Americana

7

Passing them on the roads as they journeyed toward their own interior limits, one might easily be inspired to twist the thumb of a famous first sentence. It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. On foot they traveled, in old and new cars, in motorcycle packs, in trucks and buses and camp trailers, the young and the very young, leaving their medieval cities, tall stone citadels of corruption and plague, not hopeless in their flight, not yet manic in their search, the lost, the found, the nameless, the brilliant, the stoned, the dazed and the simply weary, shouting their honest love of country across the broken white line, faces lost in disbelief and hair, the drummer, the mystic, the fascist, an occasional female eye peering from a rear window, the noise at the back of her head a short song of peace.

We were nearing the end of the first week, determined not to stray even for a moment beyond the borders of our native land, carefully avoiding all those big footprint lakes and the specter of guiltless Canada. Sullivan slept up front, in the part of the camper that extended over the cab. Pike did most of the cooking. Brand did most of the driving. I yelled and read aloud from road maps.

With us all the way had been Sullivan's three-antenna marine-band hi-fi portable radio, a never-ending squall of disc jockey babytalk, commercials for death, upstate bluegrass Jesus, and as we drove through the cloverleaf bedlams and past the morbid gray towns I perceived that all was in harmony, the stunned land feeding the convulsive radio, every acre of the night bursting with a kinetic unity, the logic beyond delirium.

When it rained Sullivan put on her old buttonless trench-coat even though we were inside the camper. What a mysterious and sacramental journey, I thought, not knowing most of the time where we were, depending on Pike to get us from place to place. Every time I saw a river I thought it was the Mississippi. Every gas station attendant we talked to was named Earl.

I taped many of our conversations.

"This big blue yawning country," Brand said early one evening over sandwiches. "I want to piss on all the trees, tumble downhills, chase jackrabbits, climb up rooftops, crucify myself on TV aerials. I want to say hi neighbor to everybody we meet. It's beautiful. It's too much. Baby, it's wild. It's the strangest, wildest, freakingest country in history. Davy, keep me bland."

"Tell us about your novel," Sullivan said.

"Writers never talk about work in progress," I said. "Isn't that right, Bobby? It destroys the necessary tension. If they talked about it, they wouldn't have to write it anymore. Essentially people write to break the tension. Right, Brand? If the creative tension is broken prematurely, the original motivation is lost. I'm surprised to hear you ask a question like that, Sully. You of all people."

"It's about a man who turns into a woman," Brand said. "He's the former president of the United States. He's completed his two terms but he's still very popular and he's always speaking at important banquets. At the same time he's turning into a woman. He's beginning to grow breasts and his genitals are shrinking. His voice is becoming high and faggy. He wears a garter belt for the secret thrill it gives him. He's a WASP, the ex-president. But de new president is black. He's patterned after Sonny Liston. He's very hip and magical. He turns on every night and he's making it with all the wives and daughters of the southern senators and even with some of the senators themselves. It'll be over a thousand pages long. It's called Coitus Interruptus. The theme is whatever you want it to be because appearance is all that matters, man. The whole country's going to puke blood when they read it."

"I want to talk about this idea I've got for a movie," I said.

"We're all ears," Pike said.

"I'm thinking of making a long messy autobiographical-type film, part of which I'd like to do out here in the Midwest, if that's where we are-a long unmanageable movie full of fragments of everything that's part of my life, maybe ultimately taking two or three or more full days to screen and only a minutely small part of which I'd like to do out here. Pick out some sleepy town and shoot some film."

"How long will that take?" Sullivan said. "You'll be filming Indians in a couple of weeks."

"We've got time. The part I want to do now will take only two or three days. Either three days or seventeen years. I'll use available light. I don't care how primitive it is technically. Besides, I won't be filming Indians personally. I won't actually be handling a camera. My job will be to supervise and be supervised. The movie I want to make will be a different kind of thing completely. I'm just starting to get it straightened out in my head. It's funny how it came to me. I saw a woman trimming a hedge. Almost immediately it became something, else. And it's still changing."

"I wasn't finished talking about my novel," Brand said.

Pike was exploring his ear with a toothpick wrapped in tissue paper. When he was done he went up front to drive.

It was dusk now, bent rust powdering the western sky, neon-blooming motels, the dull sulfuric cast of roadlights, a jalopy abandoned in a field, hood raised like the peak of a baseball cap, a scene from the rural thirties. Sullivan hummed a medley of what appeared to be antiwar tunes. Brand was curled up with his British-made rolling machine and Zig-Zag cigarette paper. We seemed to be passing a resort area now. There were the white toy cottages with pink shutters from Hansel and Gretel and the filling stations of the back streets of small towns with a lone old pump and a dog asleep in grease. I remembered to turn off the tape recorder. Then I turned on the radio. Ali Akbar Khan was performing an evening raga, a sad liquid joy spilling from the strings of his sarod, and I thought of a blind Bengali walking a tightrope over nothing. I began in the dark and would no doubt end the same way. But somewhere between beginning and end there would have to be an attempt to explain the darkness, if only to myself, no matter how strange a form the explanation would take, and regardless of consequence. Maybe it was her hair. Maybe it was the way she moved as she cut the hedge, with the beautifully stylized bearing of a child who knows she is being watched. Sullivan kept on humming. A police helicopter appeared over the trees and went beating past us down the highway. Brand sucked smoke deep into his body.

"Where the fuck have all the flowers gone," he sang, hurrying the words to make them fit.

Pike turned onto a side road and eventually pulled into an A amp;P parking lot, fitting the camper between two station wagons waiting to be gorged. We entered by the great glass omniscient door, which knew we were coming and opened of itself. Brand and I peeled off from the others and followed a dark attractive woman down a side aisle to the peaches and plums. Her fingers skipped among the peaches, testing and prodding, and we moved alongside, our cart nudging her cart.

"Peaches," Brand said.

She gave us no sign.

"Look at the word come out of my mouth all moist and fuzzy. Peaches. It's the perfect word for the perfect thing. Now we're all standing here. If we all watch my lips, we'll all see it come out. Peaches. What do you think, miss, if that's your name. Should we pick up a pound or two? We're just a couple of good-looking guys from the East Coast, especially him. Listen, I've got some grass back at the plastic bitch."

She moved over to the plums and we followed. She was tall and her hips swung terrifically behind the shopping cart.

"Come on back to the truck with us and let loose for a while. We'll eat plums and smoke dope. I'm writing a novel using the direct interior monologue technique."

She looked around for a rescuer and I studied the plum in her fine Mediterranean hand. She was the kind of woman you imagine meeting in Port Said, older, wiser than you, pig-mented of earth and made of many bloods, amused at your blond boyish Yankee ways, dispensing shattering truth in short sentences, and here she was, incredibly, among the plums of Middle America.

"Air is not invisible," Brand said.

She soon vanished. We put our cart into reverse. The shelves were long and brilliant, and I thought of my father. This was his spangled ark, cans of dessert-whip with squiggly pricklike tops, mythology and thunderbolts, the green giant's loins, buckets of power and white beyond white, trauma in the rectangles of evangelistic writ. (You have to move the merch off the shelves.) A baby sat in a grocery cart, crying; his mother gave him a stalk of celery to play with and he was content. "Who loves mommy," she said. "Say who loves her, stinky-pants. Baby loves mommy. Yes, baby loves mommy. Say it, stinky-pants. Baby loves mommy. Yes, yes, yes." Women put their heads into monstrous freezers and came out alive. Checkout girls moved their hips against the cash registers. An old lady fell down.

In time we came to a town called Fort Curtis. I was alone up front, driving slowly, wearing my green shades and a pair of old khaki trousers with huge back pockets that might have been designed to conceal rope, flashlights and barbwire cutters. It was late afternoon, an unseasonably warm day, bug juice all over the windshield, an idle insect hum coming from the tall grass by the river. The river might have been the Wabash or the Ohio or the Mississippi for all I knew. I drove slowly through the town's shady dead streets. Brick and frame houses stood under large elms. The porches had carved posts. There were lilac bushes in the gardens, moss at the base of telephone poles and a bandstand in the park at the edge of town. I drove around a little longer and then stopped in front of a three-story white frame hotel. We needed baths.

There were four elderly people sitting in the lobby, turning the pages of identical magazines. I got a room with a bath and then went back out to the camper. Brand and Sullivan were asleep on cots. Pike was sitting at the table in his World War I side-button shorts, drinking bourbon and smelling his armpits. I woke up Sullivan. She put some things into an overnight bag and went into the hotel. I waited ten minutes and went up to the room. As I reached for the doorknob I heard water running in the tub. The door was open. Some of her clothes were on the bed. I studied the plain brown robe, an item suitable for Lenten mortification. The room was painted a surly municipal green. Dust, paper clips and scraps of plaster had been swept into a corner. There was no TV set. The fabric on the armchair was thinning out. I heard Sullivan sink into the tub.

"Those dear old things in the lobby," she said. "What's the name of this place-the Menopause Hilton?"

"How did you know I was here?"

"My secret will die with me, Igor."

"Listen," I said. "When you wash your legs, do you lift one leg way up out of the water and sort of scrub it slowly and sensually like the models in TV commercials?"

"No."

"Can I come in and watch?"

"No, she said."

"Why not? We're adults."

"Exactly."

"If I promise to keep one hand over my eyes, can I come in and scrub your back?"

"Where are you sitting?"

"On the bed."

"See if you can find my cigarettes."

"They're not here," I said. "Want me to go down and get them?"

"Don't bother."

I tossed the cigarettes and matches under the bed.

"Sully, would you mind if we stayed around this town for a couple of days?"

"For your movie?"

"I'll look around this evening and then decide."

"What's so special about this place?"

"It seems old and simple and dull."

"I don't mind. Have you asked the others?"

"I think they'll go along with it. Everybody's pretty exhausted. We can use a few days of rest."

"Where are we anyway?" she said.

"It could be Indiana. But it could be Illinois or Kentucky. I'm not sure."

"I guess it doesn't matter. I don't know why I ask, but what's west of here?"

"Iowa, I think. Although maybe Iowa is further north. I'm trying to remember what's below Iowa."

"Never mind. It doesn't matter. I don't know why I asked."

I sat on the bed listening to the room tone, or general background noise, and filming in my mind a line of light and shade across the armchair. The room seemed beyond time, beyond present tense at any rate, in tone, in appearance, in the very quality of its light and air. I thought of it as the kind of room which, years before, or decades, had little purpose but to await the hardware salesman and his whisky flings.

Most likely the room had looked as shabby then as it did now. Maybe that was the dream in those days, a touch of cluttered lust, long gone now, for a new image had awakened our instincts, brides and bawds and gunmen of the West, an image to fit our ascetic scheme, the rise of the low motel, neat and clean at ground zero, electronic rabbit at the end of the bed. An arm and breast hung from the open door of the bathroom. I picked her robe off the bed and tossed it toward her wrist. The room's mood was dead. It was thirty years or more dead and gone.

That evening I got out my camera and went for a walk. It was a 16mm Canon Scoopic, modified to work as a sync rig with my tape recorder, a late-model Nagra. The camera didn't have an interchangeable lens but it was light, easy to handle and went to work in a hurry. Originally all I had wanted to do on the trip west was shoot some simple film, the white clapboard faces of Mennonite farmers, the spare Kansans in their churchgoing clothes. But now my plans were a bit more ambitious, scaring me somewhat, at least in their unedited form. I clutched the handgrip, rested the camera on my right shoulder and walked through the quiet streets. Soon a small crowd was following me.

8

Remarkably the bench wasn't green. It was light blue and it faced the yellow bandstand. The playground area, off to the side, was even more cheery in color, perhaps to counterbalance the stark forbidding nature of much of the apparatus. I sat on the bench and watched a small girl sail a book of matches in a puddle below the water fountain. I waited and slowly they approached, six welcomers in two loosely joined teams of three. First came an old man and two old ladies; then a teen-age boy leading two men who looked as though they might have shared a watch or two on a tin can off Guadal (in the Warner Brothers forties) and talked about the body-and-fender shop they would open when they got back to the States. Of course it was the camera they were interested in, that postlinear conversation piece, and they gathered around me in stages, introducing themselves, asking questions, being exceedingly friendly, secretly preparing their outrage for the moment of my incivility. But I remained well-mannered throughout, a guest in sacred places.

The old man was Mr. Hutchins, who said he liked to be called either Mr. H or Hutch, the latter name being favored by his Florida cronies. The women were his wife and his sister, Flora and Veejean, and they appeared to be in their mid-sixties, beautiful, smiling and silent, a pair of lace curtains fixed in sunlight. Hutch had once owned an Argus that he'd sent away for. He said the whole works only cost him one hundred fifty dollars-camera, projector, tripod screen, camera case, roll of film. His footage of the Everglades had been shown to a packed house in the basement of the Methodist Church.

The other men were Glenn Yost and Owney Pine and the boy was Glenn Yost Jr., who preferred to be called Bud. It turned out that each group knew the other only by sight, living in different ends of town, having been collected here, as it were, by the sight of the camera, the boy's curiosity equal to the old man's.

"How much the camera cost?" Bud said.

"Twelve hundred and change."

That was good for a whistle from Mr. H.

"I might get a super 8 this summer," the boy said. "I'm hoping the Bolex 155. We have a club at school. So far I haven't done much because the equipment they have is pretty limited. But if I can get a Bolex, I'd go right out of my mind. What kind of diopter range that thing give you?"

His father stood behind him, reflective and gloomy, left eye jumping, head tilted far to one side, almost resting on his shoulder, and I was reminded of the ancient relief pitcher Hoyt Wilhelm standing on the mound waiting for the sign to be given, fingers knuckling along the seams of the ball, men on first and third and none out, nobody caring anywhere in the world. There was a young man with a guitar sitting on the edge of the bandstand.

Mr. Hutchins described himself, in no particular context, as a stickler for accuracy. He and the ladies said goodnight then, time to catch Bob Hope on TV, and we watched them walk past a huge skeletal flywheel and out into the street.

men with all sorts of insane technical data. Owney Pine finally put one of his fat white arms around the boy's head, muffling him in jest and holding him that way for a minute or so, a quality of mutual affection informing the little scene as the man quietly jostled and bumped, barely aware of the struggling boy, who, at an overgrown fifteen or sixteen, could not have been easy to hold.

"Plan to be here awhile?" Glenn said.

"A few days maybe. My camera seems interested in this place."

"Are you one of those people from the mass media?" Owney said, still keeping Bud from wriggling out.

"I'm an independent filmmaker. I'm scouting locales at the moment. How'd you like to be in the movies?"

"Sheee."

"You think about it," I said.

Bud cut in then with another question and Owney released him. We talked a bit longer. The young man eased down off the bandstand and headed toward us. He carried the guitar over his shoulder and dragged a knapsack along the ground behind him. He seemed a skinny broken kid in decomposing clothes, enormously happy about something. The others backed off slightly at his approach-an ethnologic retreat really, one that I sensed rather than actually witnessed.

"Hey, what's that? That an 8 or 16?"

"It's a Scoopíc 16. It's basically a news camera."

"I'm walking to California," he said.

He stood there, smiling, in ankle-high basketball sneakers. Glenn Yost said he and Bud had better be getting on home to have a look at the bloodworms. He said the boy dug up worms and sold them for bait. They were kept in large jars in the basement. He and Bud liked to look in on the worms every evening about sundown because that was the time the worms did most of their writhing and both father and son got a special kick out of seeing worms writhe, especially in masses. Glenn's left eye stuttered again. I couldn't be sure whether or not this was some local brand of double-reverse sophisticated humor. The boy's face was noncommittal and I thought they might be playing games with me, satirizing the outsider's conviction that smalltown life is a surrender to just such tiny deaths, worm-watching and Masonic handshakes. (Or were they trying to negate the serpent power of the longhair, distract him with worms while the townspeople put their torches to his guitar?) Owney Pine said he would tag along with them. The park lights came on.

"I started walking about three months ago," the young man said. "I started out from Washington, D.C., so it'll be almost a coast-to-coast walk. I've been trying to do it in a straight line, D.C. to Frisco, but I've strayed a little south. There's plenty of time to adjust, I guess."

"About two thousand miles. I'm Dave Bell. What's your name?"

"Richard Spector. Sometimes I have trouble remembering it. It seems so long ago that it meant anything."

He sat next to me, feet up on the bench and knees high as he huddled against his own legs. He was very frail and his hair covered much of his face. He looked directly at me when he spoke but with no implication of challenge in his eyes, no sense of ideologies about to clash, and I felt he had whittled these things out of his way, settling down to a position defined only by the length of each footsore day.

"People have been taking good care of me," he said. "They feed me and sometimes give me places to sleep. At first I get a lot of strange what-is-it looks. But when I tell them I'm walking to California, they get all caught up in the craziness of the thing. People are real great if you can get them off details and onto something crazy. They've really been taking tremendous care of me. I brought along all the savings I had, about seven hundred dollars in cash and traveler's checks, and in three months I've had to spend only about a hundred and fifty dollars for food and for sleeping in hotels whenever it was too cold at night for outdoor-type sleeping and I couldn't find anywhere else to stay."

"I don't want to sound discouraging, Richard, but you look awfully tired and run-down."

"You should have seen me before I left."

We both laughed and then he asked if he could handle the camera. I removed the lens hood for him and he took the camera and stood up, putting his eye to the rubber eyecup and then slowly covering the park in a virtuoso 36o-degree pan. I heard a car come to an abrupt stop and I turned and saw first a young woman's face at the window on the passenger side, and then the head and shoulders of a man about my age rising over the car's roof from the other side as he looked in our direction. Apparently satisfied that he had been right in stopping, he returned to the driver's seat, threw the car into reverse and quickly parked, tires marking the pavement. He got out, again looking our way, closing the door with a certain disdainful elan, and then came through the park entrance, looking now, it was clear, not at Richard or at me-a considerable relief-but at the camera in Richard's hands. The girl followed, quite slowly, a lissome blonde of twenty-five or so, in her quiet prime, pretty and tarrying and yet to be hurt, not at all in love. Richard extended the camera to me. The man's eyes followed it right into my hands.

"Does that thing put out a sync pulse?"

"That's right," I said.

"Sound," he said.

"That's right."

"I'm Austin Wakely. The lady is Carol Deming. I saw that thing from the car and I said let me get a closer look. What kind of action are you into?"

"Under the underground," I said.

"But with sound."

"Some sound. Here and there."

"I'm an actor," he said.

"He's studying to be an actor," Carol said.

I introduced myself, told them where I was from and asked them to join me on the bench. I realized Richard Spector was gone. Then I saw him sitting once more on the edge of the bandstand.

"I'm studying with Drotty," Austin said.

"Who's he?"

"He's originally from Minneapolis. He worked with Guthrie there. But he's a very freeform individual and it became more and more untenable for him to try and function in a structured environment. That's why he came over to McCompex. That's the new institute five miles east of here. You haven't heard of it back East yet but you will. The full name is the McDowd Communication Arts Complex. The regular session ends next month. I'm staying on for the summer session. Before I came out to McCompex I worked at a variety of odd jobs around the country. I'm originally from Washington, state of."

Carol was sitting between us.

"It's a question of who I am and what I want to be," Austin said. "I have to relate to something. Drotty is nonsocietal. I've learned a lot from him. He's a homosexual of course. They all are. He has his tensions and anxieties and he smokes a great deal. They all do. But Drotty has taught me something and it's this. Societal pressure is fierce but you've always got the option to repattern. Acting is love. What was it Nazimova said?"

I moved my leg slightly, the slimmest fraction of an inch, and Carol and I were touching. She sat absolutely still as Austin continued to speak. I moved again and we were touching now thigh to knee. The occasion was one of infinite subtlety. She may not have noticed the scant pressure of my leg; she may have noticed but thought nothing of it; or she may have known all along what I was doing. I edged my arm toward hers. Austin kept talking. Now our forearms were touching, the faintest inshore breeze of our bare flesh barely in contact, flesh resting on points of almost invisible silver hair. Still she was motionless, no sign either way. I waited several minutes. Then I moved my right hand across my lap and let it rest above my right knee. Carol was looking straight ahead. I was extremely nervous. The next few seconds would tell whether or not she knew and how she saw fit to respond to the knowledge. I did not want to be disappointed. It was important that she give me the right sign. I let my hand slide very slowly into the crease formed by our two legs. I let it rest there. We were both looking straight ahead. Then I felt a slight pressure from her thigh, a slight and pleasant heat on the tips of my fingers, the slightest suggestion of shifting weight, a muscle tensing, her body not moving and yet expressing movement, finding a new balance, shifting inside itself, shifting toward me. I returned the pressure and then moved several inches away. Austin kept talking and I began to relax. Carol and I looked straight ahead. It was my first ego-moment since New York.

Austin told me how to get in touch with him and said he would like to hear more about my plans. I realized for the first time how handsome he was. He had dark hair and eyes. His shoulders were broad. There was a splendid intensity about him. We all got up and Austin and I shook hands. Carol stood off to the side, her arms folded under her breasts, normally a housewife's backyard stance, trading gossip and detergent advice, but her hips were thrust forward somewhat, eyes interested and musing, and this more than redeemed the moment. I told Austin I liked his car, a green Barracuda, and in the course of the next few sentences I managed to point out that my red Mustang, now in Maine, had the same kind of high-back buckets, plus dual racing mirrors.

As they drove away, I nodded to Richard and he slipped off the bandstand and walked back to the camper with me. We talked with the others for a while. Later, over a dinner of corned beef and sangria, Sullivan announced that Richard Spector would henceforth be known as Kyrie Eleison. I reached for the tape recorder.

"I used to be a mailboy in the Justice Department in Washington," he said. "I felt I was becoming transparent. I had the feeling that after I ate dinner, people could see the food in my stomach. That's just one of the things that was happening to me. I began to fear that chunks of government buildings would dislodge and fall on top of me. But I think the worst thing of all was when I was walking on a crowded street. You know how people jockey back and forth, the fast walkers trying to overtake the slow walkers. There's always a lot of shoving and the fast walkers are always stepping on the slow ones and knocking their shoes off. I was a fast walker. I was always hurrying even when I was just going for an aimless stroll, and I used to get annoyed when slow walkers got in my way. One day I was trying to get around an old man who kept drifting toward the curb and blocking my path and suddenly I found myself shouting at him in my own head, shouting inwardly and silently: LOOK OUT! LOOK OUT! I never actually spoke the words. I just shouted them mentally. I began to do that all the time. LOOK OUT, I would say to people. MOVE! MOVE! And I could see the words in my head in big block letters like in a cartoon. Then one day a woman slowed down suddenly and I almost crashed into her. I found myself shouting a new word in my head: DIE! If I had said it aloud she probably would have died. It was really a hideous inner scream and I could see the word in my head in red letters with a big exclamation point. I began to realize I was abnormal. I was a person who walked along the street mentally shouting DIE at innocent people. After several months of this I tried to make a conscious effort to stop shouting the word. But it was too late. It just popped into my head automatically. DIE! DIE! I'll tell you the kind of person I was. I was the kind of person who's always falling in love with the wives of his best friends."

"Have you stopped shouting DIE?" Sullivan said.

"I stopped shouting it the day I quit my job and I haven't shouted it since. I haven't shouted anything since. I'll tell you what else I was. I was the kind of person who always reads those lists of the dead and missing that newspapers print after plane crashes. I read the lists compulsively. I don't know what I expected to find. The name of a friend? My own name? A long list of dead people's names is the most depressing thing you can read. Some of the names are incomplete and some have no hometowns next to them. Then they list the missing. How could anybody be missing from a plane crash? Where could they go? I'll tell you what else I used to do. I had a strange kind of embarrassment about saying people's names, especially the names of good friends and relatives. For some reason I could never address them by their right names. It was some goofy form of embarrassment. I used to call people Max, Charlie, Guido or Steve. Those were the four names I used most often. I didn't use one particular name for one particular person. The names and people were interchangeable. I might address somebody as Max one day and as Guido the next. It could even change from sentence to sentence. Nobody seemed to mind. I guess it's like being referred to as buddy or pal or friend. I don't know why I picked Max, Charlie, Guido and Steve. I had no trouble with women. I always called women by their right names. Why couldn't I call men by their right names?"

"Has that changed too?" I said.

"Everything's changed," he said. "I no longer have any anxiety about not being able to speak French. It used to worry me. My father speaks French very well. He was always inviting people to dinner and speaking French with them. It was his way of maintaining power over me. But now I don't care about that stuff anymore. I'm no longer frightened. There's a whole bunch of people like me who have broken out. We're not interested in the power that older people grasp for. They try to keep us down by speaking French and knowing how to mix whisky sours and wearing suits where the buttons on the coatsleeves really unbutton. But a lot of us have broken out. We don't care if we don't know how to pronounce the names of French wines. What's wrong with California wine anyway? What the heck, this is America. Bad as it is, we have to learn to live with it."

Kyrie slept in the hotel room that night. The rest of us settled down on our cots inside the camper. Just before I went to sleep, I imagined myself fighting with Brand. We hit each other dozens of times. Then something else moved across my mind, possessions, things in my home, shapes of objects un-fondled of late, the Olivetti Lettera 32, the Nikon F, and then girls in purple stockings rolling across a paper plain, and James Joyce and Antonioni and Samuel Beckett sitting in my living room, six legs crossed at the ankles, Tana Elkbridge naked on Riverside Drive while her husband read Business Week at thirty thousand feet, and Jennifer naked in the West Eighties, something touching about her hipbones, and Meredith naked in Gramercy Park, and Sullivan naked in the bath. Then we were fighting again. I backed away from a long right and came back with a left to the cheekbone and a short straight right square on the point of the chin. Brand went to his knees and hung there, breathing blood. I kicked him in the stomach and went to sleep.

We had breakfast in a diner the next morning. Men in short-sleeve shirts came and went. I formed my hand into a claw. Brand sat at the table laughing. Then Sullivan began to laugh. People at the counter turned to look at them. Brand was slumped over the table, arms folded, and his head rocked as he laughed. Sullivan sat rigidly, facing Brand, laughing out over his head. I formed both hands into claws and bobbed up and down in the chair. Lips parted slightly, curling down at the corners, I bared my lower set of teeth and dug them into my upper lip. I knew they were not laughing at me and yet I continued to make ghoulish faces and claw at the air. I did not like to be left out. I did not know why they were laughing and so I pretended they were laughing at me. Pike began to laugh. I turned toward the people at the counter and clawed at their backs. Kyrie was laughing now. The waitress came with our food and Brand looked up at her and nearly fell off the chair howling. My claws became hands again. Kyrie pointed at his scrambled eggs and this set them off on a fresh wave of laughter. The waitress smiled as she stood by the table writing out the check. Brand pointed at her pencil. She looked at it and began to laugh. Everything was funny. It was a clear day in spring and suddenly everything was funny. I went to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror.

They laughed all through breakfast. Somebody would point to something and they'd all laugh. The ketchup bottle was hilarious. Brand continually took off his glasses and wiped them with a napkin. His was the universal face of alumni bulletins. Assistant plant manager of the general foam division, Tenneco Chemicals, East Rutherford, N.J. Training and education officer, Air University's Warfare Systems School, Maxwell AFB, Ala. Brand the junior partner. The young Republican. He was about an inch taller than I was. He weighed 210 or so. His eyes were panes of muddy glass, gray and very distant. Now he stood and blessed the restaurant, his face deadpan again, his right hand making crosses over the heads of the assembled men and women. I finished breakfast and left a twenty-dollar bill on the table. Pike followed me out. We stood on the sidewalk in front of the hotel. It was called Ames House, I noticed.

"See if you can answer this," Pike said. "Think about it as long as you want before answering. Here it is. Open up the stomach of a killer whale and roughly how many seals and porpoises are you likely to find?"

"You'd better let me think about it."

"Two dozen," he said.

Checkout time was noon. I went up to the room, called downstairs and asked the voice to get the office in New York. When the switchboard girl at the network came on, I asked to speak with David Bell. It was an odd feeling. Binky answered.

"Miss me?" I said.

"Who's this?"

"The person you admire most in the whole world."

"Stop fooling around."

"Dave Bell's my name; cinematography's my game."

"David, how are you?"

"Miss rne?"

"Yes, it's so boring around here."

"It's boring out here too."

"Where are you?" she said.

"Fifty-third and Lex."

"Guess what? There's a rumor going around that Grove Palmer is a fag. Jody told me Sid Slote ran into him accidentally in Bermuda and he was hanging around with some very swishy types."

"It figures. I always wondered about that guy."

"Guess what else?"

"Go ahead."

"I was waiting for you to guess. Harris Hodge? The first replacement Weede hired after the mass rape and execution? He showed up yesterday."

"What's he look like?"

"He's a very neat guy, David. A terrific sense of humor. And he's really cute-looking. Hallie thinks he looks like Paul Newman, only younger."

"How much younger? I want to know his exact age."

"I haven't been able to find out yet."

"If you got off your ass once in a while."

"Don't get angry."

"What else?" I said.

"Trotsky struck again."

"When?"

"Two days ago."

"Great, great. Whose name was signed to the memo? Wait, I want to guess."

"Like forget it," she said.

"I figure we were about due for a Giambattista Vico."

"Forget it, sweetie."

"I was thinking about Beckett last night. Was it Beckett?"

"You'll never guess so I may as well tell you. It's a three-name person. Otto Durer Obenwahr."

"Trotsky really pulled one out of the hat this time."

"I'll say. Everybody's trying to figure out who Otto Durer Obenwahr is. Ed Watchold sent his secretary to the library this morning. The place is in a minor uproar."

"What does it say? What's the quote?"

"I saved it for you. Ready? Fools! Fools! To square the circle is child's play. It is the reverse which leads to the beatific vision."

"Interesting," I said.

"What do you think it means?"

"Very interesting."

"Thanks a lot."

"Listen, find out everything you can about this bastard Harris Hodge. But especially how old he is."

"Okay."

"Does Weede like him?"

"They're having lunch tomorrow."

"Find out if Weede likes him. I'll call you again somewhere between here and the Navahos."

"Okay. Have a good time."

"So long, Bink."

"David, I almost forgot."

"Yes?"

"Ted Warburton had to be rushed to the hospital."

"When was this?"

"Yesterday afternoon. He collapsed at his desk."

"Goodbye," I said.

All five of us sat in the camper all afternoon. Pike drank Old Crow from a paper cup and made occasional growling sounds. Ahead were the Rockies, dripping sweat, paws scraping the earth, set to pounce, his keeper the lion. Brand was lost behind his glasses, traveling back, I thought, to some timeless room at the center of his being, bungled memories of four walls and the gray medicine man. Kyrie bit the knuckle of his right thumb. Somebody parking a car hit our rear bumper lightly and we nodded. I was wearing my Comanche moccasins, a pair of green wide-wale cords with a garrison belt, and a black sport shirt.

"Sully, who's Otto Durer Obenwahr?"

"Expert on liquid oxygen and high altitude drogue chutes."

"Seriously, ever hear of him?"

She seemed to be trying to tear circles out of the newspaper she was reading. She tore circles and handed them to Kyrie. He was sitting on the floor. He handed the circles up to Brand.

"I'm going for a walk," I said.

"Bring back some Mars Bars," Brand said.

"You owe me change of twenty," I said. "I left a twenty on the table."

"Don't look at me, Davy. I didn't pay the check."

"I didn't pay it," Kyrie said. "Don't look at me."

"Somebody owes me change of twenty."

"I left when you left," Pike said.

"Somebody owes me change. I've been paying for everything around here."

"Bring back some jujubes," Kyrie said.

I walked down a street that had the sadness of all roads leading out of town, a blues-song street, oil spilled by huge trucks, a traffic light swinging high over an empty intersection. I crossed to a building with a neon beer-sign out front. I found the telephone, called the McDowd Communication Arts Complex and asked for Carol Deming. I was using a wall phone at the back of the room. Three auto mechanics were at the bar. I noticed a pinball machine, a bowling machine, a jukebox and a shuffleboard with three steel discs sitting in rosin. Then I heard Carol's voice.

"North Atlantic Treaty Organization."

"Hi, I didn't know if I'd find you there. It's David Bell- from the park."

"I'm sorry, you've reached the answering service for NATO Brussels. They're all out. Would you care to leave a message?"

"I'm in a bar on Howley Road."

"Buster's," she said. "It used to be a firehouse."

"Do you have a car?"

"I can take Austin's."

"He won't mind?"

"Of course he'll mind."

I sat at the bar and had a scotch. The ashtray in front of me was full of pared fingernails. I was on the third drink when she arrived. The way she walked made her skirt sway lightly across her legs and I felt lucky and full of improvisation, a nice loose music in my head, and I knew the auto mechanics were watching her but not with sludge and crankcase lust; rather with a small joy, I thought, a tiny leap of flesh, the light lucky feeling of seeing a pretty girl with bare legs walking across a room behind a smile that says she likes being a woman being watched. I tried not to look so pleased. She glanced at my drink and asked for the same.

"I wasn't sure you were living at McCompex too. I thought it might be just him. You didn't say anything about it yesterday. Was it yesterday we met?"

"There isn't much to say, David. It's just something to do while I wait for my husband to divorce me. I had some money saved and I've always wanted to study acting. So I came on down."

"From where?"

"Detroit," she said.

"That your hometown?"

"I was an army brat. I've lived in nine states."

"What did you do in Detroit?"

"We used to have a drink every Friday evening at the Zebra Lounge. That's what we did."

"You mean people from the office."

"You know how it is on Friday. Everybody wants to unwind with a drink or two. They used to have canapes for the regular crowd. We were the regular crowd."

We talked and drank for a while. I was feeling good and loose, on the verge of inspired dialogue, drink number four, a pale flame rising. Carol took a pack of Gauloises out of her handbag. I lit one for her and a sweet evil smell lay flat on the hanging smoke.

"Did the regular crowd at the Zebra include one extrovert who was always joking with the waiter and who liked to order exotic drinks?"

"Fred Blasingame," she said.

"What were some of the drinks he ordered? This is important."

"I remember once he ordered an Americano. I remember another time he ordered a Black Russian."

"I think we're really getting somewhere. When you take a bath, Carol, do you like to lift one leg out of the water and wash it sort of slowly and sensually?"

"You're going too far."

"Carol, how do you feel about the war?"

"I can't seem to get involved, maybe because the whole thing is so halfhearted."

"People are dying."

"I know. Isn't it terrible?"

"Can you identify Otto Durer Obenwahr?" I said.

"Didn't he play lead guitar with Grand Funk Railroad?"

"Let me ask you this if I may. What is the most pressing need in America today?"

"Patriotism," she said. "Our sons must return to their mother. She is waiting with open legs. Killing the pig-eyed and the slope-headed must once again become a matter of national priority."

"Did the Zebra have piped-in music? Please answer at once."

"Yes," she said.

"Did the regular crowd ever have friendly arguments about the name of a certain tune?"

"That used to happen all the time. Carl Stoner, who was in premiums, was always having arguments with Martha Leggett. Martha Leggett was the funniest little girl you ever saw. She was less than five feet tall and Freddy B. used to let her take puffs on his cigar. We surrounded ourselves with smoke and loud noise. That's the way we chose to live. I'm prepared to defend it."

"Did the rumors about Carl Stoner and Fred Blasingame's wife have any basis in fact?"

"Come on now. There weren't any rumors like that. And anyway you haven't even asked me about the summerhouse."

I ordered two more scotches. I didn't know where we were headed and I was in no hurry to find out. It was obvious that the feints and jugglery of the moment did not confuse her one bit. Her answers were almost too easy in coming. Her voice changed, even the structure of her sentences, and as we went along I realized she was no mere student of theatercraft. She seemed perfectly relaxed, almost bored, content to let me find a pace and theme, breaking inflection from sentence to sentence and yet never relinquishing the bedrock irony, the closed fist of the Midwest. Her eyes emitted quick blue light. She was far from being the worst thing you could expect to find in an old firehouse in Iowa or Missouri or Illinois.

"Have you ever been to New York?" I said.

"We used to go over to the pier on Gansevoort Street and watch the sun go down. We used to eat soul food on Tenth Avenue."

"After several or more drinks, did any of the men in the regular crowd at the Zebra ever slip their hands under the table and try to caress either of your thighs?"

"I guess that sort of thing is unavoidable if you're going to have a few drinks in mixed company. But there was never any trouble about it. I mean all I did was sort of shift in my chair a little and they would get the idea and that would be the end of it."

"Did tiny Martha Leggett shift in her chair?"

"I have no way of knowing."

"I applaud your loyalty."

"She was a plucky little skylarking girl. She and Fred Blasingame were like a comedy team. George and Gracie. That's what we used to call them. My father's name was George."

"That brings us to the summerhouse," I said.

"Tall grass and lemonade. Those lazy afternoons at auntie Nell's. I was such a silly thing at fifteen. This is difficult."

"Please try."

"He came from the base to visit me, taller than the grass, so bright and shining in the sun. He was in uniform. Nell made lemonade. We sat out front beneath the big elm, just the three of us and John Morning. Daddy had brought me a book of poems, sonnets written by a southern lady whose lover was killed at Vicksburg. Nell went inside to start dinner. John Morning sang a spiritual and then went off to the stables. Daddy read the sonnets to me and I cried and called myself a silly thing and he laughed softly in that gentle way of his. We drank the lemonade and watched the sun go down over the big elm."

"Where was the Jamison boy?" I said.

"The Jamison boy had drowned in Loon Lake just three weeks before. Daddy knew about it, of course, but was gentle enough and wise enough to make no mention of the tragedy. After dinner we walked through the tall grass beneath the moon. We listened to the crickets and daddy held my hand. Then we went back to the house. Nell made some lemonade and John Morning told us the yearling was coming along just fine. Daddy went out to the stables to look at the yearling. I went to my room and he came up later and spoke softly in the darkness of war and death, touching me softly in soft places. He made no mention of the tragedy of the Jamison boy and he said nothing about the summerhouse."

"At what hour were you awakened by the strange sound?"

"It was almost dawn when I was awakened by a strange sound. I got out of bed and put on my riding pants and the green sweater with the button missing. I still have that sweater. It was the sweater I was wearing the last time I saw the Jamison boy, two nights before he drowned. We were on the back porch drinking lemonade. John Morning was singing a spiritual. The Jamison boy asked me whether I'd be spending the whole summer this time or just a few weeks as in the past. I said it was up to mother. He said he was tired of all the mystery about mother. He wanted to know the truth."

"So you told him about the summerhouse."

"Yes, I told him," she said. "He was the only one who knew the horrible secret. And two nights later he drowned. I still have that sweater locked away somewhere in a trunk. Do you have any idea how difficult this is?"

"Carol, when did you first realize that his death was not an accident?"

"When I was awakened by the strange sound. I knew what the sound was and I realized the Jamison boy had been shot to death prior to being drowned. I put on my red satin dress with the plunging neckline, the dress I wore to mother's second funeral. Needless to say, the sound was coming from the summerhouse. I walked through the tall grass, which was wet with dew. The sun was coming up over the big elm. I opened the door of the summerhouse."

"What did you see?"

"It was daddy. He was naked except for his uniform."

"What was he doing?"

"Really I can't go on."

"What was he doing, Carol?"

"He was firing bullets into John Morning's drowned body."

"What did you see in John Morning's hand?"

"The locket. Mother's silver locket."

"Did any of the men in the regular crowd habitually break his swizzle stick with a loud plastic snap?"

"Bob Kirkpatrick."

"Perfect," I said. "What can you tell us about him?"

"He looked like a redwood tree."

"Can you identify the governor of California?"

"There is no such place."

"Excellent. If a redwood tree falls in a deserted forest, does it make a sound? Or is sound dependent on a sentient being?"

"It makes a sound."

"What kind of sound?" I said.

"One hand clapping."

"You're going too far, Carol. But I'll try to stay with you. You mentioned your husband earlier in the evening. Was your husband part of the regular crowd?"

"My husband is part of no crowd, regular, irregular or otherwise. He's black. Blackest black."

"You're telling me he's a Negro."

"What used to be called an American Negro."

I was getting drunk. The bartender put two more drinks in front of us. I lit another cigarette for her and she turned away when she exhaled and then swung her head slowly back and looked at me with a grieving smile. The three mechanics were at the pinball machine. Four young men drank beer at the other end of the bar.

"What are you doing here?" she said.

"I wanted to escape from the regular crowd. It reached the point where I was seeing ghosts. I was asleep in a loft one night. I was tired and drunk and I fell asleep. I dreamed about the town where I grew up. When I opened my eyes I thought I saw my mother's ghost in the room. But it was just an apparition I dragged up out of the dream. What I saw was the woman who owned the loft. Whose studio it was. She had come in and was standing in the doorway when I opened my eyes. What, if anything, do you make of all this?"

"David, I'm out on my feet. I'm really tired. It's been a long day. If you don't mind I think I'll be getting on back."

"I want you in my film," I said.

They were having dinner when I got back to the camper. Afterward, for Kyrie's benefit, Brand tensed and untensed his forearm in rhythm so that the tattooed dogs seemed to be moving. I kept waiting for someone to complain about our stay here. Kyrie went to sleep under the table. I took Sullivan's radio to bed with me. I turned it on, low volume, and listened in the dark. Every time Pike snored I punched the side of the camper and he would stop for a while. Unable to sleep, I listened to the radio half the night, changing stations, countries, hemispheres, switching to shortwave and ships at sea, the whole nightworld scratching out there, entangled languages, voices in storms of passion and static, commercials, prayers, newscasts, poems, soccer riots, threats of death and war and revolution, laughter from the mountains and appeals to reason from the broad plains, demonstration in La Paz, landslide in Zurich, assassination in Dakar, fire in Melbourne, confusion in Toyko, tragedy in Athens. Then I heard a familiar voice.

"At the sound of the gong it will be exactly three o'clock in the morning. Three o'killing clock. This is Beastly here and we've still got two hours to go. But these next crucial minutes will tell all. Time to pluck the lint from your omphalos. Time to gnaw at the legs of chairs. I know you're out there in mamaland, tens of thousands of you, humped up on the floor whimpering, licking the cold steel of the barrel of your shotgun. The agon begins. Time to scream into the pillow. Time to brainpaper the walls. But if we make the next ten minutes we make the night. Three in the morning and werewolves slink in the parlor. American Mean Time. You came home from work to find your wife in bed with your sister. Curiously refreshing. You stayed to watch. Sure, I know what it's like out there. One big succulent eyeball bouncing on your tongue. Eye of goat. Black gleaming eye of master fucker of all the baby sheep you counted in your wetty bed. I know what it's like. I, Beastly, have foresuffered almost all. Forced by my priestly capillaries to go all the way to Dublin to attain suitable erection and staying power. Mollycuddling my bloomless bride. Mother of twin anxieties. Indeed I know your secrets. For the past three days you've been followed all over town by a gigantic bald Malayan wearing a mackintosh. You've placed an ad in the L. A. Free Press. Studs, butches and house-broken pets interested in self-stimulation. Adding no freaks please in small type. Using a box number corresponding to the day, month and year of your first holy communion. You are drowning in porn and prury. You are unmasked and emasculated. We interrupt this program for a news bulletin. The president rose at noon, breakfasted with cabinet members, lashed out at his critics, shook hands with a Negro, had a steambath, and lunched with Nguyen Cao Dung, the former head of an undisclosed country ostensibly run by the CIA as a nonprofit organization. This is Warren Beasley at the White House in Washington saying this is Warren Beasley at the White House in Washington. We return you now to our studios. I feel silence out there tonight. Nothing stirs but a faint gray figure limping through the bus terminals and train stations. Lonely onanist in his chilly calculations. Where is the charitable ear for my intemperate prattle? I keep my caricatures to keep me company. Lord Greystoke, the British adventurer, plans to sail a Chinese junk singlehandedly between Malta and Crete in order to prove that the Mediterranean was once a lake in Sinkiang Province. I know you're out there somewhere, all you prankish gunmen, pacing your scurvy rooms, making lists of likely targets with your Scriptomatic ballpoints, thinking incredibly in your wistfulness of the grandeur of state funerals. Photos on the wall of grouped adolphs. That hot thunder in your head, every drum since Goliath. This is Simon called Peter speaking on behalf of the Bumblebee tuna packers of America and wishing all of you a safe and sane ascent into heaven. You're in good hands with God the Father. The kid I wouldn't be so sure. A real maven. But tough in the clutch. Three after three, les misérables. The enemy grows bold. Just enough time for some random news items. Europe has apparently vanished. Its whereabouts are completely unknown. However, seamen aboard a Liberian tanker off Greenland have reportedly sighted oil slicks and all sorts of Louis Quatorze debris. Time to dig at the issues behind the news. Time to sit at the gurgling Wurlitzer beneath the streets and like that unloved phantom of the lower depths to let a single tear flow down your brutish but sensitive face. But first a word from our alternate testicle. Women, here's a remarkable new way to give junior and sis the kind of nutrition they need for those growing-up years. Kill your husband and feed him to the kids. You'd love that, wouldn't you? All that melting butterflesh. All the animosities in your soul washed away by his flavor-rich enzymes. What subtle gravies you could conjure with those executive haunches. Enough and more again for all the saucepans of Bloomingdale's. Sweet waves of acidic backwash. Alfresco would be nice. Save the uglies for junior. To make him brave. Garnish with parsley. But I go too far, even for this audience of one-celled organisms. It is my own fake flesh I mean to cook. Delirium. There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is the station break. The clock crows. It's all numbers. Numbers and Deuteronomy. I'm losing my edge but stay with me. It's your only hope. Four minutes to death. No time to waste so you'd better listen fast. The bird is beginning to grimace inside the cuckoo clock. Quick-pray. Bow down to the god of your choice and pray for the end of yourself. Pray for new eyes and ears. Pray for shapes to change. Pray for fresh juice to take with you into your imminent climacteric. Pray for short and hunless winters. Pray for the Upper East Side, all those white tile buildings full of lonely girls quoting phony Persians to boys in love with jockstraps. Pray for adriaticated Venice. Pray for desirelessness and the dice-play of cunning. Pray for the insides of things, men and batteries, that they be shaved to coolest precision. Pray for the walls of things, that they secure the things they secure against the anti-wall. Pray for the scrotum sacs of industrialists. Pray for poets who summer at Nantucket. Pray for 1958 two-toned Oldsmobiles. Pray for Umbriago, the mayor of New York and of Chicago. Pray seriously for the Austrialians because if they ever get the bomb it'll be a muddy rugger for us all. Pray for the bald eagle and his meddling beak. Pray that we stop replaying our lives into the sucking tapeworm. Pray that we not disappear O Lord into thy vastly impractical nightmind (from whence we came) without first preparing for the abrupt change of pace. Pray for expressiveness, that we cast away these welder's masks we wear to hide our grief and joy. Vulva! Vulva! Vulva! Seep inward and test what's left against the night. Be persistent as Java man was not. Water your mousterian cranium. Return to the primeval fertile crescent. Dar es Salaam! Abu Simbel! Chou-Kou-Tien! But the truth, I fear, is that I fear the dark days of the Arabian nights. I've got the Stephen Dedalus Blues and it's a long way to Leopoldville. Black panic in the filter of my kingsize Kent. We have awakened from the nightmare of history. Put your logical fork to the mushroom omelette. An unpleasant interruption in the assuring continuity. No precedents for the legal apparatus to pick at. No scrolls for men to jot their histories on, their art, their powerings of flag-draped armies. No sequels for the moviegoers in the think tanks. Riddled genes of Japan, we watch the dripping of your questions into the earth. Exeunt all and remember. King Kong died for your sins. Time for a final prayer as the cuckoo door swings open. The Queen James version. Strategic Air Command, which art in heaven, swallowed be thy planes. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in Omaha, Nebraska. Give us this day our daily dread and forgive us our strontium as we forgive those who strontium against us. And lead us not into annihilation but deliver us from rubble, for thine is the power and the power and the power, forever and never, oh man."

I had some frightening dreams that night and in the morning one image in particular stayed with me, a blue bus moving down a highway in the desert, and the picture was so clear in my mind that I might still have been asleep and dreaming, that flash of bright blue metal across the lionskin desert. For the first time in my life I could be certain that I dreamed in color. I don't know why but this cheered me tremendously.

After breakfast Kyrie said it was time for him to be moving on. We drove him the three or four blocks to Howley Road and parked in front of Buster's. We had a last cup of coffee in the back of the camper.

"I'm dedicating this walk to my buddy Art Levy," Kyrie said. "We were mailboys together in the Justice Department. A bunch of lawyers there started a motorcycle club. Eventually they let clerical workers and even mailboys join up. Art bought a stripped-down Harley secondhand and got into the club. They all wore real weird outfits-bandannas, army tunics, safari jackets, combat boots, leggings, football jerseys, cowhide vests. Lawyers and others. The Justice Department. I came into the office one morning and one of them came over to me and said Art got snuffed. I didn't know what he meant. He said he got snuffed by a fire engine. He ran into a fire engine and got a fractured skull and all kinds of massive internal injuries. He died the same night. So I tell everybody that helps me that I'm dedicating this walk to the memory of my buddy Art Levy, who gave up his life in an unequal encounter with tremendous contemporary forces."

"What will you do when you get to California?" Sullivan said.

"Learn how to play this guitar."

We got out of the camper and stood together on Howley Road. It was a black morning, cool and blowing and smelling of storm. Dirt blew up from the untended lots of the three or four houses on the road and the traffic light swung on its lanyard. Kyrie smiled and kissed each of us goodbye. Then he walked down the road, guitar and knapsack, a distinctly neo-Chap!inesque finale, and the wind filled his shirt and nearly knocked him over. We tried to find a good reason for not leaving the camper exactly where it was; nobody could come up with anything and we got back inside. Pike lifted a bottle out of his seaman's bag. It started to rain then, a steady plastic murmur above our heads. Pike told us about the cougar, its speed, cunning and resourcefulness, how it could broad-jump thirty-five to forty feet, thus comparing favorably with the impala although the latter got all the publicity, and he told us about the animal's great energy, quoting a recorded case in which a single mountain lion had killed 192 sheep in one night. Later that day I trotted halfway across town in the rain in order to do some work at the library. At night I sat alone in the front of the camper, listening to the insects, I felt an urge to leave that place, to go roaring onto a long straight expressway into the West; to forget the film and what it was beginning to mean to me; to face mountains and deserts; to smash my likeness, prism of all my images, and become finally a man who lives by his own power and smell. In Venice I had met an elderly gentleman at the American Express office. We were standing in line to cash traveler's checks. I commented on what a fine sunny day it was.

"Know what we call this weather back in Pima County, Arizona?" he said.

"What's that?"

"Rain," he said. "We call it rain."

He winked at me and proceeded to the counter. The black cats of Venice slumbered in the alleys. Of Italy, its wet sun and white tablecloths, coconut slices being sprinkled in the markets, sinister knife-blade priests everywhere. I went to Florence then and Meredith pointed at the stones and shouted how stupendous. Then, alone, down to rusty dead Roma, German tourists saluting each other, everyone waiting for Fellini to come skipping along the Via Veneto in clownface and opera cape, trailed by virgins, camels, nubians, publicity men. Through it all an idea had haunted me, a vision of mesas and buttes, the cut of the dry winds, long cool shadows and horses' faces hung on fences, Navahos tending their sheep, the stitched earth of Arizona. We call it rain. But I made the mistake of staying on Howley Road.

I woke in the middle of the night and smelled chocolate pudding, a thick rich gripping smell. Then I thought of my mother's blue apron, the old chipped stove, so terribly real, the blue apron with the flowers, the way she stood there stirring the pudding, her hand a small limp triumph of continuity and grace, an assertion of order in the universe. In the morning I loaded the camera.

9

The illusion of motion was barely relevant. Perhaps it wasn't a movie I was creating so much as a scroll, a delicate bit of papyrus that feared discovery. Veterans of the film industry would swear the whole thing pre-dated Edison's kinetoscope. My answer to them is simple. It takes centuries to invent the primitive.

Glenn Yost opened the door. His long tired head leaned to the left and the crazed eye flared. I imagined that in some green diamond-shaped pasture of his mind the bases were loaded and a big eager rookie was striding to the plate, man-mountain with heavy lumber, a golden eater of cereal. Glenn lived in a two-story white frame house on a street of very old houses, almost all white, several needing paint. He led me downstairs to the basement, where his son was sprawled in a corner watching a Kirk Douglas western on TV.

"The wife is using the big set," Glenn said. "I thought we'd be quieter down here but I see the creature beat us to it."

"The All-Seeing Eye," Bud said.

"It's fine with me. I wanted to talk to Bud anyway."

"Let's sit down."

"What do you do for a living, Glenn?"

"I'm partners in a lumber yard."

"How's business?"

"Retirement's not exactly looming on the horizon."

"That's really neither here not there. My question I mean. I was just being polite, leading into the real subject of my visit. Which is: would you be at all interested in appearing in the thing I plan to shoot in this area in the next week or so? It wouldn't take more than a couple of hours of your time. All you have to do is read some lines before the camera. Actually read from a script, a piece of paper. No memory work, no preparation. Just showing up and reading. I know it doesn't sound like the most intriguing thing in the world, especially since I can't pay you a dime, but you wouldn't be losing more than a couple of hours' time and maybe you'd have some fun. I know one thing. You'd be doing me a tremendous, a really great favor. Bud, how old are you?"

"Be sixteen in three months."

"You too," I said. "A couple of hours."

"I don't know anything about reading lines," Glenn said.

"Everything out of your mouth is a line," Bud said. "You never mean anything. He never means anything. He tells people he was in the submarine paratroopers during the war. They used to bail out of submarines. They'd drop up instead of down."

"All right, wise ass."

"How old are you, Glenn, if you don't mind my asking?"

"I guess I'm forty-seven."

"Aside from jumping out of submarines, did you actually serve in World War II?"

"He was in the Bataan death march," Bud said.

Glenn went upstairs for some beer and then we watched the movie until it ended about an hour later. I loved the landscapes, the sense of near equation called forth by man and space, the cowboy facing silent hills; there it was, the true subject of film, space itself, how to arrange it and people it, time hung in a desert window, how to win out over sand and bone. (It's just a cowboy picture, I reminded myself.) Owney Pine came down the stairs then, short and slightly bowlegged, ample in his width, roundhead, crewcut, ferrying across the floor now and docking with a bump, belly opening and automobiles pouring out.

In the morning I took my camera over to the hotel and told the desk clerk I wanted the same room, indefinitely this time. Traces of a sneeze lingered in his mustache. He looked at my camera, wondered whether or not to comment, and then simply pushed the key across the desk.

Upstairs I set the camera on the bed and sat in a chair looking at it. I blew on the tips of my fingers. I unbuttoned each shirtcuff and rolled the sleeves tightly to a point one inch below my elbows. I moved my shoulders back and forth, trying to loosen the muscles. I took out my keychain and cleaned my fingernails with the mailbox key. I blew on the knuckle of the index finger of my right hand. With the other hand I juggled my testicles until they were comfortable. Then I expelled air three times through my nose.

Austin Wakely showed up precisely on time. He was wearing, as directed, a pair of brown shoes, army-issue and spit-shined, and fresh clean summer khakis. Pants and shirt had come from the wardrobe room at McCompex; the shoes were borrowed. Austin asked ten or twelve questions, only two of which I answered-that there was no plot to this thing, that I'd be shooting in black and white all the way. The answers upset him only slightly less than the non-answers had.

"Granted I don't know much about it," he said, "but there doesn't seem to be enough light in here."

"I want it natural. I brought along some high-watt bulbs. We'll use those and pray we don't blow a fuse. I think we'll make that floor lamp the key light. This whole thing is what is known in some circles as inspired amateurism. Today's little task is pretty simple, a sort of signature that could be used as both beginning and end. When we start using sound I'll give you the words as far in advance as possible. That means twenty-four hours at most. I hope you'll be able to read my handwriting."

"I'll read it."

"Now listen," I said.

I gave him final instructions, changed the light bulbs and then set the film rating and f.p.s. dial. I adjusted the eyepiece. Austin cleared his throat although he had no lines to speak. He was standing with his back to a full-length mirror, facing directly into the camera. I moved him slightly to one side. I used a single camera position and shot straight on from the foot of the bed for about twenty seconds, a popular commercial length.

When we were done it became clear that Austin's mood had changed. He talked enthusiastically of the film and his unknown role in it. His image had been placed in the time bank and this was sufficient cause for elation. For the first time since I'd met him, I felt myself gaining the edge. There would have to be no subtle bloodshed, no long campaign to dominate another individual. I had the camera and that was enough.

After he'd gone I took a shower and then asked the voice at the switchboard to get me the network.

"I'm naked," I said.

"How exciting. Who's with you?"

"The Mormon Tabernacle Choir."

"Lucky them," Binky said. "I didn't think you'd call again so soon."

"How old is Harris Hodge?"

"David, he's twenty-six. Don't get mad. He looks older."

"Okay, how's Ted Warburton?"

"He collapsed at his desk and had to be rushed to the hospital."

"You already told me that, goddamn it, and I think you used exactly those words. When did you become a recorded announcement? I want to know if there's been any word from the hospital."

"I don't know. I'll ask around."

"Hasn't Weede tried to get in touch with Mrs. Warburton?"

"I don't know," she said.

"Well, find out. Next time you're in bed with Weede, ask him if he's tried to get in touch with Mrs. Warburton. Use exactly those words. Do you think you can do that for me, Binky?"

"Yes."

"I'm sorry," I said.

"So am I, David. I feel terrible about Ted Warburton. I really do. If you want, I can find out what hospital he's in and you can call him."

"No, don't do that. If Ted's really bad I'd just as soon not talk to him. I can't stand talking to people who are really bad. Just find out how he is and I'll call you next week."

"Okay."

"I'm sorry about what I said about Weede."

"It's okay. Everybody knows anyway. When you said you were with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, did that mean you're in Utah?"

"Yes."

"Utah's right above Arizona." "Is it?" I said.

"So you'll be on location any day now." "Precisely."

"Everybody's very excited about the project." "Don't talk that way." "Are you really naked?" "Starkers."

"I'm sorry about Harris Hodge."

I thought of asking Binky to switch my call to Tana Elk-bridge's phone. But then she would suspect that Tana and I were having an affair and since Tana was married this was not a good idea. Of course I could have given her Tana's extension, not telling her who the number belonged to, but she would have been able to find out simply by going through the network directory. It was better not to take chances. When Binky and I were finished talking I hung up and then had the voice call the network all over again. I asked for Tana Elkbridge. Her boss answered. I hung up immediately. Then I called Meredith at her office.

"Where are you?" she said.

"Out here in the Midwest. How's everything in Gramercy Park? Bombs, strikes, riots, plague?"

"Everything's fine here but I've had some upsetting news from Turkey. Mother is in a hospital in Ankara. She's been drinking again. I guess it got really bad. She fell down some steps."

"I wish I could be with you."

"So do I, David."

"I miss you."

"Yes."

"I think we've both matured," I said.

"Has the trip been good for you?"

"Whole new perspective."

"Before I forget, David, I saw my cousin Edwina a few days ago. You've heard me talk about her. She's the cousin I stayed with when I was in London that time. Her husband is here on business and they just spent three days in New York. They're in Boston now and they're going to Toronto next and then to Chicago. They're spending just two days in Chicago and I thought if you were close by you could go and see them. Edwina doesn't know a soul there and Charles will be going to meetings all day long."

I wrote down the details and then commiserated with her some more about her mother's health. I asked if there were any exciting new men in her life. She was noncommittal.

"Listen," I said. "Guess what? I dream in color."

"Are you sure?"

"I had a dream the other night about a big blue bus on a desert highway. When I woke up I was absolutely sure the bus was blue. It was the first time I knew for sure that I dream in color."

"David, that's great."

"Yeah."

"Take care of yourself now. Have a good time. Good luck with the Indians. And do try to get to Chicago."

"It was nice talking to you, Merry."

"It was sweet of you to call, David."

My father's secretary said he was in a meeting. I told her I was calling long-distance and that it was a matter of some urgency. She said she'd get him.

"What's up, sport?"

"How are you, dad? Working hard?"

"We just picked up some P and G business. A whole new line of toiletries they've come out with. This country is toilet-oriented. You know that as well as I do. We spend all our time in the toilet. We do everything in there but shit and piss. Maxine, go type that call report. The toilet is holy soil. Understand what I'm talking about?"

"Sounds like it might be a good account."

"What's on your mind, Dave? Where the hell are you anyway?"

"I'm out here in the Midwest."

"You need any money I'll have Maxine wire it right out."

"No, no, I just called to ask you something."

"Shoot."

"You never talked much about your experiences in the war. All I ever knew was that you served in the Pacific and got wounded a few times and received several decorations for valor. I was just wondering if you could tell me a little more about it."

"I don't talk about that," he said.

"That's what everybody says. But they all talk about it in the end."

"Not me, pally."

"Why not?"

"There's nothing to say. It's all over. You want to know what it was like, there are plenty of books on the subject."

"I want to know what it was like for you, not for other people. It's for something I'm writing."

"I buried a man alive," he said.

"Where was this, dad?"

"Some cruddy island. And don't sound so mournful."

"I won't ask you about it anymore. I'm sorry. It was for something I'm writing. Any word from Jane?"

"The kid's better. And Jane's knocked up again."

"I wonder if Mary has any children."

"Don't talk about Mary. There is no Mary."

"Remember what you told me about the kite-soul? The thing mother said when she was pregnant with Mary? That it was the kite-soul of her mother? You thought there was something Oriental about the phrase. In a way you were right. It comes from one of the children's books that mother used to keep in the bedroom. The book was so old it was falling apart. I just happened to be leafing through it one day and there was the phrase. It was a translation of a book for Japanese children. Beautifully illustrated."

"You like to hold on to small pieces of information, don't you? What else do you know that I don't? I'll tell you something, kid-I know more than you think. A lot more."

"Yes," I said.

"You better believe it. What's this thing you're writing?"

"Filmscript."

"Back on that kick again, are you?"

"I guess so."

"I'm growing a beard," he said. "It's coming right along. I'm not doing any trimming yet… I'll let it grow out to a big white flowing mane. There's a lot of white in it but it looks good. Wait'll you get back. It'll be all over my face by then."

"What are you growing a beard for?"

"Every man wants to grow a beard before he dies. It's one way of saying fuck you to everybody. Look, I'm nearing the finish line. I want a beard. It cheers me up just to look at it in the mirror. I'm not doing any trimming for at least another two weeks. If at all. If at all."

"I can't picture you with a beard."

"What do you sound so upset about?"

"I don't know, dad. It just seems strange. It changes things. I can't explain it."

"Look, I have to get my ass into that meeting. Give me a blast on the horn when you get back to the city. We'll have lunch."

"Right, dad. Don't work too hard."

"Thanks for the advice," he said.

I got my address book out of my wallet and tried to find some kind of listing for Ken Wild. I found his parents' phone number and address, which was that of a Chicago suburb. I got his father and told him I was an old college friend who wanted to get in touch. He said Ken was living in Chicago and he gave me both his home and office numbers. He said it was nice to hear from any friend of Ken's. He said any time I was in River Forest to drop over and use the swimming pool. I called Wild at the office.

"You are cordially invited to a black mass at your local martello tower. Roman collar. R. S.V.P."

"Oh Jesus," he said. "It can't be."

"It is."

"Where are you?"

"Nearby I think. At least relatively. I've been looking for your name, Wild. The Pulitzer committee has been strangely silent."

"My muse turned out to be a dike."

"Too bad," I said. "What are you doing?"

"I'm a project manager for my father's industrial systems outfit."

"I just talked to your father. He said I could use the swimming pool."

"Guilt," Wild said. "How long's it been? Six or seven years, hasn't it?"

"Seven," I said. "You married?"

"Divorced."

"So you're a project manager."

"Secret glee in your voice. What are you doing?"

"Making films," I said. "I've made a few documentaries. Sort of working my way up to a feature. I'm doing it all on an independent basis. Tek-Howard's been distributing my stuff. I'm on location now and I may have to get up there in a few days to pick up some equipment. That's what made me think of calling. Maybe we can get together."

"Great," he said. "Look forward to it. I really do."

I felt better than I had in quite some time. Once again I got the network. I asked for Weede Denney. I reached over, got a handkerchief out of my pants pocket and put it over the mouthpiece. Then I heard Mrs. Kling's eternally reproving voice, a model for impeachment proceedings.

"Mr. Denney's office. He's nowhere in sight."

"This is SDS. There's an invisible liquid device in your water cooler and it's programmed to explode the very second you put your phone back on the cradle."

I hung up, checked the address book again and found a number for Leigh ton Gage College. I asked to be connected with Simmons St. Jean.

"Still there, Simmons? This is David Bell. Remember me?"

"Certainly. What do you want?"

"I'm making films these days. Shooting in 16. Sort of working my way up to 35."

"Can you talk fast? I'm leaving for Marrakech in a matter of minutes."

"How are you, Simmons? Still saving every copy of Cahiers du Cinéma? Listen, have you seen the new Bergman? More depressing than ever. I saw it just before I left New York. I'm out here in the Midwest working on my film. It's a very personal statement."

"Bergman is a prime example of the filmmaker as mortician. His films suffer from rigor mortis. I haven't looked at anything of his since the first mention of the spider-god. The new Paramount comedy-western is worth any number of Bergman's exegetical nightmares."

"Same old Simmons. Great to talk to you, Simmons. Remember Wendy Judd? She's living in New York these days. Absolute wildcat in bed. Now here's why I called. Remember the snowfall scene in Ikiru? The old man has cancer. He goes to a playground and sits on a swing. It begins to snow. I think it's the most beautiful scene ever put on film. Now this is what I want to find out. One: did Kurosawa shoot up at the old man? Two: did he shoot the whole scene without cutting? Three: did the old man swing on the swing or did he remain stationary? I've seen Ikiru three times but the last time was almost five years ago. And the scene I'm talking about is so beautiful that I always forget to study it, to see how he did it. I thought if anyone would know, you would."

"I've never seen Ikiru," he said.

"That's impossible."

"As for Wendy Judd, I tended to think of her as a sort of wild mouse rather than cat. I mean she loved to nibble, didn't she?"

"Simmons, you're lying. You're a lying sack of shit, Simmons. What do you plan to do in Marrakech-attend an Arab cartoon festival?"

I hung up and took a nap. When I came to, it was after five. I called downstairs and gave them Jennifer Fine's number.

"Jennifer, it's David. David Bell."

"Of course," she said finally.

"I wasn't sure you were still living at the same place but I figured what the hell, what could it cost me. I'm out here in the Midwest. In case I'm not coming through too well, that's why."

"I can hear you."

"I hope I'm not interrupting anything. Maybe I shouldn't have called. I just wanted to say hello. Nothing special. I'm naked and I've been calling people all over the country. I just wanted to say that I know how badly I treated you when we were seeing each other. You called me a fascist. Remember? That was a funny night in a way. At least it seems funny now, although at the time it was anything but. I think I've matured a lot since then, Jennifer. But I didn't mean to bring that up. I didn't have any special reason for calling. Just to talk. Sometimes on the phone the words just come out."

"My cat died," she said.

"I guess I didn't know you had a cat. That's too bad. I know how people sometimes get attached to animals. I'm really sorry to hear that. I'm out here making a film."

"She must have died this afternoon. The cleaning woman was in this morning and she didn't call me at the office so she must have died this afternoon. I came home from work and she was dead."

"That really is a shame."

"She's still on the floor. I can't bear to touch her."

"Jennifer, I think the best thing for me to do would be to hang up so you can call somebody to come over there and give you a hand. I'm sorry about everything. I'll get in touch with you when I get back to the city. We'll have lunch. I'm going to hang up now. Goodbye."

I put down the phone and then looked up Weede Denney's home number. I put the handkerchief over the mouthpiece again. Weede answered.

"This is Ted Warburton," I said. "I just want you to know that you're an overbearing jabberwock. You're a bloody fucking baldheaded sod."

I hung up, told the voice to get me Westchester information and asked for Valeric, Old Holly. The operator said there were two Valerios listed, Annette and Joseph. Annette, I recalled, was the name of Tommy's mother. I wrote down the number. A man answered the phone.

"Is this where Tommy Valerio used to live?" I said. "I'm trying to get in touch with Tommy. We're old friends."

"Get in touch with Tommy?"

"Can you tell me where he is?"

"Tommy's been dead three years."

"What happened?"

"He got killed in the war."

"What happened?" I said. "I mean how did it happen?"

"What can I tell you? K.I.A. He got killed in action. He was a second lieutenant. He had all these men under him. Annette, how many men Tommy had under him? Anyway the President sent a letter. The President himself sent a letter to Tommy's mother."

"How's Mrs. Valerio?"

"She's fine. We're in the middle of dinner here."

"You must be Tommy's uncle. I think we met once or twice. My name is Dave Bell. Tommy and I were buddies."

"I don't recall him mentioning any Dave Bell. We're in the middle of dinner but maybe you want to talk to his mother. She's right here. It's somebody named Dave Bell."

"What?" I said.

"I'm talking to her. Friend of Tommy, he says. She's right here. Hold on."

"Don't bother. Tell her not to bother. I'm interrupting your dinner."

"She's right here."

"I have to go now. Tell her I'm sorry."

"He said he's sorry."

"Goodbye."

"She wants to know for what."

I called Wendy Judd at her apartment.

"It's David. I'm going to ask you something. I want a straightforward factual answer. Did you ever go to bed with Simmons St. Jean back in the old days at Leighton Gage?"

"Who was he?"

"Film theory and criticism."

"Pale attractive guy with spooky eyes?"

"I guess that's a fair description."

"It's really none of your business, is it, David?"

I hung up and called Carol Deming at McCompex. It was several minutes before she came to the phone.

"How about a drink and then dinner?" I said. "We can meet at Buster's. I don't know where we can get something half-decent to eat in this town but maybe you can suggest a place. What's the story on seafood out here? I'm about dying for some fried shrimp."

"I just saw Austin. He seems enthused about whatever it is you two did earlier today. When's my turn?"

"We can talk about it."

"David, that's what I get all day in this place. Theater is talk. Motivations, sentiments, speeches, interpretations."

"The broken neck of the alphabet."

"Exactly," she said.

"I'm still working things out in terms of what I need you for. Let's have dinner and discuss it."

"David, I don't want to talk. Really I don't. Not to anyone. Just give me something to play. An idea, a role, a masquerade. Something the camera will understand even if no one else does. I'm trying to be direct."

"Look, a couple of drinks, that's all. One drink. I'm at Ames House in the center of town. I can walk to Buster's in fifteen minutes."

I had four drinks and she didn't show up. Finally I went across the street to the camper. Brand was alone in there, reclining on one of the cots, hands behind his head.

"It's happening," he said. "I can feel it in my skull. The old violence. I thought it was gone but I can feel it coming back. Correctly or not I associate blandness with nonviolence. That's why I want to be bland. To use bland words. Do bland things. I've been trying not to arouse the old instincts. You can arouse them with words, mainly slang words. The theory may seem stupid. Unproven at best. But it's true for me. And the thing is back. The old urge. Better keep your eye on me."

"You keep appearing and disappearing and reappearing," I said. "You've always been like that. I've never known exactly who you were. I've always liked you, Bobby. At least I've liked most of the different forms you take. But then you go away and come back different and I have to adjust. Which one do I keep my eye on?"

"Blandness would seem to be the easiest thing in the world to achieve. Physically I'm there. I've made it. I look like a million other people. Ten million. But inside my head the action is constant. I went to hard stuff to slow it down. I smoke grass to slow it down. But I can't slow it anymore. The old action. Zap those hostiles. Davy, you don't know what it's like to lay down some 20 mike-mike on a village. See it fall apart. Come down low and strafe a hootch or two. Your cans of nape. Your 500-pounders. Your rockets. I jumped a guy on a bike once. He was pedaling along outside a village. It was known to be hostile. I dropped down behind him, way behind him, and followed him up the road a bit, flying real low. When I was about a hundred meters behind him, I laid my fire all around him. He busted like a teacup. You see, there's a primal joy to hitting a thing in motion. It's one of the oldest pleasures there is. Something moves, boom, you wing it. Beast, bird or human, the thing to do is knock it down. It's primal, Davy. It's basic to the origin of the species. I'm learning to live with it."

Spared the nervous motorized genius of his father's eye, Bud Yost seemed typical in every way, the beneficiary of a morally solid upbringing, temperate weather and a balanced diet. He was somewhat large for his age and there was a slight quake to his movements, as if he were standing on a rocking chair. He came walking out of a passageway onto the empty floor of the high school gym, wearing his basketball uniform, white with gold trim and lettering. I had asked him to wear number nine if possible, my old number in prep school, but nine belonged to a kid six feet six and 235, so Bud wore his own uniform, eleven, Ft. Curtis High in gold script across the front. I took some readings and told him to do whatever he wanted out on the court and to pay no attention to the camera or to me. I shot first from above, from the row of seats high over the court. Alone on the slick and burnt-yellow floor of the gymnasium, weaving slowly downcourt, feinting, changing speed, he tossed in an easy lay-up. Then he went to jump shots, first from in close, then a few feet farther out, then farther, the ball sounding strange as it hit the floor or rim or backboard or slapped through the net, echoes melting into duplicates of original sounds. After a while I went down to court-level and got on one knee beneath the backboard and shot straight out at him. He pumped in four in a row from the top of the key, missed two, hit two more from the corner. He was good. He had a good eye and he was much less awkward running or shooting than he was just plain walking. Crouched low, left elbow hooked out, he dribbled around the key and hit from twenty feet. I stopped filming and took off my shoes and shirt. We had a one-on-one drill, taking turns on offense, and it went on for what seemed an hour, not a word passing between us. He was too fast for me and my shooting was way off. I was nearly in tears when I finally called a halt, bending over, trying to catch my breath, washed up at twenty-eight and resigned to a future of crumpled pieces of paper and khaki wastebaskets in the rooms of marooned hotels. I sat on the floor and began lacing my shoes.

"I hope you got what you want," he said.

"It should be okay. This camera was designed for sports, nature, news, that kind of thing. I may need you one more time."

"Can I ask a question?" "That's all for today, gentlemen."

He laughed at that and then reached out a hand to help me to my feet.

Pike slept in the back of the camper. Brand and I were up front, waiting for Sullivan in the parking lot of a supermarket. I saw a group of women standing by a station wagon. There were seven of them, pushing cartons and shopping bags over the open tailgate into the rear of the car. Celery stalks and boxes of Gleem stuck out of the bags. I took the camera from my lap, raised it to my eye, leaned out the window a bit, and trained it on the ladies as if I were shooting. One of them saw me and immediately nudged her companion but without taking her eyes off the camera. They waved. One by one the others reacted. They all smiled and waved. They seemed supremely happy. Maybe they sensed that they were waving at themselves, waving in the hope that someday if evidence is demanded of their passage through time, demanded by their own doubts, a moment might be recalled when they stood in a dazzling plaza in the sun and were registered on the transparent plastic ribbon; and thirty years away, on that day when proof is needed, it could be hoped that their film is being projected on a screen somewhere, and there they stand, verified, in chemical reincarnation, waving at their own old age, smiling their reassurance to the decades, a race of eternal pilgrims in a marketplace in the dusty sunlight, seven arms extended in a fabulous salute to the forgetfulness of being. What better proof (if proof is ever needed) that they have truly been alive? Their happiness, I think, was made of this, the anticipation of incontestable evidence, and had nothing to do with the present moment, which would pass with all the others into whatever is the opposite of eternity. I pretended to keep shooting, gathering their wasted light, letting their smiles enter the lens and wander the camera-body seeking the magic spool, the gelatin which captures the image, the film which threads through the waiting gate. Sullivan came out of the supermarket and I lowered the camera. I could not help feeling that what I was discovering here was power of a sort.

In the evening we sat in the camper on Howley Road and listened to the radio. A war summary came on. I did not listen to the news, merely to the words themselves, the familiar oppressive phrases. It was like the graytalk of the network- not what something meant and often not its opposite.

"Who wants to be in my novel?" Brand said. "It'll cost you fifty dollars and I'm in a position to guarantee immortality."

"I want to be made a brain surgeon," Pike said.

"Eighty dollars even."

"A lover," I said. "Make me a great lover."

"A hundred and fifty dollars gets you into bed with the female character of your choice."

"Are you in the book?" I said to Sullivan.

"You're all in it," Brand said. "Everybody's in it."

"Put me down for the one-fifty then."

"You'll be wanting change," Sullivan said.

"I don't think so."

"Because I had an affair in someone else's novel many years ago. My partner found it less than satisfactory. He was a naval officer with heaps of experience. Of course I was just a girl then."

"Make me a brain surgeon with unsteady hands," Pike said. "You can build suspense around a theme like that."

"Suspense is no longer relevant," I said.

"Bullthrow," Pike shouted. "That's bullthrow."

"Easy," Sullivan said.

"Pike's pique reaches mountainous proportions," I said, very pleased with myself.

"Bullthrow."

The words issued smoothly from an intelligent face (no doubt), running on past some reverse point of tolerance, and soon they seemed to generate an existence of their own, to demand an independence, to live in a silhouette of meaning more subtle, more cunning than the intelligence which bred them might ever know. We listened quietly for a while. The announcer said he had accidentally read the previous day's dispatch.

"I have fantasies about falling in love with a Vietnamese girl," Brand said. "But then she dies of a funny disease and I spend the rest of my life in pain."

The northern monsoon clouds were lifting. The killer teams were sweeping the villages. At night you could see the tracers streaking across the free-fire zones. There are twenty rounds to a magazine.

"America can be saved only by what it's trying to destroy," Sullivan said.

I spent much of the next two days in the library, doing research, thinking, worrying, writing monologues and dialogues. I walked over to the camper late in the afternoon of the second day and found Pike alone. I reported my plans to visit Chicago. Then I talked him into driving me up and down one of the quiet old streets in town while I shot some footage out the front window. I instructed him to drive at a walking speed or even less. I didn't have clamps with which to fasten the camera to the door frame and I wanted as little movement as possible. Also I liked the idea of drawing out the rows of houses, extending them in time, understanding them as more important in their appearances than in the voices and sorrows they contained. It was an interview in the new language. And with no people in sight I was able to shoot at higher than normal speeds, reducing vibration and prolonging the scene even more. By inches we moved along the street, each silent and lovely home a slow memorial to some shrill inner moment unquieted by time.

There is a motel in the heart of every man. Where the highway begins to dominate the landscape, beyond the limits of a large and reduplicating city, near a major point of arrival and departure: this is most likely where it stands. Postcards of itself at the desk. One hundred hermetic rooms. The four seasons of the year in aerosol cans inside the medicine chest. Repeated endlessly on the way to your room, you can easily forget who you are here; you can sit on your bed and become man sitting on bed, an abstraction to compete with infinity itself; out of such places and moments does modern chaos raise itself to the level of pure mathematics. Despite its great size, the motel seems temporary. This feeling may rise simply from the knowledge that no one lives here for more than one or two days at a time. Then, too, it may be explained by the motel's location, that windy hint of mystery encircling a lone building fixed in what was once a swamp; a cold gale blows from the lake or bay, sunlight cracks on the wingtips of distant planes, ducks tack upwind, and nowhere is there a sign of a human on foot. The motel seems to have been built solely of bathroom tile. The bedsheets are chilly and faintly damp. There are too many hangers in the closet, as if management were trying to compensate for a secret insufficiency too grievous to be imagined. From small gratings in the wall comes a steady and almost unendurable whisper of ventilation. But for all its spiritual impoverishments, this isn't the worst of places. It embodies a repetition so insistent and irresistible that, if not freedom, then liberation is possible, deliverance; possessed by chaos, you move into thinner realms, achieve refinements, mathematical integrity, and become, if you choose, the man on the bed in the next room. The forest lodge, the suite of mauve rooms, the fleabag above the hockshop, the borrowed apartment-all too personal, the unrecurring moment. Men hold this motel firmly in their hearts; here flows the dream of the confluence of travel and sex.

Edwina Meers was staying at such a motel near O'Hare Airport, roughly seventeen miles from the center of Chicago. Meredith had given me the name of the place and I had called Edwina and Charles and told them to expect me. Then I had borrowed Glenn Yost's car, a gray spastic Pontiac, and headed north in the night. It was good to be on the road again, daring the logic of the white line. Many trailer trucks went by, bearing the license plates of a dozen states, and the car rocked in their wind. I was part of the commerce, the romance of long-haul freight, the epic striding song of the Triple A travel guides.

It was nine in the morning and Edwina came to the door in a flowered zip-front skirt and tight undershirt top.

"You lucky man, I'm all alone. Do come in. Charles has already dashed off to a meeting. Our luggage is strewn about everywhere so you'll just have to sit on the bed. Do you mind if I leave the telly on? The broadcasts in this country are not to be believed."

"Why aren't you staying in town?"

"Charles balked at the notion. The dear man has an absolute obsession for punctuality and so he decided we had best park our hot little bodies as close to the airport as possible, since our shed-ule seems to be predicated on a split-second readiness that might do justice to a miss-isle system. Positively dreads being late for takeoffs. It's all very sexual, I suppose."

"We can drive in for lunch if you like. I've been to Chicago on business trips and I think I can find my way around fairly well."

"That's awfully nice of you, David. Really I'm so glad you could come. Meredith has told me so much about you. She's such a super girl, don't you think? So sort of fresh and homogenized."

Edwina had a round plain face, freckled slightly, like a pancake. She was probably in her mid-thirties and seemed delighted about the whole thing; the tensions of an unpretty youth now safely behind her, perhaps she was finding over-thirty to be her personal prime, the golden age of her passion and wit. There was a commercial on the television set. A woman in a bathtub was washing her legs with a bar of beauty soap. One knee out of the water, she slowly guided the soap along her calf, then up over her knee and down her thigh as the picture drifted into a slow dissolve. Now she was standing on the tile floor, a long soft-focus shot, head back, hands moving slowly over the towel across her belly and thighs. Edwina leaned against a chest of drawers.

"I'm confused," I said. "Somehow or other I had the impression you were American."

"I am, David."

"How long have you been living in England?"

"Funnily enough it's almost ten years to the day. Charles and I were married in Philadelphia and then off we went. I had a South American lover before I married Charles and all he wanted to do was produce babies. He was so sort of primitive and awful. Charles had a homosexual affair before he met me. His lover was best man at our wedding."

"Have you been to Chicago before?"

"No, and neither has Charles. We landed yesterday afternoon and rented a car. Then we settled in here and drove into town. We had been invited to a sort of fat businessmen's party given by a chap called either Lawrence Thomas or Thomas Lawrence. He's the man Charles is seeing on business. It was awfully sweet of him actually, going to all that trouble for the sole purpose of getting Charles acquainted with some of the local moneybags. But I must say it was far from being the most witty dinner party I've ever attended. The men talked about steel alloys and dyestuffs and the wives were even more boring if that's possible. Do you know there's a company called American Metal Climax Inc.? God, the man who thought that one up. Anyway, David, they served coq au vin for dinner and it was ten parts vin to one part coq. Then they kept handing me tall fruity rum drinks called Dormant Volcanoes. Needless to say, I soon got pissed as a newt.

Then this Thomas or Lawrence chap took our pale little bodies to another party in a smashing eleven-room flat belonging to a man who apparently owns Venezuela. You wouldn't believe what was hanging on the walls. Braque, Chagall, Mondrian, Renoir-I can't begin to list them. I've no doubt the poor man was duped into buying absolute fakes but I must confess it was a gorgeous sight, all those walls reeking of money. This man, who's apparently called Arno Tumbler, was off on his private island in the Caribbean where he's learning to be a French impressionist. The party itself was vile. First this Lawrence Thomas man practically raped me while we were dancing. Then a whole bunch of sort of speckled mad people arrived, all with painted faces and wearing the most bloody awful things really. A bunch of palsied twits if you ask me. One of them exposed his privates to me. All I did was remark to Charles that I didn't think a team of the Queen's own surgeons would be able to determine the sex of some of these creatures and the next thing I saw was this horrible little man looking me straight in the eye and smiling, with his george dangling amidships. Really, David, am I expected to find this sort of thing amusing? There were masses of these people jumping about in their robes and feathers. One felt oneself to be the center of attraction by mere dint of one's being so extraordinarily commonplace."

I had to keep reminding myself that she was American. Like a convert to a new religion, she was more dedicated than those who have been singing the psalms for two thousand years. I wondered what her English husband thought of this rainy patter.

"You're leaving when?"

"Tomorrow afternoon," she said. "We fly to Omaha, Denver, Little Rock and Atlanta. God, how dreary. Just before we left London, masses of postcards began arriving from virtually everyone we know, all on their hols in the most super places. Gwyllam is in Sardinia photographing bandits and smugglers. Dilys is apparently on the verge of being forcibly ejected from Portugal for sheer blatant hedonism. And dear old Harry and Nigel are in Madagascar again, writing their joint memoirs and buggering each other to death. Not that I'm complaining about the likes of Little Rock, mind you. It's great fun to be back in one's native land. But, really, David, the spectacular filth. I mean one reads about the Middle West and one expects to see all sorts of Shakers and Mennonites dashing about the countryside with brooms and paintbrushes. The weather is killing though, don't you think? I should like it to be like this in London. And I understand the steaks out here are absolutely top hole."

Several minutes later we were in bed. An open suitcase slid to the floor. She kept talking about her husband. I hit her and she was quiet. Naked she was even more plain, and the hunger I had expected from her did not show itself. Into her neutrality and silence I directed something like desperation. It was the old fascism. War, sadism, self-abasement, it was all that. She took it-but not to keep and not for herself. I thought she would want to feast on my body. I had been inserted into the televised dream of motel, the pleasure of being other and none. I had been hung in that dream, a thing out of modern fiction, beautiful boy plundered by the crumbling duchess. I had expected to enjoy it greatly, her greed and tongue and the dredgings of her fantasy. But she had climbed into bed like an old shoemaker and I found myself overburdened with parts-hers, mine, the dream's-and she did not seem to distinguish between what was authentic and what was ugly and brutal. It may have been that the final partition had fallen.

"Goodness, I wonder what Meredith would think of us. Do you suppose we've committed some medieval form of incest? Three times removed or something? It's all so wonderfully sordid, don't you think? But you must think I'm easy meat, darling. And you detest the way I speak. That's all right, David, you're not the first. I've had a long series of lovers, all of whom despised the earth I walk on and all of whom begged me to take them back when inevitably I sent them away out of sheer boredom. You see, my men think I bore them when in point of fact just the reverse is true. It never dawns on them, poor lambs, until their banishment is a fait accompli. They need me, you see. They need an empty room in which to unwrap their secret goodies. Do you believe in an afterlife?"

"For whom?" I said.

"For whom indeed. Quite a good answer. Perhaps the saintly people and the tedious people are all sort of jumbled up and sent indiscriminately to heaven or hell while the rest of us go absolutely nowhere. I shouldn't mind that actually. Sublime nothingness. I'm studying the Hindus. Cycles and cycles of existence. Vicky Glinn and I are taking lessons from a swami who lives in abject poverty in a tiny flat in Battersea. This man is very impressive, the genuine article I should think, but he communicates the most awful smell. Right now I think I'd like nothing better than two hours of precious sleep. I suggest you leave, David. This way I'll get my rest and you'll be free to analyze the entire episode. You're the type, aren't you? You see, I'm not a totally stupid woman. I have my moments of insight. Pick up that suitcase, will you please? And, David, when you get around to your session of deep analysis, do try to be kind to both of us."

In the car I could taste her on the back of my hand. I stopped for gas and called Ken Wild at his office. Then I drove into town and found a camera supply store. I bought some Kodak Tri-X reversal film, a wind filter and a light metal tripod with a pan-and-tilt head. An hour later Wild walked into a restaurant about three blocks from the Drake Hotel. He had gained some weight and his forehead had risen about half an inch. We stood at the bar and ordered drinks.

"Making films," he said. "That's great. Tell me about it. I hate my life. I'm at the point where I want to hear about other people's lives. It's like switching from fiction to biography. The beginning of the end."

"What I'm doing is kind of hard to talk about. It's a sort of first-person thing but without me in it in any physical sense, except fleetingly, not exactly in the Hitchcock manner but a brief personal appearance nonetheless, my mirror image at any rate. Also my voice when I start using sound. It's a reaching back for certain things. But not just that. It's also an attempt to explain, to consolidate. Jesus, I don't know. It'll be part dream, part fiction, part movies. An attempt to explore parts of my consciousness. Not quite autobiographical in the Jonas Mekas sense. I've said part movies. By that I mean certain juxtapositions of movies with reality, certain images that have stayed with me, certain influences too. I mean you can start with nothing but your own minor reality and end with an approximation of art. Ghosts and shadows everywhere in terms of technique. Bresson. Miklós Jancsó. Ozu. Shirley Clarke. The interview technique. The monologue. The anti-movie. The single camera position. The expressionless actor. The shot extended to its ultimate limit in time. I just got laid incidentally."

"You're really going strong," Wild said. "I haven't the slightest idea what the hell you're talking about but it sounds great, it sounds really heavy, it sounds committed."

"I feel I've got to do it. I'm also doing a documentary on the Navahos for television. That'll be done out in Arizona and around there. Where the reservation is."

"But you're not working for anybody."

"Independent basis," I said. "I don't want anybody making decisions for me. I'm not getting rich, mind you, but I'm holding my own. When all this is over I may do something for Svensk Filmindustri. Just outside Sweden there. I mean Stockholm. Bergman's turf. So you're divorced. I'm sorry to hear that."

"She was a bitch. I was a bastard. Good riddance to both of us. I hate my life. I really hate my life. What about you- married?"

"Actually I'm living with a Vietnamese girl," I said. "Marriage is a lost art. Maybe if we decide to have kids. If not, things are fine just the way they are."

"Their women are beautiful," Wild said.

We finished our drinks and got a table. Wild was obviously well known in here. He joked with the waiter, ordering an angst on pumpernickel. Then he asked for two more drinks.

"But you're making money, aren't you?"

"I'm making money," he said.

"I bet you've got a great apartment with all sorts of stunning creatures to choose from."

"This is bunnyland," he said. "Both ears and the tail for the sloppiest of kills."

We had a bottle of wine with lunch and two brandies at the table afterward. Then we went to the bar and ordered stingers. Wild was in no hurry to get back to the office. It was about three o'clock. I had been driving a good part of the previous night and I felt dazed and weary. We drank quietly for half an hour.

"We're consultants to government and industry," Wild said finally. "Want to know about production flow systems? Materials handling? Centralized processing and distribution? Automation you know isn't necessarily the answer. First you study the operation. Then you analyze the system in terms of costs and functional elements. Maybe automation isn't the answer at all. Maybe it's selective automation you want. One or two small changes can turn the trick. Relocate a conveyor line. Design a special component. Too many people think automation is the answer to everything. This is a fallacy. I work with good men. They do their job and they like what they're doing and they don't ever squawk. Once I dated one of their daughters for a period of several some odd months. She was all jugs. I liked her. But she kept using a word I couldn't stand. She was always using it. I tromped over to the museum. I went tromping through the park. I tromped down Rush Street. Automation is no panacea. We understand that in my father's outfit. Systems planning is the true American artform. More than jazz for godsake. We excel at maintenance. We understand interrelationships. We make it all work, from parcel entry to in-plant distribution to truck routing and scheduling. We know exactly where to put the nail that holds the broom. A lot of countries can't do that. They don't know how. Practically nobody in Europe knows where to put the nail. You know that Frenchman who wrote that book, what he said? There are three great economic powers in the world. America. Russia. And America in Europe. We have to show them where to put the nail. But the Russians still lag. They lag in industrial research, in computerization, in automated systems. They lag. We know how to plan things, like overall corporate policy, like inventory management, like distribution, like site suitability. We're experts in containerization, unit loads, electronic data processing, feasibility studies. We know how to zero in. What's so terrible about that?"

About fifteen minutes later he said:

"Talent is everything. If you've got talent, nothing else matters. You can screw up your personal life something terrible. So what. If you've got talent, it's there in reserve. Anybody who has talent they know they have it and that's it. It's what makes you what you are. It tells you you're you. Talent is everything; sanity is nothing. I'm convinced of it. I think I had something once. I showed promise, didn't I, Dave? I mean I had something, didn't I? But I was too sane. I couldn't make the leap out of my own soul into the soul of the universe. That's the leap they all made. From Blake to Rimbaud. I don't write anything but checks. I read science fiction. I go on business trips to South Bend and Rochester. The one in Minnesota. Not Rochester, New York. Rochester, Minnesota. I couldn't make the leap."

The sun was going down when I opened my eyes. I was on a boat. I could see the towers of Marina City. I was on a sightseeing boat on the Chicago River, that silly little river which modern engineering has coaxed into flowing backwards. The ribs on my left side ached badly. It was sunset and somehow I had lost several hours. Then we docked and I started walking toward the Drake, trying to remember where the car was parked. I stopped in a drugstore and called Wild at his apartment.

"What happened? I just woke up. I was on a sightseeing boat."

"You son of a bitch," he said.

"We were at the bar. That's all I remember. I woke up ten minutes ago. What happened in between?"

"My goddamn neck."

"My ribs," I said.

"I shouldn't even talk to you."

"We were at the bar. We were drinking stingers."

"You got in an argument with Chin Po."

"Who's that?"

"Chin Po's the guy who was sitting next to you. I was sitting on one side and he was on the other."

"Right," I said. "Then what?"

"We started drinking toasts. You and I and Chin. We drank a number of toasts to Chiang Kai-shek."

"Wonderful. Really great."

"Then you started the argument. You and Chin."

"What were we arguing about?"

"An afterlife," he said. "Whether or not there's an afterlife."

"That's incredible. I don't even have any convictions on the subject. Which side was I taking-pro or con?"

"I don't know. That part is hazy. I just remember you and Chin arguing violently about an afterlife."

"Then what?"

"Then you took a swing at Chin."

"God."'

"Luckily you just grazed him and before he had a chance to swing back I stepped in between and tried to calm you down."

"What happened then?"

"You got me in the headlock."

"Jesus, Ken."

"You got me in the headlock and I couldn't break it. You had my head twisted up under your armpit and I could hardly breathe."

"I'm really sorry. I just didn't know what I was doing."

"Then I blacked out," he said. "I couldn't break the hold and I just blacked out. When I came to, the bartender was punching you in the ribs to get you to let go of me and old Chin was back on his barstool calmly lighting a cigarette."

"That's incredible."

"The bartender, Frank, kept smashing you in the ribs until you finally let go. I headed straight for the John, bounced off some chairs, got in there, flashed once or twice, threw cold water on my face and then just sat on the floor. When I came out about five minutes later, you were gone. I'm not sure but I think you came in the John for a second and shook my hand. But I'm not sure."

"Ken, I don't know what to say. I'm really sorry."

"You'd be a lot sorrier if Chin Po had ever got his hands on you."

"Why?"

"Frank told me he's a black belt in karate."

"God."

"He'd have broken your windpipe just like that."

"God, I know."

"Fat old Chin. He'd have maimed you for life."

"And I still don't know what happened to the last two or three hours. Jesus God, it's frightening. I'm really sorry, Ken. I'll make it up to you somehow."

But I wasn't sorry. I was, if anything, exhilarated. Wild was husky and compact; he brimmed with strength. And yet he hadn't been able to break the headlock I had put on him.

"Let's forget it," he said. "Look, I've been working hard and drinking kind of heavy and I think I need a vacation. Maybe I'll go dry out somewhere. You said you were going to Arizona or someplace to do a documentary. Maybe I can meet you out there. When are you due on location?"

"Tomorrow," I said, and that was the truth.

10

I hurried toward the hotel, my pockets full of scraps of paper, index cards, neatly creased sheets, Scotch-taped fragments, throwaways uncrumpled and hand-pressed, what detritus and joy, a grainy day, child of Godard and Coca-Cola.

I asked the desk clerk, an old man this time whose face was purplish with broken blood vessels, if he could turn up a portable TV set somewhere in the building. I needed it for an hour and I was willing to slip a discreetly folded five-dollar bill into the breast pocket of his sturdy mail-order shirt. He came up later carrying the thing, a bulky Motorola, as if it were a wounded man he could not wait to deposit somewhere. I plugged it in, turned the sound down to nothing, then set the Canon Scoopic on the tripod.

Soon Glenn Yost arrived. I thanked him for giving up his lunch break, explaining we had to film in the early afternoon in order to get the right kind of TV show and commercials, and then I asked him to go over the pages I had prepared for him. We would read and record on tape my questions and his answers; he would not appear on camera in this segment. I talked fast so he wouldn't have time for second thoughts.

A game show was on TV, young married contestants and a suavely gliding master of ceremonies; there were frequent commercials, the usual daytime spasms on behalf of detergents and oral hygiene. This is what I filmed for roughly eight minutes, the TV set, having to break twice for reloading, as Glenn and I, off camera, read from the wrinkled scattered script. Glenn spoke in a monotone throughout.

"We're going to talk about test patterns and shadows. Certain forms of darkness. A small corner of the twentieth century."

"I have all the answers."

"And I have the questions," I said. "We begin, simply enough, with a man watching television. Quite possibly he is being driven mad, slowly, in stages, program by program, interruption by interruption. Still, he watches. What is there in that box? Why is he watching?"

"The TV set is a package and it's full of products. Inside are detergents, automobiles, cameras, breakfast cereal, other television sets. Programs are not interrupted by commercials; exactly the reverse is true. A television set is an electronic form of packaging. It's as simple as that. Without the products there's nothing. Educational television's a joke. Who in America would want to watch TV without commercials?"

"How does a successful television commercial affect the viewer?"

"It makes him want to change the way he lives."

"In what way?" I said.

"It moves him from first person consciousness to third person. In this country there is a universal third person, the man we all want to be. Advertising has discovered this man. It uses him to express the possibilities open to the consumer. To consume in America is not to buy; it is to dream. Advertising is the suggestion that the dream of entering the third person singular might possibly be fulfilled."

"How then does a TV commercial differ from a movie? Movies are full of people we want to be."

"Advertising is never bigger than life. It tries not to edge too far over the fantasy line; in fact it often mocks different fantasy themes associated with the movies. Look, there's no reason why you can't fly Eastern to Acapulco and share two solid weeks of sex and adventure with a vacationing typist from Iowa City. But advertising never claims you can do it with Ava Gardner. Only Richard Burton can accomplish that. You can change your image but you can't change the image of the woman you take to bed. Advertising has merchandised this distinction. We have exploited the limitation of dreams. It's our greatest achievement."

"What makes a good advertising man?"

"He knows how to move the merch off the shelves. It's as simple as that. If the advertising business shut down tomorrow, I'd go over to Macy's and get a job selling men's underwear. "

"Let's get back to images. Do the people who create commercials take into account this third person consciousness you've talked about with such persuasiveness and verve?"

"They just make their twenty-second art films. The third person was invented by the consumer, the great armchair dreamer. Advertising discovered the value of the third person but the consumer invented him. The country itself invented him. He came over on the Mayflower. I'm waiting for you to ask me about the anti-image."

"What's that?"

"It's the guerrilla warfare being fought behind the lines of the image. It's a picture of devastating spiritual atrocities. The perfect example of the anti-image in advertising is the slice-of-life commercial. A recognizable scene in a suburban home anywhere in the USA. Some dialogue between dad and junior or between Madge and the members of the bridge club. Problem: Madge is suffering from irregularity. Solution: Drink this stuff and the muses will squat. The rationale behind this kind of advertising is that the consumer will identify with Madge. This is a mistake. The consumer never identifies with the anti-image. He identifies only with the image. The Marlboro man. Frank Gifford and Bobby Hull in their Jantzen bathing suits. Slice-of-life commercials usually deal with the more depressing areas of life-odors, sores, old age, ugliness, pain. Fortunately the image is big enough to absorb the anti-image. Not that I object to the anti-image in principle. It has its possibilities; the time may not be far off when we tire of the dream. But the anti-image is being presented much too literally. The old themes. The stereotyped dialogue. It needs a touch of horror, some mad laughter from the graveyard. One of these days some smart copywriter will perceive the true inner mystery of America and develop an offshoot to the slice-of-life. The slice-of-death."

"Have you spent the major part of your adult life in the advertising business?"

"All but four years."

"Where were they spent?" I said.

"I served a hitch in the army during the war."

"Where?"

"The Pacific."

"Where in the Pacific?"

"The Philippines."

"Where in the Philippines?"

"Bataan: they made two movies about it."

"Do you ever feel uneasy about your place in the constantly unfolding incorporeal scheme of things?"

"Only when I try to pre-empt the truth."

"What does that mean?"

"One of the clients I service is the Nix Olympica Corporation. They make a whole line of products for the human body. Depilatories, salves, foot powder, styptic pencils, mouthwash, cotton swabs for the ears, deodorants for the armpit, deodorants for the male and female crotch, acne cream medication, sinus remedies, denture cleansers, laxatives, corn plasters. We were preparing a campaign for their Dentex Division; that's mouthwash primarily. Okay, so we zero in on one of the essential ingredients, quasi-cinnamaldehyde-plus. QCP. We take the hard-sell route. Dentex with QCP kills mouth poisons and odor-causing impurities thirty-two percent faster. Be specific. Be factual. Make a promise. Okay, so some little creep says to me in a meeting: thirty-two percent faster than what? Obvious, I tell him: thirty-two percent faster than if Dentex didn't have QCP. The fact that all mouthwashes have this cinnamaldehyde stuff is beside the point; we were the only ones talking about it. This is known as pre-empting the truth. The creative people do a storyboard. Open on Formula One racing car, number six, Watkins Glen. Action, noise, crowd, throttling, crack-ups, explosions. Number six comes in first. Beauty queen rushes up to car, leans over to kiss driver, then turns away with grimace. Bad breath. She doesn't want to kiss him. Cut to medical lab, guy with white smock. This is a dramatization-charts, diagrams, supers, QCP thirty-two percent faster. Back to-original guy, number six, different race. Checkered flag drops, he wins, wreath around the neck, beauty queen kisses him, dissolve to victory party as they dance, kiss, whisper, dance, kiss. We took the idea to Dentex. They loved it. We took it upstairs to Nix Olympica. They loved it. They were delighted. They gave us the okay to shoot. We get cars and drivers and extras. We go up to Watkins Glen. We use helicopters, we use tracking shots, we use slow-motion, we use stop-action, we zoom, we wide-angle, we set up two small crashes and one monster explosion with a car turning over that nearly kills half the crew. I called a special meeting of the agency's planning board and ran the final print for them. They loved it. When I told them it cost as much, pro-rated, as the movie Cleopatra, they were delighted. They would have something to tell their wives that evening. The next day we showed the commercial to Dentex. They loved it. They were delighted. We took it upstairs to Nix Olympica. They turned it down flat. The money didn't bother them; they were impressed with the money; they would have something to tell their wives. But they turned it down flat. They ordered us to re-shoot both sequences in the winner's circle."

"Why?"

"Because of the Oriental. Because of the old man standing at the edge of the group of extras who were crowding around the winner's circle both times, first when the beauty queen refused to kiss number six and then when she did kiss him. Both times he was there, this small shrunken old man, this Oriental. Who was he? Who hired him? How did he get into the crowd? Nobody knew. But he was there all right and Nix Olympica spotted him. All the other extras were young healthy gleaming men and women. It's a commercial for mouthwash; you want health, happiness, freshness, mouth-appeal. And this sick-looking old man is hovering there, this really depressing downbeat Oriental. Look, I love the business. I thrive on it. But I can't help wondering if I've wasted my life simply because of the old man who ruined the mouth-wash commercial. On a spring evening some years ago, during the time when my wife was very ill, when she was nearing the very end, I walked up a street in the upper Thirties and turned right onto Park Avenue and there was the Pan Am Building, a mile high and half-a-mile wide, every light blazing, an impossible slab of squared-off rock hulking above me and crowding everything else out of the way, even the sky. It looked like God. I had never seen the Pan Am Building from that particular spot and I wasn't prepared for the colossal surprise of it, the way it crowded out the sky, that overwhelming tier of lights. I swear to you it looked like God the Father. What was the point I was trying to make?"

"I don't know."

"Neither do I. I guess that's what comes of trying to preempt the truth."

"What is the role of commercial television in the twentieth century and beyond?"

"In my blackest moods I feel it spells chaos for all of us."

"How do you get over these moods?" I said.

"I take a mild and gentle Palmolive bath, brush my teeth with Crest, swallow two Sominex tablets, and try desperately to fall asleep on my Simmons Beautyrest mattress."

"Thank you."

I took a shower and then called the network and asked for myself, wondering what would happen if I answered.

"Mr. Bell's office," Binky said.

"This is Charles of the Ritz. Our lipstick of the month is salmon puree."

"David, where the hell are you?"

"Give me ten seconds. It'll come to me."

"Come on now, don't fool around, Mr. Denney is furious. There's a whole crew standing by at the reservation and they can't do a thing until you get there. Now where are you?"

"About fifteen hundred miles from where I'm supposed to be."

"I don't believe it. You're crazy. You'll get fired."

"Tell Weede to send Harris Hodge out there. He's young and willing. He can handle it. I've been hearing good things about him."

"It's your project, David. You've got to be there."

"I'm not going to Arizona, Binky. At least not right now. I'd rather be there than here. But I've got to do this thing I'm doing."

"What thing?"

"The only reason I called was to let you know I'm all right. I thought you might worry if you didn't hear anything."

"I am worried, David. What thing?"

"I'm crossing the swamp. Listen, how's Warburton?"

"He died," she said.

"I guess I've known it for the last couple of days. I hope he'll be buried in England. Did Freddy Fuck-Nuts write a memo?" "Who's that?"

"Weede," I said. "Did he write a memo about Ted Warburton?"

"You shouldn't call him crappy names. Up to now he's been very good about your not showing up in Arizona. He's been backing you all the way. He told Livingston there must have been some unavoidable delay. An accident or something. David, I'll have to tell him you called and that you're not planning to go out there."

"What did the memo say? Did it say that Ted was a trusted friend and longtime associate and that no man is an island?"

"Something like that, I guess."

"Warburton was Trotsky," I said.

"David, no."

"Don't tell anyone. Let them figure it out for themselves, the bastards. No more memos. That was the only thing that made that place worthwhile anyway."

"Do you need any money?"

"I have enough traveler's checks for ten days or so. I won't be here any longer than that."

"Will you be coming back to New York?"

"I don't know, Bink."

"What will you do for money?"

"I don't know. I haven't thought about it."

"What about your apartment?"

"I haven't thought about it."

"Aren't you going to let me know where you are and what you're doing? I promise I won't tell anyone."

"It's okay, Binky. Everything's fine. I'll miss you. You and Trotsky's memos. The only things that made that place worthwhile."

"Thanks a whole hell of a lot," she said.

The old man came for the TV set. Then Carol Deming arrived wearing black pants, a black sweater and no makeup. I gave her a business kiss on the cheek, a gesture she acknowledged by smiling blankly at the camera. She sat in the armchair, her legs tucked up under her, and took another look at the script. Adjusting the tripod, I spoke to her from a directorial crouch. She bit her bent thumb, starlet in the enchanted light. The camera and tape recorder were cabled and ready to sync.

"Now the first part of this has to be simple, direct, wide open. In the second part you begin to draw back. I want to feel as though I'm listening to a stranger in a fog. The two women are very different. Maybe you've seen Persona. There are two women, a nurse and a patient, very different, who slowly begin to merge, to almost drift through each other's personalities and reappear with something added or subtracted, I'm not sure which, but a great movie, unparalleled, about the nature of diminishing existence. I'm getting off the point."

"How do you want me to sit, David?"

"Just the way you're sitting. I want the whole chair. Look directly at the camera. Very little voice. Keep the acting invisible. Then we'll cut and do part two."

"I'm scared."

"We all are."

"But I think I know what you want."

"Begin," I said.

"He had to borrow from his father at the beginning but after a while we were really on our own. It was a fun-type marriage. We had lots of friends and we were always calling them up on the spur of the moment and inviting them over. Whenever we ran out of things to say to each other we just picked up the telephone and called friends. If they couldn't come over we went to the movies. We went to the movies three or four times a week. We saw Breathless whenever it came back, at least half a dozen times. He loved it. I don't remember anything else we saw. We used to shop together for clothes and sometimes I'd buy things for him and sometimes he'd buy things for me. We liked to be seen together. We were invited everywhere and we always went. On weekends we discovered the city together. It was fabulous. Then came the period when he began to do strange things. He hit me once. He asked me to watch him do that thing that boys do. Out at the Hamptons he disappeared for twelve hours. When he came back he said he had been on a trip through the ages of man, meeting himself along the way. We called up our friends a lot during this period. We called up more and more friends and invited them over. I bought a lot of hats. I wanted a baby. I saw him in Rockefeller Center with a girl with a green raincoat. They were watching the skaters. She must have been freezing."

Carol went to the window and checked over the script. Without a word she tossed the pages to the floor, lit a cigarette and returned to the armchair, sitting this time with bare feet up on the chair, knees high and angled wide and with her back slumped, face framed by the knees, exhaling smoke out of that body-hut into the waiting eye of the camera. I began to shoot. Carol paused, most intelligently, for ten full seconds, contained in smoke, before beginning.

"His sense of insult was overwhelming. If someone used an obscene word in my presence, he demanded an immediate apology. He always got it, of course, his reputation being what it was. He was prepared to kill, quite literally to kill, in order to avenge the honor of someone he loved. He was always swearing on his mother's grave. In his company of men, there was no greater promise or proof of honor than to swear on your mother's grave. You could borrow any amount of money, get any favor, if you swore on your mother's grave to repay the debt. He told me about a friend of his called Mother Cabrini. Cabrini got a lot of mileage out of his mother's grave until it was learned that his mother was not dead. Telling this, he managed to be both outraged and amused. They were all children, of course, but not in the same way the rest of us are children. We have learned not to be afraid of the dark but we've forgotten that darkness means death. They haven't forgotten this. They are still in the hills of Sicily or Corsica or wherever they came from. They obey their mothers. They don't go into a dark cellar without expecting to be strangled by a zombie. They bless themselves constantly. And us, what do we do? We watch television and play Scrabble. So there it is, children of light and darkness. There are only several ways to die and I've just named two. I could no longer bear the way I was dying and so I decided to take my chances with him. We made love for the first time in the back seat of his Cadillac in somebody's driveway at ten o'clock in the evening somewhere between Boston and New York. I was not quite a virgin at the time and this upset him. He couldn't understand how a nineteen-year-old girl from a good family and so forth. We lived together, on and off. He'd go away on one of his business trips and I'd wonder how much the nature of his job meant to our relationship. I couldn't help suspecting I had manufactured the whole thing, my need for him, simply to avoid what I considered to be the alternatives. This is one of my very annoying traits. I can't sit back and let something grow of its own momentum and eventually reveal its truth or horror. I must probe from the outset. But there it is, take it or leave it, and I'd be alone in bed wondering whether I needed him at all, whether anyone would have done, anyone who spent his nights close to violent death. There must be a limit to the need to defeat boredom. In defeating it, I may have gone beyond the limit. I needed death in order to believe I was living, an atmosphere of death much more real and personal than anything the newspapers can offer. I didn't want him to get out of the business. I think I would have left him if he had. There we were then, the child of darkness and the child fleeing the light, him with his Sicilian knife shining in a cave and me with my hand between my legs at four in the morning, anticipating his bloody return. How many nights did I pass in dwelling over the beauty of his death? Gunned down in Utica, the hired assassin. Spinning in a blood-stunned barber chair. The prospect put me in something like heat. I used to imagine my quiet splendid sorrow. His would have been the most beautiful of deaths, filling me with life. He was tall and very handsome, very much a leading man of the nineteen thirties. He moved the way a proud, an almost overbearingly proud animal might move, an animal that is all sex and death. He was afraid of the dark. He lifted weights to keep in shape, he said, but really for the vanity of his body. Often he came to the dinner table in his underwear. He blessed himself when he passed a church. He believed in ghosts and devils. He tried never to use bad language in my presence and he was shocked and delighted when I used it. He went to the racetrack often and lost heavily. He bought me a mink coat and took me to the Copa. He was everything to me, a man no more than a philosophy, and it's strange, isn't it, that someone like me, with my upbringing and education and presumably well-trained intellect, would have such a very significant thing in common with this man. It was his instinct that death is without meaning unless it is met violently."

Sullivan tapped a few ashes from her cigarette into the salad she was tossing.

"We used to sit around our quarters after a strike," Brand said. "There'd be Thaw, Hoppy, Bookchester and this kid Eldred Peck who went to some obscure college down South where he wrote his master's thesis on the swastika in history. You know, tracing it way back to the early Buddhists, way back almost to the dawn of man. That was his favorite phrase. The dawn of man. And Eldred invented this game we'd play sitting around our quarters after a strike. Except it wasn't a game really. It was really a peculiar form of conversation, almost a religious chant. It even had a name. It was called Godsave. Eldred always started it off. He was younger than any of us and he had hair that was more white than blond, so white it was almost pink, a thin skinny kid who almost disappeared every time he put on his G-suit. Godsave the 94 women and children I vaporized this morning, he'd say. And we'd all follow in turn. Godsave the blind monk I incinerated with nape, Hoppy'd say. Godsave the nursery school I reduced to fine ash. Godsave the old folks' home I expunged with a 750-pounder. Godsave the 328 librarians I strafed into Swiss cheese. Godsave the team of neutral observers I burned to a crisp. Godsave the interdenominational missionary group on their 17-day excursion who never knew what hit them. After about a month Eldred refined the chanting. He made it more orthodox, more rigid; he purified it. He made us recite the same words every time. Each man had his own chant and it was the only one he was allowed to use and we'd go through the group in order, Eldred first, then Bookchester, Thaw, Hoppy and me, repeating the godsaves sometimes for two hours or more, the same five lines, one for each of us. Godsave the testaments of the increasingly real world. Godsave the poor bastards on our own side who get ubiquitized into all-pervasive spiritual flotsam by our well-intentioned bombs. Godsave our loved ones at home and may their vaginas expand and flourish. Godsave the dawn of man, which is once again imminent in the cyclic time-reversal mode. Godsave God. That was my chant. Godsave God. It was like a religious ceremony but full of ironies you don't find in most religions. And sometimes we laughed all through the chanting. Eldred was a strange kid. He was something like the way I am now. But he was way ahead of his time. He anticipated the comeback of the real world. Things become more real in proportion to the unreality of individual lives. The world has never been more real than it is now. I didn't learn that at Yale. I learned it from Eldred. The sky devoured him. He was the first to get it. But that wasn't the end of the godsaves. All we did was drop his chant and change Thaw's. Godsave Eldred Peck and his little pink pecker. Then Bookchester and Thaw got it on the same day. Hostile aircraft. Bad guys. Godsave God, I chanted that night. But Hoppy just slopped down his beer."

"Would you like me to roll one?" Sullivan said.

"Thank you, lady. But I think maybe later."

We ate lunch and then Sullivan and Brand decided to walk into town and find a place where they might buy a chess set. I was slightly annoyed at this because I didn't know the game at all. After they left I watched Pike tilt back his head and swallow, face cracking as the whisky burned its way down.

"We can leave for Colorado in a week or so if you like."

"What for?" he said.

"You want to confront a cougar before you die, don't you? No iron bars in the way. We'll go up into the Rockies."

"Pass me that ashtray."

"You want to go, don't you? That's why you came along in the first place, isn't it?"

"In Baltymore once I saw all manner of beast and fowl without leaving my room. I was blast-ass drunk for two, three weeks. Who needs the Rocky Mountains? This life isn't so big that it won't fit inside a bottle."

"Sully told me once that you saved her life. Did she mean that literally?"

"She means everything literally. Don't kid yourself about that lady. She means everything literally."

"How did you save her life?" I said.

"She had a fly eating her brain. This tiny fly had got stuck in her ear and then somehow crawled into her head. The buzzing was driving her nuts. Then it started eating her brain. She could hear the chewing in there. So we went up to her studio and I performed delicate brain surgery despite my unsteady hands. That fly was just a baby fly when it got in there but by the time I opened up her head and got it out after all the eating it did it was about the size of a good-size snail."

"Who pays for all the liquor you drink? I can't believe you've made that much money in your whole life."

"Take off, Jack."

"Name's Dave."

"Jack. Jackoff. Jackass. Jackdaw. Jackal. Jackal feeding on dead cougar. Jackal B. DeMille. What do you know about making movies?" "I've spent twenty-eight years in the movies," I said.

Austin Wakely was a fledgling actor and there was no mission he would not undertake to please the ego of the camera. He had been given only four hours to learn his lines but he professed to be never readier. I played with the tape recorder's giant dials.

"You know, this interview technique isn't anything new."

"I'm inventing the primitive," I said. "The others, in their anxiety, were merely stumbling upon certain pseudo-archaic forms. I myself did something of the sort for a TV show of my own devising. But that was TV."

"Can you pan with that tripod?"

"Not tonight."

"Don't you have a lavalier mike I can wear?"

"Nope."

"You know, they have things called diffusion filters that you can use to soften the actor's face in tight shots."

"Austin, let's dispense with terminology and see if we can weave a spell over this April evening. There won't be any tight shots. I want you standing against that bare stretch of wall. Is Carol married, by the way?"

"News to me if she is."

"Interesting girl," I said.

"Drotty thinks she's too intense. He wants her to exteriorize."

"Okay, we're ready. Try to avoid theatrical pauses. And keep inflection to a minimum."

I sighted on Austin against the wall and then started shooting, my voice a cheerful machine designed for the interrogation of the confused and the dislocated.

"Marital status."

"Divorced."

"Children."

"None."

"Appendix."

"Excised."

"What do you think of the war?" I said.

"I've seen it on television. It's sponsored by instant coffee among other things. The commercials are very tasteful in keeping with the serious theme of the program's content. Some of the commercials are racially integrated. Since I worked for seven years as an employee of the network responsible for the warcasts, I am in a position to point out that the network and the agency joined forces in order to convince the sponsor that integrated commercials were desirable. Their argument was that the war itself is integrated. Balanced programming has always been one of the network's chief aims."

"Draft status."

"I took my physical right after college. Trick knee. Terminal dandruff. They were more discriminating in those days."

"How long were you married?"

"About three years."

"Can you tell the camera why you didn't have children?"

"We wanted to have fun first. We decided that children could wait until after the fun was over, after Europe, after we became established."

"Did you go to Europe?"

"Not until we were divorced. We met in Florence and drank orangeade. I was staying in a fourteenth-century palazzo. In the dining room one evening I began a conversation with a very unattractive girl who turned out to be both German and lame. We spent part of the night in her-not my-room and in the morning I met my ex-wife on the Ponte Vecchio and we walked through the city for hours. By early evening she had developed a slight limp and I discovered I did not want to be with her anymore."

"What caused the divorce?"

"My image began to blur. This became a problem for both of us. However, we have continued to be very fond of each other. Divorce is a wonderful invention, much better than protracted separation or murder. It destroys tension. It liberates many wholesome emotions which had been tyrannized by the various mental cruelties. Divorce is the most educating route to a deep understanding between two people. It's the second and most important step in arriving at a truly radiant form of self-donative love. Marriage, of course, is the first step."

"Parents."

"Mother deceased."

"Father."

"He's buried alive but still breathing. I don't really look forward to his death. But I admit it would bring relief."

"Why?" I said.

"I remember the sound of his bare feet on the stairs. He never wore slippers, my father. People were always giving him slippers for Christmas. But there is a certain kind of American masculinity which precludes the wearing of articles of clothing which might possibly dull the effect of the brutal truth of one's immediate environment."

"The camera dislikes evasiveness. As Mr. Hitchcock says, one must not use flashback to deceive. What are you proud of, if anything?"

"I've made many short movies of one kind or another. Weekend films. Orgy-porgies. Nonplot things with friends. More than a hobby but not much more. Until this point, of course. And I used to be proud of one of the things I did. It was done in Central Park during a ceremony following one of the assassinations. There was an old Negro couple standing at the back of the crowd. The man was tall and lean with a face like a rock pointing out to sea. He wore a black suit and a white shirt with a high starched collar, rounded at the edges, and a black tie knotted about an inch below the top button of his shirt. He held a black hat in his hand. The woman was almost as tall as he was and her face in its own way was just as strong, but softer somehow, not rock but earth. The word dignity is unavoidable. And I felt for some reason that they were not husband and wife but brother and sister. Whatever they were, they looked like pillars of the black Baptist Church. They stood listening to the speeches and music, standing absolutely straight, absolutely motionless, and I raised my camera and began to shoot. From time to time I'd go into the crowd or train the camera on one of the platform speakers. But I'd always come back to the old Negro couple. I must have looked at that scrap of film fifty times. It meant a lot to me. I was proud of it. It wasn't just a day in the park or something you see on the seven o'clock news. Those two faces seemed more enduring than the republic itself. The film began with them and ended with them. They framed a sense of confusion. At least that's what I thought. It took me a long time to see how wrong I was. The camera implies meaning where no meaning exists. I had not celebrated that brother and sister. I had mocked them. I had exploited their sorrow. I had tried to make them part of a hopeful message on the state of the Union. To be black is to be the actor. To be white is to be the critic."

"Is there anything else you'd like to tell the camera?"

"Simply hello. Hello to myself in the remote future, watching this in fear and darkness. Hello to that America, whatever it may be doing or undoing. I hope you've finally become part of your time, David. You were always a bit behind, held back by obsolete sensibilities."

"Do you have any particular ambition in life?"

"To get out of it alive."

"Thank you," I said.

I shut down all systems, tape and film, and we talked for a while on subjects of no interest to either of us. Then Austin left and I took a blank piece of paper, crumpled it into a tight sphere and began tossing jump shots at the wastebasket. I pretended to be Oscar Robertson against Jerry West. An hour later I banked in a long left-hand hook and went to bed. It was the eighth anniversary of my mother's death.

I bought a hat, the first I had owned since childhood, a gray plaid bop cap which I wore with a magical child's belief in the infinities of common things. During the drive from New York to Maine I had worn at times a khaki fatigue cap, borrowed from Pike, but he had taken it back and buried it in his sea bag; no war games allowed with his private battle gear. On the hotel bed I rested, cap over my eyes. A full morning brushed through the shuddering blinds. Fellini, master of hats and noses, understands the philosophical nature of costume. My twenty-eight years in the movies. Making of a life so easily made that a hat on the head could become the man. The hat wore me. Arrivato Zampanó: the trailer and the road, her flawed boy's body announcing the strongman, and he in chains, bellowing. My teeth clicking in the dark at the Bleecker Street Cinema as they dance across the sky, a necklace of chessmen, hands locked in the northern dawn. Eyes closed, I inhaled some industrial gloom from the hat's soft lining, L. S. Stratford Ltd., bit of Finney falling down the stairs. I looked between the cracks inside the dark. Burt Lancaster toweling his chest: (and we live there, grubbing, in the pores). Bell looking at the poster of Belmondo looking at the poster of purposeful Bogart. Old man on the swing, Watanabe, singing to his unseen infancy. I took a walk around the bed, missing those stale chambers on the West Side, nicely epicene in their way, a touch of seedy glamour drifting in off Needle Park, pale tapering men who live for the films of the thirties. Shane rides toward the immaculate mountains.

I walked out to Howley Road, a cool night frozen over with stars. The light was on inside the camper and as I approached there worked up through my stomach the boy's delightful feeling of being a scout moving into enemy territory, moving through the darkness toward an outpost where the unsuspecting enemy sits smoking, just seconds from silent expert death.

"Today's my birthday," Brand said. "We're trying to think of ways to celebrate."

"How old are you?"

"Thirty."

"You're two years older than I am. What's it like to be thirty? A friend of mine told me three things happened when he reached thirty. He gained weight around the middle. He stopped reading novels. And he had a recurring year-long dream about a tapeworm in his stomach that gets so big it begins literally to outgrow him. It feeds on his vital organs, getting bigger as he gets smaller and weaker, until finally when it works its way out of his mouth, eating his gums and teeth in the process, it weighs about one hundred and eighty pounds, most of it him, and he's down to thirty pounds of bone and translucent skin and he falls on the floor and sees the huge slimy jaws of the tapeworm fitting themselves around his head as he wakes up. Warren Beasley told me that story, the radio personality."

"What do you mean he stopped reading novels?" Brand said.

"That's what he told me. I don't know what he meant by it."

"I'm taking all the slang out of my book. I'm inventing new slang."

"Sully, have you seen Ikiru by any chance?"

"Wait a minute, Davy, we're talking about novels. I plan to take out the slang and replace it with new forms, new modes. Maybe I'll eliminate language itself. It may be possible to find a completely new mode. I've been thinking about this lately. I'd like your opinion."

"In my little home movie, the thing I'm doing, I haven't reduced the value of language at all. I've reinforced it, in fact. What I've reduced is movement, the kind of movement that tells a story or creates a harmony. I want language to evolve from static forms. The film is a sort of sub-species of the underground. What I'm shooting now is just a small segment of what will eventually include more general matter-funerals, traffic jams, furniture, real events, women, doors, windows. Auto-fiction. Actors, people playing themselves, lines of poetry. When I'm done I'd like to put the whole thing in a freezer and then run it uncut thirty years from now."

"I'll be sixty then," Brand said.

"I'll be dirt," Pike said.

"Sully, I wonder if you'd be willing to appear in the movie. It won't take long. We can do it tomorrow. A brief scene. I know I haven't been spending much time around here lately but it's only because I've been so busy. I'm very grateful that nobody's complained about the number of days we've been spending here. So will you do it? A brief scene. Speak to me, sad-eyed lady of the lowlands."

"Of course, David. Anything for you."

Brand wanted to arm-wrestle. We locked hands and exchanged iron glares. I didn't know whether or not he was serious. He began to exert pressure and I put my head down and concentrated, trying to keep my elbows square on the table. For several minutes we strained, giving and taking little. My forearm was tense, muscles humming, and I put everything I had into one pivotal offensive, all my strength, a vein leaping in my wrist, his arm starting to give, elbow losing traction; then he stiffened suddenly and we were stalemated again and Sullivan was standing over us holding a strange painted wood-and-wire doll.

"It's your birthday present," she said. "I made it for you this afternoon. It's a doll-god of India. A menacing bitchy hermaphroditic divinity."

"I think I'm afraid of it," Brand said.

The grass was wet and the steel supports of the swings behind the bandstand in the park were dull silver in the clear morning. This from the twelfth year, boys on sleds seen through gauze in slow motion, their round steaming faces fading in the snow, the great love I had for my heavy boots and their rusty interlocking buckles; entering winter, pure and empty, sea-creature (brain) pulsing in the cookie jar, art and science of the shovelers of snow, the rocking chair's steady knocks thundering through the house, her hands clenching the edges of the armrests, knuckles white, and I wondered how that worked, whether blood stayed dammed in the veins of the hand or moved up the arm waiting for the hand to go soft, rocking in her darkness, snow softly dropping. But there was no snow now and I would have to shoot by daylight. Sullivan stood behind one of the swings, no questions asked or explanations offered, a woman, a figure in a landscape although snow was impossible and disease did not blast her cells, an actor, a woman nonetheless whose generating force took from the camera some of its power, weakening thankfully what was for me an all too overarching moment. Birds rested on the chimneys of several homes, starlings or wrens, neo-pterodactyls for all I knew, Iowa for all I knew, Alexandria, Kamakura, and through the eyepiece I saw pass behind her a blue panel truck with the single word Smith in white across the side. Nearer Iowa then and more than small comfort. Eight o'clock in the morning. Turned-up bowl of the bandstand. Trees and wet grass. Sand impacted in the sandbox by last night's late rain. Gulley of an outflung leg. Four-finger handprint. Pail's perfect circle. I adjusted the wind filter and she sat on the swing now, a nautical creak working down the links of the chains, tips of her fingers lightly touching them. She began to rise toward me, nothing in her eyes.

"I see myself in a big stone house on the Oregon coast," Brand said. "I'm exactly sixty years old. I built the house myself, rock by rock. I see myself as one of those unique old writers who's still respected for his daring ideas and style. Young disciples make pilgrimages to visit me. They come hiking up to my house carrying knapsacks and copies of my books. There are no roads in the area. It's like Big Sur, only more lonely and remote. The house is right above the ocean and I can see seals basking on the rocks and big lean seabirds skimming over the waves and even an occasional shark, the fin of a big beautiful shark bright in the sunlight. The shark is my personal symbol. At the back of all my books there's an imprint of a shark just like the wolfhound on Alfred A. Knopf books. The surf thunders on the rocky beach. The wind comes off the water and blows past the house and goes whistling through the woods out back. I see myself as lean and craggy. The young disciples come from every corner of the world. Sometimes they come in groups, a bunch of young Frenchmen and their girlfriends bringing greetings from famous old French philosophers and writers, guys I shared symposiums with and signed petitions with, famous old French intellectuals who haven't given up their revolutionary ideas and who still exert a profound influence on French foreign policy. The young disciples usually stay a week or so. We have quiet talks and go walking on the beach. They ask me about my life and thought. Sometimes I get a stray, a young female disciple who comes all alone from Sweden at great personal expense and hardship. She is young and blond and lovely. The Swedish experiment has not worked, she says. We go to bed together. We can hear the wind and the gulls. There's nothing in the room except the four stone walls and the bed. Afterward she tells me I am like a man half my age. We speak only rarely. She cooks simple Swedish meals for me. We walk on the beach. I read her the first chapter of my work in progress and she tells me it is the best and truest I have done. She asks me about my wife. I had been married years before to a beautiful Vietnamese girl who died of a rare lung disease. I say nothing to the Swede. I merely take her hand and lead her to the bed. Two weeks later I tell her that she must go. My work demands the tension of loneliness. She understands. I go back to work. It is all hard and clean. The surf crashes on the rocks. A month later a tall lovely Australian girl with titian hair comes walking up the steep rocky path. She is carrying a knapsack and my lone book of verse."

In the afternoon I went to the library. Then I walked back out to Howley Road, almost not noticing the brightness and calm of the day, the trees in their easy bending eagerness smelling of higher terrain. Suddenly I regretted the calmness of lowlands, of sea level, and thought if this were mountain country all my earnest plans might be shoveled easily into the wind. In the pitiless insanity of nature above the timber-line no other resolution is needed than that of a river changing color as it flows down the continent toward its own promise and past. Pike was alone in the camper, barking softly in his sleep, and there was nobody in the bar across the road.

I spent sixteen straight hours slopping white paint on the dull green walls of my hotel room and then, using a much smaller brush, printing the two thousand words of the next part of the script in black paint over the white.

I finished early in the morning. I went out to the camper, where I spent most of the day either sleeping or watching Sullivan and Brand play chess. In the evening I went back to the hotel. Glenn Yost came up to the room and looked at the walls. I told him it had cost me two sizable bribes and a promise to pay for the repainting when I checked out. His crazed eye was very active. I told him that during filming he would stand by the armchair and read the words and sentences as they progressed around the room. He'd be on camera intermittently; from time to time I'd pan one of the walls, perhaps in accord with the line he was reading, perhaps against the line, camera and man reading in opposite directions. I'd anticipate the script at times. I'd also shoot passages he had already recited. Somewhere along the way we'd cut, reload, re-position, and proceed again. I gave him time to read through the whole thing, showing him exactly where certain passages picked up after being interrupted by windows or door frames. The left eye jumped. I told him to be cool, that none of this mattered in the least.

"I stand here frankly amazed."

"The eye's really hopping," I said.

"I don't know but what I'd rather be at home fixing the screen door."

"Fellini says the right eye is for reality and the left eye is the fantasy eye. Whenever you're ready, Glenn."

"What the hell, let's go."

I stood over the tripod and gave him a hand-sign.

"Our luck was lean that year. There were about ten thousand of us. The rest were indigenous. We were spread all over the southern part of the peninsula, surrendering to anybody who happened to come around, all told about seventy thousand troops, American and Filipino, and the Japanese had to get us out of there so their own people could move in and prepare for a big assault on Corregidor. We were just in the way which was a new feeling for somebody who considered himself a pretty fair rifleman and his country the only invincible power on earth. The first thing they wanted to do was get us all assembled at a place called Balanga. We were to get there on our own from whatever company or platoon or command post had been shot away around us or starved or bored or diseased into submission. There were nine of us who started walking across a precleared firing area toward Balanga. It was only twelve or fifteen miles from where we were. They didn't give us any food but that was nothing new. We had been employing maximum stress procedure for some time and following the example of the indigenous personnel, eating dogs and monkeys and lizards. Once I saw one of them, a Filipino, eating the meat of a python. I never ate python and I never ate monkey after the first time. Lizard you can keep down but monkey-meat is like eating something that came jumping and swinging out of hell itself and I was willing to go just so far with the max stress routine. The other thing was malaria, which everybody had. But it really wasn't too bad. We got some sugar cane from the fields and ate that and there were streams to drink from. We had a colonel with us and he had a pass that some gink officer had given him when we surrendered. He showed this pass to anybody we ran into on the road and they didn't give us too much trouble. They searched us and took rings and watches and anything else they could find, like my Zippo lighter, which twenty years later I began to regret because it would have made a good ad in the campaign they were running, full-page black-and-white-bleed authentic owner testimonials. this zippo survived the bataan death march. We got to Balanga that night. We had covered the distance in one day with no strain at all. Then we heard the enemy had executed about four hundred indigenous military personnel, officers and noncoms. The Filipinos were on their way to Balanga like the rest of us when they were stopped by some ginks who were part of an aftermath reaction force. They let everybody go except the officers and noncoms, who were lined up in several columns and then tied together at the wrists with telephone wire. Then they took out their swords and bayonets and killed them. We heard they beheaded most of them. They didn't use any guns and it took about two hours to kill all four hundred. Must have been something to see. We heard it was revenge for something the indigenous personnel had done, but nobody knew what. To tell you the truth I don't think anybody cared. In the situation we were in, which was one of total, complete and utter heat and boredom and wondering what manner of crawling scabby insect you were going to dine on next, the fact of four hundred headless Filipinos was a topic for pleasant clubhouse gossip, something to discuss briefly in mild awe and almost admiration for the ginks for at least having a sense of spectacle and to be grateful for in a way because it took our minds off our own problems. Balanga was unforgettable. Thousands of men were pouring into the town. They put some of us in pastures. Others they kept in small yards behind barbed wire. We were all jammed together and it was impossible to sit down and the whole town smelled of defecation. The whole town. We were told to use a ditch but it was full of dead bodies and the smell of the dead and dying kept most of us away. Men with dysentery couldn't control themselves and had to defecate where they stood. Others just fell down and died. All this time in Balanga standing in the pasture and later burying some of the dead I tried to think of my wife and two small daughters, sanity, a home and a bed, her breasts and mouth and lovely hands, but she kept drifting away and I was too numb or unfeeling to care really whether I could bring her back, the sight of her standing naked in a dim room, and on the ground next to me a man I had thought to be dead was jacking off, flat on his back, beating it in a quiet frenzy. The ginks presented us with copies of the humane atrocity clause of the Cape Town Accords. Then they gave us rice to eat and sent us north. There were guards this time. We were walking to a place called Orani. We saw a lot of corpses on the road. Some indigenous noncombatants gave us food and we drank polluted water from streams or puddles. We weren't supposed to break ranks but we did anyway. We had to have water. It was worth the chance, no two ways about it. A lot of men were shot or bayoneted getting water. One of the guards was singing a song, walking along beside us in the hot sun smiling and singing a song. A sergeant named Ritchie, a demo expert with one of the anti-transit security outfits, broke ranks then and jumped the guard from behind and knocked his weapon into a ditch. Then he straddled the guard and started tearing at his throat. I don't think he particularly wanted to kill the guard. He just wanted to get inside him, open him up for inspection. Then two other ginks came trotting up the line and shot Ritchie in the back. We got to Orani and it stank even worse than Balanga. Just outside the town though, about a mile outside, I saw something so strange I thought it might be a vision, something brought on by the hunger and malaria. Under some trees at the edge of an empty field was a swing, an obviously homemade swing, just a board and two ropes fastened to a treelimb. Sitting on the swing was a gink officer and maybe it was the glare of the sun or maybe just the distance but he seemed to be a very old man, he seemed almost ancient, but at the same time I was sure he was wearing the uniform of a gink officer. He was looking at us, gliding very slowly on the swing a few inches forward, a few inches back, his small legs well off the ground, looking at us and singing a song. At first I hadn't realized he was singing but now I could hear it coming across the field, a slow and what seemed a very sorrowful song. Maybe it was my imagination and maybe just my ignorance of the language but it seemed to be the same song the guard was singing before Ritchie jumped him. And he just sat there, moving a few inches either way, singing that beautiful slow song and then making a gesture with his hand as if to bless us, but in a circle, a strange blessing. If it was a vision, then it was a mass vision because all of us looked that way as we went along the road. But nobody said anything. We just looked at him and listened to the song. A little ways further on we passed one of the village depaci-fication centers set up by Tech II and Psy Ops before the enemy terminated the whole concept. We were in Orani about a day. Then we walked to another town, where they stuffed us in a warehouse. There must have been thousands of us in there, crushed and elbowing and going out of our minds. Nobody could sleep. I was dying for some mouth wash. Barrels of it for everybody, green and foamy. We were all locked together and the stink was worse than ever because we were indoors. From here we walked to a rail center where they had trains waiting for us. Some of us were given food here and some weren't. We all looked forward to the trains, some dim and still functioning part of our minds thinking of god knows what childhood times we had spent on trains, the Twin Cities Zephyr if you were from the Midwest, or the San Francisco Chief or Afternoon Hiawatha; some dim vision of going across the Great Plains on a Union Pacific train and everything is vast and wild and mysterious because you're ten years old and America is as wide as all the world and twice as invincible. We looked forward to the trains but we should have known better by this time. They put us in boxcars. Whatever position you found yourself in when you were pushed into the boxcar, that was it for the whole trip. There were no windows and the doors were closed. It was the warehouse again, this time on wheels. A few minutes after the train started, somebody began to moo. That set us off. Soon we all began mooing and snorting, making noises like sheep, cows, horses, pigs. The Psy Ops people never told us about this kind of environmental reaction. Nobody laughed. We weren't fooling around. This was no comic celebration of the indomitable human spirit. No protest against inhumanity. We were cattle now and we knew it. We were merely telling ourselves that we were cattle and we shouted moo and baa in absolute seriousness and total overwhelming self-hatred. We were livestock. How could anyone deny it? What else could we be but livestock, locked up as we were in boxcars and stepping in puddles of our own sick liquid shit. We didn't hate the ginks. They hadn't gotten us into this. We had, or our generals had, or our country which treasured the sacrifice of its sons, making slogans out of their death and selling war bonds with it or soap for all we knew. The ride seemed to take years. It seemed a trek across Asia. When we were all off the train we walked to the POW camp, where they processed us with one of our own incremental mode simulators. The march was over and I tried to get back to the small white beauty of her breasts and the two girls so beautifully flabby my fingers wanted to melt when I touched them. And the third child about to be born. But I couldn't return. West End Avenue. It seemed that everybody who lived there was taking music lessons. Harkavy the country squire drinking Jack Daniel's on the rocks in his star-spangled pajamas. And my mother (what was her name) dusting the old house like a pharaoh's widow come to clean the tomb every Thursday morning. Alexandria. Our wedding on the lawn. It was all in a dark part of my mind and I had to get back there because it was in Balanga that they forced us to bury the dead. It was in Balanga that they forced us to bury the dead. It was in Balanga that they forced us to bury the dead and I was throwing dirt onto the body of a Filipino when he suddenly moved. Poor little blood-faced indigenous Filipino soldierboy. When he started to rise from the ditch. Dozens of dead men around him covered already with maggots, completely covered so that the ground, the earth, seemed to be moving, rotting bodies everywhere and the whole saddle trench about to erupt. When he lifted himself on his elbow. I dropped my shovel and leaned way over the edge of the trench, all those billions of ugly things swarming into the mouths of my dead buddies and their dead buddies and their buddies' buddies and the tough-little brown-little indigenous military personnel. When he tried to extend a hand to me. I leaned way down and then felt something jab me in the ribs. It was a guard jabbing me with his bayonet in a light, casual, condescending and almost upper-class manner like a bloody British officer of the 11th Light Dragoons poking an Indian stable boy with his riding crop. When he tried to rise. I pointed to him, trying to rise, and then the guard did some pointing of his own. He pointed his bayonet at the shovel on the ground and then at the boy in the ditch. It was rather a deft piece of understatement, I thought. He wanted me to bury the little wog anyway."

"What are you stopping for?" I said.

"That's all there is," Glenn said.

After he left I looked up Owney Pine's number in the local directory. He said he'd try anything once and we made a date for the next day.

If I could index all the hovering memories which announce themselves so insistently to me, sitting amid the distractions of yet another introspective evening (ship models, books, the last of the brandy), I would compile my index not in terms of good or bad memories, childhood or adult, innocent or guilty, but rather in two very broad and simple categories. Cooperative and uncooperative. Some memories seem content to be isolated units; they slip neatly into the proper slot and give no indication of continuum. Others, the uncooperative, insist on evasion, on camouflage, on dissolving into uninvited images. When I command snow to fall once again on the streets of Old Holly, my father's hands curled about a shovel, I can't be sure I'll get the precise moment I want. A second too soon and there is mother sitting in the rocker; too late and the memory subdivides, one part straying into fantasy: dull knife clamped in my teeth, I dog-crawl through the jungle, belly dragging, toward Dr. Weber's house. We are what we remember. The past is here, inside this black clock, more devious than night or fog, determining how we see and what we touch at this irreplaceable instant in time.

"How long have you been practicing medicine, doctor?"

"Let's see, I make it twenty-four years. Does that jibe with your figures?"

"It's not important," I said. "Where did you intern?"

"Interned first at Brooklyn Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat. Then at Pelham Senile, the New York City Mortuary, Jewish Discount, and Blessed Veronica Midwife. Followed by a brief stint on the coast at Pasadena Neuroland and Roy Rogers Lying-in. Mind if I smoke?"

"Not at all, doctor. And after your internship?"

"Private practice in Westchester. I was beloved out there. You can check that out with anybody in town. I was beloved by my parishioners. I mean my patients."

"Let's discuss the disease that's on everyone's mind today."

"The Big C. Love to."

"Would you tell the camera the different ways in which it might manifest itself."

"Look out for lumps of any kind. Look out for irregular bleeding from any orifice of the body. Look out for changes in color of moles or warts. Look out for persistent coughing, pain in your bones, indigestion, loss of weight. Look out for diarrhea. Look out for constipation. Look out for that tired worn-out feeling. Look out for painful urination and beware when you cough up blood or mucus. Look out for sores on the lips. Look out for aches in your lower back. Beware of swelling. If you develop a sudden distaste for meat, you're in big trouble. Look out for bloody stool, urinary retention, lumps in the throat, sputum flecked with blood, discharges from the nipple, lumps in the armpit. Beware of wens, canker, polyps, expanding birthmarks. We all have it to some extent. Oh yes. Cells expanding, running wild. Bandit cells. Oh yes. Massage the prostate. Whirl the poor bastard's urine at high speeds. Bombard the victim with sound waves-eight hundred thousand cycles per second. Sound kills bandit cells, drives victim crazy. Oh yes, oh yes. But by the grace of Aesculapius, god of medicine, we'll lick the Big C and make America safe for babies and other growing things. Radiation and/or surgery. Cut and burn, cut and burn. Toss me that pack of cigarettes."

"Did any of your patients despise the very earth you walked on?"

"You must be kidding. I was beloved by my patients. Making my rounds of a spring morning I would nod to them on the street and they would nod back. Many's the time they nodded first."

"Cervix, doctor."

"Neck of the womb. Scrape surface of vagina for fluid. Or get it out of there with a tube. Run a smear test, one of my favorites. Dry fluid on a glass slide. Stain it. Hand it over to a pathologist. Say the physician's prayer. Give me strength and leisure and zeal to enlarge my knowledge. Our work is great and the mind of man presses forward forever. Thou hast chosen me in Thy grace to watch over the life and death of Thy creatures. I am about to fulfill my duties. Guide me in this immense work so that it may benefit mankind, for without Thy help not even the least thing will succeed. I like that part about leisure."

"Internal examination, doctor."

"Probe and investigate. Seek and find. Make soundings. Great earth and sea smell comes blowing out. Changing tides. Sandalwood and spices. Harvest time in Flanders. I like to dilly and dally just a bit. It relaxes them."

"Death, doctor."

"Never say die is what I say. Pump glycerol into the circulatory system. Put the body on ice in a plastic bag. Place in vacuum capsule full of liquid nitrogen. Cool to three hundred twenty degrees below. Once we figure out how to thaw the sons of bitches, we'll have mass resurrections from coast to coast."

"We've run out of time," I said.

"That'll be one hundred and fifty dollars."

Any description of the main street of Fort Curtis can begin and end inside this very sentence. Beyond that I find only redundancy. The same six words identify the thing to be described and serve to describe it. The main street of Fort Curtis.

It was there that I wandered about with my strolling players, Austin Wakely and Carol Deming, each of us filled with the crosscurrents of love that pass between collaborators in secret acts, creators, interpreters, artisans, mapmakers, weavers of the speed of light. People in the street passed us, distantly, unadvised of our commitment, fairly large numbers on that warm evening, moviegoíng, shopping for seasonal items-paint, window screens, lightweight shoes. The breeze smelled of commerce, of leather goods and exhaust fumes, very pleasant in a way, the Greek figs of one's childhood. That street was a thoroughly American place, monument of collective nostalgia, and we read the store signs aloud and looked at the glossy stills behind paneled glass outside the movie theater. Nobody knew who we were and we didn't know each other.

They were fascinated by the walls of my room. I put up a bedsheet to block out the words in the area where they'd be sitting. Soon we were ready. Austin was in his jockey shorts, sitting in a chair in front of the bedsheet. Carol wore black underwear of the bikini type. She sat next to Austin in an identical straightback chair. I was getting very intricate here, not just tampering with the past, changing its color a bit, but mixing pasts together and ending at least in part with a film of a film. Terribly intricate. But the actors did not ask questions. Underwear is humorous and only the undemocratic mind interrogates humor.

Boy. Let's talk about the near future.

Girl. You start.

Boy. I think we should get married. We can go out to the Coast together for my senior year. It'll be a lot of fun. There's all kinds of water sports out there.

Girl. I'd like to learn how to water-ski. But marriage is such a big step.

Boy. Do you love me?

Girl. I don't know. I think so. I guess I do.

Boy. I'll have my car out there. We can drive into the desert. Maybe you can be in my movie. I'll be doing a movie. We can do pretty much what we want out there. We can take off our clothes and try to be free. When you think of all the people in the world who dress freely and who when they want to take off their clothes don't have to discuss it for hours on end, it's amazing.

Girl. This is my favorite set of underthings.

Boy. This is mine too.

Girl. How free is it out there? How many girls have you done things with?

Boy. One doesn't keep books.

Girl. That's very British and amusing.

Boy. Experience is important.

Girl. Experience is something I'd like to have without going through all the trouble of getting it.

Boy. As I see it, there's no reason why we shouldn't get married. We like each other a lot. We have mutual respect for each other's taste in clothes. We like to do a lot of the same things. And everybody says we're an attractive couple.

Girl. Aren't there other things to consider?

Boy. One doesn't keep books.

Girl. That really is an amusing remark.

Boy. I promise you one thing. If we get married I'll definitely put you in my film. We're supposed to use students as actors but I'm sure they'll make an exception in this case. It'll even have a soundtrack.

Girl. Can I wear what I'm wearing?

Boy. You can wear whatever you want. And you can say whatever you want.

Girl. It'll be wild. It'll be super. It'll be too much.

When Austin was dressed I asked him to leave and he said he'd wait outside in his car. Carol put on one of my shirts and read quietly through the next scene. I tried not to sneak looks at her as I played with the tape recorder. I felt it was important to keep things on a strictly professional level and I wanted to make a casual remark, something technical about sound or lighting, but nothing very scientific arrived at the tip of my tongue. Then Brand showed up, surprisingly, on time. Carol went into the bathroom and Brand stripped down to his shorts, long white things with green alarm clocks on them. She came out wearing a thigh-length nightgown and walked toward the bed without looking at either of us. Glances carefully prepared to indicate nothing more than mild interest were exchanged between Brand and me as we noted the soft commanding bounce of her breasts. Carol stood on the bed, hands on hips, looking about her as if to make sure the set had been cleared of all but essential personnel, and then lowered herself to a pillow, where she sat wrapped in her own limbs, an entrance and a place-taking of totally serious humor, one level of personality already in role and trying to demand obedience of the other, which perhaps was beginning to hate the camera. Brand sat on the other pillow. I told him to take off his glasses. Then we discussed what was to follow. Although Brand assured me that he had memorized his lines, I insisted on an improvised scene, first because I didn't trust him, second because I didn't like what I had written. I told them to retain the spirit of the thing and forget the details. Carol stared at the inkblue dogs on Brand's arm, the fornicating dogs. He blinked several times and reached for his glasses but I moved them out of reach. I set up camera and tripod at the foot of the bed.

Man. There was a red moon.

Woman. Schenectady is famous for its moons.

Man. Right away you start in. It's better you don't know anyway. I'm not supposed to tell you anything but you always get me to tell you.

Woman. You tell me where but that's all.

Man. That's enough. That's too much. Sometimes I wonder about you. Always asking. Isn't it better you don't know? You're too interested. You shouldn't be that interested.

Woman. You're my sweetheart. I want to know what you do on your business trips.

Man. It's not right that you should want to know. There's something wrong with it. Sometimes I wonder about you.

Woman. What's fascinating about people like you is your blazing sense of morality. Your devotion to the concept of a place for everything and everything in its place. When you get right down to it, that's what morality means to a moralist. It means shoot to kill but not in a hospital zone. You might wake the patients.

Man. What are you talking about? What's she talking about?

Woman. I'm talking about your underwear. Did you buy those shorts in Schenectady? Was it before or after you fulfilled the contract? I've never seen them before. They're marvelous. They go beyond the outlandish into some private area of metaphysics. All the clocks say nine forty-five. Do you suppose that's morning or evening? Somehow it seems terribly important. You must give me the name of the store so I can call them and ask. In the meantime I want you to tell me very specifically whether you were wearing those shorts when you fulfilled the contract.

Man. Let's get back to what we were saying.

Woman. You don't even remember what we were saying. Now answer my question. Were you wearing those shorts when you carried out the terms set down in the small print?

Man. Okay, I was wearing these shorts.

Woman. Now tell me exactly what time it was when you killed him.

Man. You know I don't talk about that. It's bad enough I tell you where. Details cause trouble. You learn that in this business. Details cause trouble.

Woman. Tell me what time it was. What harm could that possibly do?

Man. It was ten after one.

Woman. Repeat that.

Man. It was about ten after one in the morning.

Woman. I thought so. I knew it.

Man. How did you know?

Woman. It's written all over you. It's literally written all over you. Those clocks on your shorts are a dead giveaway.

Man. The clocks say nine forty-five.

Woman. Exactly. That's exactly the point. You've got to burn them as soon as possible. We can drive down to Nell's place and burn them there.

Man. Look, if you have to know exactly how I did it, I'll tell you.

Woman. I'm not interested.

Man. The last show was coming out. The ticket window was closed. The marquee was dark. Only about ten people came out. I got out of the car and walked up to him. I put out my hand as if I wanted to shake hands with him. It's your natural reaction when a guy puts out his hand like I did that you take it. I knew who he was but he didn't know me like from Adam. He never saw me before. But he put out his hand anyway. That's the natural reaction. Anyone would have done the same thing. We stood there shaking hands and I had a big smile on my face and I called him by his name. He wanted to let go but I kept a tight grip on his hand. Then I put my left hand in my jacket, still holding him with the other hand, and I took out the.38 and fired three times right into the breast pocket of his shirt. There was a war movie playing.

Woman. What did it sound like?

Man. What's the difference what it sounded like?

Woman. Did it make a bang? Did it make a whimper? Did it crack, resound, boom, ping?

Man. It was like 20mm cannon fire. It was like hosing down an LZ with your 20 mike-mike. There's the slang again. There it is.

Woman. How did you feel later?

Man. How would you feel? It was a hospital zone.

Woman. You broke the cardinal rule.

Man. I broke the cardinal's back. He was riding his bike, this Buddhist cardinal, when I double-indemnitized him.

Woman. What were his politics, sweetheart?

Man. Slightly to the left of God.

Woman. That would make him a Taft Republican.

Man. Which Taft?

Woman. Which God?

Man. The one that made little green clocks.

Woman. And little white boys to wear them.

Man. Respect for your husband.

Woman. You're not my husband. My husband is black. Blacker. Blackest black.

Austin's car left the curb in a burst of hysterical rubber. I knew I wouldn't be able to sleep for a while so I walked out to Howley Road with Brand. We moved along, jogging part of the way, fighters doing roadwork, snapping out short lefts and rights as we dance-jogged, doing 360-degree turns without breaking stride, hog-grunting on the dark road. We slowed to a walk.

"I'm surprised you people have decided to stay on," I said. "I thought you'd get tired of this place. I didn't think this thing I'm doing would take this long."

"Nobody decided to stay on," he said. "We never discussed it. We've never discussed anything and nobody's made any decisions that I know of. We just stayed on."

"But aren't you tired of this place?"

"I never thought about it. Anyway where would we go without you? You're leading this expedition."

"I don't think that's in effect anymore. It's just that I didn't think it would take this long to do this thing I'm doing."

"Nobody's talked about moving on," he said.

"What about your book?"

"There is no book, Davy. There's eleven pages and seven of them don't have any words on them. And I'm not making any great claims for the other four."

"I thought you were writing all the time you were up in Maine. How long were you up there?"

"Almost a year," he said.

"What did you do all that time?"

"I don't know. I really don't remember much of it. I guess I was stoned most of the time. I think I blew a fuse or something. My head went dead. That's the only way to put it. Something in there burned out and blew away. Went dead."

"And you were in that garage for a whole year. And you weren't doing anything."

"I was doing something. I was killing my head."

"All right," I said. "Pike's barking in his sleep. He doesn't care where he is as long as he's got a bottle at his elbow. You don't have any novel in the works and you're in no hurry to get back to Maine or anywhere else. But what about Sully?"

"You'll have to ask her. I told you, nobody discusses anything in our family. We're a very tightlipped bunch."

"How long's your money going to hold out?"

"The lady's been picking up tabs the last ten days or so."

"I didn't know that," I said. "I wish I could lend you some money but I'm not fixed too well myself. I guess I'm out of a job by this time."

"I was wondering about that. I'd talk to the lady if I were you."

We jogged some more, drinking in the cool air, drinking it and snorting it out again, throwing punches at the wind. Then the four of us sat around the table in the camper making small sounds with our feet and elbows.

"I was wondering about that," Sullivan said. "I seemed to remember that you were due in the Southwest sometime last week but I wasn't sure. You didn't say anything."

"I've been busy."

"That was a good job, David."

"I was making twenty-four five. Look, I need you one more time for the thing."

"I'll be here," she said.

"He took my glasses away and tucked me in bed," Brand said. "It wasn't as much fun as I thought it might be. That Carol what's-her-name Deming. She got a little bit weird at the end. What's the point of the whole thing anyway?"

"Go play with your doll," I said.

Austin dressed as he had for the first sequence. I was wearing a lime nylon turtleneck and a pair of chinos with stovepipe stripes.

"Then the lame girl in Florence was real," he said.

"That's right. It took the edge off meeting my ex-wife. We'd been hinting to each other about a possible reconciliation. But the lame girl caused a strange kind of shift in my thinking.

Hard to explain. My ex-wife's parents were in Germany at the time. The lame girl was German. Then late in the day my ex-wife started limping. None of it meant anything. But it confused me somewhat. I tried to tie it all together. But it wouldn't quite tie. It was just enough to throw things off. The lame girl was homely and that didn't help matters."

"You tell me some things but not others. Why I'm in this uniform again for instance."

"Did Fred Zinnemann tell Burt Lancaster?"

"I'm used to doing what I'm told at McCompex," he said. "But there's no reason why you can't be a little less grudging."

"Up against the wall, motherfucker."

It was his final scene. I sighted on him standing against the printed black words. Then I narrated, making it up as I went along.

"The year is 1999. You are looking at a newsreel of an earlier time. A man is standing in a room in America. It is you, David, more or less. What can the two of you say to each other? How can you empty out the intervening decades? It's possible to put your hand to a movie screen and come away with a split second of light, say a taxicab turning a corner, and it's right there on your thumb, Forty-ninth Street and Madison Avenue. You can talk to the screen and it may answer. You barely remember the man you're looking at. Ask him anything. He knows all the answers. That's why he's silent. He has come through time to answer your questions. He is standing still but moving. He is silent with answers. You have twenty seconds to ask the questions." (I held on Austin Wakely, motionless against the wall, expressionless, and quietly I counted off the seconds-one through twenty.) "We come now to the end of the recorded silence."

Austin and I shared a bottle of warm Coke.

"Listen," I said. "Can you do something for me?"

"What's that?"

"Get me Drotty. I want Drotty for one hour."

"Why was he killed?"

"He made a clerical error. He messed up some sort of minor detail. Details cause trouble. He used to say that."

"How was he killed?"

"How are most businessmen killed? Their hearts fail and they fall down on the rug. He had heart failure with minor variations. No one can say his death was meaningless."

"What will you do now?"

"I'll go to Topeka, Kansas."

"Why there?"

"I've always wanted to sit in a laundromat in Topeka, Kansas. I think it has something to do with prenatal memories."

"Do you plan to get in touch with your family?"

"I prefer to let the bitterness linger. Any kind of contact at this point would only be confusing all around."

"Are you certain they're still bitter?"

"All but my brother. He never felt that way toward me."

"Will you get in touch with him, then?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"I'm afraid to see what has happened to him by this time."

"The camera appreciates your willingness to appear before it under such difficult circumstances."

I have tried up to now to avoid any grand revelations concerning the professionals in the cast. Carol and Austin were mixed things to me. I'm not sure exactly when I realized they could be valuable but I do know that the idea grew, in one form or another, out of first impressions. In Austin's case, appearance and age were vital; the fact that he was an actor meant nothing. Carol, both overflowing and annoyingly recessive, seemed, actress or not, to possess a talent for shading every moment, for moving across one's mental landscape like a teasing pattern of sunshine and cloud; it was a difficult talent, defying analysis and frustrating to witness until it displayed itself before the camera, a petty and even neurotic talent for concealing things not worth concealing, or for pretending to conceal, or pretending to disclose, or for dropping hints or sly eyelashes, a pain in the neck in other words, and perfect.

If these two people have seemed remote up to now, even indecipherable, mainly the girl, it should be understood that I did not want to understand them too well. They were mixed things to me, living people qualified (perhaps enlarged) by my own past, by my fantasies, mirror-seeking, honors, shames, and by those I loved or failed to love. Knowing them too well would have confused the issue, and the alter-issue, and the issue's bride, and the sister of the issue. And so I've tried to set them down as I knew them then, or failed to know them.

Now, in retrospect, and briefly, I think I can say that Carol was simply a lost girl trying to make the best of invisibility. Even her hair seemed questionably blond. It is worth pointing out that the moment she first appeared before my camera I ceased to care about her other roles, all those fluent ambiguities which at first had seemed so appealing and then so disturbing the night she talked me under the table at Buster's Bar amp; Grill. The camera chewed up these parts and spat them out. Carol was the best performer in the cast because she was the most consistently invisible.

With Austin Wakely it was easy for me to keep my interest to a minimum. I had no curiosity at all about Austin, either before or after he became one of my players. He had a good strong chin and gleaming teeth. If he had been born with a red, white and blue mole on his back, a mole in the shape of a flag, it still would have been his face that I put before the camera.

Carol sat in the armchair, eyes closed, working her way out of one thin atmosphere into another. The scene had been by far her easiest and yet she seemed exhausted. I went over to the window. A man put a coin in a parking meter and walked around the corner. It was just turning noon and the street was fairly crowded. The shoestore was having a sale. A car stalled at the light.

"I've just realized how few black faces I've seen since I got here."

"Even the bibles in this town are white," she said.

"The kind of town this is I'll bet they don't even know what's going on all over the goddamn country."

"They see it on the box. It's like watching the moon through a telescope."

"Everything's going on but it's still boring," I said.

Her eyes remained closed. I almost moved toward her. I remembered the bench in the park in town, the ego-moment of our bodies barely in contact. We sat that way, chair and windowsill, for a long time. Nothing that was good, even temporarily good, even for a slow second, could happen between us. I didn't know why I was so sure of that. Maybe she was just too far inside. It was at times the way I liked to think of myself and maybe I felt nothing could be stolen from her in return for what would have to be surrendered to get at that private awareness. Besides I didn't know what she thought of me. Not knowing that, I couldn't know what form we'd take together. Then there was the fact that her eyes were closed.

"You seem tired," I said.

"It's this weather, so full of life and sweet smells. It's a struggle to get through weather like this. I like to plot my existence on a fever chart in my head. In New York in the humid weather it used to rise and once in Montana at twenty below it nearly jumped off the chart and I thought I would die of too much life. I guess that sort of thing is mostly autosuggestion though. I can talk myself into almost anything. When I die I'll talk myself into another womb and start all over. That's what they do in Tibet-people who couldn't even get into Princeton entering fresh wombs like crazy."

"Through a womb-door."

"That's right," she said. "And there are good wombs and bad wombs."

"I didn't know that."

"Absolutely."

"Are you hungry?" I said. "I'm hungry. Let's get something to eat."

"I have rehearsals to get to."

"Do you have to leave right away?"

"I'm afraid yes, David."

"We haven't had much of a chance to talk since the night of the summerhouse."

"There's less and less for people to talk to when they talk to me. I hope diminishing existence isn't contagious."

"Pandemic is more like it. I wish you'd open your eyes."

"Is there anything to see?"

"Maybe not."

"Even the bibles are white," she said. "We used to go over to the Gansevoort Street pier at sunset. Those humid evenings in that barren part of New York when I lived almost beyond living. And Roy said to me once now I know why New Jersey's where it is and not next to Alabama where it probably belongs. So the sun can go down over it."

Drotty wore black silk and pale green corduroy. He was a dagger of a man, a small jagged bad mood glinting in a corner. Yet he smoked his cigarette almost tenderly, every movement of his hand a soft and highly deliberate piece of orchestration. I hadn't expected him to be so young. In fact I hadn't expected him to show up at all. But he seemed perfectly willing to go along with what must have seemed to him an incomparably casual, if not barbaric, form of theater. This script was not bound; this hotel room was not soundproof; this director had little to say; this tape recorder was a sociological curse; this movie was doomed. Drotty mentioned none of these; he merely smoked and moved softly now about the room in black Spanish boots, a certain shrewish violence attaching to every step. His face, his small face, worked hard at being blank.

"I guess Austin and Carol have told you they've been part of this thing since the beginning."

"I don't mind if my people moonlight as long as it doesn't interfere with their work at the theater."

"I hope it hasn't."

"It hasn't," he said. "They seem intrigued by what you're doing. Perhaps I should be jealous."

"They seem a lot more intrigued by what you're doing. They talk about you all the time."

"They're getting bored. The regional theater bores everybody in the end. People come out of a sense of duty. We try to shock them but they've been in a state of shock for years. Do you know something? In five years the entire American theater including what's left of Broadway will be a government-subsidized semi-religious institution. Not unlike Yellowstone National Park. do not litter signs will be everywhere."

"Cool boots," I said.

"These were given me by a lady professor of romance languages whose only copy of her seventh unproduced play was burned in my fireplace by an Afro-American who said his name was Abdul Murad Bey. I dreaded telling her about it but when the moment arrived she seemed relieved and it wasn't too many weeks later that she presented me with these boots. Recently I heard that Abdul Murad Bey was partly responsible for the burning of Philadelphia, an unproduced play in its own right."

He finished this anecdote by tightening his features and going even more blank than before. I didn't know whether I was supposed to laugh or not, so I merely sent some air down my nostrils, trying to make the sound a cheerful one. I realized that neither of us had yet called the other by name, first or last. This oversight haunted the beginning and end of every remark. Of course it wasn't just an oversight.

We discussed his lines. He placed the cigarette in an ashtray and walked slowly to the armchair and sat down. I had to put out the cigarette for him. Then we were ready to begin.

"Film must leave an emotional residue. The retentive aspect is the one true criterion. What do I take away from a film and of that what do I keep? Something more than underwear, I would hope. I think that what you've got to do at this point is stretch your aesthetic. My task is to help the more serious of my students develop some sort of cinematic lifestyle. I do admit to finding a marginal interest in your movie. It appeals to the child in me. I like silliness. I like silly ideas. Many great movies are basically silly and the movie hero is almost always a dope. Brando for example has portrayed dope after dope. So has Belmondo, so has O'Toole, so has Toshiro Mifune. It's all a question of levels. Preminger's vulgarity is postcollegiate; yours is still matriculating. Since this is our last meeting, I think total candor is in order. I dislike you very much. I've always disliked you. You have evinced little or no respect for me. Time and again, in the presence of female students, you have attempted to undermine my position as teacher and human being. You want very much to know about my relations with a certain young lady of our mutual acquaintance. You crave bad news, defeat, punishment. Defeat is always glorious on film. The loser is ennobled by suffering and death. No camera can resist the man going down to defeat. He commands every mechanism and the attention of every mind. Perhaps you see yourself as a wide-screen hero. I've totally forgotten what I'm supposed to say next."

Glenn Yost's wife was a large friendly woman who probably started wearing a housecoat when she was three. She was a toucher and kidder, obviously well loved by the two Glenns, the kind of woman who excels at picnics-laughing and telling jokes, slapping men's backs, pinching the kids, matching bosoms with the ladies, a vast warm-weather front moving across the plains. I didn't like having her around.

I introduced Sullivan to the family, and then Mrs. Yost, Laura, told us they had been waiting dessert until we got there, peach pie and vanilla ice cream, and we all sat down to talk and eat. The Yosts kept telling funny stories about each other. There was something extraordinary in their love, something laughable about it in the best sense; each seemed a legend to the others, a comic masterpiece of blunders, conceits and disastrous hobbies. Laura did most of the storytelling, moving from dining room to kitchen in her yellow housecoat, pouring coffee over the edges of our cups. I was there to finish an unreal job, to complete the worst part of the crossing, and the reality of all this unaffected warmth did me no good. Also my camera was not interested in oral tradition. I looked at Sullivan. She was bisecting crumbs of pie with her thumbnail.

"Can we get right at it, Glenn?"

"The pantry's in there," he said.

"Maybe Bud and Sully and I can go in right now and get it done. Take only a few minutes."

"Won't it be too dark?" Laura said.

The pantry was just off the kitchen. Glenn turned on the light for me and got out of the way. Moving fast, I put one of the kitchen chairs against the far wall of the pantry. I instructed Sullivan to sit there. I watched her for a moment. Then I realized that Bud was standing next to me holding the camera. Quickly I took it from him, focused on Sullivan in the chair and began shooting. When this was done, five or six seconds later, I asked her to stand against the wall and I moved Bud into the pantry facing her, his back to the camera. Then I was standing in the doorway again. Glenn and Laura were right behind me. I had to get them out of there. They were just so much honey sticking to my fingers and it was vinegar I needed to taste, vinegar and the pant of hot steel on my tongue, if I was ever to get this done. I asked them to leave. I told them to get completely out of the kitchen. Then, with Sullivan and the boy standing, I shot twenty seconds more, my very own commercial, a life in the life. Then I cut again and asked her to get closer to him and to put her hands on his shoulders. He turned and stared at me, either because he did not understand why I had sent his parents away or because this was very different from basketball in a high-school gym and he needed a look from me, a word, something. Then I saw it was mom and dad his eyes were balancing in their bitter light; there was that in his face, the knifed look hanging tight over a brother's small betrayal, not understanding what I had to do and yet not moving either, held there by the camera in my hands or by her, by her indeed, lean dank bird; of course; it would be impossible to slip one's shoulders out from the cool shellac of those hands, to turn one's back on such presence as this. The light in the pantry was bad. I was doing everything too quickly and I knew it would be nothing but blind luck if any of this found life at all, caught the silver crystal and began to grow. I could see it in foreflash, underexposed, their bodies incomplete, her face a nest of scattered dusk, tangled gray light at the edges of the screen, and then I wondered if I would ever watch it, this or any part of it, and I wondered why this mute soliloquy of woman and boy should mean anything more, even to me, than what it so clearly was, face of one and head of the other, and I wondered of this commercial whether it would sell the product. I focused again, her hands on his shoulders, a strange, a very strange expression, something like the curiosity that follows a man out of a room, a totally uncharacteristic look in her eyes. I felt no power doing it this way. The light was worse than bad and I hadn't made the proper readings. I was going too quickly. I was not framing. I was ending the shots too soon. But I had to do it and be done with it and maybe this was the best way, to obliterate the memory by mocking it, no power at all, spilling seed into the uncaptured light. Then I began to shoot the last sequence and I found I could not stop. Through the viewfinder I saw them, motionless, supremely patient, steadfast, her long fingers knuckle to tip visible over his shoulders, her left eye looking past his ear and into the eye of the camera, and I kept shooting for two or three minutes, lost somewhere, bent back in twenty-five watts of brown light, listening for a sound behind me, and of all the things I wondered that evening the last was how much she knew.

Laura was not in the dining room. Glenn sat at the table without looking up. I thanked him for everything. I told him it was regrettable but necessary that sometimes certain things had to be done that seemed excessively rash. Sullivan was waiting for me at the door. I told him that people under pressure sometimes say or do things which appear necessary at the time but which later are seen to be foolish and unforgivable. Bud was in the kitchen doorway and I thanked him and apologized. Then I went to the table and offered my hand. Glenn looked up, took it, smiled, pressed, and softly cursed me. It was sweetly done, a nice bit of Hollywood there, the vintage years, and it won a smile in return. We released and I backed off. Then the capillaries flared in his wild eye, the thin whispering streaks, hints of cold deacon fury, the kind of cold that burns, the cold that sticks to hands, that furious cold light damning my soul, those arctic streaks, those veins in the cube of ice inside his eye.

She stood on the sidewalk looking at me come down off the porch. It was unlike her to wait. I had expected her to be halfway up the street and then I thought of the way she had stared at me all through the last sequence, those two or three minutes when I was not sure where I was. Something soft drifted off her now. The streetlights were on. I had the camera on my right shoulder.

"I'd like to take a bath," she said. "We've been taking sponge baths in the camper. When it's warm enough we go down to the river. At first it was only a nuisance. Now it's a nuisance that threatens to become a way of life."

"Have the others seen you without clothes?"

"We use great tact, David. I assure you. Elaborate schedules have been worked out. Pike is a master at that sort of thing. A quartermaster in fact. He's taken to posting all sorts of rosters, dockets and inventories. I assure you, it's all very discreetly done."

"Let's go to a motel," I said. "We can get a cab to take us."

"Is that necessary?"

"I don't think they care for men taking women up to their room at the hotel. They're pretty, you know, stodgy."

"We'll unstodge them."

Sullivan spent close to an hour in the bath. I sat looking at the partly open bathroom door, trying to think of nothing. Then I stood in the doorway. She lifted one leg out of the water, as I knew she would, and moved her hands along her calf and looked back at me over her shoulder. A word arrived then from the eye of the deacon Yost. Abomination. I went back to the bed and sat down. She had looked at me to see if I was pleased. I sat waiting. Then I turned on the lamp by the armchair and switched off the overhead light. She got out of the tub. I went in quickly and watched her dry off with a large white monogrammed towel. Then I moved closer and moved my hands over the towel over her body slowly. We said nothing. I was following her toward the bed, following a sense of unimaginable pleasure, knowing this was old Yankee guilt, salt and peter. The walls were black and white and she was at the bed. Abomination.

She was covered now, even her breasts, and lying rigid, a message that this was the end of a stanza, that now she would wait for the turn of my turn. How much she knew about that moment, and taught me, in her absurd concealment; that the true and best lewdness, that is to say the ugliest, is nothing more than modesty so fanatic it cannot bear to move for fear it might touch itself. I undressed standing by the bed as I had done that night in Maine, darkness then, wondering whether she could see me, lewd virgin Maine, a different kind of room.

She watched me standing above her and I tried to think of nothing. She was absolutely still, watching me, not a grass-blade of motion, opening new rooms by the systematic locking of doors. Knowing this, she did not reach out nor move toward nor away from me when I lay down on the bed. I stretched out on top of the sheets. I have always been proud of my body.

"Don't be afraid," she said. "Tell me what you want me to do."

"I don't know yet. Let's just stay like this for a moment. Do you remember the night we spent in Maine in that old house? You told me a bedtime story."

"Don't be afraid, David."

"I'm not."

"You were in terror back there."

"Yes," I said.

"You mustn't be afraid. I'll help you. I'll do anything you want me to do."

"First, before anything else, I want you to tell me a story. Like in Maine. Like the story you told that night before I went to sleep."

(So ready, so lewd and willing was Sullivan, so skilled the artist immersed in her craft that she did not even pause at this request, much less break into waves of saving laughter.)

"And a deep sleep it was," she said.

"A story. A bedtime story."

"I have just the thing. It's about an evil old uncle of mine and the incredible experience we shared in a small boat on a fog-shrouded day in Somes Sound."

"Are you going to make it up?"

"It's real," she said. "You made me think of it when you mentioned Maine."

"Tell me then."

"I had a hated and feared and bloody Ulsterman of an uncle," Sullivan said. "At the age of eighteen he left Dublin for Belfast, renouncing church, state, family and the adulterous shade of Parnell. My father's brother he was, the blackest of ex-Catholics, a blasphemer of the militant and dour type, not at all merry and joshing and ribald like the likes of my dead dad. Years later he came to this country and settled eventually in Maine, in a small town not far from Bar Harbor. And I went to visit him once, seeking to redress an old family grievance. It was a quiet simple town, a fit and proper place for Uncle Malcolm. He came to the door and I had almost forgotten how wild and ominous a man he looked-bald, firm, compact, real as a keg of stout. His eyes were dark, two pilot lights burning, and he looked at me as though I were the Pope's most favored concubine. He hated Catholics. He hated my father like plague, like incense. Brothers they were, stem and stern, Shem and Shaun, tight Dublin and tighter Belfast. In my letter I had given no hint of the purpose of my visit. We sat on the porch. It was a moonlit night. Statues of patriots stood on the green. No barding lads or songsters rolled out of the pubs and not a dark hop of Guinness in sight. There were no pubs; there were statues. I sculpt, as you know, and those statues, David, chilled me. Such Christianity. Such Christlessness. They looked like buggered schoolmasters pretending it was only the corner of a desk behind them. There is some grace to war; certainly there was to our revolution. But it would take a blind man with very stubby fingers to think some grace into those stones. Nothing demonic, no swirl of tunic, no hunt, no bad dreams, no courage. Upright, upstanding and up the ass. (Lord forgive me.) Christianity anyway. The ages of Omdurman and Chíllianwalla. Perversion of Christ. Infant of Prague on the plastic dashboard blessing the box of Kleenex over the back seat. Priests with stale breath clamoring after my soul in the stark black wilderness of a confessional, pursuing the curve of regenerative grace with their sleepy fingers. Uncle Malcolm and I were sitting on rockers. We were rocking in fact in step. He did not ask why I had come. He merely looked out at the statues in the dim light as if thinking that patriotic stone brings nothing to our grasp of history unless it rests beneath language; to be silent in the stone's silence is the beginning of a union with the past. But maybe he was thinking only of his boat. Because that's what he mentioned next. He owned a sloop, he said, a Hinckley sou-wester, and she was moored in a cove around the bend from Bar Harbor, which meant only twenty minutes by car from that very porch."

"This is getting boring," I said.

"You must permit me at least a fraction of the self-indulgence you reserve for your own tired ends. Not that I mean to sound harsh. But I've cooperated with you up to now and I'm willing to continue to whatever point you choose to take us. And you've asked for a bedtime story."

"I'm sorry. Please go on."

"Large issues will begin to manifest themselves out of the dull set of pieties I've been constructing here. This is not easy work for me."

"Have you rehearsed any of this?" I said.

"In bed at night I often converse with the great English-speaking figures of history. I think I can admit that to you. I develop philosophies, legends, autobiographical notes, small bits of feminine wisdom, anecdotes and lies. I present these to someone like Swift or Blake; then, as Swift or Blake, I comment and criticize. It may be only an illusion but my mind seems to be at its best just before sleep. I've had some brilliant dialogues with myself, I think; or, more to the point, with the great figures of the past. So your instinct is quite correct. In a sense I've rehearsed this story. In fact I've told it many times, refining, editing, polishing, getting nearer and nearer the awesome truth. But I have never yet revealed that truth. I have never told the whole story, not to Coleridge, not to Melville, not to Conrad. I've never revealed the mystery of the final hours of that fog-shrouded day in a thírty-five-foot sloop in Somes Sound-not to a soul living or dead."

"One second, please," I said. "I want to turn out the light."

"The rocking chairs went to and fro in perfect military formation. Uncle looked out on that dead historic vista, that Yorktown, Shiloh, that headless glimpse of Khartoum. Then he said he planned to go sailing the next morning and he asked if I would care to join him. A jolt between the eyes. But of course I accepted. There was all the moment of a biblical confrontation. To turn down such an offer would be to damn those issues which had sent Uncle hightailing it to Belfast and the likes of my dear dad down to the local for a pint of the bitterest. We spent most of the rest of the night in silence. He cooked us some stew which he served in two unmatching bowls, proclaiming even to such a disinterested party as a blood relative the depth and tenacity of his confirmed bachelorhood. We slept at opposite ends of the house. My room was a touch of the madness of Captain Ahab-bare, frigid, tilted like an afterdeck; not a sign of love for one's chosen element, not a sliver of scrimshawed ivory, not a mug, coastal rock, schooner print, even tombstone rubbing-bare, chilled, northern, damp as a foggy star. Cold cracking dawn it was when he hammered on my door. I went downstairs for a breakfast that was all molasses and agglutinating protein, some old seaman's notion of the need to cement one's bones for fear the wind will take them. In half an hour we were walking down the dock toward his dinghy and we rowed out through fog opened by the faintest lines of light and then his boat appeared, high on the water, green and white, heaving in easy slaps of tide, and even in that dimness I could see she had nothing of himself about her. We climbed aboard and he told me briefly where things were and what they did and how to crank this and ease off on that. The boat was called Marston Moor and she was the trimmest thing I'd ever seen. She was light and looked fast. Every inch of brightwork gleamed. She was a lovely thing, David, and brutally named, which was only to be expected. Uncle hoisted the jib. I cast us off the mooring and then raised the mainsail and we moved into a morning thick with unanswered questions, and unasked. Running lights picking out a red nun. Bells clanging. Gulls on the buoys. Lobster boats mooning about in the fog, their horns lowing and a bundled figure or two peering at us from the decks, so silent, so strategically silent, the cursed eye of the sailor who dreams his bones at fifty fathoms and resents the intruder because the intruder has not earned that particular plot of sea. What large fools those lobstermen must have thought us to be prowling through that gruel. Uncle glanced over the small wheel into the binnacle directly before him. Compass, wheel and mainsheet were his. I handled the jib. We said next to nothing to each other. In two hours the fog began to lift and we could see the pine forests of Mount Desert Island and then in time the foothills and then the broad brown summits of Cadillac and Pemetic mountains. It was a sight. Mist still curdling over bald spots on the slopes. The low green pines and carriage roads. Surf etching into juts and shank of rock. Frenchman's Bay. The bringing of the writ of royal Europe. By noon it was a different day, warmer, windier, all blue, crisp and squinting, sunlight beginning to butter us in godliness. For it was God's world, David, and no thought might enter the mind which did not acknowledge this. It was a sight. The blue of that water was an angel's blue. White lighthouses stood on jetties of land. We saw herring gulls and cormorants. Porpoises came bucking out of the sea and the black bells tolled. There was a sense of the firmament, an unencompassed word above us brushed by the tatters of a single cloud. The sunlight was a sword on that water. There was nothing out there that had been changed by anything but itself. God. The God-made and the untouched-by-hands. Even our boat, lovely leaning thing that she was, heeling in the wind across that great yoke of light, even Marston Moor was a mild virus, reducing our rag of sea to the status of a pretty photograph. Uncle pointed out Isle au Haut, that beautiful island which seemed to stand, as other islands sit or drowse, as the last high thing, the last of trees and soil, before the sweep of the Atlantic. I don't think we were ever out of sight of land. Some of the islands were large, banked with spruce and pine, and there were small villages set above the perimeter of rocks. Others were small and uninhabited, some not much more than sheer masses of granite. We were heeled way over now and I looked at Uncle. He still wore his foul-weather gear, right hand at the wheel, left trimming the main. He was riding that boat, not sailing it; he was riding a dolphin or a woman, a young bucking thing that might never be breached. I was starved and as soon as the wind dropped I went down to the cabin and cooked some lunch for us on the kerosene stove. He thanked me. Through the early part of the afternoon we were never quite becalmed but Uncle had to search out catspaws on the water to find some puff of wind. He never seemed to consider using the engine. I watched the islands through binoculars. I saw a woman carrying a laundry basket, and a boy running, and a man standing against the whitewashed curve of a lighthouse. They seemed incredible discoveries, pieces of rare blended mineral, land-sailors who had learned that straight lines kill. And the smaller islands. All blue and purest granite. Not a human soul. But not silent. No, they had the glory of a voice. Cry of sea birds and the endless spanning roar of surf. After a while I took the wheel and Uncle went below to consult his charts. The breeze freshened then and after a long tack into the sunset we lowered sail and motored into a cove formed by two tiny islands, mere smithereens of land, one almost solid rock, the other a bit larger and wooded. Uncle gave me the sounding lead and I tossed it in and called off the fathoms, trying to put a bit of nautical singsong in my hopeless voice. We dropped anchor then and sat on deck watching the sunset. Then we saw the windjammers, three of them, coming down at us out of that appallingly beautiful wound in the sky, square-rigged and running with the wind, blazing with the sky's iodine, completely unreal, passing now behind the smaller of our islands, one gone, two, and as the last of them vanished the first reappeared, spars crossing high over the granite, the dignity of those ships, their burnt passage from the red horizon to blue and now to darkness, the coming of the Magi. Uncle said they were packed to the bulkheads with tourists from Camden. Ah yes. After they'd gone we dined below on hash and eggs in the rocking bronze light. And I told him finally why I had come. The grievance was an old one, going even deeper than the fierce powder-burns between Orange and Green. Before his death-at St. Vincent's Hospital, New York-my father had told me that Uncle Malcolm, after leaving Dublin, had managed by unjust means to acquire title to a family plot of land on the west coast of Scotland above Lochcarron. Land willed to the family by some distant ancestor who, the story went, had blood connections to ancient clans. Land held for generations by chieftains, lairds, earls, assorted elite. And then finally-history turning like the chamber of a gun-by merchants, fools and migrant sons. All this new to me. Some inch of Scotland in my blood. The origins were lost, of course, and the mixture known possibly only by that man who first crossed down the Highlands and sailed the Northern Channel no doubt to Belfast, perhaps taking himself a bride who bore him sons who returned, perhaps, some of them, to the ancestral land, and some of them, perhaps, wandering son from father and settling in Eire to begin the new line which harvested my father's father, and himself, and his brother, my uncle Malcolm, soul of a cattle reiver. And telling this to me, more or less, my father by his eyes seemed to leave out bits and pieces. Get back the land. Be strong where I was docile. Settle all scores, avenge all injuries, please the memory of your dead mother who has also known the lows which that man has reached. Your poor dear mother. Poor lamb of an angel. Christ have mercy. I was to demand then what was my birthright. A speck of the Highlands. And there was the eye of it. All my rich hatreds and comfortable bigotries come to this. Scotch-Irish! American! (Ineluctable, Mr. Faulkner; coeval, Mr. Joyce.) Some sudden lurch in the runnings of my blood. Broadsword and pipers. Sagging dugs of the Ozarks. Centuries of the Scottish kirk. And that first part of it I told to Malcolm-the land above Lochcarron. He said it was his, acquired honorably, and would hear no more of it. What plans did he have for it then? He would live the last years of his life there, he said, and be buried in that soil. A will had been drawn up. Things had been properly administered. I had his word. He went up on deck and I followed him. All was calm. We observed an hour of silence, listening to a deranged bird shriek in the woods. Belfast and Maine. Dungeons of silence. Tons and eons of silence. To learn that history cannot inform our blood unless we listen for it. Secrets of the stone-cutters of New England. All those tight towns boasting their Bulfinch steeples and Paul Revere bells. Whose navies built on Belfast's silence. And aren't there eighteen Belfasts in America? And didn't Ulster stock the colonies? Men, potatoes and spinning wheels. Orange, not Green, dying in our revolution. But my hate could leap waterfalls with the insanity of salmon to find its pool of birth and truth. He sang me a song then, out there on deck in the darkness, barely voicing the words, a glimmer of Ireland and Scotland and even Shakespeare in his accent, and I don't think he even knew he was singing aloud.

He came from the North, so his words were few

But his voice was kind and his heart was true

And I knew by his eyes that no guile had he

So I lay with my man from the North Country

He repeated the verse several times, his voice a cradle-song, and then we went below. I slept in the cabin proper. Uncle settled down in the forepeak, coiled like heavy line. He talked in Gaelic in his sleep."

"Is that it?" I said.

"And in the morning we headed back in gray drizzle and far out upon the line of the ocean I watched the fog-bank building and rolling, a low brownish menace of a thing, and I waited in vain for Uncle to offer some note of reassurance. But he talked of everything but fog. He talked, yes, as if only some test, some hungry clap of danger, could blow away the mists in his soul. There were few boats out but those he saw inspired him to crisp elocutions of category and trait. Gaff-rigged. Or eating out to windward. Or beamy. Or port tack. Or watch her luff now. Or blue yawl from Darkharbor. Damned schoolmastering roundhead. We sailed all day through slow drizzle, a chill beginning to work deep into my bones and into the very rigging and floorboards of the sloop. And that shoulder of fog hunching toward us. And with it the yet unanswered questions, and unasked. This, David, as you will come to see, is basically a ghost story. Why had he asked me to join him on this pointless cruise? Did he know I had come to Maine with knowledge of the land? And my father. My pink soft pipe-smoking pint of a dad. What tiny delicacies had he neglected to serve from his final bed? Silence in the Tower of London. Silence on the village greens. Northern eye of wind. River of northern bloods devastating the starving dark south. In the name of the Christ of the dogs of war. Reiver fanning out to plunder lands and deities. Truly, England and the Church of God hath had a great favor from the Lord in this great victory given unto us; this is none other but the hand of God, and to Him alone belongs the glory. Matchlock and leather doublets. Pikemen in the center, musketeers on the flanks. And how ends it, this prayer from Marston Moor? Cromwell's axed head blinking on a pike at Tyburn gallows. And was Uncle then with his halloween tartan of Scot and Puritan and Ulster merely seeking to return to some sacred north? The land above Lochcarron. To wallow in the terrible gleaming mudhole of God and country. Black Knife, sitting wide as a stump on a moonlit night high in the Dakotas, had been the answering echo of my deepest hates. And the final question yet to be pondered as Mount Desert Island hove into view and Uncle ceased his chatter and made for the mouth of Somes Sound, an authentic fjord, a seven-mile gash in the high bluffs of the island. Had he thought to find refuge here, or greater danger for greater glory? The hills stood above us on both sides and we were about two miles into the sound when I turned and saw it coming, only yards away now, and then we were in it, and silence had met its darkness. Nordic fog it was, cold, wet and dark, the northernmost point, and he had come to the edge of the mystery, and sailed her deeper into the fjord, eyes leaking fog and fire, riding that boat like a man in a fury of religious heat riding the loins of a woman, and I was terrified, David, scared out of my Irish wits, terrified of the fog, of himself, of the final question which now, and not until now, began to answer itself. For they had met again, I recalled, father and uncle, long after the latter's renunciation of all held holy in the apostolic breast; had met shortly after my dad married my lovely frail lily of a mother; had come together in Deny, New Hampshire-where Uncle had then been living, a solid Ulster town-in a futile attempt to restore harmony. And some parts of this my mother had told me years before her death, that their simmerings and rages had nearly set the house ablaze, and something pale in her recollections, some loose end, could bring me now to my father's deathbed-are you with me?-and his own tactical omissions and could bring me also to Uncle's mention of a will and his word that the land, his own deathbed, would be rightly administered. And then a blade of silver struck across the darkness, viking sword on anvil, and we began to see faintly a trace of shoreline. Uncle's passion had been truly heaven-directed, or hell, and we appeared in no danger of running aground. Again I waited for a word from him. Suddenly the winds came and the boom began to lift and swing-winds from all directions it seemed, skirling about us in a noise like pipes of battle, truly fearsome, lifting the fog a bit but manhandling our small boat until I was sure we would capsize at any moment. Wind blowing down off the bluffs. Wind coming straight over the water from the mouth of the sound and the sea far beyond. Wind from all directions pitching us dangerously to starboard, then to port, mast straining, boom swinging, a batten flying out of the mainsail past my head as I tried to level the boom.

And even Uncle, even Uncle then began to lose his Christian calm. For these winds were biblical, thunderheads of a wrathful God he had not met in any kirk or clapboard meetinghouse. A sailing boat hates indecision and Uncle did not know what to do."

"Sully, I don't like this story."

"And the first angel sounded the trumpet. And the winds blew and the third part of those creatures died which had life in the sea, and the third part of the ships was destroyed. And through the silver and gray smoke there appeared a light on the shore at the last limits of the sound. And a figure held the light. And it was a stranger. And Uncle saw him and spoke. Jesus needs me. Jesus needs me, he said. And the light was a lantern and the face was like unto light itself. And in those days men shall seek death, and shall not find it; and they shall desire to die, and death shall fly from them. And Uncle had come to the end of the mystery, which is: that man receives his being as did Christ, in a gentle woman's womb, beyond the massed and silent armies, beyond eroded stone arranged across the lampless past; which is: that all energy runs down, all life expires, all except the force of all in all, or light lighting light; which is: the figure holding the lantern was a child. And from this knowledge he did turn and scorn and rant against his ship. For where was Christ the tiger in that pentecostal light? And then all mysteries were to find their unendingness, and all echoes to be answered only by their own voices. We were still in the violence of the winds and I begged him to lower sail and he looked at me and bellowed. Damn your eyes, daughter. And that was the answer to the final question. Radiant mother giving herself to that blackest of Orangemen. 'So I lay with my man from the North Country.' Eugene bloody O'Neill. And that in me then as well. Drums of Ulster. And he cried again. Damn your eyes, daughter. A few twigs snapped in my mind, I think. And then the winds stopped blowing and we came about pretty as a picture and began the voyage home. I turned around once but could see no lantern, nor child, nor bird of the forest. And I knew then that the war is not between North and South, black and white, young and old, rich and poor, crusader and heathen, warhawk and pacifist, God and the devil. The war is between Uncle Malcolm and Uncle Malcolm."

I woke in the middle of the night. Sullivan was gone. The wind blew a piece of paper across the bed and I got up and lowered the window. Then I smelled cookies baking.

11

Men like to be told of another man's defeat, failure, collapse, perdition; it makes them stronger. Women need such news of vanquished souls because it gives them hope of someone large and woeful wanting to be mothered. Sympathy resides in the glands; the breast is magic. Of course this doesn't even begin to explain what happened after Sullivan finished the bedtime story.

I turned on the light and slowly removed the sheet from her body. Once again I stood above her for a moment and she watched me. I kneeled on the bed and looked down at her. I took her hand and put it to my face and I bit and licked her fingers, which tasted of flavorless soap. I put both our right hands to her right breast. My hand guided hers to her own lips and down along her body and to the inside of my thigh and up to my chest and mouth. She was an artist and I wondered if she thought my body, which she had never truly seen until this night, to be beautiful. I placed her hand between her legs, which were together like lewd art. I lay prone across the bed and bit and licked her fingers, which tasted now of bath and light sweat. I looked into the opening.

I played with the soft flesh and spinning hair. I kissed her fingers, index and middle now bent around the tall hole, and then her middle finger was in my mouth and I sucked at the knuckle and swung my left arm near to her face and found her lips with my index finger and she sucked and licked at it. With my head, my ears, I forced her thighs apart and they gave slowly, grudgingly, with great art and lewdness, and then tongue to root I swam in my being toward defeat so satisying that no pleasure of mere sense could be noted or filed. I was on my knees again, high above her, and I dipped to her breasts and licked and smelled, playing with them, batting the nipples lightly with my finger. I asked her to stand against the wall facing the foot of the bed. She did this. I lay in the middle of the bed, my arms and legs spread wide. She looked at me. All I had to do was raise my head slightly and glance toward my middle. She advanced slowly, as all lewd advances must be made, and kneeled at the end of the bed and took my ankles in her hands and as her hands moved up my legs began to descend, with manifest deliberation, a mime of some creature that has been burrowing for centuries. Her hands were there now and they assembled a brief little pageant of phallus worship and then it was in her mouth and I began to twist and arch. Before very long I made myself ask her to stop and then I was on my knees again and she was on her back and looking up at me. Her head this time was at the foot of the bed and the simple fact of this opposition, this turning on an axis, seemed enormously lewd. I played some more with her breasts. I kissed her on the lips. Abomination. I curled my tongue between her legs again and kissed her once more on the lips in a dream of wheels in white rooms and into her then I went, evolving the basic topography, and entering her I was occupied by her, another turning on an axis, wrong way on the bed, the army occupied by the city. Abomination. I began to think her thoughts or what I imagined to be her thoughts. I became third person in my own mind. (Or her mind.) And in her as deep as I could go, hard and wild as I could strive, I listened to what she was thinking. Little mothers' sons. He wants to wake up alone. Michelangelo's David. Wasp of the Wild West. He is home at last.

I smelled the cookies baking. It lasted only seconds. Then I sank into the bed again and it was like a field on which a certain number of troops have pretended to be dead, trading their odors with the smell of the earth and feeling a delicious-ness not known since the games of childhood. I went back to sleep then. When I came out of it, I was not even amazed at the ease with which I could put aside the previous night. It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams. I showered and shaved. With my curved scissor I clipped some hair from my nostrils. I looked not bad, things considered, the film-segment done and torn out of me (all blood and eyes), the black wish fulfilled (with all the accompanying panics of such a moment), very little money in my pocket and nowhere in particular to go.

1) New York was not waiting for me with microphones and fleets of ribboned limousines, sweet old Babylonian movie-whore of a city yawning like Mae West.

2) The network had by this time disposed of my corporate remains in some file cabinet marked pending return of soul from limbo.

3) To stay in Fort Curtis was out of the question; the town was now simply the sum of its unfilmed monotonies.

4) The camper itself seemed off-limits. What could Sullivan and I say to each other? (What had we ever said?)

But in the mirror, these things considered, I looked not bad. Indeed I remained David Bell. I brushed my teeth, dressed, and went to the armchair to pare my fingernails. Perhaps I could go to Montana and fall in love with a waitress in a white diner. Canada might be nice, the western part, for it was one of the very last of the non-guilty regions in the world. I could smoke hashish for a year squatting outside the Blue Mosque in Istanbul. A woman came in then, wearing an open robe over a pair of dungarees and a sweater. I had never seen her before. She changed the sheets, punching the bed repeatedly and then striking the pillow with the edge of her hand in karate fashion. She looked at me briefly in that analytical manner by which all hotel employees compute the biographies of lodgers. I continued to clip my nails, watching silver divots jump through the air. She finished with the bed and threw the used sheets into the hall. Then she reached past the door frame and dragged in a vacuum cleaner. Immediately I pulled in my legs. She activated the machine and began to vacuum, guiding it with one hand while with the other she tried to brush her hair out of her eyes. On her feet she wore heavy white socks and loafers. The robe was beltless and huge, possibly her husband's. The machine crawled past me, eating my fingernails, and I lifted my feet up onto the chair. She got on her knees and was about to clean under the bed when she turned and looked at me. I could go to Texas.

"There's some cigarettes under here and a book of matches. You want them or not?"

"No," I said.

She sucked them in. I had no idea what time it was. My fingernails in the machine. The hair of my belly and balls curled in the sheets in the hallway. She attached a small brush to the pipe and cleaned the blinds.

"That's a Vaculux, isn't it? My father used to handle that account. That was years ago. He's growing a beard now. Just the thought of it makes me uncomfortable."

"I just do my job," she said.

She left quietly then, one more irrelevant thing that would not go unremembered. My feet were still up on the chair. Inaction is the beginning of that kind of knowledge which has as its final end the realization that no action is necessary. It works forward to itself and then back again and there is nothing more relaxing and sweet. The chambermaid had left the door open and Sullivan was standing there in her gypsy trenchcoat. We smiled at each other. If I stayed in that chair long enough they would all come to me, chancellors, prefects, commissioners, dignitaries, wanting to know what I knew that could be of use.

"Come to view the body?" I said.

"May I sit down?"

"Please."

She sat at the head of the bed, on the pillow, imitating the characteristics of my own posture, knees high and tight, hands folded over them. Above her on the wall-a gap between the printed words-was a lithograph of an Indian paddling a canoe on a mountain lake. I have said much earlier that in describing Sullivan I would try to avoid analogy but at that moment she seemed herself an Indian, an avenging squaw who would descend the hill after battle to tear out the tongues of dead troopers so they would not be able to enjoy the buffalo meat of the spirit world. Daughter of Black Knife she seemed, a workmanlike piece of murder.

"I hope you didn't miss me this morning, David. I couldn't sleep so I walked back out to the camper. I didn't think you'd mind."

"What took place? What occurred or happened? It seems to have slipped my mind."

"It stopped raining and the fantasies came out to play. Your home movie had put you in a state of anguish. I tried to console you. You wanted to be drenched in sin and so I made it my business to help you along. Old friends have obligations to each other. David, I truly love you and hate you. I love you because you're a beautiful thing and a good boy. You're more innocent than a field mouse and I don't believe you have any evil in you, if that's possible. And I hate you because you're sick. Illness to a certain point inspires pity. Beyond that point it becomes hateful. It becomes very much like a personal insult. One wishes to destroy the sickness by destroying the patient. You're such a lovable cliche, my love, and I do hope you've found the center of your sin, although I must say that nothing we did last night struck me as being so terribly odd."

"Kiss my ass," I said.

"Do you need any money?"

"Brand tell you to ask me that?"

"He said you were running low. I have some. We're bound to bump into each other again. You can pay me back then."

"I can manage, Sully."

"Where are you going?"

"West, I guess."

"I hate to think of you all alone out there, David. Honest, I really do love you in my own spidery way. You'll have no one to talk to. And no one to play games with. And the distances are vast. We're parked right across the street. Come with us."

"Where?"

"Back to Maine. Then home."

"What about Brand? Will he stay in Maine?"

"He hasn't decided," she said. "It all depends on his auntie Mildred. If she comes across with some money he may try Mexico. Otherwise he goes back to the garage. His only real hope is to return to combat. I've suggested he re-enlist. I'm convinced it's the only way he'll survive. You've got to confront the demons here and now. Right, leftenant?"

"There aren't any demons bothering me," I said. "My problem is immense, as we both know, but it's strictly an ethnic one. I don't have any Jewish friends. How do you know so much about Brand?"

"He tells me things."

"Has he told you about his novel? The Great American Sheaf of Blank Paper."

"He whispered the sad details."

"When was this?" I said.

"That very first night in Maine."

"I don't seem to remember you two being alone at any point in the evening."

"He came into the room."

"The one you and I were sleeping in?"

"Yes."

"I see."

"And he knelt by my bed and whispered things to me. Sad little things. He wanted me to know the truth. I guess he thought it would make for a happier trip. I gave him absolution of course."

"And then you moved over and let him get into bed with you."

"That's correct," she said.

"And I was right across the room. A deep sleep it was indeed. And you two have been swinging ever since?"

"Here and there."

"I see."

"Yes," she said.

"What I don't understand are the logistics of the thing. How did you manage it?"

"We grasped at every fleeting opportunity. It was like the springtime of urgent love. While we were on the road it wasn't at all easy. Things picked up when we got here."

"What about Pike?"

"Guard duty," she said.

"And the first time was that night in Maine and I was right across the room."

"It was really quite funny, David. You were snoring like Lyndon Baines Johnson."

"I don't snore. I do not fucking snore."

What followed had its aspects of burlesque humor, a touch of stylized sadism, bits of old tent shows and the pie in the face. I swung my legs over the arm of the chair and pushed myself up over it and onto the floor. Sullivan got off the bed and we were both standing now. In her soiled torn trenchcoat she seemed to belong in a demonstration thirty years overdue.

"Wait here," I said. "I want to take leave of the others. Handclasp of manly comrades. We'll drink to destiny."

"And what will you and I drink to, David?"

"My health, of course."

I climbed into the back of the camper. Pike and Brand were playing gin rummy. Pike was talking about the dingo dogs of Australia and he did not look up when I came in. I stood behind him, put my hands on his shoulders and squeezed very hard. Finally he had to stop talking.

"The lady wants you."

"What for?" he said.

"Room 211. You'd better haul ass, colonel."

He got up slowly and left and I took his folding chair, turning it around first so that my crossed arms rested on its back as I faced Brand across the small table. He was wearing a khaki fatigue jacket. I was wearing rugged corduroy trousers and a blue workshirt.

"She told me," I said.

"Who told you what?"

"Sully told me that you two have been playing doctor and nursey."

"So what."

"That took balls when you consider that we're old friends, you and I, and she was with me if not in name then certainly by implication."

"Balls help," he said.

"I've known her for years. You can't just move in like that."

"You knew her for years and I knew her for minutes. It comes to the same thing. These matters have to be assessed in the light of eternity."

"Let me tell you something. Latch on to this. Are you listening? She let you into her pants only because you're afraid to be a writer. Did you get that? My advice to you is re-up in the goddamn Air Force. Our weapons system isn't complete without you."

"At least I flew, buddy. You were some kind of grunt or file clerk."

"I wasn't even in."

"That figures."

"That figures, does it?"

"Damn straight." he said.

"Let's get out to where we'll have some room to move around in."

"Talk is cheap."

"That's a very original comment," I said.

We walked through a narrow driveway into the parking lot behind the hotel. Three cars were back there, front bumpers nudging a long squared-off log. Brand took off his jacket and threw it to the ground. I reached for the tattooed dogs on his forearm and began to pinch. He looked surprised and then yelled. Then he pinched the side of my neck. We held on to each other that way, pinching and trying not to grimace or yell. I was in great pain. I knew I could not take it for very long and I let go of him and kicked him in the shins. He pulled my hair. Then we stood facing each other.

"Why are we fighting over that ugly bitch?" I said.

"She's not ugly."

"Homely then."

"She's not even homely and you know it."

"She's homely."

"She is not," he said.

"Aren't you going to take off your glasses?"

We started to wrestle and he bit me on the shoulder. I got him in a headlock and then spun him to the ground over my hip. I didn't kick him in the ribs although it would have been the easiest thing in the world. Then, on the ground, he looked up at me fiercely and clutched his groin. It was a strange thing to do and I didn't know what it was supposed to mean.

I helped him up and we went out front. We shook hands and I told him he could have my car or sell it and keep the money; either way it was his. Then I went to the back of the camper and stole Sullivan's radio. I left it with the desk clerk and went upstairs. I told them Brand was waiting and we wished each other luck. Pike and I shook hands. Sullivan kissed me on the chin. When they were gone I packed my things in two suitcases, including the camera, which weighed only about seven-and-a-half pounds, and all the reels of tape and film. I decided to leave behind the tripod and tape recorder as well as a suit, a sportcoat and two pairs of shoes. I called the desk clerk upstairs and told him that everything was his and that it was more than enough to pay for repainting the room. He went away confused. Then I masturbated into the clean sheets, feeling an odd and emptying joy, the cool uncaring pleasure of those times when nothing is foreseen and all that is left behind seems so much dead weight for the ministrations of the minor clergy. I went downstairs and stuffed the radio into one of the suitcases. Then I took off on the first stage of the second journey, the great seeking leap into the depths of America, wilderness dream of all poets and scoutmasters, westward to our manifest destiny, to sovereign red timber and painted sands, to the gold-transfigured hills, westward to match the shadows of my image and my self.