Wilhelm holds still]
Wilhelm
Yes.
MONTROSE, SR.
You dun’t even care about the union, you idiot. You lie and cheat for me and not the stars. You, more Mexican than American, hold nothing over me, and no Albuquerque will keep us out of that Canyon, the fucking peaches. The god-damned, fucking peaches, tart. And I know you cheat, for is it probable that the desert-German must simply waft here to babble? No! No! It is not, and we are a natural world, and in natural worlds there are falls but there are not ghosts—no!
Wilhelm
Your son is sick and I know such things because I know your sin. Strumpets in houses people don’t tell of, and they were afraid, and your son too.
IVAN
Barrel practically swallows his head down and he talks yet.
Wilhelm
Say your words, Ivan. I am not the subject.
IVAN
Your son is sick, Montrose, because I watched you do it. And you won’t say it, and I did not. He won’t either because he doesn’t know, and neither does He. You have to tell it. You have to tell it.
MONTROSE, SR.
My son is sick because I am found with other women. Whores in Albuquerque of all kinds and he saw me. The boy saw when I brought her home before the war and then he couldn’t sleep and then he got sick—all the boy needs is money, my money. And I can give it!
[Montrose grabs Ivan’s collar from atop the still-clinging fire.]
MONTROSE, SR. (Cont’d)
I can give it, yes, Carleton promised. All it takes is a scalp and dead stocks. We burn the peaches and we get the money.
Wilhelm
And touch the tapestry; you are almost complete. Only a step, only a step.
IVAN
Sick men moralize. Sick men moralize and moralize and talk from on high the mount until the end, end. Such a storm this is, and what a clear night we are in.
MONTROSE, SR.
But I must say, I must: it will be well. I have done right by him, and so long as this is done, then I love him. Then I love him until there is no New Mexico nor a United States to consume it, nor a land upon which a country can be founded, founded those years ago when men wore wigs.
Wilhelm
Do you wish to know what happens in the Canyon by the divot by morning?
IVAN
No.
MONTROSE, SR.
Yes.
Wilhelm
I am as ignorant as your wish and its effects. I know nothing, put it back to me and find nothing but more unwanted. Unwanted men are all that go out here.
IVAN
No.
Wilhelm
What?
IVAN
You are forgetting you are a man. I am wanted, and Montrose with me.
Wilhelm
And you lie.
IVAN
And you the same. You lie more than any man I’ve ever seen, principally about your nature. And I tell the truth for the first time this night when I admit the place in me occupied by that thing that puts us towards war: fear. Fear and hunger make a man mad. We know this because we march in this desert for that expressed purpose. We express it because we like it and the fire it produces.
[Montrose Sr. begins to hold himself and through the kurnamescent streaks of flame that shoot towards his bespectacled-in-film eyes there are tears, and he is a boy inside a man. His hair is held from his head with bands and crusted grease in a sculpted menagerie of vines, and he is pulling them—not because he is mad, but because he has only recently discovered that he is not, and that he is sober from all drink.]
Wilhelm
Then trail along and follow the stream, if it calls you so much.
IVAN
I say no such th—
[The tapestry is out again. He flicks one of the many and always fingers and it reverberates around like a physick trick. It spins and spins and Ivan is enchanted. He begins to walk to the stream.]
Wilhelm
Crawl.
MONTROSE, SR.
He left the gun. I know you’re out there, I know you’re out there. Leave me, please leave me. I am doing as you say by asking, and I don’t brandish it. I am no saint, I know, but I did not leave my child—though if he asked, how I would. I do this, now, to you. Leave.
Wilhelm
Expect me, again. Expect me.
Exit Wilhelm
[Montrose Sr. thumbs the flintlock with rhythm.]
MONTROSE, SR.
And alone. Finally, alone. I am pricked by rust and its misfortunes, and they are all here now, in front of me. It is a shame, shame, shame, what good it has been, and what good it was. And do you agree, please do! I would have you do so.
MONTROSE, SR.
And I, too.
MONTROSE, SR.
Is it true that I laid with her, that Babylon, in the city?
MONTROSE, SR.
Not just in Albuquerque; the Carolinas did you nothing for good. They all know, too.
MONTROSE, SR.
But did I do it wrongly? Am I still the truth? And what of you? When do you leave me?
MONTROSE, SR.
Epilogues come in pairs, that’s the rule: the mollusk and the vertebrate. This is just right. Go to the stream.
MONTROSE, SR.
I can’t do nothing to hold myself in water, ‘cept for my hands. Will I not drown?
MONTROSE, SR.
It is only a hair deep. Sandcrawling poquitoes play in it all the time, before and after.
[Montrose Sr. works himself up and to the stream, sitting in its one demented current, saint-yellow and blind to its northward passage. Around him it divides and curves, impervious to any interaction and reaching for his ear-tips where they were once punctured with silver tacks before the money came. It goes through the divots left and out back onto the shellground, so retaining it is in the desert.]
MONTROSE, SR.
And here I lie. I’m not cold, nor wet. Is this pain? My own muscles know none of it. Up there!
MONTROSE, SR.
The weather is changing, yes. Clouds turn round in angles, and they are sharp like maguey and blushing with Easter. Bayonets.
MONTROSE, SR.
Did I do any soldiering—out here, I mean? Hardly any reds and blues out here to kill, and I see none but in the lonestar and they’re all gone. I want to know, tell me of the soldiering.
MONTROSE, SR.
You truly wish it? Even in the stream?
MONTROSE, SR.
Yes.
MONTROSE, SR.
And so: within the month of picking up your first rifle you’d done nothing of killing. You missed Glorieta Pass by a few months, and all there was to do was idle—Union men and the Mexicans didn’t take you much. You were skinny and small—still are. And one night, alone in Santa Fe, it was just past the Monsoon, before this winter campaign. And it was past the monsoon, and the sky was wounded in royal purple and verdance, altogether bruised in reflected waterbuds, and on that night, past that Monsoon, you decided it to be most beautiful. More magnificent, more breathless, arm-slacking beauty than you had hitherto seen in all your life. And there were rocks, many of them polished in the rain, and you decided on them, too, and you watched from in front of blowing curtains and there was an impending thing and you knew it. It was another storm tomorrow and tomorrow, and you knew that too, and you were not yellow and green. You were not there. It was very pretty.
MONTROSE, SR.
And after? I know it wasn’t far off from here. You must tell me.
MONTROSE, SR.
It’s not unlike this sky, you know. And you went out, out of the Casita whose owners you had been bargaining with for days to stay a minute longer—and there was a raid. They dragged out a few for no apparent reason—it happened. And one of the men pointing at the others was Ivan, and you saw him and for a second he was purple, and this was pretty. You forgot the others, and I wasn’t there—you told me later.
MONTROSE, SR.
Keep going, not much further.
MONTROSE, SR.
Going down to Albuquerque on saddles tougher than the bones they treaded on took days, and the pain grew in your spine—you had one, at that time. And there was drink, and you condemned him to the first tipping, you and your boy. They all went down so quickly, and you fought, and you couldn't see. Blind with drink. I couldn’t see. It kept going until a few of them found the houses and leapt into it like stray mutts, and you didn’t.
MONTROSE, SR.
And I didn't, but there was one.
MONTROSE, SR.
And she was more beautiful than all of it. All of it. She swayed like a leaf and you lost your spine. And if I word her to you again, you’ll see her and forget again. The stream—how is it?
MONTROSE, SR.
It’s the lumbar of the earth. Rocks are hard on the bottom and there’s a carpet of plants and little teeming things. I can get feeling of the worms moving. It’s boiling in appearance.
[The sun creeps over the opening plains and tribes of nomadic bushes live and dead and they are rolling down, down. Montrose shifts his weight, and the stream shifts with him. It reflects dwindling apparitions of overhanging stars that grow blinded. He will need to get up and move soon, and so will Ivan. It is pleasant, very pleasant.]
MONTROSE, SR.
Watch him, now, he’s on his way.
[Ivan is the very same man, only covered in sand. He is the same.]
IVAN
Stay put Montrose, only stay put. Morning comes quickly at this season and we are not long before our departure.
MONTROSE, SR.
They said we will die, yes?
IVAN
Yes, today’s likely. They’re starving, Montrose—starving. They have arrows to our guns.
MONTROSE, SR.
And ours is jammed, remember?
IVAN
Ah, well.
MONTROSE, SR.
Don’t hesitate to point the sun to me, man. I know you see it coming up behind.
IVAN
I see quite little.
MONTROSE, SR.
And where did you go? You were gone a while, I was left with little but to set myself down in the water. Cool waters are necessary of my own will and conviction, you see.
IVAN
Nothing much. I crawled down a good two hundred feet, and not many more inches and minutes. Everywhere empty.
MONTROSE, SR.
And I see morning coming; it may have been a long time.
IVAN
Yes, I think it was. Long time. Very long.