Underworld

1

It was the rooftop summer, drinks or dinner, a wedged garden with a wrought iron table that's spored along its curved legs with oxide blight, and maybe those are old French roses climbing the chimney pot, a color called maiden's blush, or a long terrace with a slate surface and birch trees in copper tubs and the laughter of a dozen people sounding small and precious in the night, floating over the cold soup toward skylights and domes and water tanks, or a hurry-up lunch, an old friend, beach chairs and takeout Chinese and how the snapdragons smell buttery in the sun.

This was Klara Sax's summer at the roofline. She found a hidden city above the grid of fever streets. Walk and Dont Walk. Ten million bobbing heads that ride above the tideline of taxi stripes, all brain-waved differently, and yes the street abounds in idiosyncrasy, in the human veer, but you have to go to roof level to see the thing distinct, preserved in masonry and brass. She looked across the crowded sky of ventilators and antennas and suddenly there's a quirk, some unaccountable gesture that isolates itself. Angels with butterfly wings tucked under a,cornice on Bleecker Street. Or the mystery of a white clapboard cottage on the roof of an office building. Or the odd deco heads, sort of Easter Islandish, attached to the corners of a midtown tower. She found these things encouraging, dozens such that hung unauthored, with bridge cables in the distance and occasional booming skies, the false storms of summer.

She was fifty-four now, let that number rumble in your head-fifty-four and between projects and humanly invisible and waiting to go back to work, to make and shape and modify and build.

The World Trade Center was under construction, already towering, twin-towering, with cranes tilted at the summits and work elevators sliding up the flanks. She saw it almost everywhere she went. She ate a meal and drank a glass of wine and walked to the rail or ledge and there it usually was, bulked up at the funneled end of the island, and a man stood next to her one evening, early, drinks on the roof of a gallery building-about sixty, she thought, portly and jowled but also sleek in a way, assured and contained and hard-polished, a substantial sort, European.

"I think of it as one, not two," she said. "Even though there are clearly two towers. It's a single entity, isn't it?"

"Very terrible thing but you have to look at it, I think."

"Yes, you have to look."

And they were out of ideas for a while, standing at the ledge and taking in the baleful view together, uncomfortably, she thought, because esthetic judgments feel superficial when you share them with a stranger, and finally she sensed a rustle, a disturbance in his bearing that was meant to mark a change of subject, earnest and determined, and he said to her, still looking toward the towers, he whispered actu-ally, "I like your work, you know."

"Yes?"

"Very sympathetic."

It was so humid some nights you could not close your door. You had to shoulder your door closed. Bridges expanded and sidewalks cracked and there was garbage in the streets and you had to sort of talk to your door before it would close for you.

She loved the nights that were electrical, a static in the air and lightning in soft pulses, in great shapeless beats, you can almost read the rhythmic pattern, slow and protoplasmal, and maybe a Cinzano awning fixed to a table on a higher terrace-you can't identify that gunshot sound until you spot the striped awning, edges snapping in the breeze.

Klara was happy in a guarded way, keeping it folded close. She had a sense of being favored, fairly well-regarded for recent work, feeling good again after a spell of back pain and insomnia, clear-minded after a brief depression, saving her money after a spending spree, getting out and seeing friends and standing at parapets, quietly happy, looking better than she had in years-they all said so.

It was the time of Nixon's fall from office but she didn't enjoy it the way her friends did. Nixon made her think of her father, another man of frazzled mind, rehearsed in his very step, his physical address, bitter and distant at times, with a loser's bent frame, all head and hands.

She stood at parapets and wondered who had worked the stones, shaped these details of the suavest nuance, chevrons and rosettes, urns on balustrades, the classical swags of fruit, the scroll brackets supporting a balcony, and she thought they must have been immigrants, Italian stone carvers probably, unremembered, artists anonymous of the early century, buried in the sky.

She wasn't used to being recognized. She was recognized in certain situations but only rarely and it made her feel that someone was taking measurements of her body in a small mirrored room. She tended to be unseen except by friends. She was mostly invisible, humanly invisible to people in the market down the street and not just youngsters hurrying past a hazy shape in the aisles, the unfocused stuff of middle age, but people in general-okay, men in general-who gave her generic status at best.

It was not an issue. She wasn't lonely or unloved. Well, she was unloved in the deeper senses of the word but that was fine, she'd had enough love of the deeper types, painful and ever echoing, the rancorous marriages that make it hard for you to earn a dependable solitude. It was a curiosity only, and a bracing form of self-awareness, learning to be unseen.

Miles Lightman came around a lot that summer. There was something about Miles that made her think he ate off dirty dishes but she began to get used to him, to like him a lot-he was kinetic and unre-flective, essentially artless, blank to the schemes of conceit that ruin many a budding love.

She wore long ruffled skirts, she wore denim skirts with floriated hems.

She stood on the roof of a factory building, a space made available for the evening so that a small theater group might launch a fund drive, and fifty people drank tepid wine out of plastic cups and said, We need theater.

She was near the ledge talking to a woman she didn't know and at some point she understood that the building she was facing, about ten blocks uptown, an oldish tower with a massed midsection and mosaic summit, was the Fred F French Building.

And she tried to listen to the woman but could not concentrate because the name lit up her brain, one of those deep sheer flashes that take forty years to happen.

Fred F French. She had to tell the story to Miles because it was funny and screwy and she wanted to give in to it completely, get it out and work it around and pile on the details. Boy-crazy Rochelle and the horny boy in the backseat and she was in it too, of course, Klara Sachs without the x, how she walked and talked, how things were real and she was real in ways she'd forgotten how to be.

From the tall windows of her loft she saw fire escapes angled and stepped, this was her principal view, dark metal structures intersecting in depth over the back alleys, and she wondered if these lines might tell her something.

Lofts were maybe dangerous, she thought, but not for fires-spacious and pillared and memoried and grand. She had to watch for ego creeping in. She had to ask herself would you do this piece a truer way if you worked in a stunted garret somewhere. She tried to scale her work to the human figure even though it wasn't figural. She was wary of ego, hero, heights and size.

That was the stuff of rooftop eloquence. Admire but do not emulate.

Her daughter was in town and they walked around the cast-iron district and had lunch in the Village and they shopped a little bit and it was hard. It was always hard with Teresa, she had an air of deprivation and a plainness that seemed obstinate-she was overweight and willfully unpretty and seemed to be saying that daddy loves me exactly the way I am but my mother doesn't, my mother thinks I can be better and smarter and know better and smarter people.

She heard those shots and then looked up and saw the Cinzano awning and realized the fringes were flapping in the river wind.

Teresa was twenty-five but looked ageless and shapeless and the hardest part of the visit for Klara was sitting in the loft talking, or waiting out the silences, or finding out her daughter took sugar in her tea and not having sugar in the house.

"You should visit daddy," Teresa said.

And this is spoken as a provocation, a form of censure that has nothing to do with a train ride to the Bronx.

"That's not a good idea. Trust me."

"I can't believe you live in the same city and you never once."

"Frankly I could live on the same street. It's not a question of where we live, you know? There's nothing to be gained and he knows it and I know it."

She leaves unsaid the fact that Teresa knows it too.

"Why does something have to be gained? Why is there always this thing of a gain?"

"So many years, Teresa. What's the point?"

Another silence now of tea things clinking and trucks at the loading platforms along the street, those trucks with dented metal sides and no company names.

"You don't have any Sweet 'n Low, even?"

Klara looked out the windows at the fire escapes, the backsides of gray buildings, what a gleaning of sheened iron and rust fungus and scaly brick.

"How is he?" she said.

"What? He's all right. He won't move to a new building. That building is getting to be ridiculous that he's in now."

Everywhere they walked there was garbage stacked in black bags. They were seven days into the strike, which included a number of violent incidents and one private hauler nearly beaten to death. Teresa said nothing about the mounds of trash, fifty bags in some places, because she lived in Vermont and what could she say? But she used the trash against her mother. The trash was another form of accusation, it passed telepathically between them, a hundred bags on one corner and a smell so summer-lush it enveloped the whole body, pressing in like a weather system.

In the loft Teresa said, "He listens to opera all day long. All summer until school's back in. He wants Aunt Laura to move in with him. She's getting, I don't know, not senile, just a little shaky, Laura, but I think she'd rather live alone."

Klara could hear the drag in her daughter's voice, the old mauled vowels, and how odd to hear these neighborhood noises so close to hand and from her own child, who seemed to exaggerate the slur, the loitering quality of the accent, a form of inflection and pronunciation her father and mother had escaped-that is the word, escaped-as if the young woman needed to go one boundary farther back, one level deeper into the life of the streets to make some point about constancy and faith.

She'd been pulling color out of her work for years. For a while she used bitumen and house paint. She liked to mix colors in clamshells she'd brought back from Maine a dozen years ago. But there was less color to mix now. It felt right for her to pull it out.

She walked down to the market past another new gallery, there were galleries and shops now but the cast-iron facades were safe from the wreckers, that was the main thing-the old factories where immigrants made buttons and suits, women and girls working eighteen-hour days, and she bought a box of sugar in the market before she forgets and ten months go by and Teresa turns up again.

Art in which the moment is heroic, American art, the do-it-now, the fuck-the-past-she could not follow that. She could look at it and respect it, envy it, even, in a way, but not, herself, place hand to object and make some furious now, some brilliant jack-off gesture that asserts an independence.

She said to a friend on the phone, her friend and dealer Esther Winship, who was always ready to advise a painter or sculptor, to bully the washy artist into a sound strategy, some plan for clear action, when in fact it was Esther who needed help, Esther in her bosslady trousseau, her pearls and pinstripe suits, who was losing painters and getting squeezed by her landlord uptown and feeling sorry for herself, and she said to Esther on the phone, "Hey, look, I'll start working again if you'll invite me to the country."

"Never mind the country I want you to take me to the Bronx."

"What's in the Bronx?"

"A kid who does graffiti. He does trains, subways, whole trains, he does every car in a subway train. I want to sign him up and show his work. But I have to find him first."

"How do you show his work?"

"I'll give him a wall," she said.

Klara had to admit she liked the sound of that. Maybe it was the first stage of saying, I'll give him a building, I'll give him a city block. That's the way Esther wanted it to sound. You live longer and sleep better if you can say things like that. I'll give him a train with a hundred cars.

"Why do you need help finding him?"

"I don't know his name. I only know his tag. Moonman 157."

"Sounds familiar," Klara said.

"ibu've seen it. Everybody's seen it. The kid's a goddamn master."

She loved the water tanks she saw from the roofs, perched everywhere, old brown wood with tops like coolie hats. They often built the tanks right on site, the way you make a barrel, grooved staves bound with metal hoops, and of course the twin towers in the distance, a model of behemoth mass production, units that roll identically off the line and end up in your supermarket, stamped with the day's prices.

Miles was younger than Klara, eight or nine years maybe, and looked even younger than that, so free of responsibility, engagement with real things, that he struck her as an ever welcome and weightless state, someone who happens by, almost always late but it almost never matters kind of person.

He was usually in jeans and lizard-skin boots and he had bad skin and a beautiful bent nose and wore his hair raked straight back and lived in a room and a half on the Upper West Side with reels of film and things from his life still packed in boxes-just things, you know, stuff you carry with you and keep because it's a form of mind clutter that you are comfortable with.

He worked for a movie distributor part-time and also produced documentaries, or coproduced, or made phone calls, and it was a process that carried just enough slanting light to make it renewably futile. He arranged screenings for a film society as well. And he saw everything, collected movie posters and lobby cards, could recite the filmographies of the obscurest directors because the more obscure the figure, of course, the more valuable the knowledge. This has always been a point of honor in the business.

And this summer he was trying to put together financing for a documentary about a woman who contracted the illnesses and diseases of celebrities. Through some odd form of neurohypnosis, or whatever the term, this woman, who lived in Normal, Illinois-this made her irresistible-showed the symptoms of whatever illness Elizabeth Taylor was suffering at a particular time, or John Wayne, or Jackie Onas-sis, or name your star, from a fluey sort of fatigue to the skin eruptions of herpes simplex and the wasted frame of cancer.

It was the modern stigmata. And doctors sponsored by the tabloids were studying her. And Miles wanted to title the film, if he could put it together, nice and simple-Normal Illinois .

Her hair fell freely to both sides of her face, more or less untended to, sort of chop-cut at the bottom and going noticeably gray at the parted top. She had eyes that were set wide and bulged slightly and her brows slanted away toward her temples. She had a shy look-not shy but private and if you'd seen her alone on a roof that summer you might have thought twice before sidling up with small talk.

It was the summer of sheet lightning and red wine, those deep Bordeaux that resemble lion's blood, and she stood on rooftops and terraces and wondered how all these things could have been here so long without her ever knowing.

She loved the biplane sculpture on a roof downtown, an old mail plane maybe, full-scale, with a landing strip and lights. And the stepped pyramid atop a building on Wall Street and the machined-steel spire of the Chrysler Building and the south face of the Hotel Pierre like some scansion of rooftop Paris, only elongated many times, shot versingly skyward.

She realized how rare it was to see what stands before you, what a novelty of basic sensation in the grinding life of the city-to look across a measured space and be undistracted by signs and streetlights and taxis and scaffolding, by your own bespattered mind, sorting the data, and by the energy that hurrying people make, lunch crowds and buses and bike messengers, all that consciousness powering down the flumes of Manhattan so that it becomes impossible to see across a street to the turquoise tiles of some terra-cotta facade, a winged beast carved above the lintel.

Klara conducted dialogues with her body, reminding herself before she got out of a chair where it was she wanted to go, to the kitchen maybe for a spoon, and exactly how she would have to get there. She needed to locate her body in a situation, tell herself where she was, sometimes looking back as if she might still be sitting in the chair.

She had a full mouth that was too bunched and puckered and also slightly askew, designed to speak asides, and her voice had tonal changes that were interesting, it had dips and hollows and husky undertows.

Me and my friend Rochelle, who taught me how to smoke.

She had drinks with a few people on a high roof planted with fruit trees and scarlet runner and they watched a woman jogging on a track on top of an office tower and it made them all feel happy, the jogger in day-glo sweats and the medieval turrets in the distance and the smokestacks beyond that and then the river lying silky just off Brooklyn.

Klara had a slender neck and wore a chain with an amulet from North Africa, a charm against bad luck, which her second husband gave her, Jason, when they were divorced.

Miles had a fancy deck of Italian cards and taught her a game called scopa. They played it late at night after a dinner somewhere and a session in her bed beneath the tall windows of her loft with the intersecting steps of the fire escapes running a deep perspective down the alleys.

He asked her about the stack of floorboards in the far corner. Floorboards, burlap, lengths of rope.

She had a former student who gathered materials for her. She'd taught a class in sculpture for some years and one of her young men went to abandoned buildings, to boatyards, glazieries, he scoured the outer boroughs, went to garages and bowling alleys and came back once with a dozen old pillows from a condemned hotel, stained gray by how many transient heads-such sad and eerie objects to have around.

"You don't mind working and living under one roof?"

"It's one thing," she said.

"But don't you have to get away from it? All this stuff in here. You can't escape it. It's everywhere and it's work and you have to look at it all the time."

"I am lying here with someone whose own abode."

"I know but I don't work there. I talk on the phone at most. That's the actual extent of what I do workwise. We're screening a thing you'll want to see. Next week. I'll call you."

"Good. The movies."

She loved to swim, she went to the Y nearly every day and stroked invisibly through the water, delivering herself to the laps, the soothing pool lengths, monotonous and restoring, like the rote recitations in early school-stiffens your sense of who you are,

"The thing about summer is you feel you have the city to yourself."

"I'd like to take a few days in Sagaponack. But Esther wants me to show her the Bronx before she invites me out there."

At some point she realized that the card game she played with Miles, the game they played with the expensive deck of attenuated knaves and queens, figures of a certain sinister minimalism-she understood gradually that scopa was the same game she'd seen boys playing on the stoop of the building where she lived when she was married to Albert, they were Albert's own students, some of them, Mr. Bronzini's boys, and they played the game with an ordinary dog-eared deck, of course, and called it sweep.

"What's in the Bronx?" he said.

"There's a kid she's looking for. Graffiti artist."

"Graffiti writer."

"Yes, well, it's so completely everywhere, this writing."

"Tell me when you find him," Miles said.

"What for?"

"I've been thinking about a film where we follow a kid day and night into the paint stores, into the train yards, into the trains."

"Sounds like a film they've already done even if they haven't."

"They haven't," he said.

"What happened to Normal, Illinois?"

"We're going ahead, pushing to get a grant. But she's sick now."

"Of course she's sick. This is what she does, isn't it?"

"I mean sick-sick. Independent of other sources," he said.

But the laps were more effective when she was busy on a project. She didn't love swimming nearly so much when she was idle. The laps were an attachment to rigorous work, the interval that completes the octave.

When Esther gave advice and Klara submitted to it, there should have been an element of reciprocal condescension. Because Esther was usually overbearing and Klara a little offhand and glib. But in fact she needed to hear whatever Esther had to say Esther said a number of useless things but she needed to know someone was out there preparing a space, making time for her and uttering her name and passing on stray accolades from whatever shadowy source.

It didn't always help. When Klara heard praise it sounded weak and tentative to her, badly rehearsed, and when she was criticized in the press or through the intimate roundabouts of rumor and half news, she had to struggle against the feeling that they might be right, she was doing shallow and meek and dismissable work.

"This is the Darwin dog-eat-dog," Esther liked to say, said incessantly, enjoyed saying because she knew it scared people like Klara.

She loved the floorboards stacked in the corner. Streaked brown wood, sort of drenchingly dark brown like the staved towers on the rooftops, the tanks filled with water and mostly bare to the elements but sometimes enclosed in elaborate churchly structures with lancet arches and great eagled ornamentation.

People weren't saying Oh wow anymore. They were saying No way instead and she wondered if there was something she might learn from.this.

She watched her friend Acey Greene on TV, a new friend, young and talented, interviewed late at night on a local cable outlet. She looked great-you look so great, Klara thought. Modestly afro'd, in a torn dinner jacket and red bow tie.

Miles called and she met him at an old sail-making loft downtown. The film group he belonged to showed rare things, mostly unrunnable in theaters for one reason or another, and the screenings were a floating affair-wherever Miles could secure a space.

Fifty or sixty people were here to see a Robert Frank film, Cock-sucker Blues, about the Rolling Stones on tour in America.

Klara sat in the dark and spooned yogurt from a carton. She realized she'd been seeing Mick /agger's mouth everywhere she went for some time now. Maybe it was the corporate logo of the Western world, the leer and pout that follows you down the street-she liked to watch him dance and devil-strut but found the mouth a separate object, sort of added later for effect.

She told Acey, who sat next to her, she said, "I think everything that everybody's eaten in the last ten years has gone into that mouth."

She loved the washed blue light of the film, a kind of crepuscular light, a tunnel light that suggested an unreliable reality-not unreliable at all in fact because you have no trouble believing what you see but a subversive reality maybe, corruptive and ruinous, a beautiful tunnel blue.

"You have to interpret the mouth like it's satire," Acey said.

Coke sniffing backstage or in the tunnels and people sitting around a room or sleeping on a plane, that edge-of-time feeling, remarks half uttered, a cigarette in someone's mouth, people not yet ready to stir, and she liked the glancing sound, the way documentary sound, this land of flyby movie, bounces off the tile walls, the cinder-block walls in dressing rooms and stadium tunnels.

Someone saying, Often he will shoot me in an unfavorable way.

And she realized yes, his mouth was completely satirical, it was car-icaturish, a form of talking anus from the countercomics of the sixties, and all the jeers and taunts we'd uttered, all the half sentences we'd mumbled had come out of the same body opening, more or less.

Acey said, "I saw them in San Francisco, this is the same tour, has to be, two years ago this was."

Throwing the hotel TV off a balcony.

Interviews mumbled and blotted, the simplest of earnest rehearsed queries lost and pondered and lost again, the tour is a series of unfinished remarks, and a man and woman fucking on the plane, and the mouth chewing food, the paste-on peel-off mouth, Mick strobed and flashed in concert like some multimouth de Kooning female, sucking on the hand mike.

The camera phalanx in the tunnels. People sitting around, two people asleep in a lump or tripped out or they could be unnoticeably dead, the endless noisy boredom of the tour-tunnels and runways.

Acey said, "I went to the show and there's this bodyguard, maybe I can spot him in one of these shots, a black guy with a T-shirt that says Stones, you know, Security, only something else completely but along those similar lines."

And Klara loved the tunnel blue light and the nothing-happening parts, everybody's got cameras and they're shooting nothing happening, and the sound that gets lost in the ceiling tiles.

Someone saying, I hate those motherfuckers. Those in-between schmucks.

Saying, What state are we in?

Two mumbling junkies on a bed, a man and woman equally sort of squintingly attentive to the needle that's angled in her arm.

Saying, How come you wanted to film that?

Saying, It hadn't occurred to me to film that.

Oh Indiana.

It just happened.

Mick standing slack-jawed in room. The mouth gargling and spit-ting, licking ice-cream cone. And the concert footage that's gelled red, bodies bioluminescent, what we all love about rock, Klara thought, the backlit nimbus of higher dying.

Excedrin on TV, significantly more effective than common aspirin.

"And he's following me," Acey said, "down this long tunnel and he's saying, Brown sugar you wait for me because there's something I got here which I definitely want you to look at. Hey brown sugar. And I turned, which was admittedly, you know, completely dumb-ass, and he didn't have it out but he had his hand on it."

Two white men in room and one white man talking in black voice about, Put the brothers in touch with their cultural heritage. And sec-ond white man threads needle into arm and first white man talking black says, Tomb of the Unknown Junkie, a Hundred and Thirty-seventh Street and Lenox Avenue, made top to bottom, he says, from discarded spikes.

Someone saying, They took my child away from me because I was on acid.

Where's my room key?

Tunnels and runways and washed blue light and then the opening to the stage, the loud white glare and prehistoric roar.

You suck him off?

No. Just took a picture with him.

Saying, The state comes along and takes my kid from me.

And nude woman caressing herself on bed in hotel room who rubs hand on pussy then licks it. And Acey interrupting her story to say, "Mmmm."

The whole jerk-off monotonic airborne erotikon.

And Klara thought it was interesting that this was the only woman who didn't seem like a girl. It was interesting, she thought, how all the women in the film were girls or became girls. The men and women did all the same things, dope, sex, picture taking, but the men stay men and the women become girls except maybe the woman who rubs her pussy and licks it and says something inaudible because the whole point of sound in a film like this is to lose it in the corners of the room.

I don't care-it's only San Diego.

Acey was telling her story and meanwhile looking for the guy in the story up there on the screen.

"And I wanted to say something to, you know, disabuse him of every wishful thought in his head. Hey brown sugar. But we were alone in this big roaring echoing place, the concert's in full roar somewhere above us and, Brown sugar, he's, Brown sugar, brown sugar."

"This show we're looking at now?" Klara said.

"I don't know if it's the same night but it's the same show, the same city, the same motherfucking band of emaciated millionaire pricks and their Negro bodyguards."

It was the rooftop summer and the air was filled with heroes, the dusty sky that burned with stormlight. Oblong gods braced in narrow corners and a pair of seated pharaohs that flank an air conditioner. And she loved the mermaided columns she saw on lower Fifth and all the oddnesses, the enigmatic figures she could not place in particular myth, mainly downtown, atop the older banks, on the parapets and setbacks-robed oracles jutting over the streets or helmeted men of unrevealing aspect, lawgivers or warriors, it was hard to tell.

And it was down there on a roof one Sunday, the streets hot and dead, that the gentleman reappeared, the European she'd talked to once before, gazing into the unfinished grid of the World Trade Center.

Yes, hello, we meet again.

And he told her that the figures she'd been wondering about with their cultic look, faces in shadow under the streamlined headgear, were called the Titans of Finance. And how suitably dour they were, as if measuring the Depression's effects on the streets below-she guessed the building had been erected around that time.

"Some kind of secret fraternal order, sounds like to me."

"Perhaps," he said. "But all banking is secret, I think."

And she could believe it, with all the granite and limestone massed around them, and the newer towers, curtained sheer, of reflecting glass and anodized aluminum, and every office empty of human trace today, except in basements maybe where paper was spun through microfilm machines, a billion checks a second.

His name was Carlo Strasser. He lived on Park Avenue and collected art with an amateur's clumsy passion, he said-an apartment on Park and an old farmhouse near Aries, where he went to do his thinking.

And of course she said, "What do you think about?"

And he said, "Money."

She laughed.

"I sometimes wonder what money is," she said.

"Yes, of course, exactly. This is the question. I will tell you what I think. It is becoming very esoteric. All waves and codes. A higher kind of intelligence. Travels at the speed of light."

He was dressed very well, he was turned out, he had presence and manner and she felt a little shambly, but not uncomfortably so, in her denim and old sandals. The man confirmed her in her partialities and she was marvelously, in fact, at ease, talking to him.

They heard foghorns in the bay and paused to listen and the sound had an element of formal awe, it rolled and caromed down the narrow streets, collided with itself, an organ work that swelled the air and sent pigeons beating out of the tower clocks.

He asked questions about painters and she did something she almost never did-she expounded, she did detailed analysis, a thing she'd tended to avoid even when she used to teach. She heard herself go into explanations so ardent and newly struck that she realized she'd been withholding them from herself.

"Louise told me once, Nevelson, that she looked at a canvas or a piece of wood and it was white and pure and virginal and no matter how much she marked it up, how many strokes and colors and images, the whole point was to return it to its virgin state, and this was the great and frightening thing."

Klara could not connect this remark to her own work but she liked to repeat it to herself anyway-she liked the idea of a famous artist being frightened by what she does.

"I have a small Nevelson," he said. "Very small piece, I bought it years ago, and now you have given me a reason to look at it in a different way, and this is something I will do with pleasure."

"I'd go into her studio and she'd show me a black sculpture, a wood sculpture painted black, and I'd comment on the color and I'd comment on the material and she'd look at the thing and she'd say, 'But it's not black and it's not wood.' She thinks reality is shallow and weak and fleeting and we're very different in that regard."

Miles showed up later and Carlo Strasser faded gracefully into the cluster, eight or nine people standing around a table filled with cheese and fruit and wine, those lion-blood Bordeaux, those damson plums and blue-black nights and how the thunder sounded dry and false.

Standing in someone's kitchen, slicing a lemon, she understood that the knife would slip and she would cut herself and she did.

It was one of those microseconds that's long and slow and nuclear-packed with information and she knew it would happen and kept on slicing and then it happened, she cut her finger and watched the blood edge out from the knife line and slide unevenly down her knuckle.

She watched people sunbathing, they did it so completely, dominating the experience, a woman flopped on a ledge with a blanket and a pitcher of iced tea and a child's drinking glass appliqued with flowers and a paperback book that Klara tried to spy the title of-they did it without conceding anything to the stone ledges or pitched roofs or breathless tar surfaces, it was the spectacle of here I am, and there's a window washer's empty rig scaling the side of a slab tower. She saw a brick facade flushed with coral light, more or less on fire with light, and the brick seemed revealed the way only light reveals a thing-it is baked clay of some intenser beauty than she'd ever thought to notice. And there's the old lady again sitting in her webbed chair with the Sunday papers scattered, so familiar and encouraging-she holds a reflector under her chin and faces sacrificially into the sun, a plattered head going mummy-brown in the deeps of a summer day.

She watched the blood slide out from the cut and noticed the creases and whorls in her finger and heard the music in the next room, it's Esther's husband Jack playing one of his old 45s, the swing-band music that drives his guests out onto the roof.

The garbage was down there, stacked in identical black plastic bags, and she walked home past a broad mound that covered a fire hydrant and part of a bus sign and she saw how everyone agreed together not to notice.

Miles Lightman showed up late for dinner on a roof uptown, carrying a box of the black cigarettes she smoked, queen-sized and extra-mild and slow-burning, and a baggie of marijuana, which he liked to call boo, a term he'd heard in some bar in Harlem maybe twenty years ago.

They were on the roof of a new building, forty stories, it loomed over the reservoir in the park and they stood a while watching runners in the night. The runners went around the reservoir in fair numbers, faintly lamplit, and Miles thought they resembled fleeing crowds in a Japanese horror film. He had a thing for fleeing crowds. He wanted to do a picture book on the subject. He collected publicity stills from obscure productions-fleeing crowds of Asiatics looking up at something awesome.

They stood on the roof and looked across the park to the silhouetted buildings named like ocean liners. The Beresford, Majestic and Eldorado. The Ansonia and San Remo.

Fleeing crowds always included a mother with a baby and a woman with bulging breasts and a man with his arms flung up to shield him from some terror in the sky.

Miles looked at the runners going around the reservoir and he came up with a name for the forty-story building that loomed over the park, so tall and massive it made its own weather, downdrafts nearly strong enough to topple people walking by.

Godzilla Towers, he thought they ought to call it.

It's women, usually, who take the lead in recovering lost careers. When you begin to hear about a writer reemergent or a painter lovingly disinterred, it's usually because women have shown extraordinary interest, even when the artist is a man. Usually the artist is a woman, but even a man-we specialize in forgotten lives, Klara said.

She was talking to Acey Greene. Acey did not need to be reclaimed, of course. She was young, smart, ambitious and so on, and interestingly sweet-mean, playing with juxtapositions as a form of ironic dialogue with herself-a device to help her confront the prospect of being famous.

Acey grew up in Chicago, where both parents were teachers, and she began to do pen-and-ink sketches, she began to do West Indian collages pretty much in the tritest manner possible, according to her own account, and had a sexual adventure with a member of the Black-stone Rangers, a very sizable street gang, and eventually packed a bag and went to Los Angeles, where she married a professor of sociology and enrolled at Cal Arts and got a divorce and found her karma as a painter.

When Klara first saw her work she told people how good it was and word reached Acey on the Coast. Eventually she followed her paintings east. She was living at the Chelsea Hotel for the time being and sharing studio space in Brooklyn somewhere.

"What about you?" she said.

"Me, I had to make a career before I could worry about losing it. That was not easy. I pay and pay."

"A family," Acey said.

"I broke up a family, yes. I went away, I came back, I took my daughter for a while. She was better off with her father and I understood that but it consumed me, being separated like that. I had a very bad time. Of course we all did. She came down to see me on weekends or whenever. He rode the subway with her and left her at the door because he didn't want to set eyes on me."

"What would it do to him?"

"And then he came and picked her up and I was not allowed to walk all the way down the stairs. I walked her down to the first floor. I was living in a ramshackle building way downtown and it was arranged and agreed that I would walk her to the first floor and let her go the rest of the way herself because he might otherwise set eyes on me. What would it do to him? Something, I don't know, catastrophic."

"But you talked on the phone."

"We talked on the phone. In monosyllables. We sounded like spies passing coded messages. It was a very hateful time. But once she was older, that stopped, the phone calls. She and I made our own arrangements/Albert was gone for good."

"And her?"

"Teresa doesn't hate me. Maybe worse. I think she hates herself. She was part of the failure somehow. Let's not talk about this."

"We'll go for a walk."

"We'll walk across the bridge. Ever do that?"

"I'm new here, lady. You forget."

Acey's best work was part of a series about the Blackstone Rangers. Chicago winters, young men in hooded sweatshirts, morose and idly violent, hunched in front of barred windows or sitting on a broken sofa in the snow, and Klara thought these pictures were utterly modern in one sense only, that the subjects seemed photographed, overtly posing or caught unaware, sometimes self-consciously aloof, a housing project massed behind them or here's a man with lidded eyes and a watch cap and one of those bloated polyester jackets and a gun with banana clip-you see how Acey belies the photographic surface by making the whole picture float ineffably on the arc of the cartridge clip.

People on the roof, Esther's guests fleeing the swing band on the record player in the apartment and Esther's husband coming out as well, Jack, because he's the kind of man who melts away if he's left alone for twenty seconds.

She loved the little temple across the street, a top-floor facade with a set of recessed windows between the fluted columns, and does someone actually live there?

She felt good. She felt lucky for a change. She was sleeping well and saving money and seeing friends again.

"What's she reading?" someone said, talking about the woman on the ledge with the child's drinking glass and paperback book.

"Looks like detective fiction from here," Jack said. "Lots of moral rot. That's what people read in summer."

He was a tall florid guy, Jack Marshall, a Broadway press agent who was on the perennial edge of dropping dead. You know these guys. They smoke and drink heavily and never sleep and have bad tickers and cough up storms of phlegm and the thrill of knowing them, Klara thought, is guessing when they'll pitch into their soup.

She wore a bandage on her finger and waited for Miles to show up with her cigarettes because he was more reliable than she was.

She grubbed one from Jack for now.

And people on the street, when did Klara begin to notice how people talked to themselves, spoke aloud, so many of them and all of a sudden, or made threats, or walked along gesturing, so that the streets were taking on a late medieval texture, which maybe meant we had to learn all over again how to live among the mad.

"You have a boo-boo, Klara."

"You can't kiss it, so go away."

"I don't want to kiss it. I want to lick it," Jack said.

"Does someone live, I'm very curious about the thing across the street there."

"Inside the little Greek temple? I think it's an office."

"I would love to get a job there."

"Import-export."

"I could do either."

"So could I. But I want to lick it," he said.

Acey had an oval face and high forehead. Her hair had the barest cinnamon tinge. If you looked at her, if she sat across the aisle on a bus and you sneaked a glance every other stop, it was probably because of her mouth. She had a tough mouth, a smart mouth-it had a slight distortion of shape you'd probably call a sneer although the look shifted and moderated all the time and gave her smile a windfall quality, like a piece of unexpected news.

"I didn't have to leave my husband to paint," she told Klara. "I had to leave him because I didn't want to be with him anymore."

"What was the problem?"

"He's a man," Acey said.

Klara noticed, midbridge, how the younger woman checked the human action, the bike riders and runners and what they wear and who they are and the thing they develop together of a certain presentational self. Not like Chicago, Acey said, where the action near the lake is all unself-conscious sweat, people who are busting to run, to shake off the film of office and job, the abnormal pall of matter. Here the film is what they're in, the scan of crisp skyline, and she seemed ready for it, Acey did.

"And you're here now. And maybe for good. So the sense of starting over must be doubly strong."

"I probably started over a long time ago. Unbeknownst, basically, to everyone but me."

"You worry about the consequences?"

"Of breaking up? Had to happen. I'd worry if it hadn't."

"What about the husband?"

"What about him?" Acey said.

"I don't know. What about him? Does he know you have women lovers?"

"He gets off on dykes. I told him. I said, James, I'll send you some action snaps, baby."

"You're a gangster," Klara said.

"Gangster's moll. Gang moll. That's what they called me in L.A. You know, the Blackstone paintings. Middle-class Negro groupie."

"Very nice. They called me the Bag Lady."

They laughed and crossed to the Brooklyn side, where Acey worked in an old warehouse not far from the bridge approach. She did not want to show her current work prematurely and they only did a tour of the space. There was a Marilyn Monroe calendar on the wall, the famous early pinup called Miss Golden Dreams, a high-angle shot of the nude body posed on a velveteen blood-red bedsheet.

"This can't be here accidentally, can it?"

"Okay, it's something I'm looking at," Acey said.

"And thinking about."

"Something I'm working out for myself, little by little by little."

"Interesting. But I hear you're doing something completely different."

"Oh yeah? What do you hear?"

And Klara swung an arm toward the far wall, where canvases stood on a low shelf or were bracketed on easels, some with strips of construction paper she'd glimpsed earlier-paper taped to unfinished work as color-mapping guides.

"I hear you're doing a Black Panther series."

Acey did her scornful smile, slow and elaborate.

"Oh yeah? Well you know what? That's what I hear too."

This was supposed to be a postpainterly age, Klara thought, and here was a young woman painting whole heat, a black woman who paints black men generously but not without exercising a certain critical rigor. The frontal swagger of the gangs, a culture of nearly princely hauteur but with bodings, of course, of unembellished threat, and this is what Acey examined surgically, working the details, looking for traces of the solitaire, the young man isolated from his own moody pose.

They walked back across the bridge.

"They still call you that? The Bag Lady?"

"Not so much anymore," Klara said. "There were a few of us then. We took junk and saved it for art. Which sounds nobler than it was. It was just a way of looking at something more carefully. And I'm still doing it, only deeper maybe."

"It's not my thing. Maybe I don't trust the need for context. You know what I mean?"

"I guess."

"Because I understand up to a point. You take your object out of the dusty grubby studio and stick it in a museum with white walls and classical paintings and it becomes a forceful thing in this context, it becomes a kind of argument. And what it is actually? Old factory window glass and burlap sacking. It becomes very, I don't know, philosophical."

They reached the other side and Acey wanted to walk some more and Klara was nearly beat. They looked at old sailing ships moored off South Street. She was trying to dispel the little hurt, the small delayed disappointment of Acey's casual slighting of her work. First she delayed her reaction, then she tried to smother it.

"I was the type girl," Acey said, "I was always in a hurry to grow up. Now I guess I'm here, officially. This city is the ticking clock. Makes me panic but I'm ready."

What Klara admired most was the seeming ease of address, the casually ravishing way Acey laid down paint. Saturated undercoats and beautiful flesh browns, skin strokes in every sort of unnameable shade and many grays as well, glaucous and sky smoke, because it's always winter in Chicago and the gang members belong to their terrain, to the pale brick and iced-over windows, and in this sense they could be brothers to the olive-skinned men in the frescoed gloom of some Umbrian church-Acey had the calm and somber eye of a cinquecentist.

She was talking on the phone to Esther Winship.

Esther said, "Dear god why?"

"Because it's easier and quicker."

"But I haven't been on a subway in thirty years."

"Good. I want to feel superior."

They took the Dyre Avenue line. The train was marked with graffiti outside and in, slapdash and depressing, Klara thought. She did not like the idea of tagging trains. It was the romance of the ego, poor kids playing out a fantasy of meretricious fame.

"I thought it would be stifling hot," Esther said. "I thought I'd suffocate in my seat."

She said this in a grim whisper, afraid that someone might overhear and take offense somehow. In the subway, words have a charged quality they don't carry elsewhere.

"It's called air conditioning," Klara whispered back.

"I'm completely stunned."

Esther liked to sound stupidly out of touch-it sealed her in a safer frame of reference.

Two stops into the Bronx their train took on passengers and another train pulled into the downtown side and Klara felt a poke in the ribs. It was Esther, thrusting an elbow to get her attention because the other train was one of his, Moonman's, every car spray-painted top to bottom with his name and street number. And Klara had to admit this particular kid knew how to make an impact. The train came bopping into the old drab station like some blazoned jungle of wonders. The letters and numbers fairly exploded in your face and they had a relationship, they were plaited and knotted, pop-eyed cartoon humanoids, winding in and out of each other and sweaty hot and passion dancing-metallic silver and blue and cherry-bomb red and a number of neon greens.

Esther whispering out of her clenched jaw.

"That's him, that's him, that's him."

That was his train all right but they never found the young man himself. They looked for the address Esther had acquired from a reporter who'd done a story on graffiti writers. Moonman had not told the guy what his real name was or where he lived-only his age, sixteen. The address came from another kid, who claimed to be in Moonman's crew, and the two women searched it out, walking across a terrain of torched buildings, whole blocks leveled by arson, and there were buildings still burning in the distance. They stopped and watched. Three or four buildings oozing lazy smoke. No sign of fire engines or anxious people grouped behind barricades. Just a few passersby, it seemed from here, routinely occupied. They watched in silence and it was hard to bridge the distance. They couldn't quite place the thing in context. It was like a newsreel of some factional war in a remote province, where generals cook the livers of their rivals and keep them in plastic baggies. A thing totally spooked by otherness.

Esther finally spoke. "This is where you used to live?"

"No. I lived about a mile north of here."

"Still, I have to show you more respect."

"Thank you, Esther. But it wasn't like this at the time."

"Still, I have to make an effort to be nicer to you."

"You do that," Klara said.

They knew it wasn't a good idea to stand around indefinitely and when they reached 157th Street and looked for the young man's address, they found there was no such number.

They went into a couple of bodegas and asked at the check-cashing place.

People said, "Mooney, who's Mooney?" They said, "What kind of Mormon? There's no Mormons here."

And the women said, "No, no, no, no. Moonman. Moonman uno cinco siete." And they made spray-paint gestures and said, "Graffiti, graffiti."

And Esther wore a safari jacket like some network correspondent looking for rebels in the smoky hills and who could blame her, really.

"You look a little Chinese tonight," Miles said.

"Jason used to call me the chink."

She said this in her small voice. She looked and sounded small to herself. People were getting bigger, she was getting smaller, going more or less invisible. If Miles were not here, how long would it take the waiter to wait on her?

"Jason. I know a Jason?"

"Jason my second husband. Jason Vanover."

They were eating seafood on Mulberry Street in a place Miles liked to come to because a mobster had been killed here, shot in the head by a couple of guys from a rival family, or his own family maybe, or a family from out of town.

"You're always mentioning people that I don't know and that I never heard of and you mention them," he said, "in a way that makes me think I'm supposed to know who you're talking about when as a matter of fact I couldn't possibly."

"It's true, I do that."

"People go by me in a blur."

"It's just that I feel if I know someone, it's automatic that the person I'm talking to about that individual should also know him, by some human arithmetic," she said.

Miles had a cold, he always had a cold, it went unnoticed, went without saying, he had coughing jags and slightly woozy eyes, completely unremarked by people who knew him-it was part of the irregular life, the general unhealth, half meals and travel and erratic sleep.

He looked around for particular silhouettes, hefty men in suits who might be connected.

"I used to look more Chinese when my hair was shorter," she said.

"What did he do?"

"He was a market analyst, a risk-taker with his own and other people's money, and a sailor, we used to sail for weeks at a time, a yachtsman. That was the best thing about our marriage. When we shared the ketch everything fell into place. He had a ketch he named High Finance."

"You on a boat?"

"We knew we had to cooperate. We had to live in close quarters. Take turns at the wheel, in the galley, share the head, stow the equipment, coil the lines, keep things in their place. Yes, me on a boat. We were disciplined. We respected the boat and the elements. We had a pretty good marriage as long as we were aboard."

They walked over to the loft. A supermarket cart stood in the middle of the street and cars went around it and a man rose from the shadow of a loading platform murmuring a plea to Jesus.

They shared a joint and watched a newsclip of Nixon waving on TV.

"Acey told me she was at a party and she said to a man, What do men really want from women, and he said, Blowjobs, and she said, You can get that from men."

"In six months Acey will be too famous to live," Miles said. "She'll be assassinated walking out of a disco."

It wasn't quite the time for her to go back to work but it was beginning to be the time. Something in her skin began its anxious leap, some need to handle and shape, only deeper really-some need so whole she could sit alone in the loft and be a little wary of it.

"Yes, walking out of a disco," she said. "And then you'll want to take me dancing there."

Her mother took her downtown, her and Rochelle, her best friend, and they ate lunch at the automat near Times Square, where the front window was stained glass and the milk came out of the mouth of a bronzed fish. They watched matinee crowds enter theaters and her mother made comments on the ladies' hats. They looked in shop windows of the better sort. Her mother took them into fine hotels and office buildings, marched them right in and showed them the moldings and engravings in the lobbies, the carved wood on elevator doors. And they stood outside a skyscraper on Fifth Avenue, it was probably 1934 and the Japanese were entrenched in Manchuria and they looked straight up the face of the building and walked through the polished lobby and it was the Fred F French Building, which intrigued the girls because who on earth was Fred F French, and Klara's mother, who knew things, who worked for a social service agency and studied child psychology, who followed world events and worried about China, who planned these outings systematically, did not have a clue to the identity of Fred F French, and this intrigued the girls even more, intrigued and amused them, they were thirteen and fourteen and everything amused them. They rode home on the Third Avenue el, rattlebanging up Manhattan and through the Bronx, looking out the train windows into tenement apartments on both sides, hundreds of film-flickering lives shooting past their eyes forty feet above the street, and Rochelle might see an undershirted man leaning tousled out his window and, Maybe that's Fred F French, she'd say, he's had a streak of bad luck, ha ha, and that was the end of that, Klara said to Miles-they were in bed playing cards in the loft, until three or four years later when the girls left a high school dance with two boys who weren't even in their high school, interlopers from the north, and the four of them slipped into somebody's parked car at the dark end of the street and they puffed a couple of cigarettes and talked and smooched and necked and petted. Klara and one boy were huddled in the front seat and Rochelle had the other boy in the roomy rear, boy-crazy Rochelle putting on a show of tonguing and seat-slithering, actually raising dust from the upholstery, and she wore a smoky look that distracted the front-seat partners and made them stop and watch. There was just enough light to watch. And it went on toward the outer limits of what a girl is willing to commit herself to, even a boy-crazy minx like Rochelle. The boy in the backseat was in a bundled frenzy by now and Rochelle's look contained a complicated betrayal, it was smoky and deadly and cool and it seemed to be saying to Klara that their friendship, the best and deepest there could ever be, was about to enter a strange and disturbing phase, the intricate thing of men and sex and personal needs. There was a flurry of hands and knees, there was all that stuff of backseats and body angles and what you're wearing, the whole grabby flare-up of sex in the dark. She heard panty-band elastic snapping. She thought she heard the boy's finger actually enter the fleshy pocket between Rochelle's legs, a palpatory sea suck, the wetness, the slaver of long stupefying kisses, that whole thing of having a strand of his hair in your mouth that you can't exactly locate, and it was abruptly and bitterly clear that Rochelle had done this before, gone this far and more, and what a shock to Klara, detecting such experience in her best friend's eyes, and she watched in a clinical spell, she looked and listened-what a stark thing a secret is when it belongs to someone else.

Now she knew what people meant by experience, the way they used the word experience, and the form it took was not sex but knowledge, and the knowledge was not hers but her friend's-how it twisted her insides and made her feel puppyish and dumb.

She heard Rochelle mutter something like, Time to take the rubber out of your wallet, Bob, or she might have said Rob, but instead of a pale flexible sheath the boy took out his living thing, stiff and pulsing and ultraviolet, there it was, suddenly unbuttoned and in the world, pretty much the configuration Klara had imagined but so hot and real, independently alive, unyoked to the host, to the bearer, the wearer, and Rochelle was nervous because the boy did not have a rubber and Klara was nervous because the Japanese might invade China.

Miles cut the cards and listened.

And at the all-crucial moment Rochelle Abramowicz looked over the boy's shoulder into the eyes of Klara Sachs and said to her, thoughtfully, What do you think the F stands for?

And Klara said, What F?

And Rochelle said, The F in Fred F French.

This was a good thing to say, maybe it was the best thing anyone had ever said, then or now, under the circumstances, and it made them friends again. They dissolved, as the saying goes, in laughter, they practically disappeared into their constituent elements, into atoms and molecules, a couple of girls in a gangster Packard, blown forward in time, and Klara stood on the roof sipping tepid wine and hearing people say, We need theater, and she knew she would tell this story to Miles and she also knew she could never again have a friend like Rochelle or a mother like her mother for that matter and she looked across ledges and parapets to the old skyscraper with the massed midsection and the sunburst paneling, ten blocks north, and thought how wonderful it was, what an accidental marvel to come upon a memory floating at the level of a glazed mosaic high on a mid-town tower-the old spoked sun that brings you luck.

The poets of the old nations of the basin told stories about the wind.

Matt Shay sat in his cubbyhole in a concrete space about the size of a basketball court, somewhere under the gypsum hills of southern New Mexico.

This operation was called the Pocket.

There were people here who weren't sure whether they were doing weapons work. They were involved in exploratory research and didn't know exactly what happened to their findings, their simulations, the results they discovered or predicted. This is one of the underlying themes of the systems business, where all the work connects at levels and geographic points far removed from the desk toil and lab projects of the researchers.

Matt used to do consequence analysis, figuring out the lurid mathematics of a nuclear accident or limited exchange. He worked with data from real events. There was the thing that fell to earth on Albuquerque in 1957, a thermonuclear bomb of jumbo tonnage mistakenly released from a B-36-nobody's perfect, okay-and landing in a field within the city limits. The conventional explosives detonated, the nuclear package did not. The incident remained a secret to this day, seventeen years later, as Matty sat in his cubicle reading a camping guide.

He'd been in the Pocket for five months and was definitely doing weapons work but of the soft-core type, involved with safing mechanisms mainly, his face pressed to a computer screen. He wasn't sure how he felt about this. He'd wanted to do weapons, he'd wanted the edge, the identity, the sense of honing his silhouette, knowing himself a little better-a secret installation in the desert.

They named it the Pocket after a creature called the pocket gopher that lives in tunnels it frantically digs under the furrowed dunes.

The dune fields, the alkali flats, the whiteness, the whole white sea-bottomed world, the lines of white haze in the distance, the six-thousand-year-old mummified baby found in a cave near White City, yes, and there were animals that bleached themselves white over the eons, a once-brown mouse that color-matched itself to the gypsum drifts to escape the gaze of predators.

The wind blew out of the Organ Mountains, busting up to fifty miles an hour, refiguring the dunes and turning the sky an odd dangerous gray that seemed a type of white gone mad.

And the men and women of the Pocket, mainly men and mainly single, with only a small cluster of marrieds and their albino, was the joke, children-they lived in semiattached bungalows at the edge of the missile range and listened to the wind that the sages of the old nations spoke about, evolving metaphors and philosophies, and it recrested the dunes, blowing steadily, sometimes, for days.

Do you work with sound waves? Do you gauge the effects of blast on delivery aircraft? Do you do physics packages and dream about a girl back in Georgia, the one who put her hand in your pants at the drive-in near the swamp? Do you long to see a fireball, an actual test shot- they are outlawed of course by now, atmospheric blasts, but you wish you'd seen one of the monster shots that vapored an atoll way back when.

He ate lunch in the underground mess with Eric Deming, a tall shuffly man in his early thirties, a couple of years younger than Matt, and one of the bombheads.

There was a droop to Eric's shoulders and clothes. He tended to eat with his hands-french fries, sure, but also lettuce, beets, boiled rice, corn niblets, anything he could pincer and lift in units.

"When's Janet coming?"

"Soon. We're working out the details," Matt said.

"Will you show her to us? We haven't seen a woman from the outside world."

"You're in Alamogordo all the time."

"That's not outside. You have to go a thousand miles before you're outside. You know that. In this state, Matty."

"She's not coming here."

"Okay but in this state do you know the percentage of people who have security clearance? Isn't that why we love it?"

"We're meeting somewhere west of here and then we're going camping. Remote remote remote. If I can talk her into it. She's not eager to do this, Janet."

Eric worked in a lab area that Matt was not cleared to enter. He used to work with radioactive materials inside a sealed glove box. He wore protective gloves, he wore overgloves attached to his sleeves, he wore layers of treated clothing equipped with a number of film badges and rad-detectors and he worked with bomb components-the neutron initiator, the detonators, the subcritical pieces, the visceral heat inside the warhead.

He was doing something else now and Matt didn't know what it was. He wore a Q badge with yellow edges and spread astounding rumors.

The bombheads loved their work but weren't necessarily pro-bomb, walking around with megadeath hard-ons. They were detail freaks. They were awed by the inner music of bomb technology. Matt watched them. He went to their parties and learned their language. They carried an afterglow of sixties incandescence, a readiness to give themselves compulsively to something.

They thought he was angling for a transfer in, ready to become one of them, wear the coded badge, the Q-sensitive access that would get him through the last gate and into the tunnel that led to bomb design.

But Matty was sneaking looks at outdoor magazines, at camp bags and dome tents, because he needed time to get away and think.

He had doubts about the Tightness of his role.

Down route 70 a ways, near the sign for the missile range, an area that is white on your map-this is where the protesters stood, seven or eight men and women, sometimes only two or three, and they carried a sign stretched between wooden uprights, World War HI Starts Here, and base personnel taunted them, or just smirked, or were flattered by the sign, or felt sorry for the sign carriers because they were windswept and unattractive.

Matt liked seeing them. He counted on it in a way. It began to be important to him, knowing they were there, four, five, six people, usually women outnumbering men, or maybe two grim figures clinging to the uprights, never saying a word as military vehicles passed, or flatbed trucks with draped objects, or civilian workers and construction crews, the odd finger flipped their way.

The white places on your map include the air base, the army base, the missile range, the vast stretch to the northwest called the Jornada del Muerto and the interdunal flats as well-the flats were map-white, on the page and in living fact, and a few low buildings were situated here, fenced structures with propane tanks, to service the underground operation in the Pocket, where weapons were conceived and designed.

They worked to strict deadlines. There were always deadlines to meet. The bombheads complained about this. They were the people of superior sensibility, the ones who'd gained a rational mastery over themselves, who were not subject to moral ambivalence, to the sentimental babyshit of consequence and anguish. They were the ones who understood the hard-ass principles of the conflict and they did not like bureaucratic pressures exerted from the surface.

But the deadlines persisted. There were deadlines all the time. There was the urgency of war without a war.

Eric said, "Hear the latest secret?"

They were walking beyond the bungalows at sunset, totally alone on the sand plain, and Eric kept looking around for eavesdroppers, comically of course, and he affected a side-of-mouth murmur that might frustrate even a lip-reader recruited to study surveillance tapes.

"It's an old thing just now surfacing," he said, "in the form of very faint rumors."

"What old thing?"

"Workers at the Nevada Test Site in the days of aboveground shots."

"What about them?"

"And people living downwind. These people have a name, incidentally, that totally defines their existence."

"What is it?"

"Downwinders," Eric said.

They ambled out past low growths of saltbush toward the electrified fence.

"What about them?" Matt said.

"Nobody's supposed to know this. It's something that's more or less out in the open but at the same time."

"What?"

"Secret. Untalked about. Hushed up."

"What's the secret?" Matt said.

"Multiple myelomas. Kidney failures. Or you wake up one morning and you're three inches shorter."

"You mean exposure to fallout."

"Or you start throwing up one day and you throw up every succeeding day for seven, eight weeks."

"But isn't this something we have to expect? Occasional miscalculations. It's dangerous work, you know?"

Eric seemed to enjoy this remark. No, he seemed to expect it, he seemed to find it encouraging. They walked out past a large parabolic dune and it was so draggingly hot out here that the air seemed a form of physical hindrance.

"Little farm communities downwind of the tests. Nearly all the kids wear wigs," Eric whispered.

"Doing chemo?"

"Yeah. And here and there a kid that's born with a missing limb or whatnot. And a healthy woman that goes to wash her hair and it all comes out in her hands. She's a ravishing, you know, brunette one minute and totally bald the next."

"Where?"

"Mainly southern Utah, I hear, because it's downwind. But other places too. Adenocarcinomas. Old Testament outbreaks of great red boils. Great big splotches and rashes. And coughing up handfuls of blood. You look in your cupped hands and you see a pint of radded blood."

They walked along the electrified fence past a warning sign graffiti'd by a protester or some apostate working slyly in the Pocket.

"You think the stories are true?"

"No," Eric said.

"Then why do you spread them?"

"For the tone, of course."

"For the edge."

"For the edge. The bite. The existential burn."

Matty was six years old when his father went out for cigarettes.

Eight days later, when his father hadn't come back and hadn't called or sent a message through a friend, the boy took all the change he could find in the apartment and started walking.

He'd never gone alone past the Third Avenue el in this particular direction but that's where he walked. Then he crossed the avenue where the trains ran through the long corridor below street level from the suburbs all the way down to Grand Central Station. That Nicky would one day throw rocks at. That Nicky would stand at the railing in plain sight throwing rocks at the trains running right below him.

Then he climbed the long set of steps up to the streets near the Concourse. He'd climbed these steps with his mother to go to the movies and get a sundae at the ice-cream parlor nearby and now he climbed the steps alone, going to the Grand Concourse, where the movie theater stood, the Loew's Paradise, and there were sixty or seventy steps and buildings on iron stilts, like another country altogether.

He sees himself from this distance in the white sands standing across the street looking at the great Italianate facade of the Paradise.

He sees himself staring up at the clock and the roof balustrade and the ornate stone cupola.

He sees himself buying a ticket, barely able to reach the window hole, and he pushed the coins through the hole and watched the ticket woman hit a thing that sent the ticket out of a slit.

He walked into the lobby. He felt an enveloping sort of warmth rise from the thick carpet like the happy repose of a stroked dog. There were goldfish swimming in marble basins. He looked at the etched glass chandeliers. There were a number of jutting balconies where paintings hung in gilded frames. He thought this was a thousand times more holy than church.

He is sitting in his half bungalow near the missile range and he sees himself climb the carpeted staircase because he wanted to sit high up, close to the theater ceiling.

He saw the usher standing with a flashlight held across his belt. The usher wore braiding on his shoulders and a row of brass buttons set aslant his chest and he flashed the light repeatedly on and off just to hear it click. Matty thought the usher would tell him he could not sit in the balcony because it was grown-ups only here, for smoking, or boys and girls who want to neck. But the usher clicked the thing and stood there and Matty walked right by.

He climbed to seats near the ceiling, where stars twinkled and moved. The whole sky moved across the ceiling, stars and constellations and misty blue clouds. His mother wanted him to be an altar boy when he was old enough but this was more tremendous than church.

He sees all this as a grown-up who has never smoked a cigarette, who barely drives a car and no longer plays chess and loves a woman who's a nurse in Boston.

He sees himself sitting in the balcony at the Paradise. The light from the movie glowed or faded depending on the nature of the scene. He looked at the wall nearest him and then at the other wall and when the light flared and leaped there it all was, the whole tremendous thing, arches, porticos, statues, the urns and marble busts, the vines trained through balusters, the pedestaled heroes with long swords, the columns in the shape of draped figures, both walls crowded with stacked anatomies and structures, too much to take in, and angels that stood halo'd atop the pediments, and he sat there and waited for his father, for the ghost or soul of his father to make a visitation.

He took off his glasses, he put on his glasses. Then he took them off and wiped them with a pale cloth and sat in front of his screen blinking at a display of data that pertained to an arming system, to that element of the weapon designed to send signals that will arm or safe or resafe the firing system. He heard a faint boom somewhere over the desert, the blast wave of mach speeds, and it thrilled him, moved him. It always did, no matter how often he heard it or how far he was situated from the source. The sound woke him some mornings when the planes flew right over and sometimes he stood outside his quarters before nightfall and watched the matched contrails of half a dozen aircraft in tight formation, the planes themselves long gone, but it was the drag and sonic shock, this is what awed and moved him, and then the afterclap rolling off the mountains, like they were blowing out a seam in the world.

There were people here who didn't know where their work ended up, how it might be applied. They didn't know how their arrays of numbers and symbols might enter nature. It could conceivably happen in a flash.

Everything connected at some undisclosed point down the systems line. This caused a certain select disquiet.

But it was a splendid mystery in a way, a source of wonder, how a brief equation that you tentatively enter on your screen might alter the course of many lives, might cause the blood to rush through the body of a woman on a tram many thousands of miles away, and how do you define this kind of relationship?

Matt did not like to drive. He'd been driving only six months and knew he'd never feel natural at the wheel. The best he could do was mimic a driver. He borrowed a four-wheel-drive vehicle from one of the bombheads and drove it with the instruction booklet in his lap. The roads, the road signs, the other cars made him self-conscious, exposing his crime of driving.

But he wanted to practice for his camping trip with Janet and he went for drives on his days off and there were signs for runaway truck ramps and dangerous crosswinds and there was the Jesus is Lord sign and the lines of whitish haze in the deep distance that he now knew to be sea-bottom sand and the Do not enter sign When road is flooded and the slat-back shadows on the flats formed by the crossbars of power lines that stretched hellbent to Texas.

Returning one day from a drive he saw the protesters, as always, positioned in the wrong place. They should have been standing by the third gate to the air base, the unmarked gate, because that's where scientists from the Pocket entered and left, and they were the most susceptible presence, and he half wanted to tell the protesters to move their operation up the road.

Matt looked slightly Jewish, a little Hispanic maybe. He'd lifted weights in his late teens, remaking the soft flimsy body that used to function as an adjunct to the Univac head. Back in the Bronx, people said he looked a little everything. Mexican, Italian, Japanese even-his friendliest smile could look like a ceremonial grimace. A police sketch made from seven different descriptions-that was Matt. He never stopped resembling the student he was at City College in the late fifties, hardworking, nearsighted, smart and poor, riding the subway to class.

He sat with Eric Deming in the mess. Eric took a strand of spaghetti in his fingers and slow-lowered it down his throat with a certain amount of snakely constriction.

Matt said, 'All right. These are things we have to expect. We're not naive. Mistakes are part of the process. There's a sudden wind shift and the fallout blows the wrong way. Or the blast and shock are larger than anyone anticipated."

"The placid nineteen-fifties. Everybody dressed and spoke the same way. It was all kitchens and cars and TV sets. Where's the Pepso-dent, mom? We were there, so we know, don't we?"

"You know. I don't know," Matt said.

"You were there. We were both there."

"You were there. I was somewhere else."

"Dad's in the breezeway washing the car. Meanwhile way out here they were putting troops in trenches for nuclear war games. Fireballs roaring right above them."

"Positioned too close, you mean."

"That's the story I hear. You look at your arm and see right through it. Basically your arm becomes an x ray of your arm. You can see right through the uniform cloth and the skin. The light's so white. You can see blood, bones and whatnot. But that's not all. You can see all this with your eyes shut. You don't have to open your eyes. You see right through the lids. Ha!"

"Well was it officially acknowledged?"

"You wake up one day a few years later, all your inner organs are fused. It's one big jellied lump."

"But did the men get compensated?"

"I don't know," Eric said.

"That's not part of your rumormongering."

Eric stuck a finger in Matty's creamed spinach and hooked a shreddy morsel toward his mouth.

"What good's a rumor that deals with bureaucratic details? The point is this," he said. "It happened right out in the open but it's still a huge secret to this day. That's the story anyway. Which I don't happen to believe. They did major shots off towers or dropped devices from planes and they put troops too close to the blast and they let the fallout drift to Utah, where kids are getting born with their bladders backwards."

Matt wanted to like Eric. The guy was smart, friendly, sort of semi-charismatic in a physically awkward and too-tall way. But his motives were sometimes lost to observers in the inward drifts of his smile. You saw the shadow action around the mouth and wondered if you were being set up for something.

"You know about the school not far from here. This is not rumor now but fact. I've been there and seen it. The Abo Elementary School and Fallout Shelter. A real place down in the ground."

"Just like us."

"We're not real," Eric said. "They're only kids. It's a grade school. They still have a chance to be real. I was sent there to speak to them."

"As a bombhead."

"As a clean-cut younger member of the military industrial complex. A diversion at recess type thing."

"What did you say to them?"

"There's a water tank at the edge of town. State Champs in bright new paint. And rows of neat homes. Then you come upon the school but just barely. Some trailerlike structures and a couple of basketball courts and finally you spot an entrance and you open the steel door and go down the stairs and there's a lot of concrete and steel and the lighting's slightly eerie. The classrooms, the bedding, the canned food, the morgue. No window breakage. That's one of the features. Because there aren't any windows of course. But the point is. What's the point, Matty?"

"I don't know. Tell me."

"Did they do all this to protect the kids from Soviet bombs or from our bombs and our fallout?"

"I don't know. Both. What did you say to the kids?"

"I spoke in tongues," Eric said. "I mean think about it. I'm standing in an underground room at the northern edge of a great desert with filtering systems for fallout and a fully equipped morgue and there are crayon drawings pinned above the blackboard of piglets and cows. Incidentally."

"What?"

"I have a chess set in my room. What about a game?"

The Pocket was one of those nice tight societies that replaces the world. It was the world made personal and consistently interesting because it was what you did, and others like you, and it was self-enclosed and self-referring and you did it all together in a place and a language that were inaccessible to others.

Janet Urbaniak was Matt's girlfriend, a registered nurse. They were off-and-on serious, mostly on, often impatient with each other but always strongly joined, the kind of star-matched couple born to meet and disagree.

He called Janet on her days off and she told him where she'd gone and what she'd seen or bought, and who with, and for how long, and he listened and commented and asked for details.

She worked in a trauma unit now. She told him about her nights there but he said almost nothing about his own work and of course she understood and did not probe.

Janet called his mother twice a week to find out how she was doing and then she called Matt to give him a report and then Matt called his mother to confirm everything, to clarify the particulars of an ache or pain, and he liked all these calls, the ones he made and the ones he heard about-they gave him a life outside the Pocket.

He drove his borrowed jeep past a protester alone, a woman struggling to keep the sign upright in a dry stiff wind that beat across the flats. He wanted to stop and talk to her. Give her a hand, have a chat. He wanted to show his tolerance of her viewpoint, allow himself to be convinced by some of her arguments, make certain trenchant points of his own and then drive her to the nondescript room where she lived at the edge of this or that town, with a partial view of the mountains, and have soft, moaning and mutually tolerant sex in her rumpled bed, but he slowed only slightly as he drove past.

Later someone told him the protesters lived in a ruined school bus in the Sacramento Mountains. Matt kind of liked that. He liked the idea of people leaving everything behind to pursue an idea. He thought of Sister Edgar in sixth grade talking about desert saints, pillar saints, stylites, and she hoisted herself up on her desk and crossed her legs under the habit, a saint lotused on a column in the Sinai, and spoke to the class in snatches of Latin and Hebrew and he remembered liking that-he liked to think of a godstruck band of wanderers haunting the test ranges and silos of the West.

It was part of the reason he'd come here in the first place. For the questions and challenges. For the self-knowledge he might find in a sterner life, in the fixing of willful limits.

Did you do grad work on solar energy? Did you do a paper on the trigger principle of nuclear fission? Do you go to the dentist every six months for a prophy and a polish? Are you a physicist with a grudge against your mother? Are you a systems engineer who masturbates in secret while your wife is watching reruns of "The Honeymooners"? Do you wish to hell you could see a tower shot with all the special effects, with the sun coming up ass-backwards and the trees casting shadows in the wrong direction, the spectacle of the unmattered atom, the condensation cloud arranged split-secondly on the shock disc, sort of primly place-centered, and the visible shock approaching, and the biblical wind that carries sagebrush, sand, hats, cats, car parts, condoms and poisonous snakes, all blowing by in the desert dawn?

Eric kept after him to play chess. But he didn't want to play chess. He didn't talk about his chess. His chess was old dark difficult history, suppressed forever. The history of a chess homunculus. No one knew about his chess. Janet knew a little and only Janet and no one else but his mother and brother and Mr. Bronzini, of those who might tend to remember.

"'You don't get the point," Eric said in the jeep.

"You're spreading rumors you don't even believe. That's the point," Matt said.

"They had to throw up roadblocks because the cloud was moving into populated areas. Neuroblastomas. Beta burns. Two-headed lambs. Or entire herds of sheep dead in the fields. Or you wake up one morning and your teeth start flipping out of their sockets, painlessly and bloodlessly."

Two or three teeth, say. Sort of gently expelled with the faintest kind of squishy sound, Eric said. And you wrap them in cold wet gauze and jump in your car and drive to the dentist's office confident that he'll be able to reinsert the teeth because don't doctors do amazing things with severed limbs. Or he will not reinsert the teeth. He will send the teeth to a lab at the new medical center where they have equipment so advanced it can learn more about you in a passing glance than you could figure out yourself if you lived to be a thousand.

But at the first red light you take the gauze out of your pocket and unfold it for a brief peek, Eric said, and there's nothing there but a small mound of powder because your teeth have completely crumbled. These hard strong reliable structures designed for biting and gnawing, for tearing flesh. These things that last a million years in the jaws of prehistoric people, in the skulls that we dig up and study. Turned to dust in your pocket in six frigging minutes.

He called Janet and talked. He talked and listened. The smaller the talk, the better he felt. He took satisfaction in the details of her day, the matters of barely passing interest that struck him in his lonely love as items of privileged witness.

Sometimes she talked about her work, trauma duty deep in the night, and she was matter-of-fact about it, bodies flopping on the just-mopped floor of the corridor, relatives dragging in a knife victim or OD, the uncle and mother gripping the man's head and legs and a cluster of small kids at the edges, two to each arm.

She described scenes that were like paintings of the European masters, the ones who did miracles and wars.

Her strength in these matters made her beautiful to him. She was a smallish woman, they were both fairly short and Janet was slight as well, and he liked to imagine her in a scrub suit plunging a fist into someone's chest cavity and coming out with a bullet or a chicken bone. Her shyness did not conceal her eloquence of mettle and will. He saw and heard it often. She clung to him persistently to make a point.

He thought they were too damn earnest. They wanted a family and each other but were periodically beset by the complexity of the undertaking, the plans, the chances, the cities, the idea of marriage and children and jobs and how hard it is to do everything right, and they agreed and bargained and argued, they planned and fought.

He looked at Landsat photos shot from space a year or two earlier. The pictures were false-color composites that revealed signs of soil erosion, geological fracture and a hundred other events and features. They showed stress and drift and industrial ravage, billion-bit data converted into images.

He saw how remote sensors pulled hidden meanings out of the earth. How sweeps and patches of lustrous color, how computer fuchsias or rorschach pulses of unnamed shades might indicate a change in water temperature or where the dwindling grizzlies go to forage and mate. He looked at spindly barrier beaches that showed white as shanked bone. He found sizable cities pixeled into mountain folds and saw black lakes high in the ranges, kettle holes formed by glacial drift.

He could not stop looking.

The photo mosaics seemed to reveal a secondary beauty in the world, ordinarily unseen, some hallucinatory fuse of exactitude and rapture. Every thermal burst of color was a complex emotion he could not locate or name.

And he thought of the lives inside the houses embedded in the data on the street that is photographed from space.

And that is the next thing the sensors will detect, he thought. The unspoken emotions of the people in the rooms.

And then he thought inevitably of Nick.

He wanted to call his brother many times. He thought he'd like to talk to him about the work he was doing here. He'd be able to give Nick a general sense of things, let him know that the kid was doing important work but that it troubled him now and then.

One day he might find himself putting together a physics package, the explosive components of a nuclear device – true-blue bombhead country.

Matt wasn't sure he could deal with this himself. He could if he had to, and Janet would help, she'd have a clear position he could set against his doubts, but he wanted to talk to Nick. He wanted to hear his brother's voice coming down the phone line, the slightly bent stresses that carried a literal lifetime of associations.

Nick had a graveness that was European in a way. He was shaped and made. First unmade and then reimagined and strongly shaped and made again. And he was somber and self-restrained at times and not free-giving but maybe he would give the kid advice about the moral and ethical aspects of this kind of work. Mainly what Matt wanted was a show of interest. This was more important than outright counsel, a recommendation or judgment, but he wanted that too – a judgment in his brother's voice.

He didn't know what his brother might say. He might say this is the way you define yourself as a serious man, working through the hard questions and harrowing choices, and if you stick with it you'll be stronger in the end. Or he might say, Fool, what kind of mark will this make on your soul when you become a father like me? Think of the guilt of raising children in a world you've made – your talent put to such desolate use. Speaking softly now. And who knows the ticklish business of weapons better than I do, brother?

But he'd never make that last remark, would he? And Matt didn't make the call. They didn't often talk, or they talked about their mother, or they hassled each other routinely, but maybe he'd call later when he felt the urge again.

When the wind gusted out of the mountains it rebodied the dunes and if you were up out of the Pocket and sitting around at home with a beer and a snack you saw your laundry go horizontal on the backyard line, all of it, sheets, hankies, boxer shorts, pajama bottoms, like people of all sizes and shapes snapping from the pressure, letting their souls fly forth to the gypsum hills.

"But that's not the point," Eric said, "you keep mi, mi, missing the point."

It was raining in the mountains.

Eric had a fake stutter he liked to use to texture the conversation, a thing he'd developed to mock himself or his listener, although neither one of them stuttered, or maybe he was imitating some nightclub comic or simpy character on TV-it wasn't clear to Matt.

He looked out a window of Eric's bungalow. The rain was a wall of smoky shimmer that hung across the limestone bluffs. Eric sat on a sofa that was still wrapped in warehouse plastic amid a mess of scientific journals, UFO monthlies, supermarket tabloids, half a dozen Playboys and some lost food.

"Even though huge amounts of territory were affected and large numbers of people were exposed, it remains a major secret to this day."

"So secret it may not be true," Matt said.

"Do you believe it's true?"

"I believe mistakes were made."

Eric enjoyed this. His shadow smile appeared at the far end of the sprawled body. It came and went, like some inner dialogue he was conducting that ran parallel to the spoken lines, a thing of elusive drift.

"But the point is, pure and simple."

"What's the point, Eric?"

He picked up a magazine and leafed through it aimlessly, speaking in a tone that was slightly impatient but mostly, now that he was finally coming to the point, a little weary and bored.

"It was done deliberately," he said. "They knew the tests weren't safe but they went ahead anyway. They marched troops to zero point after the detonations. They sent manned aircraft through radiation clouds. They injected people with plutonium to track its course through the body, They did this deliberately, without telling people what the risks were. They exposed troops to the atomic flash and some of them were given protective eye filters and some were not. They experimented on children, infants, fetuses and mental patients. They never told the Navahos who worked in uranium mines what the dangers were. The dangers were considerable as it turned out. They zapped the testicles of prison inmates. They basically grabbed you by the balls and zapped you full of x rays. This is the story I hear. Do you believe it?"

"It's awfully, I don't know."

"Of course. It's very hard to believe. That's why I don't believe it," Eric said. "Not for a tenth of a second."

The rain line came dragging across the flats and the wind kicked up. The poets of the desert nations told stories about the wind. It bucks and swirls and turns you around and knocks you flat. But it also speaks so softly only your inner spirit can hear it and this is how you correct your path.

Eric said, "They never told the test subjects they were sub, sub, sub, sub."

"Subjects."

"I don't believe it," Eric said. "But you may feel differently."

Matt didn't know how he felt. But he didn't think the story was completely far-fetched. He'd served in Vietnam, after all, where everything he'd ever disbelieved or failed to imagine turned out, in the end, to be true.

Then one day he stopped to talk to her, the woman alone with the protest sign. He parked the car on the opposite side of the road and walked on over. She held one post cradled in her arms, one eight-foot-long upright piece, and the other was planted in the dirt with rocks piled around the base, and the sign itself, a spray-painted sheet, extended wind-whipped between the posts.

He stood there and started talking. He talked to her in a reassuring, trite and slightly compulsive way, like a first-timer nervous in a singles bar. He realized her wrist was padlocked to the post. He'd never noticed this before and it seemed, well, a little self-dramatizing maybe. Or fanatical and irrational and victim-wishful. She looked at him briefly as he spoke. He'd finished the get-acquainted part and was talking about the need for readiness and the folly of being naive about the other side's intentions.

He didn't use words such as American and Soviet. They seemed provocative somehow. Or NATO and Europe and the East Bloc and the Berlin Wall. Too soon to be so intimate.

She looked at him only briefly. It was not a hostile look but it was brief. There was something scoured about her, a sense of rubbed surfaces, a willing away of normal accretions and gleanings, and he thought she carried the countermarks of the rural poor.

He talked to her about the need to match our weapons to theirs, even when the numbers become absurd, because this is the only seeming safeguard against attack by either side.

She was fair-skinned, etched and fixed, with lank hair, string hair, and he thought she was true and impressive and unreachable.

They stood on a stretch of flat straight highway, beautiful and lonely, and if you're going to do this kind of work, isn't it necessary, he thought, to be fanatical? World War HI Starts Here. Isn't this exactly what he wanted from these people, a kind of sunstruck religious witness?

He told her he was completely willing to listen. But she would not talk to him. She stood padlocked to the post and looked off down the road somewhere. He could not despise her arrogance because she wasn't arrogant. She wasn't smarter or more sane or less guilty. They are armed, he said, and so we have to be armed. She clutched the upright and looked down the road, blue-eyed, with an inbuilt wince, and he went back to the car and drove away.

Eric's laundry jumped on the line. It shot straight out and held stiff in the wind.

"I think of my days in the glove box," he said. "Handling that hot pluto. Mistakes were made even in the small narrow sealed limits of the box. Better believe it. With all the safety procedures and data sheets and supervisors, people still made amazing mistakes. And I'd stick my hands in the gloves and think oddly of my mom, who was a super sensible lady and used to wear rubber gloves to do the dinner dishes back in the placid days when we were bombing our own people."

"I'm leaving tomorrow," Matt said.

"Let me have that jacket when you go."

Matt wore a lightweight calfskin jacket, the kind of soft leather that scuffs and unscuffs at a touch, and Eric often remarked his wish to own it whatever the difference in their sizes.

"I think I'll probably take it with me for the not so rugged parts of the trip."

"The taste is metallic according to downwinders. You open the door and step outside to get the newspaper that the newsboy on his bike has tossed on the porch and you taste a kind of metallic grit in the air, like salt made of metal shavings. Coming to our party tonight?"

"Wouldn't miss it," Matt said.

"Irbur child is born with eyes that are pure white. No discernible pupil or iris. Just a large white eyeball. Two if you're lucky."

Eric lifted the Playboy off the sofa and held it sideways, letting the centerfold swing open so he could see the monthly subject full-length.

He said, "Where are you going exactly?"

"Someplace remote."

"Remoter than this?"

"I've been looking at maps."

"But remoter than this?"

"Where the paved roads end."

"You're a city kid, Matty."

"I've been looking at southwest Arizona maybe."

"I want that jacket if you die."

When the bombheads threw a party you couldn't expect to emerge into the world you'd always known. And last night's affair seemed to overlay the landscape as Matty drove west on Interstate 10 through a town called Deming, which was Eric's last name of course, and how clammy was the hand of coincidence-faces, places and provocative remarks all running through his mind.

He'd smoked something that had made him immobile. But not just immobile. Matt was not a user except at parties, where he'd go through the sociable motions, taking a pull on a long-stemmed pipe with a clay bowl that was tamped with grassy substance. But the thing he'd toked last night was either a rogue strain of hashish or standard stuff laced with some psychotomimetic agent. And he was not just immobilized. And somebody sat in front of him and spoke thickly into his face in a ridiculous movie accent evidently meant to be Prussian.

"You can never underestimate the willingness of the state to act out its own massive fantasies."

It was Eric of course. But even if Matt understood this, he could not place it in the jocular context of broad bombhead sport. Because he was not just immobile-he couldn't think straight either. He was surrounded by enemies. Not enemies but connections, a network of things and people. Not people exactly but figures-things and figures and levels of knowledge that he was completely helpless to enter.

The villingness of the shtate.

You can never unterestimate the villingness of the shtate.

Eric went on in his stupid voice, talking about problem boxes and minimax solutions, all the kriegspielish stuff they'd studied in grad school, theory of games and patterns of conflict, heads I win, tails you lose, and Matty sat there stoned totally motionless.

He was locked to his chair, mind-locked and gravity-trapped, aware of the nature of the state he was in but unable to think himself out. He was bent to the weight of the room, distrustful of everyone and everything here. Paranoid. Now he knew what it meant, this word that was bandied and bruited so easily, and he sensed the connections being made around him, all the objects and shaped silhouettes and levels of knowledge-not knowledge exactly but insidious intent. But not that either-some deeper meaning that existed solely to keep him from knowing what it was.

To ahkt out its own massif phantasies.

Eric was still talking, stirring a drink with his finger, and it occurred to Matt in the morning, driving his car through Deming, that maybe the accent was not supposed to be Prussian at all but Hungarian. Eric was paying tribute to the original bombheads, all those emigres from Middle Europe, thick-browed men with sad eyes and roomy pleated pants. They came to do science in New Mexico during the war, an overnight sprawl of trailers and hutments, and they ate the local grub and played poker once a week and went to the Saturday square dance and worked on the thing with no name, the bomb that would redefine the limits of human perception and dread.

He sat in the chair studying someone's shoe.

He knew he wasn't part of some superficial state that people like to borrow from when they say they're feeling paranoid. This was not secondhand. This was real and deep and true. It was all the one-syllable words that mean we aren't kidding. It was also familiar in some strange paleolithic root-eating way a thing retained in the snake brain of early experience.

He studied the shoe on the foot of someone seated near him. It was an Earth shoe, one of those functional, sensible, unsexy, shallow-heeled and vaguely Scandinavian items of fad footwear, the shy, androgynous and countercultural shoe, unthreatening to the environment or the species, and he wondered why it looked so sinister.

Eric was stuttering now.

He didn't know who was wearing the shoe. The idea of connecting the shoe to the person who was wearing it required such an immensity of effort, there was such encumbrance and complication that he could only bend his head to the weight of the room. Maybe the shoe looked sinister because all its meanings and connections and silhouettes were outside Matty's faculties of knowing.

And maybe it looked sinister because it was the left shoe, on the left foot, and this is what sinister means of course-unlucky, unfavorable, leftward-and the word was asserting its baleful roots, its edible tubers and stems, through the medium of someone's shoe.

Eric was still there, talking in a normal voice interrupted by stutters. He seemed to be in another time frame, Eric did, cut and edited, his words in stop-start format and his position frequently altered in relation to the background, and here he was again on the sign for Deming, his name floating out of the soft dawn as Matt drove west, deeper into the white parts of the map, where he would try to find a clue to his future.

3

The statue in the marbled niche had the thighs and calves of a man, a man's bundled muscles in the forearms, but the figure in fact was biblical Eve, tight-breasted, with an apple in her hands and the sloping shoulders of a fullback.

And why not. The evening had the slightly scattered air of some cross-referenced event. Klara wandered through the grand foyer, among the early arrivals, and what a happy buzz they generated, mostly men in fact, and this was interesting. Look at the lean sleek geometry and gunmetal surfaces, the draped mirrors and long chandeliers, it was an art deco palace, burnished steel and chrome, a sense of machine-age completion, and fairly refined in tone except for the mural.

The lobby crowd loved the mural. An enormous mystical vision, sixty feet by forty, with a sort of Lost Horizon motif, situated above the staircase and contoured in a gentle curve so that the craggy peaks of the painting were captured in the towering mirrors, extending the enchanted effect over much of the lobby. Amber mists, a cloaked old man with a staff, a cluster of flamingos standing in the alpenglow-a vision so steeped in kitsch you could die just by buying the postcard.

Yes, this was Radio City Music Hall, a place Klara had last visited when she was thirteen probably, about a year after the doors opened- showplace of the nation. She remembered the soaring walls and carpeted stairs. She remembered the powder room, that's what she remembered, downstairs, in the grand lounge.

She watched Miles Lightman weave through the crowd, doing a couple of pirouettes as he approached, taking in the full 360, eyes slightly popping.

"Where are we, in a model room at Bloomingdale's?"

"We're in 1932, that's where we are."

"It's sort of I-don't-know-what, isn't it?"

"Jazz moderne," Klara said.

"Can you believe I've never been here?"

She was surprised to see that Miles had dressed for the occasion. Many people had and so had Miles, to the extent that he dresses. He wore his scuffed boots and jeans but also had a leopard shirt and mustard tie and a black corduroy jacket with an Edwardian flare.

They watched a man come down the grand staircase, feigning injury as he went past the mural. Miles had a package of cigarettes for Klara. While they waited he gave her further background on the event.

The event was a showing of the legendary lost film of Sergei Eisen-stein, called Unterwelt, recently found in East Germany, meticulously restored and brought to New York under the aegis of the film society Miles belonged to, a remarkable coup for the group. After a period of maneuvering, infighting and hard bargaining they managed to reach an agreement with several rock impresarios and arranged to cosponsor this one-time screening, with orchestral accompaniment, in a house seating nearly six thousand people.

"How do you explain the turnout?" Klara said. 'A lot of gay men in this lobby."

"I think you ought to see the film and figure it out for yourself. I'll only tell you that word got around, early on, that Eisenstein made a film with a powerful theme and the footage has been hidden away all these decades because the theme deals on some level with people living in the shadows, and the government, or the governments, the GDR and the Soviets, have suppressed the film until now."

Probably shot in the midthirties, sporadically and in secret, during a period of acute depression for Eisenstein. Ostensibly idle at the time, goaded by fellow Soviet directors to discard his theories and conceits. Called eccentric, called myth-ridden and politically unsound, accused of being out of touch with the people. Stories began to circulate that he'd been executed.

Esther Winship showed up waving her handbag and saying, "I don't need to see the movie. I already love it. This hall is so wonderful. I'd forgotten it was here. Miles, you look like a mod-and-rocker reunion."

"Where's Jack?" Klara said.

"Where could he be? Is it your shirt or tie that gives me vertigo?"

"Thank you, Esther."

"He's having a drink around the corner," she said.

There was an ambivalence that vitalized the crowd. Whatever your sexual persuasion, you were here to enjoy the contradictions. Think of the relationship between the film and the theater in which it was showing-the work of a renowned master of world cinema screened in the camp environment of the Rockettes and the mighty Wurlitzer. But a theater of a certain impressive shapeliness, a breathtaking place, even, for all its exaggerations and vanities, with roundels of enameled brass on the outer walls and handsome display cases in the ticket lobby and nickel bronze stair rails here in the foyer, a space thai: resembled the hushed and sunken saloon of an ocean liner. And possibly a film, you're not likely to forget this, that will be riddled with mannerisms whatever the level of seriousness. At least you hope so. Didn't Ivan the Terrible contain scenes so comically overwrought, amid the undeniable power of the montage, that you laughed and caught your breath more or less simultaneously?

"Nobody, practically, has seen the film up to this point," Miles said. "Four of us have seen it in our group and half a dozen promoters and theater brass and that's about it on this side of the Iron Curtain."

Miles knew Eisenstein inside and out. He knew more than was humanly healthy. He knew the shot sequence in Potemkin just about cold. The deadly cadence of black boots. The white jackets of the soldiers. The mother clutching weakly at her waist, The rear wheels of the baby carriage rolling out of the frame.

But there were things nobody seemed to know about this movie. Where it was made. How it was made-he didn't have official backing obviously. And why he didn't use sound. One theory pointed to Mexico. The enormous amount of footage he shot openly for his Mexican epic was a cover for a subversive venture, went the theory and this was it.

"Actually I haven't seen a single thing he's ever done," Esther said. "But I met him once, you know."

Miles turned his head slowly to look at her.

"You knew Eisenstein?"

It was a look of total revaluation.

"Met him briefly."

"Where?"

"Here. I was very young, of course. New York. Barely twenty, I think. And he was sitting for a portrait and my parents knew the painter and I went along."

"We have to talk about this," Miles said.

"That's all there is, I'm afraid. He asked me to call him Sergei."

"What else?"

"He drank a lot of milk. He said it was breakfast."

"What else?" Miles said.

"Actually he showed up with the milk, in a bottle. I got him a glass and he thanked me."

"What else?" Miles said.

The other thing nobody knew was where the title came from. Eisenstein knew German and may have had a reason for choosing a title in that language. But it's more likely the film acquired the title during its long repose in an underground vault in East Berlin.

"Gnomelike sort of fellow, as I recall."

"What else?"

"Large head. Sort of very high forehead. Milk came in bottles then, remember?"

It became the movie people had to see. A nice tight hysteria began to build and there were tickets going for shocking sums and counterfeit tickets and people rushing back from the Vineyard and the Pines and the Cape to engineer a seat.

Just a movie for godsake and a silent movie at that and a movie you probably never heard of until the Times did a Sunday piece. But this is how the behavioral aberration, once begun, grows to lavish panic.

"But will we actually be able to sit through it?" Esther said. "Or is it one of those things where we have to be reverent because we're in the presence of greatness but we're really all sitting there determined to be the first ones out the door so we can get a taxi."

"You're thinking of theater," Miles said. "This is film."

Jack Marshall turned up with peanuts on his breath, Esther's husband, and they went into the auditorium.

Klara remembered it now, suddenly so familiar, the feeling of plush and mothered comfort, it felt like her mother hovering, a space soothingly wombed and curved, and the way the proscenium arch rayed out into the ceiling, about eight stories at its highest point, and the spoked rows of downy seats, and the choral staircases that softened the side walls, and the overvastness that seemed allowable, your one indulgence of this type, shrinking everyone in the hall to child size, heads turning and lifting, a rediscovered surprise and delight floating over the crowd, not the last such emotion that people would share this evening.

It developed that the show had a pace and theme and it started with the sound of chase music, offstage, a tinny piano doing the familiar sort of ragtime score that used to accompany silent movies. Then the house lights went down and the great motorized curtain slowly lifted and the full orchestra appeared. A rustle in the audience. Moments after the musicians began to play, the whole unit commenced moving, sliding nicely in its band car to the front of the stage. How wondrously funny and odd. The music became suspenseful now, a series of diminished chords, perhaps a scary moment pending-and sure enough the orchestra reached the stage apron and dropped rather dramatically into the pit and then completely out of sight, elevatored down like so many geeks in tuxedos, a maneuver of a certain farcical bravado, greeted with cheers.

Gone but not inaudible. They were playing patriotic music now, a medley of familiar marches with drum ruffles and sousaphones, and the curtain descended halfway, recontoured in flag format and starred and striped by colored floods, and just as the audience began to wonder what the point was, out came the Rockettes, what a toothsome shock-did anyone know there was a stage show in the works?

They were wearing West Point gray and came out saluting, thirty-six women remade as interchangeable parts, height, shape, race and type, with plumed dress hats and fringed titties and faces buttered a christ-massy pink but isn't it odd they're wearing bondage collars-saluting and high-kicking in machine unison and Klara thought they were kind of great and so did everyone else. Snapping into close formation, tap-dancing in a wash of iridescent arcs, all symmetry and drill precision, then fanning open in kaleidoscopic bursts, and she passed a question along the aisle to Miles, who sat at the far end of the foursome.

"How do we know it's really the Rockettes and not a troupe of female impersonators?"

And this droll notion seemed to travel through the audience because isn't it unlikely that the real Rockettes would be wearing slave collars and doing routines with such pulsing sexual rhythm? In fact it's probably not unlikely at all, it's probably what they do all the time. You don't know for sure, do you? And if they are the real Rockettes, what you're seeing are three dozen women in close-order cadet formation, or women done up like men and not the reverse-but it's a cross-dressing event either way.

Klara realized the flag curtain was gone. And when a camera in the flies took a live video shot of the dancers that was projected on a back screen she understood, you all did, how a crowd is reconfigured, teased into methodical geometry, into slipknots and serpentines. And it was funny of course because the routines were so impeccably smooth and serious, so nineteen-thirties in their dynamic alignments, and isn't that when the movie was made?

The dancers spread across the stage and in a single dexterous swipe, like unholstering a gun, they pulled off their tearaway trousers and went into a final rousing kick, gams flashing, and drew several waves of applause. Then they dissolved their kick line and formed a star, clearly depicted in the high-angle shot on the screen above them, and the footlights painted them solid red. They marched in place as the orchestra lifted solemnly into the pit and began to play, what-something Russian, Mara thought. And how strange it was to see a thing like this, a red star of such political and military moment, plunked down here, the grim signet of the Soviet Union, in the Music Hall of all places-think of all the Easter shows and Lassie movies.

The dancers stood white-faced now, upstage, transfixed by beams of light from mammoth spots high in the rear of the auditorium. The curtain began to fall, covering first the video image of the dancers and then the dancers. The music grew weepy and frilled and then the curtain lifted to reveal the vast movie screen bearing a single word, Unter-welt, and finally the borders at each end of the curved screen folded in to accommodate the small squarish frame of the old movie, and images poured from the projection booth, patchy and dappled with age.

Of course the film was strange at first, elusive in its references and filled with baroque apparitions and hard to adapt to-you wouldn't want it any other way

Overcomposed close-ups, momentous gesturing, actors trailing their immense bended shadows and there was something to study in every frame, the camera placement, the shapes and planes and then the juxtaposed shots, the sense of rhythmic contradiction, it was all spaces and volumes, it was tempo, mass and stress.

In Eisenstein you note that the camera angle is a kind of dialectic. Arguments are raised and made, theories drift across the screen and instantly shatter- there's a lot of opposition and conflict.

It seems you are watching a movie about a mad scientist. He sweeps through the frame, dressed in well-defined black and white, in layered robes, wielding an atomic ray gun. Figures move through crude rooms in some underground space. They are victims or prisoners, perhaps experimental subjects. A glimpse of a prisoner's face shows he is badly deformed and it is less shocking than funny. He has the sloped head, shallow jaw and protuberant lips of an earthworm- but a worm with a human pathos about him.

In a scene that was extravagant, silly, off-kilter and technically impressive all at the same time, the scientist fires the ray gun at a victim, who begins to glow in the dark, jerking and dancing and then looking rather wanly at his arm, which starts to melt away.

Other victims appeared, muscles and bones reshaped, slits for eyes, shuffling on stump legs.

Klara thought of the radiation monsters in Japanese science-fiction movies and looked down the aisle at Miles, who was a scholar of the form.

Was Eisenstein being prescient about nuclear menace or about Japanese cinema?

She thought of the prehistoric reptiles that came mutating out of the slime and the insects with chromosome damage poking from the desert near some test site, ants the size of bookmobiles-these were movies for the drive-ins of the fifties, a boy and girl yanking at each other's buckles and snaps while the bomb footage unfurls and the giant leeches and scorpions appear on the horizon, all radioactive and seeking revenge, and the fleeing crowds, of course, because in the end these creatures not only come from the bomb but displace it, and the armies mobilize and the crowds flee and the sirens wail like sirens.

Eisenstein's creatures were fully human and this complicated the fun. They humped and scuttled through the shadows, hump-lurched with hands dragging, and you can always convince yourself it's okay to laugh at cripples and mutants if everybody else is laughing, it's a way to play off your aversion, and it wasn't just the twisted features and elaborate gestures and the curious sort of lip-gloss effect you've noticed on the faces of male actors in silent movies but the music as well, this was pretty broad too-string sections of soaring melodrama.

A title now and then, in Russian, untranslated, not that it mattered-it made in fact for a giddy kind of total confusion.

Jack said, "Getting claustrophobic, are you?"

And it was true, the film was embedded so completely in the viewpoint of the prisoners that Klara was beginning to squirm.

Jack said, "I bet you'd give a hundred dollars to stand in the rain right now and smoke a cigarette."

"Is it raining?"

"Does it matter?"

The plot was hard to follow. There was no plot. Just loneliness, barrenness, men hunted and ray-gunned, all happening in some nether-land crevice. There was none of the cross-class solidarity of the Soviet tradition. No crowd scenes or sense of social motive-the masses as hero, colossal crowd movements painstakingly organized and framed, and this was disappointing to Klara. She loved the martial architecture of huge moving bodies, the armies and mobs in other Eisenstein films, and she felt she was in some ambiguous filmscape somewhere between the Soviet model and Hollywood 's vaulted heaven of love, sex, crime and individual heroism, of scenery and luxury and gorgeous toilets.

All you have to do is think of the other Underworld, a 1927 gangster film and box office smash.

Esther said, "I want to be rewarded for this ordeal."

Admit it, you're bored. Klara tried to take encouragement from Miles. He was in a state of rapt elation, that pure surrender he undertakes, able to lose himself in the eye and mind of the movie, totally drawn and charmed-charmed at some level even when he doesn't like what he's watching. But she knew he liked this. It was remote and fragmentary and made on the cheap, supposedly personal, and it had a kind of suspense even as it crawled along.

How and when would it reveal itself?

She wondered why the film was silent. Maybe it was shot earlier than the experts surmised. But she thought it was more likely that Eisenstein knew he'd have an easier time doing the film in secret if he did not use sound. And maybe silence suited the development of his themes.

What about the politics? She thought this film might be a protest against socialist realism, against the party-minded mandate to produce art that advanced the Soviet cause. Was he in secret rebellion? He'd been condemned for earlier work, according to Miles, and had seemed to capitulate. But what was this murky film, this strange dark draggy set of images if not a statement of outrage and independence?

Even better. Doesn't this movie seem to anticipate the terror that was mounted against Russian artists in the late nineteen-thirties? The secret police. The arrests, the torture, the disappearances, the executions.

The mad scientist aims the gun.

A figure stands against a wall, his body going white.

The scientist shows a tight smile.

The victim is transfigured, pain-racked, his lower lip dribbling off his face, a growth appearing at the side of his neck, a radiant time-lapse melanoma.

The scientist approaches and touches the man, tenderly, on the cheek.

Abruptly the screen went dark. Intermission seemed a timely idea and Klara thought she'd take Esther on a tour of the powder rooms, there were quite a few, she thought, on several levels, and well worth beholding-murals, sculpture, furniture, things she'd seen through her mother's eyes, suddenly free in space, independent of memory

Miles went up to a private viewing room in the third mezzanine to confer with his colleagues. The two women left Jack in a chair in the grand lounge, downstairs, a carpeted area about two hundred feet in length, and they went into the nearest powder room.

"I've got a question," Esther said.

Klara lit a cigarette. Esther, who'd stopped smoking, bummed one and lit it and inhaled and then looked away to protect the sensation, to guard it from distraction.

They heard a rumble. They felt something shaking under their feet and Klara studied the white parchment wall, listening carefully.

Then she took a drag and said, "S'okay, friend. Only the subway. The IND plowing under Sixth Avenue with its cargo of human souls."

They went up to the mezzanine levels and peered in at the walnut and pigskin in the men's smoking rooms and Klara said, "So what's your question?"

"Do we have to stay for the rest of it?"

"Miles went to a certain amount of trouble. Besides I want to see what happens."

"What could happen?"

"I don't know. But it's an interesting movie to look at from time to time."

"There's something about the tone," Esther said. "The photography. The glances that get exchanged. It's awfully shrouded of course. And the way the scientist."

"Touched the victim."

"What do you know about Eisenstein?"

"He was your friend, not mine," Klara said.

They made their rounds of the powder rooms and went back down to find Jack on the lower level, sitting above the rattle of another subway run.

The train was one of his, Moonman's, he had a dozen pieces running through the system, top-to-bottom burners, and it just so happens he was aboard tonight, under the water mains and waste pipes, under the gas and steam and electric, between the storm sewers and telephone lines, and he moved from car to car with each stop and checked out the people who stepped inside, wearing their retractable subway faces, and the doors went ding dong before banging shut.

Ismael Munoz, dark and somber, watching people come aboard. Sparsely stubbled Ismael reading lips and faces, hoping he might catch a bravo comment. Hey this guy is lighting up the line. This was his newest piece so here he was going uptown on the Washington Heights local, every car tagged with his own neon zoom, with highlights and overlapping letters and 3-D effect, the whole wildstyle thing of making your name and street number a kind of alphabet city where the colors lock and bleed and the letters connect and it's all live jive, it jumps and shouts-even the drips are intentional, painted supersharp to express how the letters sweat, how they live and breathe and eat and sleep, they dance and play the sax.

This was not a window-down piece. This was a whole-train burner with windows painted over and each letter and number bigger than a man.

Moonman 157.

Ismael was sixteen, not too old and not too young, and he was determined to kill the shit of every subway artist in town.

Nobody could take him down.

And he sat there in his khaki jacket with his eyes ever moving, waiting for someone to say something that would make his day

He knew he was getting fame. He had imitators now, a couple of fairy-ass kids who tried to outking him in his own country. One of them got busted by the vandal squad, sentenced to clean graffiti from the station walls with an orange juice mixture because there's an acid in the juice that eats into paint.

Serves the chulo right for biting my style.

And he sat there with his longish face and misaligned teeth, an old man's worried head, and he studied the platform people at every stop. They reacted to the train, their heads went wow. Some shocked looks too, they're seeing hell on wheels, but mostly the eyes go yes and the faces open up. And he studied the riders as they shuffled in, carrying umbrellas, some of them, and concealed weapons, others, and gum wrappers and phone numbers and crushed Kleenex and hankies wrapped around house keys all wadded together on their mulatto bodies because the subway's where the races mix.

It made him think he was an unknown hero of the line, riding a train he'd maximum tagged. Revealing himself in a cartoon glow. Hey it's Moonman in our midst.

Once a man stood on the platform and took a picture of one of Moonman's top-to-bottoms, a foreigner by the look of him, and Ismael sidled to the open door so he could be in the picture too, unknown to the man. The man was photographing the piece and the writer both, completely unknown to himself, from someplace like Sweden he looked.

The whole point of Moonman's tag was how the letters and numbers told a story of backstreet life.

At Columbus Circle he changed to the Broadway train because he had business at the end of the line. He got on a train that was bombed inside and out by Skaty 8, a thirteen-year-old writer who frantically tagged police cars, hearses, garbage trucks, who took his Krylon satin colors into the tunnels and tagged up the walls and catwalks, he hit platforms, steps, turnstiles and benches, he'd tag your little sister if she was walking by Not a style king, no way, but a legend among writers for the energy he put forth, getting his tag seen by major millions and then two weeks ago, and a genuine regret went through Ismael as he recalled being told, he slumped and sagged all over again and felt the deepest kind of soldierly sadness-Skaty 8 hit by a train while he's walking on the tracks under downtown Brooklyn.

People moved along the car, they skated to a seat, they looked at display ads above the heads across the aisle, all without eye motion that you could detect with the most delicate device.

Ismael used to walk the tracks when he felt sorry for himself. Those were foregone times. He'd pop an emergency hatch in the sidewalk and climb down into a tunnel and just, like, go for a walk, be alone down there, keeping the third rail in sight and listening for the train and getting to know the people who lived in the cable rooms and up on the catwalks, and that's where he saw a spray-paint scrawl, maybe five years ago, down under Eighth Avenue. Bird Lives. It made him wonder about graffiti, about who took the trouble and risk to walk down this tunnel and throw a piece across the wall, and how many years have gone by since then, and who is Bird, and why does he live?

And the guy who reached around saying excuse me please.

He rode up the edge of Manhattan headed for the Bronx. There was no art in bombing platforms and walls. You have to tag the trains. The trains come roaring down the rat alleys all alike and then you hit a train and it is yours, seen everywhere in the system, and you get inside people's heads and vandalize their eyeballs.

The doors went ding dong before banging shut.

He saw a thin black male standing at the end of the car, disregard-ful, he's acting out the birth of the cool, and Ismael thought he was an undercover cop. It made him go low profile in his mental makeup, willing himself to be unnoticed in his seat, because he believed they were closing in on him. There was a big push out of City Hall to wipe out graffiti once and for all, to cork these ghetto crews and the middle-class white boys that came biting in behind them, and writers were being careful and playing safe.

He did not fear arrest, only the complications that would follow. Arrest would be good for his notoriety. It might even mean a story in the Post. But then the matter of the family begins to be important. It's not that he didn't want to be a father. He liked the idea of father and family. But there were so many things in between.

When he walked the tunnels as a kid he used to ask about Bird and he found out this was Charlie Parker. A jazz giant. He used to talk to the men who lived on the catwalks and in the unused freight tunnel under the West Side, they had beds and chairs and shopping carts, they had slippers they put on in the evening, they were mostly ordinary men, they washed the dishes and took out the garbage, and they told him about bop, bebop, and how Bird was dead at thirty-four. And one day Ismael, maybe he's thirteen, he's taking a leak against a wall and a guy comes along and stands behind him and reaches around, believe it or not, saying excuse me, and holds Ismael's dick while he pisses.

Dead at thirty-four, that was Bird, which was a ripe old age in the tunnels.

He knew he was getting fame because he had imitators, first, and because other writers did not disrespect him by spraying over his work, except some of them did, and because two women came looking for him in the Bronx.

But, see, this was the way his mind was reasoning at this particular time. Stay totally low and out of sight. Do not get your name or face in the papers. Do not get in trouble with the transit police. Because he had a woman he used to live with who was pregnant head to toe. They used to live with her mother and her mother's part-time man and it isn't that Ismael Mufioz doesn't want to be a father. It's just that this is not the time to get personally involved.

He heard they went into the superettes, two women from the galleries. They went into the bodegas, the church, the firehouse, he pictured them going into the firehouse to ask about graffiti, twenty men in rubber boots eating combination pizzas.

He sat on the Broadway train listening to the way his mind was reasoning.

People from the galleries were all over the Bronx looking for Moon-man, for Momzo Tops, for Snak-Bar and Rimester and the whole Voodoo crew.

Forget it, man. He could easily envision a case where the whole gallery scene is a scam by the police to get writers out of the tunnels and train yards and into the open, identified by name and face.

The man held his dick and eventually sucked it, whenever it was, a couple of days later, or weeks, that was the act he performed. And Ismael went down there, feeling sorry for himself, fairly often after that, going through a fence near the West Side Highway and into an opening in a grated emergency exit and down the narrow steps into the freight tunnel, where they had bookshelves, some of them, and Christmas decorations, and used half names and code names, tags like the writers would develop, and the truth of the matter is that he still goes down there for sex with men because some habits you drop and others you come to rely on.

The train went past City College, then veered east.

They did it herky-jerky in the dark. Or they went to a cable room and did it with sheets and towels. They kept pets down there arid ran clotheslines across the tunnel and stole electricity from the government.

Bop, bebop. And how Bird was dead at thirty-four.

And he sat there in his khaki slouch, looking down between his feet, glancing at the feet across the aisle, all the notched and dimpled shoes that did not seem to be things that people bought and wore so much as permanent parts, body parts, inseparable from the men and women sitting there, because the subway seals you durably in the stone of the moment.

The train entered the Bronx and he got off four stops later, at the end of the line, where his crew was waiting faithfully.

There were three of them, ages twelve, eleven and twelve, and they'd spent the day racking paint from hardware stores, which is a pastime, petty theft, that Ismael has long since risen above.

They walked up the steep hill at 242nd Street.

"Where's the rain?" Ismael said.

"Nothing happen," they said.

"I hear rain on the radio all day. I figure we don't work tonight. Ten to one against."

"Nothing happen," they said. "Two, three drops."

They had the spray-paint cans in three gym bags. They had Ismael's sketches in a manila portfolio. They had peaches and grapes in a paper bag inside a plastic bag. They had the French mineral water he liked to drink while he worked, also acquired in the day's little wave of thievery, Perrier, in pretty green bottles. He believed in going elite whenever possible. They had nozzles for the spray cans. They had master keys to open up the cars in case he wanted to work inside, which he did not.

His crew consisted of hopefuls, of course. Up writers of the future. They racked for the master. They kept lookout while he painted. They crossbraced their arms to support his weight when he needed to reach the upper part of a car.

A chain-link fence ran along the street, topped by razor ribbon. The crew paused near the west end of the fence, where there was a section of snipped links, concealed by poison ivy. They held back the fence and Ismael edged through, jump-stepping to the roof that was adjacent. There was a series of equipment sheds with sawtooth roofs. They went to the last roof and shinnied down drainpipes to the wooden planking at track level, which they could do in their sleep by now, and began to look around for a suitable train to tag.

They knew pretty much in advance that they wouldn't be hassled. There were too many trains, too many writers. The city could not afford all the guards that would be needed to patrol the yards and sidings through the night.

They saw Rimester near a light tower, one of the older writers, a black guy wearing a kufi, a skullcap, who did amazing wildstyle window-downs, Ismael had to admit-the letters decorated with love poems and sentiments of heartbreak.

They gave each other ceremonial respect, with precise and detailed flourishes of handshake and phraseology, and they rapped about this and that, and then Rimester described how he'd seen six of his cars going under the acid bath in the large yard about a mile and a half south of here. They run the cars under sprinklers built above the track. All his two-in-the-morning spray-crazy unpaid labor getting buffed away in minutes. Forget orange juice, man. This was the new graffiti killer, some weirdshit chemical from the CIA.

It's like you knock a picture off a shelf and someone dies. Only this time it's you that's in the photo.

That's how some writers felt about their tags.

There were a dozen tracks at the siding here. Ismael and his crew went to the far end, to the last track, overlooking the field where the Irish played Irish football. They picked out a flat-this was an old train with a paintable surface, much better than the ridgies that were coming on the market.

The crew lined up his colors and he went to work. He had a Rus-toleum yellow he'd started using, like mad canary, and the crew fitted different nozzles on the can so he could vary the breadth and mass of the strokes.

"We seen Lourdes," they said to him.

Lourdes was the woman he used to live with, two years older than Ismael, more or less, and maybe twenty pounds heavier right now.

"Who asked you who you seen?"

"She say she want to talk to you."

"Mdrzcdn, who asked? I ask?"

Ismael rarely got angry He was not an angry guy. He had the reflective head of an elder of the barrio, playing dominoes under a canopy while the fire engines idle up the street, but if the crew expected to do the fill-in once he set the style and faded the colors, they'd better learn the manners of the yard.

"Where's my Perrier, okay? You want to work with Ismael Munoz, you give him his Perrier and forget about messages from whoever."

They worked through the night without unnecessary talk. They handed him the spray cans. They shook the cans before handing them over and the clicking sound of the aerosol ball was basically the only noise in the yard except for the spray itself, the hissy wash of paint folding over the old iron flanks of the train.

The man who reached around and said excuse me.

Moonman 157. Add the digits and you get thirteen. But that's the street where he lives, or used to live, he lives a lot of places now, so it's properly part of his tag, it's what they know him as, and bad luck is an ego trip you can count on, and think of a train coming out of the tunnels and going elevated-think of your tag in maximum daylight rolling over the scorched lots where you were born and raised.

The crew shook the cans and the ball went click.

He stood on the door edge of one train and leaned across to the train parked adjacent and tagged it from the windows up.

And he went down the slate stairway that crumbled to the pressure of his weight, his hand on the rusty pipe that was the banister, and he felt the mood of the tunnel on a given day. It might be a coke mood one day, Ismael did not do drugs, or a mood of speed that's traveling through the tunnel, someone made a buy and shared it, or a mood of mental illness, which was often the case. And always a brown rat mood because they were there in pack rat numbers, an endless source of stories, the size of the rats, the attitude of unfearing, how they ate the bodies of those who died in the tunnels, how they were eaten in turn by the rat man who lived in level six under Grand Central, he killed and cooked and ate a rat a week-track rabbits, they were called.

In other words to muralize a whole train you need a full night and part of the next night and no shuffling bullshit talk.

And a mood of who you are in your head day by day, which he did not share with anyone at street level, and going to sleep in a cousin's bed at night or in the supply cellar of some bodega where they knew Ismael Munoz and gave him a place that was adequate and hearing the doors go ding dong and seeing the man from Stockholm, Sweden, who took pictures of his piece.

He liked to watch the eyes of platform people to see how they reacted to his work.

His letters and numbers told a story of tenement life, good and bad but mostly good. The verticals in the letter N could be drug dealers guarding a long diagonal stash of glassine product or they could be schoolgirls on a playground slide or a couple of sandlot ballplayers with a bat angled between them.

Nobody could take him down. He kinged every artist in town.

They had dozens of cans out and ready, all by prearrangement, and he called a color and they shook the can and the ball went click.

"Where's my Perrier?" he said.

But you have to stand on a platform and see it coming or you can't know the feeling a writer gets, how the number 5 train comes roaring down the rat alleys and slams out of the tunnel, going whop-pop onto the high tracks, and suddenly there it is, Moonman riding the sky in the heart of the Bronx, over the whole burnt and rusted country, and this is the art of the backstreets talking, all the way from Bird, and you can't not see us anymore, you can't not know who we are, we got total notoriety now, Momzo Tops and Rimester and me, we're getting fame, we ain't ashame, and the train go rattling over the garbagy streets and past the dead-eye windows of all those empty tenements that have people living there even if you don't see them, but you have to see our tags and cartoon figures and bright and rhyming poems, this is the art that can't stand still, it climbs across your eyeballs night and day, the flickery jumping art of the slums and dumpsters, flashing those colors in your face-like I'm your movie, motherfucker.

They came funneling out of the lobby and moved down the aisles and found their seats, the anticipation of early evening largely depleted by now, and they settled in quickly, all business, and the second half of the film began.

Klara looked around for Miles. But Miles didn't show. He'd evidently sensed the impatience of his guests and decided to stay with the cineastes in the private booth upstairs.

"Does this mean we're unworthy?" Esther said.

It seems you are witnessing an escape. Figures moving upward through gouged tunnels into a dark rainy night. A long scene of silhouettes and occasional tight shots, eyes peering in the dark.

Then a spotlight swung across the orchestra pit and came to rest on a side curtain on the north wall, set slightly higher than the stage and some yards distant. And you knew what you were going to see half a second before you saw it and what a mood-booster, absolutely. The curtains parted and the horseshoe console of New fork's last great theater organ, the mighty Wurlitzer, stood framed and gleaming in the dark hall.

The organist was a slightish man, white-haired, who seemed to hover in the alcove, his back to the audience, wizardly in his very smallness, and he hit the thunder pedal just as a figure on the screen drew back cowering from some danger above, and laughter swept the auditorium.

The prisoners continued their climb, moving in grim proximity to each other.

The organist hit a series of notes that had an uncanny familiarity. The sort of thing that takes you hauntingly back to your bedside radio and the smells in your kitchen and the way the linoleum used to ripple near the icebox. It was a march, sprightly is the word, and it worked in ironic counterpoint to the foreground silhouettes on the screen, figures climbing in rote compliance, and Klara felt the music in her skin and could practically taste it on her tongue but wasn't able to name the piece or identify the composer.

She gave old Jack a poke in the arm.

"What's he playing?"

"Prokofiev."

"Prokofiev. Of course. Prokofiev did scores for Eisenstein. I knew that. But what's this march?"

"It's that Three Oranges thing, whatever it's called. You've heard it a thousand times."

"Of course, yes. But why have I heard it a thousand times?"

"Because it was the theme music on an old radio show. Brought to you by Lava soap. Remember Lava soap?"

"Yes, yes, of course."

And Jack chanted in sacramental sync with the organ.

"El-lay-vee-ay. El-lay-vee-ay."

"Of course, yes. It's completely clear to me now. But I don't remember the program," she said.

And Jack kept chanting because he was having such a good time with this, and so was the audience, eyes shifting from the screen to the console and minds locked in radio recall, those of you who were old enough, and somewhere backstage, in a dozen lofts, the enormous organ pipes sounded the tones-pipes, wind chests, shutters and blowers bringing this vintage theme, borrowed from a Russian opera, back home to the past.

And Jack left off his chanting to adopt the bardic voice of a veteran announcer doing the show's opening.

" 'The FBI in Peace and War,' " he spoke ringingly

It was nice to have friends. Klara remembered now. Neighbor kids used to listen to the show, faithfully, toward the end of the war, and she could almost hear the voice of the actor who played the FBI field agent.

The curtain closed on the organist just as the sun came out and Esther said, "Finally."

Yes, the film has climbed to the surface, to a landscape shocked by light, pervasive and overexposed. The escaped prisoners move across flat terrain, some of them hooded, the most disfigured ones, and there are fires in the distance, the horizon line throbbing in smoke and ash.

You wonder if he shot these scenes in Mexico, or could it be Kazakhstan, where he went to shoot Ivan the Terrible, later, during the war?

Many long shots, sky and plain, intercut with foreground figures, their heads and torsos crowding out the landscape, precisely the kind of formalist excess that got the director in trouble with the apparat.

The orchestra was in its covert mode, somewhere under the pit, playing faintly at first, a soft accent edged against the strong visuals.

You study the faces of the victims as they take off their hoods. A cyclops. A man with skewed jaw A lizard man. A woman with a flap of skin for a nose and mouth.

A series of eloquent largo passages begins to fill the hall.

The audience was stilled. You saw things differently now. If there was a politics of montage, it was more intimate here-not the themes of atomic radiation or irresponsible science and not state terror either, the independent artist who is disciplined and sovietized.

These deformed faces, these were people who existed outside nationality and strict historical context. Eisenstein's method of immediate characterization, called typage, seemed self-parodied and shattered here, intentionally. Because the external features of the men and women did not tell you anything about class or social mission. They were people persecuted and altered, this was their typology- they were an inconvenient secret of the society around them.

Now there is a search party on the prowl, men on horseback strung out across the plain. They recapture some of the fugitives, they shackle and march them in somber lockstep, in tired mindless versions of the stage routines, and Klara saw it retrospectively, how the Rockettes had prefigured this, only it wasn't funny anymore, and they bare the faces of those who are still hooded, and the shots begin to engage a rhythm, long shot and close-up, landscape and face, waves of hypnotic repetition, and the music describes a kind of destiny, a brutish fate that bass-drums down the decades.

Klara was moved by the beauty and harshness of the scenes. You could feel a sense of character emerge from each rough unhooding, a life inside the eyes, a textured set of experiences, and an understanding seemed to travel through the audience, conveyed row by row in that mysterious telemetry of crowds. Or maybe not so mysterious.

This is a film about Us and Them, isn't it?

They can say who they are, you have to lie. They control the language, you have to improvise and dissemble. They establish the limits of your existence. And the camp elements of the program, the choreography and some of the music, now tended to resemble sneak attacks on the dominant culture.

You try to imagine Eisenstein in the underground of bisexual Berlin, forty-five years ago, with his domed head and somewhat stunted limbs, hair springing from his scalp in clownish tufts, a man with bourgeois scruples and a gift for sublimation, and here he is in the Kit Kat or the Bow Wow, seamy heated cellars unthinkable in Moscow, and he's dishing Hollywood gossip with men in drag.

I'm terribly fond of Judy Garland, he once said.

But you don't want to be too modishly knowing, do you? He was a dynamo of ideas and ambitious projects but it isn't clear that he had the sexual resolve to realize actual contact with either men or women.

Look at the figures in long shot on the low smoky line of the plain.

All Eisenstein wants you to see, in the end, are the contradictions of being. You look at the faces on the screen and you see the mutilated yearning, the inner divisions of people and systems, and how forces will clash and fasten, compelling the swerve from evenness that marks a thing lastingly

You realize the orchestra has been silent for a time. All hoods removed, members of the expedition plodding in endless matching step, trailed by distempered dogs oozing from the eyes. Then you hear the melody again, one more time, the familiar march from Prokofiev, not the mock-heroic organ but full orchestra now, and the pitch is very different, forget the amusing radio reminiscence, it is all vigilance and suppression, the FBI in peace and war and day and night, your own white-collar cohort of the law.

The march lasted only a minute and a half but how dark and strong, what fatedness in the rolling brass, and then there was a long silence and a white screen and finally a face that transfigures itself in a series of multiple-exposure shots, losing its goiters and gnarls, a seamed eye reopening, and it was awfully mawkish, okay, but wonderful also, a sequence that occurred outside the action proper, a distinct and visible wish connecting you directly to the mind of the film, and the man sheds his marks and scars and seems to grow younger and paler until the face finally dissolves into landscape.

The orchestra began to rise into the pit and the music now was Shostakovich, you are sure of this, how spacious and skysome, lyrically wheeling, bird-wheeling over the wide plain.

Then it ended. It didn't end, it just stopped dead. A landscape of foreground dogs and distant figures leaning to their march. Klara remained in her seat, you all did, and she felt a curious loss, that thing you used to feel as a child when you walked out of a movie house in the middle of the day and the streets were all agitation and nasty glare, every surface intense and jarring, people in loud clothing that did not fit.

Miles showed up and they went to a bar that Jack knew. Jack knew all the midtown bars, he knew the steak houses and the best cheesecake and where you got onion soup that makes you think you're in Les Halles and he told funny stories about his early days in the theater district, flacking shows up and down the street, but Klara wasn't listening.

The film was printed on her mind in jits and weaves. She felt she was wearing the film instead of a skirt and blouse. She heard Esther laugh and it sounded like someone in a room three rooms away. Miles told a story that required her to join in but she couldn't get the details straight. She smiled and drank her wine. The conversation was over there somewhere. She kept seeing snatched fragments. She saw the marked faces in the great landscape. She had the movie all around her, sitting in a bar under walls of white neon beating in the Broadway heat.

4

In cities you build a language of circumspection and tact, a thousand little intimations, the nuance that has a shimmer of rubbed bronze. Then you go to the wilderness and become undone, lapsing into babble, eating mushroom caps that implode your brain, that make you preternaturally aware and afraid, turn you into an Aztec bird.

Matt Shay sat in the terminal at the airport in Tucson and listened to announcements bouncing off the walls.

He was thinking about his paranoid episode at the bombhead party the night before. He felt he'd glimpsed some horrific system of connections in which you can't tell the difference between one thing and another, between a soup can and a car bomb, because they are made by the same people in the same way and ultimately refer to the same thing.

There was a garbage strike in New York.

There was a man being paged known only as Jack.

A woman with an accent said to someone seated next to her, "I so-call fell in love with him the day he paint my walls."

There was a man in a wheelchair eating a burrito.

He sat waiting for Janet's plane to be announced. He wondered if this might be a good time to call his brother. Nick was living in Phoenix now, doing some vague consulting work and teaching Latin once a week at a junior college.

When Nick dies a team of metaphysicians will examine the black box, the personal flight recorder that's designed to tell them how his mind worked and why he did what he did and what he thought about it all, but there's no guarantee they'll find the slightest clue.

Reciting Latin epigrams to business majors in a place called Paradise Valley.

Matt took off his glasses and blew on the lenses, his mouth worked into a whispery ellipse, and then he ran his handkerchief over the steamy surface and held the glasses to the light.

Whenever the ambient voice asked someone to pick up the white courtesy phone, a small girl made a fist and spoke into it.

He put his glasses on. Janet came out of the gate and he laughed when he saw her. Laughed in sheer and healthy delight, in relief that she was finally here and in physical anticipation as well, and he laughed at the shambles they were going to make of the camping trip they were taking and he laughed in the end because he couldn't help it. He was woozy from the long day's drive and didn't have the strength to keep from laughing.

Janet walked briskly toward him wearing a slightly twisted grin, the one that meant she wasn't completely sure what she was doing here.

"The captain said it's a hundred and four."

"Should I call Nick?"

"What for? It was seventy-two in Boston."

"He's right up the road. It seems dumb not to call."

"There's a garbage strike in New York," she said.

He was woozy from driving and she was numbed by confinement and engine noise. They went to the parking area and crammed her bags into the jeep. The jeep was brimful, a consumer cartoon bulging with equipment, clothing, luggage and books,

"Tell me again where we're going," she said.

They spent the night at the edge of an Indian reservation, in an old adobe lodge with a teenage girl eating popcorn at the desk and the white dome of an observatory visible from their bed.

It was a fine beamed room with creepy suburban furniture and they were shy because they hadn't seen or touched each other in a long time and Janet had to get used to this. They'd only slept together several times, planned always in advance. They didn't have a set of understandings, a pace and glance, the whole hushed protocol of wishes and hints, bodies lightly brushing in the elevator. There was no elevator here. And Janet was a little unsure of herself in a strange room. It wasn't really her, was it?

Another woman might feel the lure of anonymity. Meeting a man in a room of a thousand previous men and women. Shedding the personal past in a faceless sort of motel abandon. But this wasn't a motel and at least there was that to be thankful for.

She was nervous, standing by the window in her jeans and bra. They'd gotten only as far as the bra. That's when she paused to talk, to let him know how she felt. She was not sexually anxious. She was sexually anxious, yes, but mainly unsure in a general way, she said, because it did not seem completely comfortable, meeting a man in a setting that had predetermined expectations-a strange bed in the middle of nowhere. She had a way of seeing herself, a wariness about things that didn't feel right. The place wasn't particularly clean for one thing. The girl downstairs for another, cross-eyed or walleyed, whatever. She talked to him honestly, in her small voice, slightly piping, and he lay in bed and listened, waiting for her to get used to the idea, a flight across country that ends in a random sort of room, making her feel isolated from everything that's familiar.

He listened and waited and finally understood that some of the things she was saying about herself were also true of him. He understood this the way you sneak up on things you've always sort of known.

She stood by the window. Over her shoulder he could see the observatory dome washed in last light at the top of the mountain.

There were men who walked these deserts a hundred years ago, the penitentes, chanting and fasting, scourging themselves with hemp whips, or whips made from the braided fiber of the yucca plant, or cord whips, la cuerda, a small whip of tightly knotted wool.

Janet didn't know how to look at the desert. She seemed to resent it in some obscure personal way. It was too big, too empty, it had the audacity to be real.

They drove and talked.

"Tell me again why we're going there."

"It's a wildlife preserve and gunnery range."

"So if one doesn't kill us, the other will."

He reached over and put his hand on her leg.

"We want to be alone," he said.

"We could be alone in Boston."

"They don't have bighorn sheep there. We want to see bighorns in the wild."

"What will we do when we see them?"

"We'll be happy. It's rare that anyone sees them. And it's very remote, where we're going. We'll rejoice and be glad. They're beautiful animals that no one ever sees."

She moved closer to him. She didn't like public affection and even if they were alone on the road it wasn't her apartment, was it, and it wasn't even a room in a lodge with a locked door and drawn curtains, once she'd gotten around to drawing the curtains, but she moved a little closer anyway and told him if she'd known he was going to stroke her thigh she wouldn't have worn thick coarse jeans, would she?

Matt didn't think he'd ever felt so happy. He was happy when she leaned against him and maybe happier still when she read aloud from the small library he'd amassed in preparation for the trip.

They saw hawks installed on utility poles and she looked them up in the bird book and said they were kestrels-falcons, not hawks, and this made him happier yet.

The landscape made him happy. It was a challenge to his lifelong citiness but more than that, a realization of some half-dreamed vision, the otherness of the West, the strange great thing that was all mixed in with nation and spaciousness, with bravery and history and who you are and what you believe and what movies you saw growing up.

After a while he told her to stop looking at the book and look at the scenery but the scenery was empty spaces and lonely roads and this made her very nervous.

When Nick came back from Minnesota, Matty called him the Jesuit.

His catechism days were well behind him now, Matty's were, his days of blind belief, and he liked to gibe at his brother's self-conscious correctness, his attempts at analytical insight. Whatever Nick's experience in correction and however deftly the jebbies worked him over later in their northern fastness, minting intellect and shiny soul, it was still a brother's right to heckle and jeer.

Their mother also called him the Jesuit but never so Nick could hear.

They filled the tank and bought charcoal, food and bottled water. They found the office of the refuge manager at the far end of town and Matt went in and received a permit and signed a liability release. This was called a hold harmless form and it basically pointed out that if they were killed and/or injured during live-fire exercises while they were in the refuge, it would be the giddiest sort of childlike illusion for either or both of them and/or their survivors to think for even a minute about receiving compensation.

Fair enough. They were allowed to enter the refuge but placed on notice that air-to-air exercises were set to commence three days from now. Friendly fire. It put a little edge in their schedule.

He told all this to Janet, conscientiously. He told her they weren't allowed to handle or take possession of any military items found in the area such as fuel drums, flare casings, tow targets, projectiles carrying real or dummy warheads. He told her there were no human inhabitants of the refuge. He told her there was no gas, food, lodging or other facilities. She had a right to know. He told her there were no paved roads or running water.

But he didn't tell her why this excited him. He didn't say anything about this because he didn't understand it, the stark sort of shudder, the leveling out, the sense of knowing he was headed into remote Sonoran waste, where the interplay of terrain and weapons was a kind of neural process remapped in the world, a hollow sort of craving lifted out of the brain stem, or wherever, and painted over with words and sky and diamondback desert.

Janet said, "All right. Go go go go."

"At's the spirit."

"We're going to do it, let's do it."

"At's what I want to hear."

They drove south through a white space on the map, headed for the entrance to the refuge, and he recalled something Eric Deming had told him about this part of Arizona, a rumor, a sort of twilight zone story about people known as sensitives, men and women who were psychically gifted-telepathists, clairvoyants, metal-benders.

There was a secret facility near the Mexican border where sensitives were tested and experiments carried out. The idea was that psychic commandos might be able to jam the enemy's computer networks and weapons systems, perhaps even read the intentions of the defense minister riding in his chauffeured car in the middle of Moscow.

In fact the Russians were thought to be well ahead of us in this endeavor, Eric said, soulful and mystical as they were, and we were desperate to catch up.

Janet said, "There's something else of course."

"What do you mean?"

"Besides sheep. We're not going all this distance to look at sheep."

"Bighorn sheep. We want to be alone. Undistracted. So we can talk. An extended period. So we can figure things out."

"What things?"

"You know what things."

"What things?"

"Do we get married? Do we have kids, children? Do we wait a while? Do we live here, or there, or somewhere in the middle?"

"What else?" she said. "Because I know there's something else," Matt could believe the story about a closed base where sensitives refined their paranormal skills. Thought transfer and remote viewing. Why not believe it? He'd read many an enemy's mind as a ten-year-old, pushing wood across a game board. This was the supernatural underside of the arms race. Miracles and visions. The final wishful weapon is a middle-aged lady from Decatur who can pinpoint the location of Soviet submarines off the East Coast.

Unreal. This is what disturbed him. It was one of the things he wanted to talk about with Janet.

There were ship ridges, great ship rocks with prows thrust upward, and there were hills that resembled rubble heaps. The land seemed to be in open formation, harsh and scarred, and you could almost read upheaval and convergence. It looked like dinosaur country. They saw white mountains and flesh mountains and slags of glassy matter that turned out to be mountains when they drew near.

It took a long time to get anywhere. There was only the one road, one track, and sections were deep sand and other parts were ruts and gulleys. The sun beat down with a swarming sort of density. They came to flooded stretches where they had to leave the track and maneuver the jeep tenderly around the palo verde and cholla.

He looked up the words. He consulted the books all the time. He drove with a book or two in his lap, or asked Janet to look things up, or asked her to drive so he could read.

The dust powdered the hood and windshield and the sun seemed nearly upon them, burning down so squarely and vastly he wanted to laugh in shitface fear.

"I know you can't tell me about your job."

"I can tell you some things. I work with safing mechanisms, they're called. Timers, batteries, switches, actuators. Electromechanical locks. I run endless computer tests. I drink instant coffee and look at cross-section details of great finned weapons on my screen. Then a bunch of guys in California or Nevada or someplace will take a warhead and rocket-launch it into a hardened target at fifteen hundred miles an hour."

"To test your calculations."

"Splat. Not just mine of course. But, yes, that's the idea."

"You make weapons safer. Safer to handle and use."

"That's right."

"Then what's the problem? It's not exactly criminal activity."

"No but it's weapons work. It's what I wanted. I wanted this and more. But now I'm feeling unsure about it."

"It's important work, Matthew. We need the best people to do this work."

They were camped just yards from the track. He made a charcoal fire and they emptied cans of pork and beans into a pan. They put on sweaters and sat on a blanket.

She said, "What would you do if you left?"

"I'm not sure. Get a doctorate maybe. I know some people who work in think tanks. I'd want to talk to them. Sound them out."

She gave him a sour look. The term made her unhappy-think tank-and he didn't blame her. Passive, mild, middle-aged, ivory-towerish. People rustling papers in redoubts of social strategy. Situation reports, policy alternatives, statistical surveys.

He got the flashlight and led her to a spot where she might pee. The moon was nearly full. He waited while she lowered her jeans and squatted, more or less in one motion, and she looked at him and smiled, a dirty sort of smirk, a dirty-face girl with mucky drawers-didn't we do this once before, in another life? He played the light around them and softly sang the names of bushes and shrubs to the sound of Janet piddling. She laughed and peed in spurts. They thought they heard a coyote and she struggled into her jeans laughing.

They set up the dome tent and got into their mummy-shaped camp bags, nicely lined with flannel, and they realized the coyote was Wolfman Jack on the transistor radio, a howling disc jockey vectored into the desert from some bandit station below the border.

Don't put no badmouth on me, baby, we gon rock tonight. Da Wolfman sending Little Richard to climb in your face from out of the glory days of the marcel pompadour and the glass suit. Richard don't need no dry cleaner. He got his Windex wid him.

The sleeping bag had stretch straps that made it possible for you to roll over on your side, if that was your preference, and when Little Richard started bending notes in his primal falsetto, Matty thought he was in bed in the Bronx, a fifteen-year-old capable of trading his brother's old fielder's glove for three or four raunchy rock-and-roll singles, which he played when his mother was out.

Janet called him Matthew This was her way of separating him from family history, the whole dense endeavor of Mattiness, the little brother and abandoned son and chessboard whiz and whatever else was in the homemade soup.

He'd told Janet the story, how Nick believed their father was taken out to the marshes and shot, and how this became the one plot, the only conspiracy that big brother could believe in. Nick could not afford to succumb to a general distrust. He had to protect his conviction about what happened to Jimmy. Jimmy's murder was isolated and pure, uncorrupted by other secret alliances and criminal acts, other suspicions. Let the culture indulge in cheap conspiracy theories. Nick had the enduring stuff of narrative, the thing that doesn't have to be filled in with speculation and hearsay

Of course Matt thought his brother was guilty of emotional delusion. But when Janet agreed too readily, dismissing Nick's version, he cut her off quick. He defended Nick. He told her how he himself had thought their father was dead, originally. Not a runaway, a dropout, the grievously weak man who takes a powder. Dead somewhere in untranslated space. And even if he was a little kid at the time. Even if he did the sad-funny fruitcake thing of going to the Loew's Paradise to see the soul of his faithful departed father drift across the starry ceiling. Even if he was unable to make a studied judgment, he told her, consider the episode itself, the journey he'd made to a movie house through strange neighborhoods, alone, at the age of six. The power of an event can flow from its unresolvable heart, all the cruel and elusive elements that don't add up, and it makes you do odd things, and tell stories to yourself, and build believable worlds. Who the hell was Janet to ridicule his brother?

There were scar lines in the distance, deep arroyos, and stands of tall saguaro on the south slopes of mountains.

The track was white sand and then red dirt, it was cracked playa, drained and baked, and then it turned abruptly to mineral green dust and then again to sand and finally stony rubble.

Janet liked to drive aggressively whatever the surface. The jeep bucked and jumped, leaning badly at times, and when the track went narrow in thick bush she had to tell him to get his dangling arm back inside before the thorny acacia cut him up.

"I don't think you should leave your job out of conscience. Conscience works both ways," she said. "You have duties and obligations. If you're not willing to do this work, the next person may be less qualified."

"How hot do you think it is?"

"Never mind how hot. Too hot to be here. You have special training and a certain kind of skill."

"At some point we have to decide whether to turn around and go back out the way we came in."

"Or what?"

"Or keep going into bighorn country and exit the refuge somewhere in the northwest sector before the exercises start."

Ten minutes after he said this, they saw objects in the distance and he put the binoculars on them. They appeared to be tanks and jeeps, some trucks as well, but they were flimsy somehow, unbulky and perfunctory, showing squared-off contours and a cheap gleam-simulated tactical targets.

"I want us to be together," she said. "You know how much I want a home and family. I want to have a child. I've always wanted these things. I want to be safe, Matthew."

He reached over and fingered some loose hair at the nape of her neck.

"You want to be safe. This is the woman who works half the night treating injured people," he said. "Shocks to the body. One emergency after another."

"There's nothing unsafe about that. That's completely safe to me. It's the thing I do best and I want to keep on doing it. And you should do the thing you do best. That's what safe is."

"If I keep this job, how do we live together?"

"We'll do it. We'll work it out," she said.

The air went taut and the light took a chlorine edge and then it was raining hard. They couldn't see a thing and sat parked on a rise. The storm seemed to originate ten feet above them. They sat there waiting and they talked.

Matt could tell her anything. It was completely easy with her. She knew him before he was born. She could finish a thought he'd only barely started. She had no shaded spaces in her, none of the silences and disguises that can be fascinating, yes, but not for a guy like him, he thought.

They heard name-saying birds such as whippoorwills and phoebes. After the rain the heat came blowing back and he scanned with the glasses for birds of prey. They hung in the burning air, fantailed and soaring and great, and he went scrambling for the book when he spotted a large dark bird nested in the arm-crotch of a tall saguaro.

It was a golden eagle, immature, and he gave Janet the binoculars and took them back and couldn't stop talking. He talked and laughed and looked at the books. He talked less to Janet than to the bird. He checked the book a number of times to confirm for the bird's benefit that it was an eagle, an eaglet, with a bit of flashing on the wings and a wash of honey-gold at the hindneck.

Janet was not caught up in this. He glanced at her and found a complex plea in her eyes. She was asking him something but he wasn't sure what it was. He put the glasses back on the bird. The bird was a flick of the dial to her. You turned on the TV in the nurses' lounge and saw giraffe heads bobbing on the veldt. This was her nature preserve, a cramped room with a couple of sofas and chairs, where she sat and yakked with the night staff about coffee prices and unsafe streets and the burn victim with the smell you can't describe-this was the handgrip, the safehold she needed to live.

But the look she'd given him was not about what she needed or where she preferred to be. She wanted him to understand something about himself.

Every defeat was a death inside the chest, his little bird-boned thorax. Basically dead at eleven, that was him. Good riddance to little wooden rooks. How many years did it take him to get over the game?

It was Fischer-Spassky that brought him back, and only briefly at that, two years ago, in Iceland, halfway between Washington and Moscow, where they played twenty-one games, Bobby and Boris, a summer's rousing theater of black and white.

Matt checked the newspapers and watched TV. He rooted for Bobby, the gangly boorish boy now pushing thirty. He identified with the public tantrums, all the rude demands, the strokes of unwhole-someness that Bobby consistently delivered, the open show of bitterness when he lost.

If the American's eventual victory didn't begin to redeem Matt's own sulky youth, at least it edged the game out of the private migraine of abnormal introversion and into the mingled thing out there, the everyday melee of competing states and material forces.

You need a makeshift word to describe the process. De-ego'd. This is what the game did to Matt. So let our Bobby rant. He was only showing what is always there beneath the spatial esthetics and the mind-modeling rigor of the game, beneath the forevisional bursts of insight-an autoworld of pain and loss.

He told her about mountains hollowed out in New Mexico. These were storage sites for nuclear weapons. He told her about the gouged mountain in Colorado where huge wall screens could display the flight track of a missile launched from a base in Siberia. He knew a few things about Obyekt, the Installation, built by slave labor in a remote part of the USSR, and he told her about it-a center for bomb design.

People went willingly to these places, scientists eager to meet some elemental need. Or was it just a patriotic duty or the standard chal-lenge of doing serious work in physics or mathematics? He thought they went in search, on impulse, almost recklessly, to locate some higher condition.

"You make it sound like God," she said.

He told her what he could about the Pocket. The Pocket was just a cozy donut-dunk in a vast hidden system. A system predicated on death from the sky. He told her about the emergency networks, under-ground shelters carved out of mountains in Virginia and Maryland where leaders could keep the government running during a major war. He told her about accidents in the Soviet Union, rumored explosions and fires at nuclear plants, and the sense of excitement he felt, the thrill of devastation in the enemy barrens, and his subsequent shame.

You make it sound like God. Or some starker variation thereof. Go to the desert or tundra and wait for the visionary flash of light, the critical mass that will call down the Hindu heavens, Kali and Shiva and all the grimacing lesser gods.

"Maybe I stayed a Catholic too long. Should have got out when I was ten."

He thought about the sensitives, preparing for psychic war, and he thought about the penitentes, men in black hoods dragging heavy wooden crosses through the desert, a hundred years ago, or fifty years, and lashing themselves with sisal and hemp, all that Sister Edgarish stuff, and speaking fabricated words-the maunder of roaming holy men.

"I don't know what you mean by staying a Catholic. I told you what I think about conscience," she said.

"It's only partly that. It's mainly that I feel I'm part of something unreal. When you hallucinate, the point of any hallucination is that you have a false perception that you think is real. This is just the opposite. This is real. The work, the weapons, the missiles rising out of alfalfa fields. All of it. But it strikes me, more and more, as sheer distortion. It's a dream someone's dreaming that has me in it."

Maybe Janet was a little annoyed by this. Found it self-indulgent or unconvincing or beside the point.

"I heard a story not long ago," he said. "They did a bomb test in the nineteen-fifties in which a hundred pigs were dressed in custom-made GI field jackets and positioned at well-spaced intervals from the blast site. One hundred and eleven, to be exact, pigs, as the story was told to me. Then they exploded the device. Then they examined the uni-forms on the barbecued pigs to evaluate the thermal qualities of the material. Because this was the point of the test."

Janet didn't respond because whatever the point of the test, and whatever the point of the story, it was only making her mad.

"Picture it. Chester whites. A breed of large fat hog with drooping ears. Wearing khaki uniforms with zippers, seams, everything, and with drawstrings drawn because that's how the regulation reads. And a voice on the loudspeaker's going, Ten, nine, eight, seven."

She told him to get his arm inside the jeep.

"Is this when history turned to fiction?" he said.

She looked at him briefly.

"That's not the question you're asking," she said.

"What am I asking?"

"I don't think you're asking that question. That's a large question and I think you're asking a smaller question and it has nothing to do with pigs in uniforms. You're talking about something else completely."

He didn't look at her.

"What am I talking about, Janet?"

"You tell me," she said.

He kept his eyes on the rutted track and didn't say a word. Acacia slapped and twanged on the windshield and doors. They both watched the track.

There was a structure about two hundred yards ahead, concrete and bunkerlike, sand-streaked, with slit windows and brambly growth edging up the walls.

It was nearly sundown and they decided to camp nearby. There was something irresistible about the building, of course, even an unyielding ruin such as this, slabbed private and tight. It stood alone here, with mountains behind it, and carried the tilted lyric of a misplaced object, like some prairie drive-in shut down for years with the audio hookups all askew and the huge screen facing blankly toward a cornfield. It's the kind of human junk that deepens the landscape, makes it sadder and lonelier and places a vague sad subjective regret at the edge of your response-not regret so much as a sense of time's own esthetic, how strange and still and beautiful a chunk of concrete can be, lived in fleetingly and abandoned, the soul of wilderness signed by men and women passing through.

"I'd rather sleep in there," Janet said, "than do the tent again."

There were two slab doors sealed tight and the windows were narrow and high but they went around the back and found an opening at waist height and climbed inside. After all the choppy hours they'd put in, jeep-weaving over rubblestone and sand, the place seemed homey enough. A table, a few chairs, some nude calendars on the wall and a couple of shelves filled with canned food, utensils, safety matches and old magazines.

Matt thought the bunker might have been constructed to accommodate spotters during exercises, a couple of ordnance guys helicoptered in to check firing accuracy, retrieve tow targets and possibly mark the location of unexploded rockets and bombs.

Back outside he started a charcoal fire and they ate quickly and unconversationally and scraped the makings and remains into a plastic bag and stowed it in the jeep because they didn't know what else to do with it.

They carried their camp bags into the bunker and undressed in the moonlight. Janet sat on the nylon shell, one leg flat, one flexed, and she leaned back like a sunbather at lunch break on the library steps. He approached and lowered himself and felt the sun on her body, the residue of deep heat transferred to his hands and mouth and the way their bodies exchanged a sense of the day and the land, all the heat and blowing dust heavy on their breath, tasted again, fingertipped and felt and smelled.

But the act was melancholy and slightly odd, it was calm and sweet and loving but also odd and slightly resigned and they lay together without speaking for a long time afterward.

"I think we ought to turn back in the morning."

"Why?" she said. "We came this far."

"I think we've seen everything there is to see, pretty much."

"You haven't seen the bighorns."

"I don't need to see the bighorns. I don't need to see the prong-horns either, There are pronghorns out there, antelope."

"You barely saw the eagle."

"I saw the eagle."

"From a distance, barely, in its nest," she said.

"The eagle was great. The eagle met every expectation."

She slept, he did not.

He finally told himself the truth, that he'd wanted her to talk him out of his job. This was the question he'd been asking all along. Aren't you going to tell me that you don't want me to do this kind of work, for your sake, and the baby we'll have, and the home we'll own someday?

But Janet did not cooperate.

He understood this finally, that he'd wanted her to think he was making a sacrifice, leaving the Pocket for wife and child. He'd wanted her to say, Come to Boston and marry me.

But Janet did not say it.

He wasn't made for this kind of work. He wanted to leave the job but he didn't want to do it himself. He wanted her to do it for him.

But Janet did not do it. And she knew all along what was in his heart. And she had no patience with his arias of the unreal. Whatever we're doing in secret, she'd say, they're doing something worse.

The wind drove out of the east from time to time and he heard an animal near the jeep, going for the garbage.

No, he was not a weaponeer. But that wasn't the point. He'd wanted her to feel responsible, and guilty, for making him change his life. What an edge that would give him in the years to come.

At Army Intelligence School he did double shifts of classwork, surrounded every edgy minute by combat analysts, language experts, counterintelligence guys snooping out drug use, by agent trainees on simulated missions, a spook for every body function.

They sent him to Vietnam, to Phu Bai, and the first thing he saw when he entered the compound was a flourish of spray-paint graffiti on the wall of a supply shed. Om manipadme hum. Matt knew this was some kind of mantra, a thing hippies chanted in Central Park, but could it also be the motto of the 131st Aviation Company?

From this point on he had trouble with the input.

He worked in a quonset hut, cranking rolls of film across a light box. This was the take from aerial recon, an endless series of images sucked up by the belly cameras of surveillance planes. It was all about lost information, how to recover the minutest unit of data and identify it as a truck driven by a man smoking a French cigarette, going down the Ho Chi Minh trail.

He tossed a frisbee to a gook dog and watched the animal leap and twist.

There were rumors about a secret war, bombs in unnumbered tons dropped from B-52s. Laos, Chaos, Cambodia. Except the tons were not unnumbered but conscientiously counted because this is how we earn our stripes, by quantifying the product.

Matt was a spec 5, the same pay grade as a sergeant but less command authority. That was okay with him.

The rocket attacks were not okay, or the mortar rounds that came arcing down out of the rain.

The rains came and the sirens sounded and he went to the nearest entrenchment, a shelter put together with sandbags and construction debris, with an open sewer running through.

The heat and heroin came and there was the odd body found facedown in the muddy company street, a casualty of smack.

Someone hung a photo of Nixon in the quonset hut, two men flanking him, familiar somehow but unrecallable, and there were rumors about a substance stored in black drums near the perimeter of the compound.

In the movie version you'd freeze the frame with the dog in midleap about to snare the frisbee. A park on a summer's day somewhere in America -that would be the irony of the shot, with a solo guitar producing the bitter screech of feedback.

This is what happens when part of a system's output is returned to the input.

Yes, someone tacked up a magazine page and Matt could not quite identify the two men who flanked the President but they weren't politicians or corporation heads. A curly-haired man, handsome and smiling. And a sad-eyed guy with a honker nose and the leaden aspect of an immigrant in a borrowed suit.

He cranked the film across the light box. When he found a dot on the film he tried to make a determination. It was a truck or a truck stop or a tunnel entrance or a gun emplacement or a family grilling burgers at a picnic.

It was hot and monotonous and planes came and went all the time, gunships, transports, medium bombers, stratotankers, fighter jets, executive jets, a little pink Piper carrying an instructor and a student and finally converted cargo planes spraying the jungles with a herbicide stored in black drums that had identifying orange stripes.

There were rumors about whole other wars, just to the east, or was it west?

The drums resembled cans of frozen Minute Maid enlarged by a crazed strain of DNA. And the substance in the drums contained, so the rumor went, a cancer-causing agent.

He heard the rumors and the mortars and felt the monsoon heat and heard the universal slogan of the war.

Stay stoned, man.

He'd wanted to come to Vietnam. He'd been back and forth in his mind about the war but thought this was a thing he had to do, a form of self-reckoning-stay straight, be brave, answer when your country calls. But there was also something else, the older blood-borne force known as family.

He could not evade the sense of responsibility. It was there to be confronted. He did not want to slip away, sneak through, get off cheap, dodge, desert, resist, chicken out, turn tail, flee to Canada, Sweden or San Francisco, as his old man had done.

When he found a dot on the film he translated it into letters, numbers, coordinates, grids and entire systems of knowledge.

Om mani padme hum.

In fact the dog didn't leap at all but only watched the frisbee sail past, more or less disdainfully.

A dot was a visual mantra, an object that had no properties except location.

The jewel in the heart of the lotus.

He was in his sleeping bag but wasn't asleep. He wanted company and woke up Janet. He stuck his arm out of the bag and reached over and shook her awake.

"I want the same things you want."

"All right, Matthew."

"I want us to be surrounded by familiar things. I'm excited about it. I want to start right away."

"You ought to wait. Stay where you are. Work for another year at this job. See what happens," she said.

"I want to think up nicknames for our children. Do you know what I mean? I want us to be surrounded. I want photographs, silverware, things well pass on some day. I want to talk about what we're having for dinner. You like baked clams? We've barely ever talked about food, you and I."

"Stay where you are," she told him. "Don't do anything in a hurry."

"I'm excited about this. I wish it wasn't going to take so long to get out of here. I'd like to start driving basically right now."

"Go to sleep," she told him.

"There are so many things to talk about."

She was asleep inside a minute. Matt lay there helpless against his racing mind. He understood finally that he wouldn't be able to sleep and he decided to watch the sun come up over the desert.

He put on his pants and a sweater and went out behind the bunker about fifty yards, where he switched off the flashlight.

Then he sat in the dirt and waited.

He remembered how he'd felt sitting in a chair at the bombhead party, locked in a gravitational field, his head buzzing with suspicion.

He thought of the photograph of Nixon and wondered if the state had taken on the paranoia of the individual or was it the other way around.

He remembered how he felt cranking film across the light box and wondering where the dots connected.

Because everything connects in the end, or only seems to, or seems to only because it does.

At the light box he was a parody of the traditional figure in the basement room, the lone inventor stooped over his worktable, piecing together the pins, springs and wires of some eccentric contraption, the lightbulb idea that would change the world.

And the voice with the Hungarian accent, Eric Deming speaking into his face in the crowded room.

The dots on the film might have been trucks going down the supply route or new model cars coming off the line or condoms that look like fingers on a latex glove.

And someone in the quonset hut had to tell him who they were. Nixon flanked by a couple of ballplayers, old-time guys, a winner-loser sort of thing, joined at the hip for life.

He sat in the dust with his eyes closed and smelled the wet resin of a creosote bush and began to sense light about to break somewhere.

People hide in their basement rooms. They take to the bunkers and tunnels as weapons roll identically off the line and begin to light up the sky.

And how can you tell the difference between orange juice and agent orange if the same massive system connects them at levels outside your comprehension?

And how can you tell if this is true when you're already systemed under, prepared to half believe everything because this is the only intelligent response?

People hide in dark dank places, where mushrooms grow, sprouting quickly.

The dots he marked with his grease pencil became computer bits in Da Nang, Sunday brunch in Saigon and mission briefings in Thailand, he guessed, or Guam.

When you alter a single minor component, the system adapts at once.

Somebody had to give him the names. The president flanked by Thomson and Branca, Bobby and Ralph, the binary hero-goat inseparable to the end.

A mushroom with a fleshy cap that might be poisonous or magical. In Siberia somewhere the shamans ate the cap and were born again. What did they see in their trance state? Was it a cloud shaped like a mushroom?

He was in the Pocket even then, cranking film all night long, waiting for the mortar rounds to come raining down. They made a crunch like a kid eating cereal on TV

And how can you tell the difference between syringes and missiles if you've become so pliant, ready to half believe everything and to fix conviction in nothing?

And how can you know if the image existed before the bomb was invented? There may have been an underworld of images known only to tribal priests, mediums between visible reality and the spirit world, and they popped magic mushrooms and saw a fiery cloud that predated the image on the U.S. Army training film.

Watched from a safe distance, says the narrator, this explosion is one of the most beautiful sights ever seen by man.

He was in the Pocket even then, in a way, but did not think along the systems track to the culmination of his tedious little labors. The thousand-pound bombs clustering out of the bays of B-52s like finned pellets of excrement, cratering the jungle trail.

But they were the enemy so what the hell.

And they're the enemy still, or someone is, and he opened his eyes and saw the sky go an odd sort of mad granny gray.

Ideas used to come from below. Now they're everywhere above you, connecting things and grids universally.

The binary black-white yes-no zero-one hero-goat.

And the two men flanking the president in the photo tacked up on the quonset wall. The tallish handsome fellow and the bushy-browed immigrant. Could just as easily be Oppenheimer and Teller, their bodies greased with suntan oil as they quote Hindu scriptures to each other.

Om does not rhyme with bomb. It only looks that way.

Death and magic, that's the mushroom. Or death and immortal life. Psilocybin is a compound obtained from a Mexican mushroom that can turn your soul into fissionable material, according to scholars of the phenomenon.

They are everywhere at the same time, endlessly connected, and you half believe the most implausible things because you'd be stupid not to.

All technology refers to the bomb.

He sat in the dust with his eyes opened and realized the sun was rising behind him and wondered what this meant.

It meant he'd been facing in the wrong direction all along.

Matt drove the jeep, Janet drowsed next to him, drowsed a while and got bounced awake and nodded off again.

He felt good, clear-minded, he drove and thought, he saw everything, he identified plants without the book.

The sun was still very low and the track would take them right into it for a time before veering gradually north.

He saw the rubble turn to sand.

He saw the silty limestone bottoms of dried-out creeks that paralleled the track.

He heard the wing-whir of mourning doves breaking out of the bush.

He saw a dust devil on a level stretch of desert doing slow-motion spirals.

There was an odd charged pause.

Then the roar descended on them, so close it stopped his blood, and Janet grabbed an arm. No, first she fell against him, knocked sideways by the force of the noise, a flat cracking boom, and then she snatched his arm and missed and grabbed again. He sat there with his head hammered into his shoulders. The jeep left the track but he freed his arm from Janet's clutch and steered it back. He realized his other arm was raised just over his head, curled above him in defense.

The noise broke over them and washed past, nearly taking them with it, and Janet was looking at him. Her mouth made a small smooth lonesome oval.

Matt was intently absorbing the news. He was sorting through. He was looking toward the mountains, ready to be happy. Then he saw the twin glint just before they disappeared, a pair of F-4 Phantoms in silver skin reaching the top of their arc before leveling off-just thought they'd skim the desert on a quiet morning.

He was happy, hearing the echo carom off the ranges now, a remnant thunder that cross-called from the Little Ajo Mountains to the Growler Mountains to the Granites and the Mohawks and out into the towns and truck stops. Yes, he loved the way power rises out of self-caressing secrecy to become a roar in the sky. He imagined the sound waves passing over the land and lapping forward in time, over weeks and months, cross-country, eventually becoming the gentlest sort of rockabye rhyme in a small safe room where a mother nurses a baby and a man stands with his arm over his head, a research fellow, not in fear of shattered plaster and flying glass but only to draw down the shade-the sky is going dark, and a tangy savor drifts from the kitchen, and there is music in the house.

But it was the steroid jolt he experienced now, the gooseflesh, the prickling thrill that traveled over his body as they sat trembling in the little jeep. They were not yet ready to talk to each other. They needed a moment to collect themselves, speechless in the wake of a power and thrust snatched from nature's own greatness, or how men bend heaven to their methods.

5

First there was an empty room. Then someone appeared and began to put things on a table, to move the magazines and picture books and put out bowls and crocks and cut flowers and then to reinstate some of the picture books but only the ones that claimed a status of a certain sumptuous kind. Then a few people arrived and there was sporadic conversation, a little awkward at times, because not everyone knew everyone. Then the room slowly filled and the talk came more easily and the faces shed some layers. Klara spoke with someone in a corner, half aware that the spirit of being friendly and funny and well-met was overtaking the place, and isn't it one of those things you never consider but might find amazing if you did, how the details of contact, the eye movement and hand waves, the smiles of recognition, the catch-up lives that propel the early dialogue- how this becomes an energy that moves among the guests like a circulating angel, inspiring stories, rumors, flirtations and misconstrued remarks, basically the makings of human history, even though people don't drink the way they used to, so you can't say it's the gin that makes them happy and natural. It's mainly the encouragement of others. It was the rooftop summer, the summer of sheet lightning, and she watched thunderheads go white in the gunned flash. Threat of rain, said the Weather, but it rarely rained. She waited for Miles to show up with her cigarettes and thought that being alive had never seemed such luck, although she was getting nervous about her work because it just wasn't coming

In a corner of the room she talked to a man who complained about people keeping large dogs in small apartments and after guests began to leave she took the elevator to the roof and a young woman said, "I semi lost my mind"-I sem-eye lost my mind-and there was a man, a painter Klara knew, with a great-looking necktie, and she thought that keeping dogs in small apartments was one of those subjects nobody talks about and then everybody does, abruptly, it comes flowing out of doors and windows, should you or shouldn't you, only to stop one day with a ruthless sort of suddenness, leaving the dogs undiscussed, rare Siberian breeds in studio walk-ups.

She watched the runner on the track on top of an office tower, a woman in day-glo sweats, at sundown, with smokestacks in the distance. Three or four people stood at the ledge with drinks, watching with matched pleasure, and the jogger went around the track, alone, thirty stories up, and it was a beautiful thing to see, the woman's lightsome stride and the great faded day that shows burningly in the glass slabs and then the power-company smokestacks down near the river, blowing gorgeous poisons.

She walked through Times Square with Miles and he made her stop to admire a pimpmobile parked in a towaway zone outside a topless pinball parlor. The car was painted rose and mauve and the side windows were protected by iron grillwork-guy's got an urban sense of humor. Tourists took pictures, posing each other in front of the car, taking turns snapping and posing, and there were Krishna skinheads with handbells, young and pale in ocher robes and high-top sneakers, jumping devoutly up and down.

Acey Green had a grandmother act she did, mostly vocal, in which she referred to Klara as child. Reprimandingly. Oh child please, don't be such a fool,

They were in a SoHo bar.

"It's impossible," Klara said. "A woman doesn't even think of marrying someone like Miles."

"Who you wouldn't want to marry whether you thought about it or not."

"Give him a little credit."

"That's what I give him," Acey said.

"No, Miles is great. But you'd have to be crazy to try something permanent or even halfway binding. Can't be done, either from your viewpoint or his."

"Just the word cohabitation."

"That's right." And Klara laughed. "The word alone."

"He's a little evasive would be my general, you know."

"He's a little unready," Klara said, and the more she talked about his irresponsibility, the more affection she felt for the man. "There is always a plot potential, you see." And she laughed again. "He sees things closing in and becomes defensive and withdrawn. But it's not an issue. There are no issues between him and me. We get along great."

Things flew out of her hand. A coffee mug flew right out of her hand and over the kitchen counter. She could not find the veal cutlets she'd just bought. Then she looked around for the extra key to the downstairs door. The key could only be in one of two places, there were no other possibilities, worldwide, but it wasn't here and it wasn't there and she stood at one end of the loft staring through the tall windows opposite and she wondered if the fire escapes, if those dark lines intersecting in depth over the back alleys could tell her something about her work.

"You be whistling dixie, child," said Acey in the bar.

For a while she used house paint, radiator paint. She liked rough surfaces, flaked paint on metal, she liked puttied window frames, all the gesso textures, the gluey chalks and linseeds that get mixed and smeared, that get schmeered onto a weathered length of wood. And it took her years to understand how this was connected to her life, to the working-class grain, the pocked sidewalks, beautiful blue slate in fact, cracked and granuled at the corners, and the tar roofs, and the fire escapes of course, painted green and then black and how the flowoff of drips and trickles became elements of memory, and the aluminum paint on the whistling radiators, and the paint her father carried home to recoat the kitchen chairs, a chair upended on a newspaper page, and the spidery plash of white paint on the inked page, and the spattered page on the old linoleum.

At Esther and Jack's she held a glass of wine and listened to Jack talk in his friendly sandpaper voice. She liked his voice and she liked his jokes. Old ruddy grayhair Jack, somehow still alive, waving his cigarette and ever on the verge of forgetting your name. Jack was greatly given to robust jokes that Esther hated and Klara kind of liked, the kind of joke you're supposed to like in spite of yourself, outdated stones with stupid stereotypes and a range of dialects, but sly in the manner in which they welcome the listener's complicity-Jack told jokes in which nothing ever changes.

At some point she realized she was putting down paint mainly to take it off, scrape it with a kitchen tool-she liked the veiny residue.

And her radius of endeavor, her smallish ambition, what she saw as a clustering in her work, a familial thing, determinedly modest. She was only now beginning to wonder if she wanted to ensure herself a life unlaureled, like her father's.

Albert used to tell her in his slightly didactic way that the Italians of his experience, his Harlem and Bronx upbringing, his Calabrian heritage, tended to be wary of certain kinds of accomplishment, as immigrants, people who needed protection against the cold hand of the culture, who needed sons and daughters and sisters and others because who else could they trust with their broken English, their ten thousand uprooted tales, and he came home one day, the thirteen-year-old son, and saw his parents huddled on the sofa in one of those dolorous southern states of theirs, his mother's eyes dark-pocketed, drained by betrayal, and his father helpless and bent, a forty-year-old man who could double his age, in an eyeblink, through membership in some cooperative of sorrow, and they were looking at Albert's report card, just mailed from school, and he thought he'd failed everything, flunked out, been expelled, D's at best and funereal F's, but it was just the reverse, wasn't it, a row of A's with little gold stars stuck to the margins of the card, and young Bronzini eventually understood the nature of their distress, that they didn't want to lose him, the shopkeeper and the shopkeeper's wife, to the large bright world that began at some floating point only blocks away.

Klara did not see herself sharing this state of mind even remotely, until now, sitting alone in the loft, knowing how guarded she was about certain accomplishments, not other people's but her own- how distrustful and slightly shamed. She needed to be loyal to the past, even if this meant, most of all if this meant incorporating her father's disappointments, merging herself with the many little failures he amassed like faded keepsakes. She thought of his View-Master reels of the Grand Canyon and the great West, the unreachable spaces he clicked into place on his stereoscope, and she recalled so clearly the image of the Hopi scout posed on the edge of some rimrock, and whatever it was out there in the 3-D distance, the Painted Desert or Zion Park, and how her own smallness, her unnoticeability was precisely the destiny she'd assigned herself.

Acey was drinking tequila and Klara took her usual humdrum ration of white wine because she liked white in the afternoon on the days when she had a glass before six or so and red with dinner, and a dead afternoon in a dark bar was not the worst of fates.

"What are you doing that I should know about, workwise?" Acey said.

"I'm going to Sagaponack to hide out."

"Hide out. You don't hide out there. You hide out here."

"Depends on what you're hiding from."

"Start working. Just start working. What are you sitting here for?" Acey said. "You ain't making history looking at me."

It was so humid you had to put your shoulder to the door or it would not close. She heard those shots on a terrace somewhere and then she saw the striped awning, Cinzano, and knew the sound was only canvas snapping in the wind.

Klara talked about her early days painting, trying to paint, and how it was small-scale hell in a number of ways but was beginning, now, to seem late bohemian and sort of pastel-edged until she made herself remember more rigorously.

"Men treated us, male painters, let's face it, the big names, as if we were dumb little would-be artists. Students forever, you know, in kneesocks. At best," she said. "And speaking of work."

"What?"

"I gave you some public praise the other day. I was talking to a woman doing a piece on younger artists. I told her who to watch. And in return."

"And that's not the first time and I want you to know it means a lot."

"Shut up. In return," Klara said, "you're required to give me a verbal preview because if I'm going to sit here and be envious of someone who's working, at least you can tell me what you're doing."

Acey's mouth did its sneery lift and curl. She looked at Klara and finished her drink and issued a kind of scorched sigh.

"Okay. You remember the Marilyn Monroe calendar you saw in my studio."

"Sure."

"And you know how it is when you're starting on a project, how you sometimes have to start with a series of misunderstandings."

"I always start that way."

"I thought and worked and sketched and did small oils and large charcoals and finally I realized. It's not Marilyn I want, it's fake Marilyn. I wanted a packaged look. I didn't want Monroe, I wanted Mansfield. All bloated lips and total boobs. I mean it was so obvious and it took me fucking forever."

"Have I ever seen a Jayne Mansfield movie?"

"Nobody has. Doesn't matter. She was uncontainable in a movie," Acey said. "And there were all the other Marilyns. On the one hand you can never have too many Marilyns. On the other hand the minute Marilyn died, all the other sexpots died with her. They were like philosophically banned from existing. Jayne outlived Marilyn by only five years and for about four and a half of those years she was bummed-out, washed-up, beat up by husband number whatever-he-was and there was nothing left but exploitation movies and heavy drinking."

"You're crossing over. White women," Klara said.

"Jayne was a white whale. I had to shake off a lot of higher-minded shit before I got to where I am with this work. And I'm doing some things with color I want your opinion of."

"Anytime."

"Because you're the one I trust."

"Paying phony compliments is hard work," Klara said. "That's why I don't do it."

It was the summer of Nixon waving on TV, clutching Ike's wrist in the fifties clips, or the hand-jerk over the head, sudden and neurologically odd, or the final wave from the helicopter on the lawn, arms shooting out, fingers shaping a sad pair of V's, or the clips of the late sixties that showed his arms wantonly flung in the winged gesture of victory, of resentful writhing triumph-here I am, you bastards, still alive and kicking.

Miles talked her into going to Bloomingdale's to help him buy a gift for his mother because she'd be thrilled and slightly shamed, his mother would, wrapped in happy chagrin, outside Toledo, to own a thing from Bloomingdale's. They went through a vast area of reflecting surfaces and little knobby bottles and the cling of a hundred teeming essences and Klara finally found something, a batik blouse and vaguely Persian slippers, and they were headed out through the menswear area, touches of autumn decor and many tables and displays, racks of field coats and fleece liners, and Miles said, "Wait."

What is it, she wondered, and he put a hand to her arm-wait, look, do not speak. Then she saw what he meant. Eight or nine boys, black kids moving among the suits and knit sweaters, maybe a dozen now, adolescents mostly but some no older than ten. Then she saw a guard coming from the perimeter, summoned by walkie-talkie, and the younger kids were trying to go unnoticed, among the mirrored surfaces, somewhat comically, their eyeballs doing surreptitious scans, and they must have felt the pressure by now, the full weight of observation. One of them grabbed a jacket, half hurried, and one of them said something and they all moved now, converging on one display. They grabbed and ran, jackets flying off hangers and hangers bouncing on the floor, and they grabbed what they could, two-three jackets, some of them, or only one, or two kids snatching the same jacket, and ran for different exits. There were two guards coming fast and another semicrouched by the main door. The customers stood motionless and alert, fixed in neutral zones, and one kid was pinned by a guard and Klara had a sense of half a dozen others scatter-running through the store, weaving and shying off, all the jacket arms flapping.

And Miles said, "Leather," in a voice that rang with broadest joy.

He said, "They take the subway down to Fifty-ninth Street and come up the stairs right into the store and they flood one area and grab what they can and then they're outta here, man, in a dozen directions."

He said, "Security gets ahold of two, maybe three kids at most."

He said, "Notice, they didn't take the big insulated parkas, they didn't take the warm stuff or the hooded stuff or the down vests. Only leather. They took the leather," and his voice was musical with admiration.

Acey leaned over her empty glass.

"How old was he?"

"I don't know. Seventeen, eighteen. I don't think I wanted to know."

"Seventeen's a man."

"I was teaching kids to draw, part-time. And I had a baby, two or three years old, and this was awesome enough, and my husband's mother who was bedridden, although maybe she'd died by then, and my husband of course as well."

"And this juvenile delinquent in his what-did they wear pegged pants? He came on to you."

"I don't know who came on to whom. Only thing I know, we're in the spare room next to where my mother-in-law just died."

Acey's eyes went humorously wide and she let her mouth hang open.

"Maybe you're right. Seventeen's a man," Klara said. "Because one thing this was not. This was not a case of sexual initiation. It wasn't at all tender. And he didn't need instruction especially. And you're also right about juvenile delinquent. Except the term doesn't do justice to the thing he eventually did."

She looked down the cornice line of Park Avenue to the New York Central Building with its traffic arches and great clock and floodlit summit and she wasn't sleeping well lately and someone stood next to her looking at the same thing she was looking at and she went inside to watch Nixon wave.

Esther Winship's apartment was lavishly understated, beiges, off-whites, great staid sofas that did not give when you sat, and expanses of dunnish rug, deep-piled, and almost no pictures, and the few pictures Esther elected to hang were self-effacing to the point of who cares, and the place had so much attitude, all tension and edge, that Jack seemed largely lost here.

Esther said, "I haven't given up, you know. I've sent agents into the field."

"For what?"

"Moonman."

"I thought we'd forgotten all that. Besides, didn't somebody do a graffiti show?"

"It didn't include him."

"I think it's just as well you don't find him."

"Why's that, sweetie?"

"You'll sign him and dump me."

Esther liked that. She had a laugh that was two thousand years old, salty and hoarse. And Klara found it strange to feel the way she did about graffiti writers. It should have been Esther who decried the marked-up trains-defaced, ugly, like mobile dumpsters. Esther in her flawless suits and face powders and lightly clanging jewelry. Esther, she thought, and not for the first time, her dealer and friend and enemy.

"That is the utterest nonsense of course."

"Just tell me when we're going," Klara said.

"Out to my place?"

"So I can stop the mail."

"You're invited, you know. We're all going. It's official. Friday week."

"I love stopping the mail," Klara said.

And it should have been her who defended the graffitists, daredevil kids who put color and spunk into the seismic blur of a rush-hour Monday.

Chance of rain, said the Weather, but it didn't rain. The garbage was down there in identical black plastic bags, leaching out, beginning to burn its way out of the bags, and she looked and did not look for rats, passing the mound on her way to the Y. She swam nearly every day at the Y and then not so often and then only once a week because the point of swimming was to take the edge off work, return her to the offsetting rhythms, the agreeable mild monotony of what is left of you after a long pull of work and isolation.

It was the summer of damson plums, juicy and bluish, and she loved the water towers that hung at dusk, raised on pillars and stilts, like oddments of the carpentered city, the least likely things to survive, dowels and staves, the old streaked wood hooped in its delicate bulk.

In a little roof garden with a cheapo copy of a marble from the Acropolis, a male figure minus arms and head and most of one leg, and with a ravaged cock and birdblown shit on his left pec, and why was he so sexy, Klara thought-it was here that she saw the man for the third time in about seven weeks, Carlo Strasser, the amateur art collector and whatever else he was, in his splendid Italian shoes, with a farmhouse, she recalled, near Aries.

It turned out the host had been meaning to invite the two of them to dinner for the longest time. And it turned out Carlo was in solid-state electronics, traveled to Hong Kong and Taiwan on business and had once flown to Mexico City to see a soccer game.

"Actually I'm supposed to be in Dus-sel-dorf today"-he pronounced it comically-"but I thought, you know, life is short and I get on too many planes lately and besides."

"Besides you can pick up the phone."

"I can pick up the phone, absolutely. Someone is there at the other end."

All around them on brownstone roofs were skylights and tall vents with spiral caps and new metal fencing that extended past the roof edge to discourage cat burglars.

And late at night she woke up in the loft and thought she was somewhere else-not somewhere else but in a place that wasn't hers because even after years here she could not wake up without feeling she was in alien space, in dreamspace still. The height and breadth of the area, the pillars and tall windows were out of some early dream, not quite nightmarish, of a child located at the edge of a room, or a child dreaming the room but not in it herself-a room surreally open at one end, where the child stands or the dream begins, a room where things, where objects are called chairs and curtains and beds but are also completely different, unsupported by the usual guarantees, and she shifted in the bed and woke up Miles.

They went to the Fulton Fish Market and Miles took photographs, it was four in the morning, of a row of enormous swordfish chucked down on the pavement, what an epic of misplacement, these great sea creatures beached on a New York street, and then they found an all-night diner and had bacon and eggs and coffee.

Miles wanted to talk about Acey Greene.

"This stuff she's doing. You know what she's doing, don't you? A group of paintings on the Black Panthers. More crap being dumped on black males."

She let him talk.

"You overrate her about two hundred percent. Her stuff is all show. It's a cut above total shit. You need to look again. It's all surface. She's catering, she's pandering to white ideas about scary blacks."

Klara realized that in her praise of Acey's work she'd been waiting all along for someone to disagree. Now here it was. The moment sat in her stomach in a lump with the egg yolk and rye toast.

"You know how it works. She got what she wanted from you. Approval, publicity, whatever. Now she's greasing other wheels."

Klara sat there in an odd kind of thoughtful silence. She wanted him to keep talking. Say it all whether it's true or not. She felt completely ungenerous but thought he might have a point about Acey's work. He had useful intuitions about art. It was one of the things between them, of course, how he'd stand before one of Klara's pieces and let her know with a few well-placed words and with his general surrender to the object that he saw what she was doing.

"She loves the slippers," he said.

"She loves the slippers. What are we talking about? Oh your mother."

"She loves the slippers."

"She loves the slippers. Good. I'm happy."

Or possibly the case could be stated thus. He was totally wrong about Acey's work but maybe she wanted him to be right.

In Sagaponack she dropped her bag in the guest room and went to visit painters all over the local map. They painted in sheds, whitewashed studios and renovated potato barns and she went mostly alone, borrowing Esther's car because Esther was on the phone trying to deal with landlords and lawyers.

At dinner Jack got dizzy and lay on the sofa and the evening more or less went on around him.

She stood on the sand and watched the waves barrel up and come snugging beach ward.

She called Miles, who was leaving the next day for Normal, Illinois.

She met a sculptor with a face full of burst capillaries, English, his wife was dying, and she had a long talk with him, a completely intense conversation about the way in which their work exposed them, layer by layer, as inadequate, and they took solace one from the other, seeing how such things can be shared no matter how seemingly unique. And embraced when she left.

Esther said, "You're looking sexy lately, you know that?"

"Says who?"

"Old Jack."

Klara typically grew tired of old Jack and then took his side, sympathizing, saying Jack has a point and finding him funny and then finding him tiresome again, even pathetic at times, but he loved Esther in the sweetest way, spoke about it openly and didn't care who heard and told waiters and doormen how good she was in bed and Esther knew it wasn't possible to stop him and probably didn't want to. They both needed the drama of public avowals because how else could their vividness survive?

Things flew out of her hand. A glass flew out of her hand when she was standing on someone's deck. Alone in Esther's car she talked about left turn and right turn, reciting directions aloud, telling herself to stop on red.

On the phone Miles said, "People don't think it's totally, you know, bizarre that a woman can get sick every time Henry Kissinger gets sick, a thousand miles away. We the ungreat have to get our diseases any way we can."

A wind started blowing and would not stop and it carried a faint taste of summer's end and Esther said, "It's like the tramontana" and Klara thought oddly of Albert, or not so oddly-he loved the Italian words for different kinds of winds blowing off the Alps and up from the African littoral.

And she didn't really like the English sculptor's work if we're going to be honest about it, whatever their affinity of ominous doubt.

"No, seriously, you look great," Esther said.

The nights so breezy and clean. Shadows, whispers, a man's chin-line, his hair, how he holds a wineglass.

Esther said, "Jack's a baby of course. That's why he stayed on the sofa when he was feeling out of sorts the other night."

"He wanted to be with people."

"He's the biggest baby ever but if he dies on me I'll go to pieces in a tenth of a second."

She loved them both and told them when she left and meant it the way you always mean it after four blowy days and nights and good food and talk and the potato fields running clear to the dunes under high swift skies.

Such luck to be alive, she thought, and took the train back, humanly invisible in her roomy seat, where she smoked a cigarette and looked forward to being home-home alone, surrounded by all the things and textures that make you familiar, once again, to yourself.

Her father used to say, The best part of a trip is coming home.

But when did they ever go away? Only rarely, and briefly a rented bungalow on a lake, with another family because godforbid we shouldn't feel crowded, her mother said, and let's hurry back before someone steals the note we left for the milkman.

When Klara's mother found a business card in his jacket-she was taking his suit to the cleaner and found a business card with his name but no company and the name was spelled Sax and of course she asked him about it.

He told her it was for trips he might take. He wanted to have a card to give to someone he might meet on a train.

Her mother said, That's not what I'm asking. Never mind such a trip is strictly I don't want to say what.

So then what you are asking?

I'm asking the spelling. Her mother said, Sachs is not a hard name.

He said, It's not a question hard or easy.

Her mother said, What is s-a-x? This is what? You're changing careers, this means? We have a jazz musician in the house?

He said, It's a small thing, never mind.

Her mother said, It's not so small.

He said, The names are pronounced the same. It's a small thing. I only changed the spelling so it's easy for someone to pronounce on a train who's accustomed to easy names. Which most names in business they're easy if you'll notice.

Sachs is an easy name. Her mother said, This is not a hard name unless the train you're talking about is full of people who are a little funny, let's say, in the head.

Her mother's maiden name was Soloveichik.

He said, It's not the name is easy or hard. It's what the letters say. That whole business of the c-h.

Her mother said, What whole business?

And her father made a sound that Klara would not forget. She thought about it many times in the years since he made the sound. He made a sound, a harsh guttural produced at the back of the mouth, rattling and metallic, filled with rancor, and at first she thought he had the card printed because he did not want people to make the mistake of thinking he was German and then she thought he had the card printed because he did not want people to know he was a Jew.

People on trains. Businessmen with their own cards and shaving kits and private compartments on the most important trains out of Grand Central Station.

And how curious, what a distance he sought to travel from the grating sound of that c-h with its breadth of reference, its guttural history and culture, those heavy hallway smells and accents-from this to the unknown x, mark of mister anonymous.

And the change provoked Klara's loyalty precisely because it made no practical sense, because it exposed the mind spirals of a certain kind of torment.

Her father was a billing clerk in a department store. Then he was an insurance agent working on commission in the drearier reaches of the Bronx. They gave him the Negro neighborhoods and Chinese laundries and the immigrants from everywhere, just off the boat. He painted signs for a while, company names on frosted glass doors, applying gold leaf with a sable brush, a thing he did well but hated.

It's only a business card, he said. I didn't go to a judge and get my name changed. On my tombstone you can carve the regular spelling to your heart's content.

Her mother said, How come I never knew you played an instrument?

And when Klara's divorce from Albert became final, she changed her name from Bronzini back to Sachs but made a point of spelling it with an x_y if only publicly in her emerging identity as an artist-it was how she signed her work.

"Yes, well, maybe it's true. Seven teen's a man," KJara said. 'And I've asked myself was the thing more important than I was willing to admit?"

"In other words did it show you a way out?"

"Did it point a way out?"

"Which you didn't want to think about at the time."

Acey didn't want another drink and Klara still had half a glass of wine and they talked away the afternoon, one of those dead summer days in a dark and empty bar.

"And he didn't seem to make too much of it himself. He was, I thought, remarkably unconfused and even-keeled was my impression. My second husband sailed a yacht but was not so even-keeled and I don't know why I'm bringing that up."

She laughed and sipped her wine.

"He drank Tanqueray martinis, Jason did. He took a bottle of Tan-queray every time we went to Maine, or a couple of bottles, I guess. We were allowed to forget the vermouth but not the gin but we didn't forget the vermouth either and I loved going up there but I used to wonder sometimes in the most detached sort of way."

"How it happened."

"How did it happen that I'd marry a man who says what he says and thinks what this man thinks?"

"And drinks martinis," Acey said.

They talked about other things. They talked about work.

"See, Marilyn hated being Marilyn. But/ayne loved it," Acey said. "She was born to be Marilyn. She lived in a pink palace that had a sizable zoo. And the way these things happen, the discount sex queen becomes famous and famous and famous and finally she's the most photographed woman in the world."

"And she died how?"

Acey lowered her head to her chest, doubling up her chin and doing a southern sheriff's voice.

"Ho-rrific car crash. Like/immah Dean."

"Are you painting the wreck?"

"No, I want a /ayne that's a living threatening presence. This is one greasy peroxide blond. Constant secretions from every quarter. This is a woman with a heavy flow. Atomic /ayne."

"Anytime you're ready to show it," Klara said, and the sun had cleared a building nearby and was beating on the street.

"You worry too much," Acey said. "You worry about the work you're not doing because you feel deeply obliged to justify. I think you're always justifying in your mind. And you also worry about the work you've done because considering what you gave up and took away, considering the damage you caused, if we tell it like it is, child, you need to convince yourself your work is good enough to justify this."

They paid the bill.

Acey put her hands on the older woman's shoulders and pressed tight, sort of macho motherly, and the bartender brought their change.

In Sagaponack Esther wore safari outfits and talked on the phone.

She said to Klara at breakfast, "Who cuts your hair? Did they arrest the mass murderer who cuts your hair?"

At someone's house Klara talked with a woman it turned out she used to know, a painter from the early days, the industrial spaces on the East River, near the ferry terminal, where Klara lived after her divorce, with a makeshift shower and no stove, fifty dollars a month, and met painters and sculptors, people who worked with found material, and the street was paved with old stone blocks, once used as ballast perhaps, and they used to gather on the roof sometimes, three or four painters and a wife or husband and a couple of kids and a dog someone was keeping for someone else, and the two women remembered how Klara never sat on the sloped part of the roof, on the tar-paper surface that sloped up to the edge because she was afraid of edges, and there was a sense of sea passage and new work, and off to the north, situated beyond the rooftop, between the rooftop and the great bridge, was the polyhedral mass of towered downtown.

The wind blew day and night and Jack said, "I'm reasonably sure that's what's-his-name over there who used to be married to the paper bag woman. It was a great scandal. She was the paper bag heiress and I sat next to her at dinner-this was, godhelp me, twenty-five years ago. Esther knows who I'm talking about. It was a major scandal. Esther, help me out here."

The thing about Jack is that he sounded drunk when he wasn't and then made beautiful and courtly sense absolutely blotto.

They were in a small basement place in Chinatown eating broad noodles that were very tasty chow fun or chow fon, the menu was spattered-a place with formica tables and spattered menus and no liquor license and Miles with a mint toothpick in his mouth.

"I've got a movie to show you that you Ye going to hate me for this movie."

"We can't be talking about Normal," she said.

"We shot about eleven hours in Normal. She was inexhaustible, this woman, because she was born that way She comes across like a law of physics but I still don't know what we've got. Could be crap."

"And in the meantime."

"Ibu're going to hate this other thing but there's no question of not seeing it because you have to see it."

He deferred to Klara in a number of ways, sometimes subtle, sometimes not, and forced soft arguments he knew he could not win and played certain subjects toward her strength, which should have annoyed her but didn't, and was otherwise thoughtful, carrying her brand of cigarettes and talking her through this dormant period in her work, a time of small despair.

He had his cold, it was always there, voice a little woofy his eyes dimmed by medications, and after Acey's show they all went to a disco somewhere and she watched Miles and Acey dance and they looked completely great together and how curious, of course, because there was no love lost, or maybe not so curious-the lights were flashing and the music shook the walls.

It was the rooftop summer, still, and she sat in the dense shade of a grape arbor on a Chelsea roof, redwood posts and rafters and a latticework of cedar that was weathered bony gray.

A poet walked across the roof, he came from the far end of the roof over the thin slate surface.

He said, "They're writing the name Marie."

And Klara looked out through the opening at the front of the arbor, fringed with broad puckered leaves, grape leaves of whatever variety of native grape, and she saw the smoke from a skywriting plane, spelling the name Marie.

And the World Trade Center rising at the southern rim, the towers siamesed when you see them from this angle, joined at the waist by a transit crane.

What an encouragement it was that someone built this thing, lugging so much wood and soil up five narrow flights, raising the posts and joists, and vines growing out of half barrels, old whiskey barrels great-girthed and stained, and she sat with three others at the table eating nachos and drinking sangria, the others did-Klara liked her wine unmixed.

It was the summer of blue-black nights, ambiguous thunder to the east, hoarse and false, and the city grid below-a guy beheads his lover, puts the object in a box and takes it on the train to Queens.

And don't forget the poet drunk on a cast-iron bench and the small strange woman who photographed him obsessively.

Klara watched the skywriter's smoke begin to attenuate and drift. A cat walked along the ledge at the far end, a stray from the alleys and back gardens, and she didn't know why, you never know why, but her mother was part of this moment, angry about something, and a neighbor with a special shoe, a man with a high shoe, an orthopedic shoe, things, shapes, masses, memories, all the braidwork of unmatching states.

Even the poisoned air floats a woman's name.

Miles took her to the studio of a video artist he knew. Not a studio, okay, but an ordinary set of rooms packed with equipment and TV sets, where the guy lived and worked. People started arriving. There were people already there and others started arriving and there was a pungent trail in the air, the root aroma of marijuana rolled and toked communally, and a sense of some event not unlike the showing of a midnight film, only not SO loose a group-a little beady-eyed, these people, wary of their own anticipation.

" " They sat on the floor mainly. There were a few folding chairs and a sofa in one room and a number of people stood huddled in corners but most of them sat on the floor, which was covered with soda stains and unspeakable scuz. TV sets were arranged in stacks everywhere in the flat and other sets were parked individually on TV tables with copies of TV Guide and there were sets with rabbit ears and a few old mahogany consoles and every size screen from the smallest imported eyeball to the great proscenium face of the household god.

And one whole wall in one room-there was a TV wall, maybe a hundred identical sets banked floor to ceiling.

Klara and Miles stood in a corner and she'd begun detaching herself from the event long before she got here because she'd been told what it was at some point but still had to see it, whatever the level of misgiving.

The event was rare and strange. It was the screening of a bootleg copy of an eight-millimeter home movie that ran about twenty seconds. A little over twenty seconds probably. The footage was known as the Zapruder film and almost no one outside the government had seen it.

Of course the event had a cachet, an edge of special intensity But if those in attendance felt they were lucky to be here, they also knew a kind of floating fear, a mercury reading out of the sixties, with a distinctly trippy edge.

The footage started rolling in one room but not the others and it was filled with slurs and jostles, it was totally jostled footage, a home movie shot with a Super 8, and the limousine came down the street, muddied by sunglint, and the head dipped out of the frame and reappeared and then the force of the shot that killed him, unexpectedly, the headshot, and people in the room went ohh, and then the next ohh, and five seconds later the room at the back went ohh, the same release of breath every time, like blurts of disbelief, and a woman seated on the floor spun away and covered her face because it was completely new, you see, suppressed all these years, this was the famous headshot and they had to contend with the impact-aside from the fact that this was the President being shot, past the outer limits of this fact they had to contend with the impact that any high-velocity bullet of a certain lethal engineering will make on any human head, and the sheering of tissue and braincase was a terrible revelation.

And oh shit, oh god it came from the front, didn't it?

And that was the other thing, all these things in the sequence that begins with frame 313, and wouldn't you know, Miles would say later, there had to be a thirteen somewhere in the case.

She was getting backaches again and sleeping episodically and it hurt to sit in a chair sometimes. They told her to go to a yoga class. They told her about herbal teas and holistic massages.

She went to the hospital to see Jack Marshall, who was recovering from heart surgery, and she went with Esther, who thought that a hospital visit was a thing out of pharaonic antiquity, where you fixed your face and arrayed yourself sedately and you carried books, puzzles and flowers and brought along a priest to utter certain phrases.

Esther didn't seem to know what went on in hospitals and she moved at a cringing gait, leaning away from doors to patients' rooms, afraid she'd glimpse something or catch something, taking it all personally-a challenge to her remoteness from such matters.

Jack said that catheter was the ugliest word in the language.

They told her to eat whole grains, take warm baths, to see a man in Finland who did the lower back.

She went to Acey's opening, of course, in a hot new gallery uptown, in the early fall, and Acey looked sensational in a white linen suit with a sequined bandeau and the work was all breasts and heart-shaped asses, a raunchy assault in which a woman's body parts, her skintight gowns and full mouth and bazoomy tits become a kind of politics.

There was no comfort here, Klara thought. If women have a condition called incompleteness, and some recover nicely and some don't, then these paintings were flaunting it, loving it, shoving it in your face. And Acey located her arguments in composition and perspective, in the odd bodiness, the massive off-center ass, the misalignments, the relationship of breasts to body, the way Jayne came angling out of her Jaguar, all avid excess, her knees and dimpled crotch bursting out of their package.

It was a question of lines of force. Here was a woman who lived outside the bureaucratic needs of male desire, outside the detailed ceremonies and horny hands.

Acey used off-tones, flesh tones, completely nonpop, a lot of sand and amber and a beautiful burnt rose, a sunburnt strip that ran across the top of every canvas, a little sad and frayed, and all of it slightly blurry and doubled, color-xeroxed, that was the telling touch-you have copycat Jayne, the reproduced goddess, and she is all the more strong for being unoriginal.

They went to a disco somewhere and she watched Miles and Acey dance and they looked totally great together and she felt a little jealous, of course, and she still felt jealous half a minute later-not jealous but begrudging-when Acey danced with a woman.

She watched them weave and shimmer in the flashing lights and she was admiring and begrudging both, taken by the sight of them, the other woman in jeans and braided sandals, some diplomat's daughter, Klara thought, hair hung down in spiral curls, and how completely easy they were in their physical mien, a grace of a certain passing abandon, searching each other's eyes in the fever strobes, and she was stung by her reaction.

Acey's ascent, Acey's name in the air, her brash talent and sense of freedom and her self-asserting manner and how she wants it all and'll probably get it and dancing sort of striped in the lights with her jacket flying open and the music shaking the walls.

The funny thing is, Esther wasn't kidding. A priest showed up, from some actor's chapel, arranged by Esther, although Jack hadn't been to church in forty years except for midnight mass at Christmas, which he attended, as they say, religiously.

They sat around and talked about Broadway show tunes. Jack was too weak to sing or tell jokes. He was a great splayed length of pounded veal. Esther held his hand until she had to go out for a smoke. She'd stopped and started again and the priest went with her and Klara adjusted the pillow for Jack.

And when she embraced Acey at the end of the evening-it was the end of Klara's evening because the music in that place was a form of brain seizure and she had to get out fast and when she embraced Acey and told her the show was great and wished every blessing on her head, it was an experience of shadings and half meanings and an awful sort of feeling, to extend love to a friend with reluctance.

She decided to go to Los Angeles with Miles. He'd run out of money for Normal, Illinois and was trying to get financing from an Israeli gangster who lived in L.A. Or there were two men maybe, she wasn't sure, one Israeli and one gangster, and she decided she'd go. She didn't like the idea of going but she thought she'd go out of a sense of loose ends or whatever the exact state of mind-she wasn't sure of that either.

And the poet drunk on a cast-iron bench, the visiting Romanian on the roof, and how a woman no one knew shot seven rolls of film and left without a word.

In the three days she was there. She was there to small and passing purpose so it wasn't supposed to matter what she saw and heard but at some point in the three days someone mentioned the Watts Towers and Klara thought she probably ought to see this place because she'd known about the towers for years and thought maybe if there's time and then forgot about it.

At another point she got a call from New York and who was it, someone eager to read reviews of Acey's show, the first to appear, and they were bad, they were stinging and grim, and Klara called a few people who said word around town was even worse.

They spoke with controlled excitement, that tone of breathy documentary where you code your pleasure to the formal pauses.

They waited for her to respond in kind. This made her feel sleazy as hell. They waited for her to rejoice in kind, on cue, with due observance of the protocols.

That was the next-to-last day. On the last day she went to see the Watts Towers. Miles dropped her off and said he'd come by an hour later. She had no idea. She didn't know a thing so rucked in the vernacular could have such an epic quality. All she knew about the towers was that the man worked alone, an immigrant, for many years, a sort of unimaginable number of years, and used whatever objects he could forage and scrounge.

She went around touching things, rubbing her palms over the bright surfaces. She loved the patterns made by jute doormats pressed in cement. She loved the crushed green glass and the bottle bottoms that knobbed an archway. And one of the taller towers with its tracery of whirling atoms. And the south wall candied with pebbles and mussel shells.

She didn't know what this was exactly. It was an amusement park, a temple complex and she didn't know what else. A Delhi bazaar and Italian street feast maybe. A place riddled with epiphanies, that's what it was.

Cats passed through, they were everywhere, asleep in the sun or trying to mooch a knuckle rub, strays from the hot streets, ghetto cats, and she felt a kind of static in her body, seeing columns inlaid with broken glass, shards of discarded mirrors, and the crazy-quilt tiles, and the arc he'd shaped over the front gate with cans of Canada Dry.

She felt a static, a depth of spirit, she felt delectation that took the form of near helplessness. Like laughing helplessly as a girl, collapsing against the shoulder of your best friend. She was weak with sensation, weak with seeing and feeling. She touched and pressed. She looked up through the struts of the tallest tower. Such a splendid independence this man was gifted with, or likely fought for, and now she wanted to leave. She didn't need to stay any longer. An hour was too long and she stood by the entrance, buzzing, and waited for Miles to arrive.

That night she got on the phone and tried to find Acey, she called around for an hour, waking people up, and Miles came in, dragging, and pulled off his boots where he stood, a seamless swipe of the hand, repeated.

She said, "Look, your socks are the color of the rug. That must mean it's time to leave."

He told her about his afternoon, which was spent around a pool drained of water, speaking of which-there was a guy there who described how he'd faked his own suicide by drowning and managed to effect a clean disappearance.

"'You're talking a mile a minute," she said.

And there's Yankel saying, the Israeli with the bankroll, Some people fake their death, I'm faking my life.

She called New York again and found out Acey had gone somewhere or just didn't want to talk.

Miles wanted to talk. Miles was beat, he was dragging but also amped-up, jangled by caffeine and freeway traffic and whatever else he was inhaling in the way of controlled substances. Three days of whatever else on the fringes of the business. They were in a borrowed apartment and he had to get up early to go to Normal and there was a space between his weariness and his sparky nerve ends and they filled it persuasively with sex. They did it and did it and talked and did it. They had a thumping time, or she did-she wasn't sure what he was having. He was intense and a little feverish and had his indigenous common cold and when he talked it was on a polyphonic plane, steep and desperate, and when he fucked it was strong and aloof-not aloof but rootless, a kind of any-fuck in the sense that there was nothing outside the act, they lived for the strokes, for the nasal drone, and finally he slept, and then she did, and they barely made their flights in the morning.

From the air, what was it like? The vast swept West, basin and range, you could almost detect the mineral content, the badland shale-it was the kind of immense and unsparing beauty that left you slightly subdued because you didn't know the natural language, the names of formations and mountain folds.

And her father with his Hopi scout, Hopi or Navaho-his View-Master slides of a headbanded scout at the edge of a canyon. Sitting in the kitchen clicking his slides through the handheld device. He specialized in slides of the great West. He called it the great West and it was, it is, look at it, his 3-D slides of the trail ride down the canyon on muleback, or the Canyon Dons the Velvety Cloak of Twilight, and that's exactly what it did, his completely unreachable West, and he sat in the kitchen because the light was better there.

She didn't know the West and she'd never flown above it in weather so clear. It looked young and untouched, it had the strangeness of worlds we'd never seen, it was not ours from up here, it was too flowingly new and strange-we hadn't settled it yet.

Klara remembered who she was. She pulled away from the window and she was a sculptor, although she didn't always believe it, an artist-she believed them sometimes when they said she wasn't.

She thought of her work, the skewed meter of putty and junk, the crambo clink, she thought of rust rot and wadded cotton batting. She wanted to feel the urge to work again. She wanted to be rushing out of the airport to take a taxi home. She needed to feel that thing begin to happen, suddenly, that faithworthy feeling, that newness, a freshet of life behind the eyes.

She called around looking for Acey and reached her a few days later, she was bitter and tight and didn't want to talk. But Klara talked to her. She was good at this. She'd talked like this to Teresa a thousand times, the daughter determined to be unhappy.

They had dinner that night and talked some more. Klara was in control. She cajoled and encouraged. She was good at this. She was eager to help and she was helping.

The waiter stood there reciting the specials. There was a fire down the street, or a false alarm, and an amplified voice erupted from one of the trucks, absorbing everything around it, and the days got darker earlier, and the streets began to acquire a medieval texture with strange draped women, scarfed like Tuaregs, living in junked cars, watchful and silent, and the ones who danced in subways for loose coins, and the ones with their own radio programs that you didn't need a radio to listen to because they followed you down the street in the endless inspired catastrophe of New York.

After a while some people got up and walked around. They didn't leave, almost nobody left. The footage kept repeating and they walked around, they stirred from their corners and visited the other rooms or stood in front of the TV wall. They were like tourists walking through the rooms of some small private collection, the Zapruder Museum, one item on permanent display, the twenty-some-odd seconds of a home movie, and it runs continuously.

It ran continuously, men who carried the power of the state, the film muddied by sunglint, riding in a car with their confident wives, all the jostled quality of birthday footage.

Or they stayed on the floor and passed a joint and just kept looking in an acquired sort of awe, here comes the car, here comes the shot, and it was amazing that there were forces in the culture that could out-imagine them, make their druggiest terrors seem futile and cheap.

The footage ran at normal speed on some sets, slow motion on others, and the car moved down Elm Street and past the freeway sign and the head dipped out of the frame and reappeared and the shot was unexpected.

Different phases of the sequence showed on different screens and the spectator's eye could jump from Zapruder 239 back to 185, and down to the headshot, and over to the opening frames, and on the TV wall the sets and frames were geared to patterns. The TV wall was a kind of game board of diagonals and verticals and so on, interlocking tarots of elemental fate, or synchronous footage running in an X pattern, and whatever the mathematics of the wall there were a hundred images running at once, here comes the car, here comes the shot, and even though it wasn't part of the footage Klara was sure there was a Hertz sign on top of the Book Depository-she'd seen it in photographs, forgotten about it until now and thought it was another passing strangeness, however minor, a rent-a-car sign brooding over the motorcade.

A man and woman stood in a closet with the door open, seemingly stoned and not especially noticeable, remotely making out-Klara happened to glimpse them when she went by.

She knew she'd hear from Miles at dinner about the secret manipulation of history, or attempts at such, or how the experts could not seem to produce a clear print of the movie, or whatever. But the movie in fact was powerfully open, it was glary and artless and completely steeped in being what it was, in being film. It carried a kind of inner life, something unconnected to the things we call phenomena. The footage seemed to advance some argument about the nature of film itself. The progress of the car down Elm Street, the movement of the film through the camera body, some sharable darkness-this was a death that seemed to rise from the streamy debris of the deep mind, it came from some night of the mind, there was some trick of film emulsion that showed the ghost of consciousness. Or so she thought to wonder. She thought to wonder if this home movie was some crude living likeness of the mind's own technology, the sort of death plot that runs in the mind, because it seemed so familiar, the footage did-it seemed a thing we might see, not see but know, a model of the nights when we are intimate with our own dying.

Someone passed her a joint, she passed it back.

On a large console the screen was split four ways and the headshot ran in every sector and, "It's outside language," Miles said, which was his way of saying far-out, or too much, or the other things they used to say, and here was an event that took place at the beginning of the sixties, seen belatedly, that now marked the conceptual end, carrying all the delirium that floated through the age, and people stood around and talked, a man and woman made out in a closet with the door open, remotely, and the pot fumes grew stronger, and people said, "Let's go eat," or whatever people say when a thing begins to be over.

It ran continuously, a man in his forties in a suit and tie, and all the sets were showing slow motion now, riding in a car with his confident wife, and the footage took on a sense of elegy, running ever slower, running down, a sense of greatness really, the car's regal gleam and the murder of some figure out of dimmest lore-a greatness, a kingliness, the terrible mist of tissue and skull, so massively slow, on Elm Street, and they got something to eat and went to the loft, where they played cards for a couple of hours and did not talk about Zapruder.

She married Carlo Strasser in his Park Avenue apartment before a justice of the peace and twenty-five friends of the couple. Carlo's daughter was there, the youngest of his three children, a beautiful spindly girl, fifteen, who lived with her mother in Brussels. It was one of those autumn days in New York. And Klara's daughter also appeared, about half an hour late but lively and bright, completely unmorose-she embraced people left and right and danced after the ceremony with Jack Marshall.

It was one of those taut autumn days. The bride wore an old brocade vest that had once been her mother's, and someone's before that, a second cousin or great-aunt, and maybe someone's before that, before America. People ate wherever they found a space, standing up or sitting primly in hall chairs, and the dancing did not last long-it wasn't meant to be a drawn-out affair.

When the guests were gone they decided to take a walk, the bride and groom and their daughters, and after a night of stiff winds the air was rinsed clean and the light was so precise that distances in the park seemed diminished. Clouds began to build, fair-weather cumulus, high-prowed and drifting. It was one of those days in Central Park when there's a distilled sense of perception, a spareness, every line firm and unredundant, and the leaves were beginning to turn, the dogwoods and sumacs, and nothing was wasted or went unseen.

How nice to be a family again, even if fleeting and incomplete, with parceled-out children and children on tight schedules and who knows when they'll all see each other next. Carlo's daughter spoke a clipped efficient English. She stuck to her father's side and followed his wagging hand to particular vistas. They could look over the treetops to the buildings on Fifth Avenue, the unbroken taupe facade, and then to the mansards and temple-tops at the western edge of the park, and Klara imagined the whistling doormen, the taxis hotfooting past-she loved the showy yellow coats of New York cabs.

It was one of those days of light and scale when everything you see has the full breadth of intention. She held Teresa's hand and talked about visits here and there, and they made promises and resolutions, they made mental notes. And how nice, how strange to be doubly paired like this, husband and wife, mother and daughter, and she saw that Carlo walked with a slight limp and was amused to think she'd never noticed- felt free to be amused, felt what the hell it's only marriage.

They walked behind a man with a wolfhound, a dog as grand as any in a vodka ad.

Klara laughed for no reason. Maybe she laughed for no reason and maybe because she'd noticed her husband had a limp. The others thought she was laughing in relief, laughing in the spirit of a swirling day, and it made them all smile benignly. They thought she was laughing in the aftermath of checking on planes that were late and hearing complaints from the caterer and finding the right receptacles for all the goddamn flowers. And finally just unwinding on a walk, they thought. Laughing in ragged relief. They thought they knew the mystery of living in her skin.