It is not as long as I had fears of New Haven to Portland, only five hours by Amtrak with one latency inside Boston. The trains of Amtrak are comfortable but not also fast and luxurious as those in France, and unreasonably expensive.

I was met at the station of Portland by Jennifer, the celebrated transsexual who wrote the memory-book and appeared on the popular television program for the stupid women. She is a woman large with the hair of long ash and the chests of artificial firmness and buoyancy for one of her age. Everywhere the men turned their heads for to follow with eyes for the sidelong look on her, unconscious that she had in the past been a man. Immediately at the moment of receiving me she launched ahead in a maniac and clownish execution, speaking in the affected falsetto voice, developing absurd imaginary scenarios, without stop, so that it was impossible to speak or question her on the subjects first in my concern of conscience. It was one hour and a half to her house.

The house it is beautiful and located on a lake. Maine is like Germany or Scandinavia in summers, shone upon and pleasant without feeling the reluctant heat and infernal moisture of Maryland. The air is fresh and feels of the trees coniferous. Jennifer has a pleasant and beautiful wife (it is an unexplained loophole in the laws homophobic of the United States) and two schoolboys. Then older is clownish and amusing like Jennifer and plays the tuba, the rote practice of which is somewhat monotonous and impossible to be unaware of. The young person seems to be like a robot or foreigner of space, speaking like his mother Jennifer in the voices of idiots. He is a Prodigy with the Chess and has me beaten in inside twelve movements with my humiliation.

In day we went to seek turns of bicycle around the back roads from rural Maine, threatened from time to time by greasy and unnecessarily colossal trucks of American design. It has a pleasant and wooded sector, with much the beautiful vistas. With the twilight Jennifer and I appreciated cocktails on the platform to look on the lake. There was a drink they called it "Mojito," a mixture of Cuba with the heavy use of the crushed leaf of mint, regenerating and poisoning. With the passage of the hours and one cocktail the insane antics and the idiotics of voice began to drop and we could speak intelligibly about Mr. Kreider. Apparently he had spoken to visit but he is much undecided and inclined to impulse during this time of the crisis. However, Jennifer visited him in New York during a certain time. In order to encourage him she took him to visit a cemetery of the famous. They extended to listen to the music of Miles Davis at his tomb and placed their hands waggishly on the spherical breasts of the sphinx flanking the crypt of Woolworth, the tycoon of department stores, and rested at the tomb of the American author Herman Melville. At the tomb of Melville Mr. Kreider has supposedly indicated that he was forsaken and at the end of his spirit in his depression. She did not know what to answer him. She did not know whereafter he had gone.

As in Maryland, it is of use here to eat large shellfish cooked with the vapor, a horrible business. In the place of being beaten with the hammers of wood, they are split with grips of nut-crackers. The entrails of the interior come outside in one viscous and dreadful mass. The giant crawfish is even taller and more insectoid than the blue crab, and the flesh is rubbery and insipid. All appreciated this food but for me. I condescended to eat a bite out of the graciousness but could not be persuaded to have more. I was enough with corn-of-the-ear and cold salad of potato.

In the night of Maine the stars frighten in their numbers and luminosity. To rest in the burbling bucket of heating and the glance fixed upwards in the sky, it is like to float in space. Jennifer sipped of a balloon glass of bourbon and spoke with feeling of Mr. Kreider. She knew him during almost twenty years, when she was a professor of a writing of Mr. Kreider's. Mr. Kreider went to remain with her in the hospital in Wisconsin when she had her “re-attribution of kind” surgery, and read to her of the book “The Married Princess” with her bedside and observed films of Keaton and of the musical type and divided calmeurs with her. She feels large the affection and gratitude towards him and is considerable inside his debt. One or twice per minute when a meteor would scratch through the sky, the image fluoresced on the retina, or perhaps only the memory. There is nothing of the light pollution or misty air of the semi-Atlantic area. However, there are mosquitos as large as the birds which regale themselves on the blood of the neglected. We withdrew ourselves within the house, where Jennifer drank Irish whiskey and started with to play the toothing-stone and sing the sad ribald ballades of the Irish people until it was hour for the bed.

Jennifer, a mother, withdraws herself early to equalize, leaving me to rest on the deck, listening to demented ghostly cries of some unknown birds of the water* and to consider the unknown destiny of my complicated and exasperating but loved mentor. I am a deeply interested party about the wellbeing of Mr. Kreider's and am badly at ease leaving the empty house and to give up my search for him in this condition of disequilibrium. But it is time when I am turned back to Europe and devoted my full efforts with my own novel. I worked too much long an apprentice. The question maintaining for me is: to what do I owe this man?

-C.-H.

*In the next morning I was well-informed that those are called “lunatics.”