Americana

1

Then we came to the end of another dull and lurid year. Lights were strung across the front of every shop. Men selling chestnuts wheeled their smoky carts. In the evenings the crowds were immense and traffic built to a tidal roar. The santas of Fifth Avenue rang their little bells with an odd sad delicacy, as if sprinkling salt on some brutally spoiled piece of meat. Music came from all the stores in jingles, chants and hosannas, and from the Salvation Army bands came the martial trumpet lament of ancient Christian legions. It was a strange sound to hear in that time and place, the smack of cymbals and high-collared drums, a suggestion that children were being scolded for a bottomless sin, and it seemed to annoy people. But the girls were lovely and undismayed, shopping in every mad store, striding through those magnetic twilights like drum majorettes, tall and pink, bright packages cradled to their tender breasts. The blind man's German shepherd slept through it all.

Finally we got to Quincy's place. His wife opened the door. I introduced her to my date, B.G. Haines, and then began counting the people in the room. As I counted I was distantly aware that Quincy's wife and I were talking about India. Counting the house was a habit of mine. The question of how many people were present in a particular place seemed important to me, perhaps because the recurring news of airline disasters and military engagements always stressed the number of dead and missing; such exactness is a tickle of electricity to the numbed brain. The next most important thing to find out was the degree of hostility. This was relatively simple. All you had to do was look at the people who were looking at you as you entered. One long glance was usually enough to give you a fair reading. There were thirty-one people in the living room. Roughly three out of four were hostile.

Quincy's wife and my date smiled at each other's peace earrings. Then I took B.G. into the living room. We waited for somebody to approach us and start a conversation. It was a party and we didn't want to talk to each other. The whole point was to separate for the evening and find exciting people to talk to and then at the very end to meet again and tell each other how terrible it had been and how glad we were to be together again. This is the essence of Western civilization. But it didn't matter really because an hour later we were all bored It was one of those parties which are so boring that boredom itself soon becomes the main topic of conversation. One moves from group to group and hears the same sentence a dozen times. "It's like an Antonioni movie." But the faces were not quite as interesting.

I decided to go into the bathroom and look at myself in the mirror. Six framed graffiti were hanging on the bathroom wall. The words were set in large bold type, about 60-point, on glossy paper; they were set in a scripted typeface to look real. Three of the graffiti were blasphemous and three were obscene. The frames looked expensive. I noticed some dandruff on my shoulders. I was about to brush it off when a girl named Pru Morrison came in. She was from somewhere in Bucks County, just beginning to get caught up in the whirl of urban monotony. She stood facing me, her body flat against the closed door. She was all of eighteen and I was both too old and too young to be interested in her. Nevertheless I didn't want her to know about the dandruff.

"Thought I'd wash my hands."

"Who's that nignog?"

"Pru, I understand Peck and Peck has a special on riding crops this week. Why don't you run on over?"

"I didn't know you went out with nignogs, David."

I began to wash my hands. Pru sat on the edge of the tub and turned on the faucet just enough to cause a trickle. I wondered whether this was supposed to have a sexual connotation. Sometimes it was hard to tell about these things.

"I got a letter from my brother," she said. "He's manning an M-79 grenade launcher. He's in one of the roughest battle zones. He says every square inch of land is fiercely contested. You should read his letters, David. They're really tremendous."

The war was on television every night but we all went to the movies. Soon most of the movies began to look alike and we went into dim rooms and turned on or off, or watched others turn on or off, or burned joss sticks and listened to tapes of near silence. I brought my 16mm camera along. It was a witty toy and everyone was delighted.

"He says you can't tell the friendlies from the hostiles."

"Who?" I said.

"I hate your filthy rotten guts," Pru said.

"Quincy tells me you've got a new boyfriend, Pru. Texas A. and M. Some kind of junior cadet. Quincy tells me you met him through a computer dating system."

"That lying bastard."

"Your own cousin, Pru."

"You've got dandruff," she said. "I can see it on your jacket. Dandruff!"

Quincy was in rare form, telling a series of jokes about Polish janitors, Negro ministers, Jews in concentration camps and Italian women with hairy legs. He battered his audience with shock and insult, challenging people to object. Of course we were choking with laughter, trying to outdo each other in showing how enlightened we were. It was meant to be a liberating ethnic experience. If you were offended by such jokes in general, or sensitive to particular ones which slurred your own race or ancestry, you were not ready to be accepted into the mainstream. B.G. Haines, who was a professional model and one of the most beautiful women I have ever known, seemed to be enjoying Quincy's routine. She was one of four black people in the room-and the only American among them-and she apparently felt it was her diplomatic duty to laugh louder than anyone at Quincy's most vicious color jokes. She almost crumpled to the floor laughing and I was sure I detected a convulsive broken sob at the crest of every laugh. She needed more practice, I suppose. All evening, in fact, she had been smiling at everyone who approached and responding with grave nods to all the social insights directed her way by the scholars in the room. It was confusing. Finally I reminded her that we were supposed to be polite to her, not the reverse. Then I added a brief lecture on the responsibility she had toward her people. She speared a passing hors d'oeuvre and became elegant again.

It was almost over. A few people had already left. It was just a cocktail party and small groups were forming for dinner. In a corner of the room Quincy's wife was doing a modified cocktail version of what we referred to as her karate striptease, a dance she said she had learned on their trip to the Orient.

In a little while I would ask B.G. where she wanted to eat. She would suggest that I decide. We would go to a small French restaurant way over on the West Side, on the rim of no man's land, where the wind blows cold off the river and the low bleak tenements breathe decay; and where, at this time of year, there is a sense of total emptiness, of a place that has been abandoned before the boots of war. No one could live there but torn cats and children with transparent bellies, and those distant lights, crackling over Times Square, belong to another city in another age. B.G. would order the frogs' legs. I would try to impress her by speaking French to the waiter with the warmth and intimacy of a hero of the Resistance greeting an old comrade-in-arms. The waiter would despise me and B.G. would see through my bluff. There would be nothing to do but finish the evening with one of those chain-smoking conversations about death, youth and anxiety. I remembered that I no longer smoked.

"Where would you like to eat?" I said.

But she didn't hear me. She was talking to a man named Carter Hemmings. Although Carter was thirty years old, or two years older than myself, he was one of my subordinates at the network. I was always very conscious of the ages of men with whom I worked. What I feared most at the network were younger men who might advance to positions higher than mine. It was not enough to be the best; one had to be the youngest as well. My secretary, through some tidy espionage, had been able to learn the ages of all those men whose levels of responsibility were comparable to my own. When she told me that I was the youngest by a full year and three months, I took her to Lutèce for dinner and got her a fifteen-dollar raise. Carter Hemmings was afraid of me. For this reason, and also because it was a time for holiday compassion, for prison reprieves and military truces, I did not interrupt his conversation with B.G. Instead I got myself another drink. Only about a dozen people remained. Sullivan, in her gypsy trenchcoat, stood against a wall. It had been foolish of me to invite her; she looked tense. A Pakistani who worked at the UN was facing her. He held a drink in one hand and an ashtray in the other. Sullivan seemed content to flick her ashes to the floor. I stood directly behind him and tried to get her to laugh by making swinish faces. She slipped her right foot out of her shoe and then, with exquisite nonchalance, tucked her leg way up behind her against the wall so that it disappeared, storklike, behind the shroud of her trenchcoat. She remained that way, on one leg, a cryptic shoe moored beneath her.

Whether on purpose or not, Sullivan always made me feel totally inadequate. I was drawn to her, terribly.

"Because I am a Moslem," the Pakistani was saying, "I do not drink. And yet I feel I must maintain a glass in my hand, or the others, perforce, will think me too solemn and undeviating an individual. We Moslems are very strict in the matter of alcohol, dress and the carnal relations. Perhaps you are tired of these people and would like to go to your flat. May I offer to accompany you? My Plymouth Fury is parked directly across the road. Where do you live?"

"In the hearts of men," Sullivan said.

I moved in on them. The grandfather clock began to chime. I looked at the Pakistani and moved my lips, without speaking, to give the impression that my words were being drowned out by the clock. After eight sustained chimes it was silent and I picked from my thoughts, in mid-sentence, a meaningless travelogue of Switzerland, and continued it aloud. He looked at his glass and then at the ashtray, trying to decide which might be more safely placed on top of the other. He was in unknown territory and wanted to have at least one hand free. Then Quincy came over and began to talk about a new mega-drug he had taken the week before. And the whole scene dissolved before any of us could find out what it was all about.

I went out on the terrace. Automobiles were moving across Central Park, ticking red taillights trailing each other north and west toward the darkness and the river, headlights coming this way, soft orange, the whistling doormen. The park's lamplights were dull cold steady silver. I was wasting my life.

Everybody called her by her last name. She was a sculptor, thirty-seven years old, unmarried, a tall woman who seemed by her manner or bearing or mere presence to change a room slightly, to make it self-conscious. Sullivan had the kind of face and body which inspire endless analogies and I will try to keep them to a minimum. At parties, appearing in a plain loose dress, flat heels, no makeup, hair long and lifeless and uncombed, she was the woman who was invariably described within good-natured coveys of people as strange, different, curious, remarkable. At such parties, as Sullivan would stand listening to some desolate man describe the ritual terrors of his life, or sit alone patting the swept waist of a guitar, I would hear people speculate on her ancestry. Many seemed to think she might be an American Indian. Others thought her origins were Catalonian or Polynesian or Dead Sea. Once I heard an admiring woman describe Sullivan's face as pre-Columbian. To me, she was simply homely. (One's vengeance, of course, had its sour politics to play.) Her hands were long and grimly knuckled. Her dark eyes seemed trained to remain unamused by whatever passed before them. Her narrow nose, a fencer's nose somehow, had a tendency to flare unexpectedly, sniffing disaster in someone's commonplace remark. In all, she was a lean hard over-boned woman. Men were always telling her how very much they wanted to go to bed with her.

I went back inside. Quincy's wife was sitting on the sofa now, stirring her drink with a toothbrush. Pru Morrison had apparently left. Quincy and two women were sprawled on the floor in front of the TV set. The two women were employed at the network, as was Quincy. One of the women made notes of what he said as he watched the program. I looked around for my date. Sullivan, still roosting on her left leg, was talking to a man who looked like a quonset hut. I began swinging my arms chimpanzee-style and executing heavy little hops. At the same time I inserted my tongue over my upper teeth and gums to create a bulge in the area between nose and upper lip. I hunched way over until my hands dangled below my knees. Sullivan gave me a brief look. Then the man took her glass and went into the kitchen. I straightened up and went over.

"What happened to your ashtray?"

"He had to get back to the office," she said. "Sudden crisis on the subcontinent."

"I should be at the office myself. Everybody's bucking for my job. It's a contest to see who stays later. Guy named Reeves Chubb sleeps in his office about three nights a week. His desk is full of dirty shirts. We don't go in there for a meeting unless his secretary sprays the place with air-freshener. But I'm holding my own. I may even take a vacation one of these days."

"Skiing? All those nymphs in titty sweaters."

"I don't know," I said. "I'd like to do something more religious. Explore America in the screaming night. You know. Yin and yang in Kansas. That scene."

"Maybe I'll come with you," Sullivan said.

"Seriously?"

"I'd like to do it, David. I really would."

"I have to go out West anyway in a few months to do a documentary on the Navahos. I thought I'd take my vacation a couple of weeks before that and spend the time driving out there."

"We can take Pike with us."

"Sure," I said. "He can get somebody to run things for a while."

"We'll let him map out our route. We'll give him a battlefield commission. He'll like that."

I felt good. It was a good idea. The man came back with their drinks. We were introduced and then I went looking for B.G. Haines. The bathroom was empty. I went into the bedroom and examined the coats on the bed. Her coat wasn't among them. I looked in the closet and it wasn't there either. Then I went into the kitchen. It was empty too. I stood there awhile. Then I opened the refrigerator door and took an ice tray out of the freezer. There were four ice cubes left. I brought up phlegm from my throat and spat on each of the cubes, separately. Then I slid the tray back into the freezer and shut the refrigerator door.

I went back to the living room. Sullivan was still talking to the round gray man. I couldn't take my eyes off that empty shoe.

2

I was an extremely handsome young man. The objectivity which time slowly fashions, and the self-restraint it demolishes, enabled me to make this statement without recourse to the usual modest disclaimers which give credit to one's parents or grandparents in the manner of a sires-and-dams book. I suppose it's true enough that I inherited my mother's fine fair skin and my father's athletic physique, but the family album gives no clue to the curiously Grecian perspective of my face. Physical identity meant a great deal to me when I was twenty-eight years old. I had almost the same kind of relationship with my mirror that many of my contemporaries had with their analysts. When I began to wonder who I was, I took the simple step of lathering my face and shaving. It all became so clear, so wonderful. I was blue-eyed David Bell. Obviously my life depended on this fact.

I was exactly six feet two inches tall. My weight varied between 185 and 189. Despite my fair skin I tanned unusually well. My hair was more blond than it is now, thicker and richer; my waistline was thirty-two; my heartbeat was normal. I had a trick knee but my nose had never been broken, my feet were not ugly and I had better than average teeth. My complexion was excellent.

My secretary told me once that she had overheard Strobe Botway, one of my superiors at the network, refer to me as being "conventionally" handsome. We had a good laugh over that. Strobe was a small, barely humanoid creature who had the habit, when smoking, of slowly rotating the cigarette with his thumb, index and middle fingers, as Bogart did in an early film of his. Strobe hated me because I was taller and younger than he was, and somewhat less extraterrestrial. He talked often of the Bogart mystique, using Germanic philosophical terms which nobody understood, and he subverted many parties by quoting long stretches of dialogue from obscure Bogart films. He also had his favorite character actors, men whose names nobody could ever connect with a face, men who played prison wardens for seven consecutive movies, who were always attacking Japanese machine-gun nests with a grenade in each hand, who were drunkards, psychotic killers, crooked lawyers, or test pilots who had lost their nerve. Strobe seemed to admire the physical imperfections of people, their lisps, scar tissue, chipped teeth; in his view these added up to character, to a certain seedy magnetism. His world was not mine. I admired Humphrey Bogart but he made me nervous. His forehead bothered me; it was the forehead of a man who owes money. My own instincts led me to Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster. These were the American pyramids and they needed no underground to spread their fame. They were monumental. Their faces slashed across the screen. When they laughed or cried it was without restraint. Their chromium smiles were never ambiguous. And they rarely had time to sit down and trade cynical quips with some classy society dame or dumb flatfoot. They were men of action, running, leaping, loving with abandon. When I was a teenager I saw Burt in From Here to Eternity. He stood above Deborah Kerr on that Hawaiian beach and for the first time in my life I felt the true power of the image. Burt was like a city in which we are all living. He was that big. Within the conflux of shadow and time, there was room for all of us and I knew I must extend myself until the molecules parted and I was spliced into the image. Burt in the moonlight was a crescendo of male perfection but no less human because of it. Burt lives! I carry that image to this day, and so, I believe, do millions of others, men and women, for their separate reasons. Burt in the moonlight. It was a concept; it was the icon of a new religion. That night, after the movie, driving my father's car along the country roads, I began to wonder how real the landscape truly was, and how much of a dream is a dream.

Strobe died in the middle of a meeting. He had a heart attack at his desk. He is conventionally dead. But he would have been happy to know that his reaction to my physical traits was shared by others at the network. Hidden energies filled the air, small secret currents, as happens in every business which thrives in the heat of the image. There was a cult of the unattractive and the clever. There were points scored for ruthlessness. There were vendettas against the good-looking. One sought to avoid categories and therefore confound the formulators. For to be neither handsome nor unattractive, neither ruthless nor clever, was to be considered a hero by the bland, a nice fellow by the brilliant and the handsome, a nonentity by the clever, a homosexual by the lunatic fringe of the unattractive, a bright young man by the ruthless, a threat by the dangerously neurotic, an intimate and loyal friend by the alienated and the doomed. I did my best to keep low. I moved quietly close to walls and up and down the stairwells. A small incident confirmed the value of these tactics. It happened one day, after lunch, when I found myself crossing Madison Avenue stride for stride with Tom Maples, a young man who had joined the network at roughly the same time I had. We exchanged the usual cautious pleasantries. When we reached the sidewalk, a lovely teen-age girl wearing pink eyelashes asked me for my autograph. "I don't know who you are," she said, "but I'm sure you must be somebody."

Her smile was rather winning, and blithely I signed her fold-out map of the subway system, thinking Maples might be amused. He avoided me for the next six months. After that I did my best to be exceedingly humble and withdrawing. I felt it was essential to the well-being of others.

It's time now to run the film again. I mean that quite literally, for I still have in my possession a movie made in those years, and many tapes as well. There isn't much to do on an island this remote and I can kill (or rather redistribute) a fair amount of time by listening to the soundtrack and taking yet another look at some of the footage.

I went down the corridor to my office. My secretary was at her desk eating a jelly donut and writing a letter. Her name was Binky Lister. She was a cheerful girl, a few pounds overweight in a pleasant way. She was having an affair with my immediate superior, Weede Denney, but continued to be a trustworthy secretary, which means she lied on my behalf and defended me on all counts against charges made by the secretaries of men who feared and hated me. She followed me into the office.

"Mr. Denney wants you for a ten o'clock meeting." "What's it all about?"

"He doesn't tell me everything for chrissake." "Don't get mad, Binky. It was just an idle question." Standing there she crossed her ankles awkwardly, a sort of non-facial pout. I sat behind my enormous desk and at once imagined myself naked. Then I pushed the chair back slightly and began to revolve in a magisterial 180-degree arc, surveying my land. The walls were covered with blow-ups of still photographs from programs I had written and coordinated. My bookcase was full of bound scripts. There were plants in two corners of the room and a dozen media periodicals arranged neatly on the end table. The ashtrays were all from Jensen. I had a black leather sofa and a yellow door. Weede Denney's sofa was bright red and he had a black door.

"What else?" I said.

"A woman called. She didn't leave her name but she said to tell you the frogs' legs weren't as tasty as usual."

"My life," I said, "is a series of telephone messages which nobody understands but me. Every woman I meet thinks she's some kind of Delphic phrasemaker. My phone rings at three in the morning and it's somebody stranded at some airport calling to tell me that the animal crackers have left the zoo. The other day I got a telegram-a schizogram-from a girl on the Coast and all it said was: my tonsils went to a funeral. Do you ever send messages like that, Bink? My life is a telex from Interpol."

"If it's all so annoying, why did you smile when I told you about the frogs' legs?"

"It was good news," I said.

I went around to Weede's office. He was sitting in his restyled barber chair. For a desk he used a low round coffee table made of teak. Across the room was his three-screen color TV console. The barber chair, being an eccentricity permitted someone in Weede's position, hadn't bothered me much, but the coffee table was a bit frightening, seeming to imply that my titanic desk was all but superfluous. Weede was a master of the office arts, specializing in the tactic of reaction. Some time after I had joined the network, a subordinate of Weede's named Rob Claven decided to decorate his office with exactly fourteen of his wife's paintings. It was a fairly horrifying sight. Weede didn't say a word. But a week later a few of us, including Rob Claven, went to a meeting in Weede's office. What we saw startled us. All the paintings and old schooner prints had vanished and in their place was hung a single eight-by-twelve-inch reproduction of a detail from the Sistine Chapel. The almost bare walls were Rob Claven's death sentence. The Michelangelo was the dropping of the blade.

Finally Weede nodded me out of the doorway and directed me to the blue chair. He did this with a movement of hand or eye so close to imperceptibility that even as I sat down I could not determine how I knew that I was supposed to sit in the blue chair. Reeves Chubb was already there, smoking one of his mentholated cigars. Weede told us an anecdote that concerned golf and adultery. Within a few minutes five more people entered, one a woman, Isabel Mayer, and the meeting began.

I looked out the window. Men in yellow helmets were working on a building that was going up across the street. They weaved in and out of its hollow bones, shooting acetylene, and catwalked over shaky planks. Strangely they did not seem to move with any special caution. Perhaps they had come to terms with the fear of falling. They had probably seen others fall and despised those deaths for the relief that followed the shock, a relief that must have risen with the wind, floor to floor, up the raw spindling shanks of the building. What could you do but go quickly to a dark bar and drink three burning whiskies? At one level two men squatted, riveting, and another, a level above, jumped from plank to plank, his arms held out slightly, hands at hip length. In mid-jump, at a certain angle against the open side of the building, he had the sky behind him, a rich and early blue, and they were framed in girders, man and sky, for what seemed an impossible second. I could see the riveters and the man jumping but they could not see each other. I watched for a long time, simultaneously trying to map the office voices and make them mean something. Then another man appeared from behind a girder, a tall man whose pants did not quite reach the top of his workboots. He stood motionless for a moment, hand canted against the rim of his helmet, shielding his eyes from the sun. He seemed to be looking at us. Then he lifted his hand above his head and began to wave. He was looking right at me, waving. I didn't know what to do. The cool voices clicked, measuring, compromising, destroying, pressuring. I felt he had to be acknowledged. I didn't know why but I felt it had to be done. It was absolutely imperative; a sign had to be given.

"Look," I said. "Look at that man over there. He's waving at us."

"Look," Isabel said. "He's waving. That construction worker. Do you see him, Weede?"

Then we were all on our feet, all eight of us, crowding before the window, waving back to him. It was exhilarating. We were all waving and laughing. Weede began to shout: "We see you! We see you!" We shoved each other to get more room. Isabel was trying to climb onto the wide radiator shelf that edged out from the bottom of the window. I helped her up and she knelt there, waving with both hands now. The sky was cloudless. We were laughing uncontrollably.

We finished the meeting in high spirits. Weede suggested we all go to lunch together. Reeves Chubb begged off, saying he had a lot of work to get done, and I knew that sooner or later Weede would make him suffer for that little bit of whitewash. We went to the Gut Bucket, a nouveau speakeasy with spittoons and sawdust where you paid $4.50 for a hamburger. It was full of network people, actors and models. There were hundreds of photographs of George Raft on the wall. We sat at a circular oak table. Nobody said anything for fully three minutes. Then the waiter came and took our orders.

Across the room a very attractive couple sat drinking. Their legs touched beneath the table. I stared at the girl, trying to catch her eye. All I wanted was a brief smile, nothing more. It would have pleased me a great deal. There was an energy in me which demanded release in these small ways. To thieve one smile from that man's afternoon. I hoarded such ego-moments, remembering every one. The nod. The pretty smile. The deep glance over the tip of the cigarette. Anything more would have been too much. I didn't want to cause any pain.

"Good meeting," Weede said. "Are we agreed on that?"

The waiter brought the food before we were finished with our second drinks. The place was filled with fantastic women. Weede told us about his camera safari in Kenya. He and his wife, Kitty, had spent a month there in the autumn. He said that we all had to come up to his apartment and look at the slides some time. At the network, people were always making vague invitations. Someone you hadn't seen in months would materialize in your doorway, a seraphic image above your morning coffee. "Let's have lunch some day," he'd say, and that would be the end of him. Or one of your superiors, lifting his soapy head from a washroom basin, would squint in your direction and mumble: "When are you going to come over and have dinner with Ginny [Billie, Ellie, Sandy] and me?" Genuine invitations were usually delivered in secrecy, either in confidential memos or behind closed doors.

Weede excused himself before dessert arrived and he left in an atmosphere of unbending silence. We all knew where he was going-to the Penn-Mar Hotel on Ninth Avenue, where Binky would be waiting for him. They met every Thursday for an hour or so. After he'd gone Isabel decided to order a brandy and we joined her. She was a short mashed woman of forty-five or so. Four months earlier, at a party aboard a tugboat repeatedly circling the Statue of Liberty, she had gone around telling everyone she had dropped one of her pubic hairs into Mastoff Panofsky's scotch and soda. Everybody was afraid of her. There was no logical reason for this; her job, in some obscurely defined way, dealt with fashion coordination, and she was not competitive with anyone in the entire network. Yet we all went to shameful extremes to prove our friendship and loyalty. It may have been that we sensed a dangerous feline perversity. Competitive or not, she seemed to be a woman who might attack at any moment, making no concessions at all to the etiquette of office combat. Now she began to tell us about the graffiti in the ladies' rooms of various restaurants around town. She hit the table after each recitation. The brandies came and we talked about the winter schedule, agreeing it was first-rate. A very tall girl wearing candy-cane trousers walked across the room; her legs seemed joined directly to her shoulders. Then Reeves Chubb came in. He saw us and waved. He dropped into the vacated chair with a burst of relief that seemed worthy of some historic moment, as if he had been gouging through a rain forest for months before finding us, the lost battalion.

"Did I miss Weede?" he said. "Guess I missed him, damn it. Thought I'd come down for a quickie before tackling that China thing. What's everybody drinking? I just heard Phelps got the ax. He doesn't know about it yet so don't say anything. They'll probably wait until after the first of the year. Paul Joyner thinks he's next. His door has been closed all morning. Hallie said he's been calling everybody he's ever known since high school. But he's been saying he's next for the last eight years. I guess he figures if he says it, it won't happen. Reverse jinx. The last few weeks have been hell on wheels. I've been in the office every weekend this month. If there's no letup soon, my child bride says she's going home to mother. Did you read where MBO is using recons for the depth skeds? I ran into Jones Perkins on my way down. He said Warburton's got some kind of rare fatal blood thing. I'd love to go to Aspen for the holidays but I don't see how I can swing it. My secretary's going though. I don't know how they do it. Hallie's going to Europe again in the spring. Have you heard what Merrill did, that perfect ass? Which reminds me. Blaisdell told me he saw Chandler Bates' wife in San Juan last weekend. Hanging around El Convento with some tacky scuba type. Isabel, those are the most stunning gloves. If I don't take a vacation soon, you're going to walk into my office and see nothing there but a heap of ashes. What's everybody drinking?

We went back to the office. In the early afternoon it was always quiet, the whole place tossing slowly in tropical repose, as if the building itself swung on a miraculous hammock, and then the dimming effects of food and drink would begin to wear off and we would remember why we were there, to buzz and chime, and all would bend to their respective machines. But there was something wonderful about that time, the hour or so before we remembered. It was the time to sit on your sofa instead of behind the desk, and to call your secretary into the office and talk in soft voices about nothing in particular- films, books, water sports, travel, nothing at all. There was a certain kind of love between you then, like the love in a family which has shared so many familiar moments that not to love would be inhuman. And the office itself seemed a special place, even in its pale yellow desperate light, so much the color of old newspapers; there was the belief that you were secure here, in some emotional way, that you lived in known terrain. If you had a soul, and it had the need to be rubbed by roots and seasons, to be comforted by familiar things, then you could not walk among those desks for two thousand mornings, nor hear those volleying typewriters, without coming to believe that this was where you were safe. You knew where the legal department was, and how to get a package through the mailroom without delay, and whom to see about tax deductions, and what to do when your water carafe sprang a leak. You knew all the things you wouldn't have known if you had suddenly been placed in any other office in any other building anywhere in the world; and compared to this, how much did you know, and how safe did you feel, about, for instance, your wife? And it was at that time, before we remembered why we were there, that the office surrendered a sense of belonging, and we sat in the early afternoon, pitching gently, knowing we had just returned to the mother ship.

There was a phone ringing in the corridor. Nobody bothered to pick it up. Then another one began ringing. I walked slowly around my office, stretching as I went. I tried to remember whether Burt or Kirk had ever acted in an office film, one of those dull morality tales about power plays and timid adulteries. I noticed a memo on my desk. I knew immediately, from the brevity of the message, that it was another of the strange memos that had been appearing at irregular intervals for over a year. I picked it up and read it.

To: Tech Unit B

From: St. Augustine

And never can a man be more disastrously in death than when death itself shall be deathless.

Nobody knew who sent these memos. Investigations had been made, people questioned, but nothing came of it. Whoever sent them had to overcome two difficulties. He had to get into the multilith room and run off enough copies for our entire sub-section without being discovered. And he had to distribute the memos, one by one, to every desk and office in the area. The multilith operators had been cleared of any suspicion and so had all the mailboys. No one had ever seen these particular memos delivered; they simply appeared, either in the morning or the early afternoon. This was the first of the St. Augustines. Previous memos had borne messages from Zwingli, Lévi-Strauss, Rilke, Chekhov, Tillich, William Blake, Charles Olson and a Kiowa chief named Satanta. Naturally the person responsible for these messages became known throughout the company as the Mad Memo-Writer. I never referred to him that way because it was much too obvious a name. I called him Trotsky. There was no special reason for choosing Trotsky; it just seemed to fit. I wondered if he was someone I knew. Everybody seemed to think he was probably a small grotesque man who had suffered many disappointments in life, who despised the vast impersonal structure of the network and who was employed in our forwarding department, the traditional repository for all sex offenders, mutants and vegetarians. They said he was most likely a foreigner who lived in a rooming house in Red Hook; he spent his nights reading an eight-volume treatise on abnormal psychology, in small type, and he told his grocer he had been a Talmudic scholar in the old country. This was the consensus and maybe it had a certain logic. But I found more satisfaction in believing that Trotsky was one of our top executives. He made eighty thousand dollars a year and stole paper clips from the office.

I sat at my desk and with a ballpoint pen traced the outline of my left hand on a blank piece of note paper. Then I called Sullivan but she didn't answer the phone. I walked around the office some more and looked out into the corridor. Many of the girls were back at work, unhooding their typewriters and storing squalid Kleenex in the bottom drawers of their desks where it would rest with old love letters, rag dolls, and pornographic books their bosses had given them in the spirit of the new liberalism, and also to see if anything would happen. I closed the door. Then I unzipped my pants and took out my cock. I walked around the office like that for a while. It felt good. I put it back and then filed Trotsky's memo in the folder that held all of his other work as well as some poems I had written in the office from time to time and some schizo-grams from girls I knew. (hello from the scenic coast of nebraska.) I opened the door. Binky was at her desk. She took a sandwich and a paper container out of a white bag. The sandwich, when she unwrapped it, looked wet and gummy. There was something very touching about that moment.

"Welcome back to the big rock candy mountain."

"Hi," she said. "I spent two solid hours at goddamn Saks without buying a thing. And now I'm about to eat a Coca-Cola sandwich. Merry Christmas."

"Trotsky struck again."

"I saw it," she said. "I still think it's you."

She knew that would flatter me. Often she said things that seemed intended to do me some good. I never knew why. In many ways Binky was a good friend to me and I used to wonder what would happen if I tried, in the jargon of the day, to complicate our relationship. Once, working late in the office, she removed her shoes while taking dictation. The sight of a woman taking off her shoes has always stirred me, and I kissed her. That was all, a kiss between paragraphs, but maybe it wasn't mere tenderness which made me do it, nor a desire to challenge the blandness of our attachment. Maybe it was just another of my ego-moments. It was only several days before that I had learned about Binky and Weede.

"Come on in," I said.

She brought her lunch with her and we sat on the sofa.

"Phelps Lawrence just got bounced," she said.

"I heard."

"There's a rumor that Joyner's next."

"Joyner started it," I said. "It's part of his survival kit. If he's not careful it's going to blow up in his face one of these days."

"Jody thinks it's the beginning of a purge. There's been a rash of confidential memos. She thinks Stennis might be forced to resign. But keep it quiet. She made me promise not to breathe a word."

"I've noticed all the closed doors. Sometimes I think they close their doors just to frighten us. Everybody knows closed doors mean secret discussions and secret discussions mean trouble. But maybe they're in there watching guitar lessons on Channel 31."

"Grove Palmer is getting a divorce," Binky said.

Suddenly I realized that I hadn't brushed my teeth after lunch. I kept some toothpaste and a toothbrush in my office and always brushed my teeth after a lunch that included a few drinks. The washroom after lunch was always full of men brushing their teeth and gargling with mouth wash. There were times when I thought all of us at the network existed only on videotape. Our words and actions seemed to have a disturbingly elapsed quality. We had said and done all these things before and they had been frozen for a time, rolled up in little laboratory trays to await broadcast and rebroadcast when the proper time-slots became available. And there was the feeling that somebody's deadly pinky might nudge a button and we would all be erased forever. Those moments in the washroom, with a dozen men sawing away at their teeth, were perhaps the worst times of all. We seemed to be no more than electronic signals and we moved through time and space with the stutter and shadowed insanity of a TV commercial.

"What's happening with your Navaho project?" Binky said.

"Quincy keeps jamming up the works. I'm going to talk to Weede and see if I can get to work on it alone. But don't mention it to anybody."

"David," she said.

"What?"

"They may drop 'Soliloquy.' '

"Are you sure?"

"The person who told me said the crappy sponsor wasn't interested in renewing."

"Why not?"

"The person didn't say."

"There's always the Navahos," I said.

"David, I think it's the third or fourth best show on TV."

"Soliloquy" was a series I had worked out on my own. It was the first major thing I had done since joining Weede's group-a small, elite and experimental unit put together for the purpose of developing new concepts and techniques. The rest of the network despised us because of our relative freedom and because of the industry prizes we had won for our warcasts, which were done independently of the news division. "Soliloquy" had won nothing. Each show consisted, very simply, of an individual appearing before the camera for an hour and telling his life story. I wanted to ask her what else Weede had said about the series. But that wouldn't have been fair. She had already taken a chance in telling me as much as she had. Just then Weede went by my office, moving swiftly, head down, body tilted forward as if on skis. He always came back to the office at least half an hour after Binky on Thursday afternoons; this maneuver, obviously, was an attempt to avoid suspicion. I liked to think that he walked around the block five times during that half-hour, or stood in a phone booth in the lobby and pretended he was talking to someone, moving his lips over the mouthpiece, perhaps actually speaking, carrying on a normal businesslike conversation with the dial tone. And he always walked by my office very quickly, then tried to avoid me for the rest of the day. He must have possessed an extraordinarily complex sense of guilt. I think he was afraid of me on those Thursdays. But on Friday morning he would come looking for me, breathing smoke and vengeance, as if I were the engineer of his guilt.

Binky went back to her desk. I loosened my tie and rolled up my sleeves. I had managed to deceive myself into believing that people would be deceived into believing that a man so untidy (in an atmosphere so methodically spruce) must be driving himself mercilessly. The phone rang. It was Wendy Judd, a girl I had dated in college. She was living in New York now, having traveled for a year right after she divorced her husband, one of the top production people at either Paramount or Metro.

"I'm dying, David."

"Don't generalize, Wendy."

"New York is vicious. Listen, before I forget, can you come to a dinner party tomorrow night? Come alone. You're the only one who can save me."

"You know I go bowling with the fellas on Friday night, Wendy."

"David, please. This is no time for jokes."

"Our team is called the Steamrollers. We play the Silver Jets for the all-league title tomorrow. Winner gets a cup with a naked Greek bowling ace embossed on the side."

"Come early," she said. "You can help me toss the salad. We'll talk over old times."

"There are no old times, Wendy. The tapes have been accidentally destroyed."

"Eightish," she said, and hung up.

Outside, the girls were hammering at their little oval keys.

I went for a walk. Everybody was busy. All the phones seemed to be ringing. Some of the girls talked to themselves while typing, muttering shit whenever they made a mistake. I went around to the supply area. The cabinets were the same color as troops in the field. Hallie Lewin was in there, leaning over a bottom drawer. There is no place in the world more sexually exciting than a large office. It is like a fantasy of some elaborate woman-maze; wherever you go, around corners, into cubicles, up or down the stairwells, you are greeted by an almost lewd tableau. There are women standing, sitting, kneeling, crouching, all in attitudes that seem designed to stun you. It is like a dream of jubilant gardens in which every tree contains a milky nymph. Hallie saw me and smiled.

"I heard Reeves Chubb got canned," I said.

"Really? I had no idea he was in trouble."

"Don't breathe a word."

"Of course not."

"Hallie, you've got the sweetest little ass I've ever seen."

"Why thank you."

"Not a word about Reeves now."

"I promise," she said.

I went around toward Weede Denney's office. On the way I saw Dickie Slater, the sixty-five-year-old mailboy, standing behind Jody Moore's desk rubbing his groin. When he saw me he grinned, man to man, and kept rubbing. Jody was on the phone, speaking Portuguese for some reason. I turned a corner and saw James T. Rice running down a hallway at top speed. I had no idea what I wanted to say to Weede. I was upset about the series being dropped and I felt venomous. In similar situations I usually reacted as a child might react after he has been disappointed or rebuked, with a child's petty genius for reprisal. I told bizarre and pointless lies. I broke my typewriter. I stole things from the office. I wrote snake-hissing memos to my subordinates. Once, after an idea of mine had been criticized by a senior vice-president named Livingston, I went back to my office, blew my nose several times, and that night sneaked up to Livingston's office and put the soiled handkerchief in the top drawer of his desk.

Weede was standing in the middle of his office, deep in thought, one hand absently grooming his bald head. He looked at me carefully.

"Can't talk to you now, Dave; wires are burning up; see you first thing in the morning."

On the way back to my office I stopped at Binky's desk to talk some more but she looked busy. I went inside and dialed Sullivan's number again. She was there.

"Utah," I said.

"Hello, David."

"Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, Arizona."

"I didn't see you leave last night. You abandoned me to all those keening necrophiles."

"Steamboat Springs, the Sawtooth Mountains, Big Timber, Aztec, Durango, Spanish Fork, Monument Valley."

"I hear America singing," she said, but not as if she meant it.

"I know a guy with a camp trailer. He's living in Maine somewhere. We can pick him up and then all head west in the camper.

"All I need is an hour's notice."

"Blasting through New Mexico in the velvet dawn."

"I'm late for an appointment," Sullivan said.

I tried to get some work done. It was dark now and I went to the window. Looking south, from as high as we were, I could see the stacked lights extending almost the entire length of Manhattan, and that delicate gridiron tracery in the streets. I opened the window slightly. The whole city was roaring. In winter, when the darkness always comes before you expect it and all those lights begin to pinch through the stale mist, New York becomes a gigantic wedding cake. You board the singing elevator and drop an eighth of a mile in ten seconds flat. Your ears hum as you are decompressed. It is an almost frighteningly impersonal process and yet something of this kind seems necessary to translate you from the image to what is actually impaled on that dainty fork.

I strolled around to Carter Hemmings' office. He was at his desk, smelling the nicotine on his fingers. When he saw me he tried to neutralize the flow of panic by standing up, absurdly, and spreading his arms wide, an Argentinian beef baron welcoming a generalissimo to his villa.

"Hey Dave," he said. "What's happening, buddy?"

"I understand Mars Tyler got the sack," I said.

"No kidding. No kidding. Jesus."

"There's a big purge on. The tumbrels are clattering through the streets."

"Sit down," he said. "I'll get Penny to order some coffee."

"Can't spare the time, Carter. All the circuits are overloaded. How's that laser beam project shaping up? They're starting to put pressure."

"I'm trying to hammer it into workable form, Dave."

"Have a good time with B.G. last night?"

"I didn't know you knew her, Dave."

"Slightly," I said.

"Beautiful girl. But we didn't really hit it off. Dinner. Then I took her home."

"Weede was talking about you during lunch today. He's a curious man, Weede. Sometimes given to rash judgments. Better get cracking on that laser beam thing. I'll be in early tomorrow to take a look at it. Weede'll be in early tomorrow too. We're all coming in very early tomorrow. Have a nice evening, Carter. Say hello to your wife for me."

"Dave, I'm not married."

I went back to my office. Binky was in there trying to straighten out my files. It was almost time to leave. I fixed my tie and buttoned my shirtcuffs. In the corridor all the phones were ringing. I wondered who Trotsky was.

3

People leaned into the traffic, scouting for cabs. Thousands of men hurried toward Grand Central, moving in broken strides, dodging, marching down deep corridors, emptying into chambers, the warm trains waiting, long darkness, newsprint on every finger, the fight against sleep. I liked to walk home from the office because it made me feel virtuous.

The crowds didn't begin to thin out until I got south of Forty-second Street, and traffic was bad all the way. Below Forty-second, people were able to choose their own pace and yet here the faces seemed gray and stricken, the bodies surreptitious in the scrawls of their coats, and it occurred to me that perhaps in this city the crowd was essential to the individual; without it, he had nothing against which to scrape his anger, no echo for grief, and not the slightest proof that there were others more lonely than he. It was just a passing thought. I got home, turned on the TV, undressed, and got in the shower.

I was living then in an apartment overlooking Gramercy Park. My ex-wife lived in the same building. The arrangement wasn't as strange as it may sound-it wasn't even an arrangement. While married we had lived in a larger apartment on the other side of the park. From a friend I learned of the vacancy across the way and it seemed sensible to move in since my wife had just left me and there was no need for such a large place and no point in paying the higher rent. She lived in the Village for a while, taking ballet lessons, courses at the New School, instructions in macrobiotic nutrition; she also joined a film society and began going to an analyst. She invited me down to dinner one evening and said finally, over coffee, that her new life wasn't working out too well. The activities were not very involving and her gentlemen friends seemed able to discuss nothing more important than their season tickets to hockey games, football games and the Philharmonic. She missed Gramercy Park, she said; it was one of the last civilized spots in an ever-darkening city. Some time later an apartment became available in my building. I told her about it and she took it sight unseen.

She was a pretty girl, blond, with small breasts and a cheerleader's bounce. Meredith Walker was her name. We had met at a country club dance in Old Holly, the Westchester town where I was raised. I was nineteen then, home from college for summer vacation. Merry had been living in the town for only a few months. Her father was an Air Force major who had been assigned to head an ROTC detachment at a small college nearby. She said the family had been moving from place to place all her life. She was eighteen and didn't know what it was to have a home. I can remember that night well, a perfect August night with a warm wind raking the tops of the big oaks, with lawn sprinklers hissing and the silver couples standing near the trees, the men in white dinner jackets and their girls in chiffon and silk, each couple sculpted in the dim light, almost motionless, and the distances between them absolutely right so that the whole scene obeyed an abstract calculus of perspective and tone, as if arranged for the whim of a camera. A girl walked across the grass, then quickly whirled, shrieking, as the spray from a lawn sprinkler touched her arm. The laughter of her friends on the warm night was like a knife-chime on delicate glass and it seemed to take a long time to reach us. Merry and I were standing on the veranda. There were fireflies and music, a lazy samba, a foxtrot. Merry looked beautiful. We talked quietly and held hands. Once again, as on so many occasions in my life, I was stirred by the power of the image.

We went to my car and drove to the amusement park at Rye. There, in tuxedo and evening dress, we rode the dragon coaster four times and then returned to the country club. We danced for a while. I experienced a pleasant sense of self-awareness on behalf of both of us. We were being examined by the older couples, our parents' generation, and it was clear from their glances and the tone of their whispered remarks that we were regarded as something special. Later we met each other's parents and then her parents met my parents in one of those slapstick ballets of mistimed lunges, delayed handshakes and profound eye-averting silences. My mother ended the last of these silences by telling us about the dances she had attended in Virginia as a very young lady. We all smiled and looked over her shoulder, trying to spot the Rappahannock. I ladled out two glasses of punch and took Merry back out on the veranda. She told me about some of the places in which she had lived and about the unreal nature of life on a military base; it was life without a future tense, she said, and there was always the feeling that you would wake up one morning and find that everyone had left except the women and children. She was happy that her father was now assigned to a college and she hoped they would be able to stay in Old Holly for a few years at least. I was getting bored. In the past, she said, the closer they lived to military base the more difficult it had been for her mother to stop drinking. But things were better now and Merry was fond of Westchester. She said it had substance.

I went back to school in southern California. After Christmas, Merry went to London for an extended visit. She stayed with a cousin, Edwina, and her husband, Charles, who was English. She loved London rain or shine; she loved the parks, the theater, the pubs, the policemen's hats. Her letters were brisk and full of detail-names, numbers and historical dates. Americans cannot keep track of the centuries. Those were the days when I used to wonder who the Pre-Raphaelites were, when did Galileo live, was it Keats or Shelley who drowned. Meredith's letters gave me a bearing on the English scene at least and I used to study them diligently, memorizing all the kings and their dates, all the hilarious battles, as if her next letter might include a tricky little quiz. Such study was one of the duties of earnest young love; besides, in an odd statistical way her letters were charming, not very different from the epitaphs in Westminster Abbey. My own letters were long, poetic and unpunctuated, well stocked with sexual imagery. I felt that the six-thousand-mile distance between us permitted me some license. I enjoyed printing the words AIR MAIL in bold block letters with my Venus 4B drawing pencil.

The campus was at the edge of the desert. There was an artificial lake where I went swimming almost every evening, often in the company of Wendy Judd. In the morning I did push-ups before going to class. There weren't many classes. Leighton Gage was a small, expensive and very modern liberal arts college. (We had theology of despair in a palm grove.) In the afternoon I drank Coke and wrote poetry. I thought about Meredith a lot, her flawless nose and perfect teeth. Using fellow students as actors, I made a thirty-minute film for my junior thesis. It was about a man who goes into the desert and buries himself in the sand up to his neck. A bunch of Mexicans come along and sit in a circle around his head. My film instructor, Simmons St. Jean, said it was the most pretentious movie he had ever seen, but that pretentiousness wasn't necessarily bad.

My mother died in April and that summer Merry and I were married in the Episcopal church in Old Holly. I tried to stop smoking. We went back to Leighton Gage together for my senior year. I wanted only to relax, to learn to read the mind and body of my mate, to keep away from Wendy Judd, who continued to hunger after my shadow, my image, the thrust and danger of my car. I wanted to free myself from that montage of speed, guns, torture, rape, orgy and consumer packaging which constitutes the vision of sex in America.

Merry's tight little body unclenched and I swam in and out with joy. Nights in the Sugar Bowl. Faint pale petal-scent of the Pasadena Rose Parade. We spent plenty of time together. During senior year at Leighton Gage it was necessary only to pay the tuition and register. You went to a few classes every week, if you wanted to, and the rest of the time was devoted to researching your major interest. Merry and I explored the desert and I did a lot of filming. I was using a Beaulieu 8mm camera then, the S2008 to be exact, with non-detachable pistol grip, automatic exposure control, an Angenieux zoom lens- all in all, a clever piece of optical mechanics that had set my father back almost seven hundred dollars. The possibilities of film seemed unlimited. Through the camera lens passed the light of a woman's body. I felt I could do things never done before. A hawk glanced off the sun and I plucked it out of space and placed it in the new era, free of history and death. I made a forty-five-minute film about underwear. The college gave all student filmmakers in senior year the use of its sound equipment and this was my first talkie. Merry was in the film. She and five of my friends, male and female, sat around my room in their underwear and talked about the different kinds of underwear they had worn since childhood. Simmons St. Jean said it was refreshing but stupid.

After I graduated we returned to Old Holly and moved in temporarily with my father. It occurred to me that I had fifty more years to live on the earth and not the slightest idea how I would spend them. My father took care of that. After a one-week period of grace, during which I was supposed to be resting up from my four study-crammed years at college, he began telephoning business associates. My father was an account supervisor in a large advertising agency. He was directly responsible for twenty-two million dollars in billings. It took him only till Wednesday. He came home and gave me a choice of three jobs, two in advertising agencies, where I would start either in the training program or as a sort of micro-assistant in the broadcasting department, and one at the network, where I would have to start in the mailroom. I took the network. I felt it was important to avoid following too closely in his footsteps. Merry agreed. Independence is everything, she said, especially when you're just starting out in life.

Merry and I took the large apartment on Gramercy Park. My job paid very little and I had to borrow from my father. But I began to come along, getting out of the mailroom in only four months, which they told me was close to the record. We had a good time in New York that first year. We made quite a few friends and we were a popular couple. Merry got a secretarial job and we left for work together in the morning and then met in the lobby of her building every evening so that we could go home together. We told each other everything that had happened to us during the day, although there wasn't much to tell. On Sunday afternoons some friends would come over and we would stir up a huge creamy bowl of the drink-dessert we had concocted, the Spontaneous Abortion- gin, vodka, scotch, rye, brandy and a half gallon of cherry vanilla ice cream. Merry clipped recipes from the ladies' magazines and we would cook together in the evening; when we ended up with something charred and inedible, which was fairly often, we would go laughing around the corner for a hamburger and chocolate shake. In some deep shaft in my being a black machine began to tick. Merry bought some striking clothes with the help of an allowance her father gave her. She had the right figure for the kind of condensed clothing everybody was wearing then. We were always very conscious of what we wore and there were no rules to worry about. One way or another, everything we wore looked great. We saw all the new movies and went to a lot of parties. We seemed to believe that everything we did was the most wonderful thing that had ever been done. We wore certain clothes to certain movies. Grays for black and white. Boots, leather, chino, flag shirts and the like (our pre-acid gear) for Technicolor. Dressing, we matched each unmatching item with great care and spent several minutes assuring each other that we were ready for the waiting line at Cinema I. Each movie we saw was the greatest. Merry would talk about it constantly for two days and then forget it forever. There was no time for remembering things because something else was always coming along- another great movie, a great new pub or restaurant, a great new men's shop, boutique, ski area, beach house or rock group. I took an army physical and edged out a narrow escape thanks to my trick knee and a chronic cyst at the base of my spine. The action was really just beginning then and they were fairly selective about the young men they tapped for immortality.

Soon I was no longer content merely to make love to my wife. I had to seduce her first. These seductions often took their inspiration from cinema. I liked to get rough with her. I liked to be silent for long periods. The movies were giving difficult meanings to some of the private moments of my life.

Meredith was strongly influenced by British films of the period. She cultivated a sort of corporate unpredictability. Walking with me on the street she would suddenly release her hand from mine and skip away into some fantasy sequence. When we shopped together she stole things, one or two small useless items, hiding them in her sweater and making jokes about looking pregnant. At the Metropolitan Museum she told a guard I had tried to molest her in the Egyptian Tomb; this was the first of many such quaint harassments of people in minor positions of authority. Once we saw an old lady in Central Park selling flowers. Merry asked me to buy two dozen mums and then led me to the small bridge at the southeast end of the park. We stood on the bridge and dropped the flowers in the lake, one by one, as the ducks circled in the violet haze. It was all there but the soundtrack and I could imagine a series of cuts and slow dissolves working in Merry's mind.

At work I dressed in the establishment manner, which, granted, was not without a touch of color, the establishment having Learned that every color is essentially gray as long as everyone is wearing it. So I did not hesitate to show up for work in an orange tie, but never more orange than the orange others wore.

Once out of the mailroom, I began to learn more about fear. As soon as fear begins to ascend, anatomically, from the pit of the stomach to the throat and brain, from fear of violence to the more nameless kind, you come to believe you are part of a horrible experiment. I learned to distrust those superiors who encouraged independent thinking. When you gave it to them, they returned it in the form of terror, for they knew that ideas, only that, could hasten their obsolescence. Management asked for new ideas all the time; memos circulated down the echelons, requesting bold and challenging concepts. But I learned that new ideas could finish you unless you wrapped them in a plastic bag. I learned that most of the secretaries were more intelligent than most of the executives and that the executive secretaries were to be feared more than anyone. I learned what closed doors meant and that friendship was not negotiable currency and how important it was to lie even when there was no need to lie. Words and meanings were at odds. Words did not say what was being said nor even its reverse. I learned to speak a new language and soon mastered the special elements of that tongue.

In a curious way I liked my job-in the beginning, at least. It made me think and see as I had never done before. In those early days I visualized my mind as a dark room with many doors. I functioned best with several doors open. Sometimes I opened more doors, let in more light, risked the truth. If anyone seemed to perceive a distant threat in my remarks or actions, I closed all the doors but one. That was the safest position. But usually I kept three or four doors open. The image of this room was often with me. When I spoke at a meeting I could see the doors opening and closing in my mind and soon I arrived at the point where I could regulate the ebb and flow of light with absolute precision. I got a raise and then another. I became involved in the actual production of shows. Meanwhile, life with Merry went on the same way, a blend of jump-cuts and soft-focus tenderness. But something else edged in, a whisper of desperation. I'd come home late and find her sitting on the floor wearing a sombrero and trying to write a haiku. It pained me to learn that she did these things even when she was alone. She bought many funny hats during this period and wore them everywhere-sombreros, jockey caps, straw boaters, a wool seaman's hat, a wide-brimmed mata-hari, a fez, a baseball cap. The black machine ticked.

"Let's do something mad tonight," Merry would say.

But there was nothing left to do. We tried to rediscover the spontaneous joy of that roller coaster ride. We even went back there once, a pair of veterans returning to the Normandy beaches, but it rained that night and we sat in the car in the parking lot and watched the high white lights go out. Feeling it was a time for final gestures, for the ultimate convolution, I made clumsy love to her in the front seat. The motor was running, wipers working, radio caught in a buzz between stations, and we bumped through all these sounds as through an interstellar pocket in deepest space.

The first girl was Jennifer Fine. I realize there is nothing more dull than another man's chronicle of infidelity and in many ways that first affair of mine was a dullard's dream; it differed from most only because I was not a commuter and did not have to adapt my orgasms to the disciplines of a train schedule. Yet a few words must be said here about Jennifer Fine if only to show what happens to people like myself when they are given something like love and asked for nothing in return but a recognition of the other's need for some elemental form of gentleness. She was a dark girl with large brown eyes. She worked in the research department of the network. We had met there when I was a mailboy, and she had seemed lonely and interesting. Once I realized that Merry and I could not remember our lines, I looked up Jennifer's extension in the network directory. She was the one, I decided, who would guide me into the vortex of the cliche.

We met for a drink in one of those oxblood pubs on the East Side where the laughter and tinkling chatter seemed canned, subject to volume control. I established a format by showing up five minutes late, knowing that Jennifer would arrive precisely on time; that was the kind of girl she was. We ordered drinks and talked cheerfully for a few minutes, mostly about network people we both hated. Then we lapsed into a massive silence as if suddenly realizing that all possible communication between us had been exhausted in ten routine sentences. I knew I was going to like Jennifer. I liked the way she held to her silence. In that movie-set atmosphere she seemed a librarian-mystic. Her face was thin and not quite pretty (but at the same time almost beautiful) and it was partly concealed by her long hair; purposely, I thought, as if the face sought refuge from time to time. Her hands could not keep still and there was evidence of fingernail-biting. She looked into the empty ashtray. I put my hand beneath her chin and raised her head, soft eyes shifting, two spoonfuls of tea. It wasn't long before I was discussing how important it was to take certain precautions. I was a married man, after all, and we might easily be seen by someone from the office. I outlined a series of procedural measures covering lunch, drinks, dinner, inter-office phone calls, office parties and so forth. I did this not because I really cared whether someone might find out but because intensity and suspense are fundamental to the maintenance of a successful affair.

The following evening, once more arriving separately, we met for dinner in an Indian restaurant on West Forty-ninth Street. A spectacular woman wearing a sari took our order.

Jennifer and I had a long talk. She was afraid of everything- subways, strangers, high buildings, the number nine, plastic, smoke, airplanes, snow, pigeons, insects, parties, cabdrivers, elevators, suburbs, Bergman films, Spanish cuisine, men in Gucci loafers. After dinner we walked through Central Park, emerging in the West Eighties, and headed toward her building, a summer evening, bald men sitting on orange crates with handkerchiefs on their heads. Two squad cars and an ambulance were parked halfway down the block. It was still light. Children played and a dog moved across the shadow of an old man's cane. We came to her building and went upstairs, saying nothing, both feeling the tension generated by the sound of our footsteps on the dark staircase. It was a small neat apartment. The bathroom smelled of lemon and mint. When I came out she fled to the kitchen alcove to make drinks. I sat on the sofa bed and we talked across the room, balancing the celebrated dangers of the West Side against its lower rents. So this is the extramarital life, I thought.

"I'm making you a gin and tonic. It's too late to protest."

"Nice apartment," I said.

"Do you think it's too conventional?"

"It's so conventional it transcends convention. It's like a premature artform. A room in a museum a hundred years from now. The American Wing."

"I really should get an air conditioner."

"They're expensive, aren't they? We had to pay a small fortune for ours."

"It's terrible, isn't it?"

"Mind if I take off my jacket?"

"Of course not," she said.

"There, that's better. Maybe I can open that window a bit more."

"It's stuck. It's been stuck ever since I moved in."

"How long have you been living here, Jennifer?"

"It'll be two years in October."

"Is this a rent-controlled building?"

"David, before you make love to me, promise you'll call me again."

Girls like Jennifer carry with them through their lifetimes an empty cup into which a man must pour his willingness to be responsible. They ask only that, to be taken seriously. I left her apartment at two in the morning and returned three evenings later. After several months I began to realize how much I meant to her. Of course, like all filmgoers and dabblers in adultery, all students of the cliche, we had discussed the importance of keeping our relationship at a low emotional level. But all this time I had been trying, almost desperately, to make her fall in love with me. Once I was sure she had, I began my retreat. I saw her less often and when we were together I was moody and evasive. Jennifer knew what was happening and it hurt her deeply; she was not just another of those neurotic rag dolls, so indigenous to New York, who fed on rejection as if it were a nipple. In bed I was treacherous, playing private games, teasing along the edge of fetish and violence. One night, the next to last, I swung off her, got out of bed, turned on the radio, reached for a pack of cigarettes and lit one quickly-all the things, it seemed, I had been looking forward to while we were making love. Then I put on my tapered shorts and sat in an armchair.

"Do you have to leave right away?" she said. There was no tragedy in her voice and no plea; she simply wanted to know, to confirm.

"She's been complaining about all the late nights. She thinks they're working me too hard."

"Before I forget, next Tuesday is off, David. My sister is getting married and we have to rehearse. I go to Brooklyn for weddings and funerals. Is Wednesday all right?"

"I guess so. I'll have to let you know. I saw you on Park Avenue today."

"When?"

"Lunchtime. We walked right by each other."

"Why didn't you stop me?"

"You weren't alone," I said.

"David, that was my future brother-in-law. And this is the third or fourth time you've mentioned something like this. You know I'm not seeing anyone."

I put out the light. Then I turned up the volume on the radio. Sound filled the room, huge noise, bass and drums booming out of the speaker, beating and scratching, then the sting of a fierce needling trumpet. In the darkness that trumpet had a deeper beauty, filling space, leaving time behind, a difficult sound departing and returning, and I did not feel I was in a room with four walls. A note hung at eye level, dim speck on the railroad horizon, then vanished into a long silence shaded by the revving bass. I went to the bed and sat there, still smoking, legs draped over her belly, crosswise, my back to the wall. A boyfriend for Jennifer. What a gift-wrapped piece of luck he would have been for me. Whatever guilt I felt was set around a picture of Jennifer, alone and wounded, and had nothing to do with my stock betrayal of Meredith. To Jennifer I remained unrevealed. I refused to give her any sense of myself and I can only guess the reason, that I needed every ego-scrap, that I feared my own disappearance. To say I took advantage of her love would be much too mild an indictment. What I did was worse. I did not take advantage of it; I did not even acknowledge its existence. I pretended to believe that I was just another season in her life, in no way exceptional; there had been others and there were surely more to come the moment I went my way. Then her body shifted beneath me, hunting a beat, and the four walls returned. I had an early meeting the next day.

"It's getting to be time," I said.

"David."

"It's getting to be time to go. Time to wrap it up, folks. Be back tomorrow night on behalf of the Bell System-communications for home, industry, and four-fifths of the universe-with another installment of whatever it is we've been doing here, brought to you courtesy of the first family of telephones and electronics since time began and life crawled forth upon the land where it has remained ever since with an asterisk for the Ice Age. What time is it? It must be after two."

"Fascist," she whispered, once, twice, again, a clear brilliant fury in her calm voice.

I saw her alone one more time. I wanted to make perfect love to her. A final touch. But she would not even let me see her home. All she wanted was a book I had borrowed.

There were several other women, girls, during my affair with Jennifer, and there were many afterward. It was simpler with them and at times I was even more the fascist but they let me get away with it, either because they had no choice or because they liked it that way. I was very fond of Jennifer. She is the only one who remains more than a memory of slide-out beds, indifferent dawn departures and that hellish feeling of having left something important behind me in one of those indistinguishable rooms.

Meredith found out of course; they always find out. It brought us closer together. I came home late one night. She was in our yellow bed, sitting up like a daisy.

"I've discussed it with mother," she said. "I'm leaving you."

"Will you go back to Old Holly?"

"Dad has been re-assigned. They're going to Germany. For a while I thought I might go with them. But I've decided to stay in New York."

"Maybe I'll go with them," I said, a remark that was supposed to imply that I liked her parents, that I wanted to hide my shame in a foreign country, that I had not lost my sense of humor.

"There's some cold lamb in the fridge."

(What a game kid, I thought.)

"No thanks. Quincy and I took a break around ten and had some dinner at Asia Minor, that place I told you about where Walter Faye punched the waiter. Walter Faye's the one with the wife who's from Brazil who invited us out to Greenwich that weekend we couldn't go."

"And then you both went back to work until half an hour ago. You and Quincy. All alone up there in that big shiny building. Remember how you used to tell me what a strange feeling it was to be there at two in the morning? The only one in the whole building. You said you felt like an astronaut ready to blast off. Why bother sticking to the story at this late date?"

"It's hard to admit things to you, Merry," I said. "I don't mean to sound condescending but it's like explaining death to a child."

"Thank you," she said.

"You look all scrubbed and fresh. You really do. Terrific."

"I think I'd like to go to sleep now."

"Can we still be friends?" I said.

She went to Mexico for the divorce. I took her out to the airport and met her when she returned. I was twenty-three and she was twenty-two.

I stepped out of the shower. I could hear the weather report on TV, which made me think of a friend of mine, Warren Beasley, who used to be a weatherman. I dried myself, hitched the bath towel around my waist, went to the phone and could not remember who I wanted to call. I looked at the TV screen for a moment and then found myself in a chair about a foot away from the set, watching intently. I could not tell what was happening on the screen and it didn't seem to matter. Sitting that close all I could perceive was that meshed effect, those stormy motes, but it drew me in and held me as if I were an integral part of the set, my molecules mating with those millions of dots. I sat that way for half an hour or so. Then a commercial came on, one I had seen and heard dozens of times, and I got up quickly and walked around the room, feeling numb and sleazy, the way an awakening man feels when he realizes he passed out drunk on his host's sofa the night before. I went over to the coffee table and checked my mail. There were some bills and five or six Christmas cards. One was from a girl in Denver; she had written: when YOU FEAR ENOUGH TO FEND THE FURRY BEAST. Another was from my sister Jane, who was living in Jacksonville with her husband, Big Bob Davidson, and their three children. It wasn't a Christmas card in the usual sense; it was closer to a family newsletter, the kind Jane sent every year at this time. It was mimeographed on a standard piece of bond paper; there was a magazine cutout of a sprig of holly pasted to the top of the page.

Merry Christmas from Florida,

As I sit down to fill you in on another year in the Davidsons' busy life, I can't help but wonder if we haven't all been shortchanged. There simply couldn't have been 365 days to this year.

To start with, we adore Florida. We try to take full advantage of the sun, the beach and the mild climate. This casual, informal living suits we Northerners just fine. With all the sunshine favoring our fair city, the little people (Vaughn, 6; Blair, 4; Sue Ann, 2) are free from colds and sore throats all year round.

In April, we made a whirlwind trip to Big Bob's beloved Philadelphia where we spent a zany day with the whole Davidson clan gathered to greet their wandering hero. What a memorable day that reunion was, particularly for Bob, who, I feel compelled to report, had more than his share of the ample liquid refreshment on hand. Then we scooted up to Old Holly, in Westchester County, where we visited with my Dad, who is still "knocking them dead" on Madison Avenue, and my dear "little" brother David. It was such a pleasant visit, but also sad, with the memory of Mother still lingering like notes from a far-off flute in that big old house. But David cheered us up with a gala day in the city, capped by a visit to his office in midtown Manhattan. We met many of his associates and even one or two TV "celebs." Bob was mighty impressed!

Summer was a fun time in Jax, but also hectic. We had quite a few cookouts on our modest patio and I drove the "three musketeers" over to the beach almost every day. We had a hurricane in September with many killed. Then it was time for Vaughn to go into first grade. Our little "scholar" combed his hair and put on a brand new suit for the occasion. However, just last week Bob had to rush him to the hospital for surgery to correct some kind of congenital problem. I hope I will have good tidings on this subject next year at this time.

Bob and the children join me in wishing everyone a joyous Christmas and a very prosperous New Year.

Her signature, Jane Davidson, was at the bottom. At my father's house in Old Holly, where they spent most of their visit, they never got out of their tennis sneakers and khaki shorts. This was a new Jane to me, this long-striding American man-woman. When we all lived together in Old Holly, I had never thought of either of my sisters-Mary was the other- as being anything less than feminine. Now here was Jane as co-captain of a roller derby team. They ate nothing but hamburgers, frankfurters and potato chips. Big Bob always seemed to be on the floor wrestling with the kids and their dog while Jane ran up and down the stairs like Babe Didrikson Zaharias, two steps at a time and a shitty diaper in her hand. My father, whose fantasy life (I suspected) was a curious blend of the dusty vast splendor of longhorn aristocracy and the faultless breeding of English dukedom, viewed this panorama with glacial disdain, one suede elbow resting on the mantelpiece, his stately manor stance, and a putrid cheroot in his mouth- Charles Bickford in a boundary war with some effete sheep rancher. But he managed to remain calm and an hour after they had left he confessed to a distant loneliness. He was a complicated man, often coarse in speech and manner, unintentionally comic at times, yet possessed of genuine insight- a good man, I think, beneath the snarl and brawl. Evidence of his fantasy life, manifested mainly by the clothing he wore and the books in his library, did not seem apparent to anyone but myself, and it may well be that I sought to dilute the force of his reality, the powerful effect on me of the very fact of his presence, by mixing some giddy daydreams into the jug. My father had served in the Pacific during World War II. He came back with some shrapnel in his chest and a lot of medals. He kept the medals hidden and never talked about the shrapnel but I knew that both were there. We had a long talk about sex and death and I drove back to the city even faster than usual.

I remembered who I wanted to call. It was Pike. I told him I had something important to discuss and we decided to meet at Zack's Bad News, a small bar in the East Village where he spent a lot of his time. I shaved, sprayed on some deodorant, ferreted some food particles out of my teeth with dental floss, then sandblasted with the electric toothbrush and gargled with mouth wash. I put on a pair of green chinos with slash pockets, my mandarin opium-shirt and Tobruk desert boots. Then I slipped into the stained leather Montana grizzly-hunting stud-coat I had just bought at Abercrombie's. I decided to walk down to Zack's. It was cold and the wind came around corners carrying the smell of snow and a faint intimation of evergreen from the Christmas tree stands. On Third Avenue the buses went by in packs, lit up like operating rooms, each window containing several moribund heads. A few yards in front of me was a man with a transistor radio. He held it to his ear and crossed the street with no regard for traffic. I walked behind him for five blocks and he didn't lower the radio once. I moved alongside him. He was listening to a weather report and talking to himself, or talking back to the radio. He was much younger than I had expected, a boy of about fifteen, very round and blotchy in appearance, secret eyes peering out of the baby fat, and he had the slightly retarded look of incipient genius-that crowlike scratchy cunning of the city's ragpickers and bottle-savers, those evolutionary masters of survival. The boy looked at me.

"Snow bulletin," he said.

I never liked to get too close to such people. I crossed Third Avenue quickly. I had gone less than a block when I heard him shouting to me. He was standing on the other side of the avenue near a lightpost, hands cupped to his mouth and the radio tucked into his armpit, calling to me, his bulky figure vanishing and reappearing, a slide presentation, as the cars and buses passed between us.

"It's on the way," he shouted. "They just announced it. It's heading this way. We should get it any minute. Three inches by midnight. All motorists are warned to keep off emergency routes. The mayor says don't drive unless it's absolutely necessary. It'll be here any minute. Three to four inches. Snow! Snow! Snow!"

Zack's was an unusual place. Only on rare occasions were any of the local anomalies present-Zoroastrians, Zen cowboys, soothsayers and the like, or lost children looking for Ames, Iowa-and they never seemed to stay very long. It didn't draw any of the area's ethnic or subculture groups and it certainly wasn't vibrating with laughter and political talk, that graduate school atmosphere of elbowing jocularity. Zack's was one of the quietest places in New York. Most of the regular customers appeared to be crazy. They just sat and drank, mumbling to themselves. Every so often one of them would sing a totally incoherent song, a private hash of lullaby and talking blues, the kind of song heard nowhere else except on a subway at three in the morning. The place scared me a little.

Pike was sitting at his unofficially reserved table with a young girl I had never seen before. Pike was close to sixty. His full name was Jack Wilson Pike and he called everybody Jack. He had fine blue eyes, a disappearing chest and the leisurely belly customary in a man his age. I had met him through Sullivan, who once said that he was as American as a slice of apple pie with a fly defecating on it. She also said he had saved her life once, though she didn't state the circumstances. The girl wore an old chapped leather wind-breaker which I recognized as Pike's, his aviator raiment.

"How do you like my waif?" he said.

The girl hit him on the shoulder.

"He says I'm his waif. He's an Air Force colonel and I'm the waif he like rescued from a burning building. The one his own planes bombed. We haven't come to the part of why he was hanging around in the streets while his own planes were dropping bombs."

"I was a spy," Pike said. "I was an advance man. I parachuted in at dawn so I could set up the bombing coordinates. They dropped me in with nothing but a shortwave set and a bowie knife. No guns, they told me. A single shot and the whole countryside would be alive with troops. If you have to kill, they told me, use the knife. It's quick and it's quiet."

She gave him a backhand to the ribs. Pike asked me what I wanted to drink. He seemed drunk himself, or well on the way, and in an hour or so his head would tumble to his chest, and his entire upper body, with the sad and ponderous majesty of a dynamited mountainside, would pitch toward the table. He returned from the bar with two drinks.

"I have news," I said.

"The lady told me."

"What do you think?"

"Drop me off at Miami Beach."

"Due west, Pike. Into the great white maw."

"The great white maw and her sister Katy. A man can get killed out there at this time of year. Ask Gash here. She hails from Wyoming, the equality suffrage state. Tell him about the elk herds, booboo. How it gets too cold for even an elk to tolerate. That's where I draw the line, at fur-bearing animals. When it's too cold for them, count me out."

"I'd like to live in a big wet greenhouse," the girl said.

"Blizzards," Pike said.

"They want blizzards," I said. "The network wants blizzards. We want to show how much progress the Navahos have been making and if we can get a blizzard at the same time the show'll be that much more interesting. Airlifts by helicopter. Makeshift hospitals."

"You'll garner the industry's choicest awards. But count me out."

"Look, that part of it is beside the point. We'll just drive out there, that's all, just for the hell of it. We won't be going for a few months so the weather's bound to be a lot better than it is now, even out there. I think we can pick up a camp trailer in Maine. And we'll just go. You can map out the route. It won't cost us much. Food and gas. And I'll spring for the gas.

"Ask Jack if he's ever driven cross-country before. Ask him if he knows how boring it can be in the deepest contiguous sense of that word. I've done it a number of times, windshield wipers beating in my brain."

"Look, my last two years in college I took my T-Bird out and back. It was terrific. I stopped only to sleep and eat. This time we'll go slower. We'll stay off the superhighways. We'll discover all the lost roads of America. I'm bringing my movie camera. We'll get it all on film. Your spiritual father, Pike. You've always talked about meeting a cougar. Well, he's out there, crouched on some big brown rock, swishing his tail."

The girl wasn't drinking. I couldn't figure out the connection between them. She was about one-third his age and seemed very attached to him but in a way I could not quite define. Her blankness intrigued me. She looked almost alluring in Pike's wíndbreaker, small and dumb and tentative. I felt a need to know more about her, to fill out that incomplete image. Only completed could it begin to tell me whether I had a further need to demand from it some small recognition of my galvanic potentials as a man. I remembered the attractive couple in the restaurant during lunch that same afternoon, legs touching beneath the table. Pike was beginning to fade.

"Why are you driving when you can fly?" she said. "Don't you love to fly? I love it. It's the sexiest thing there is."

"This is a religious journey," I said. "Planes aren't religious yet. Cars are religious. Maybe planes will be next."

"Planes are sexy."

"That's right, the way cars used to be. But cars are religious now and this is a religious trip."

Something stirred.

"He's out there, you say, swishing his tail. I've always wanted to confront a cougar face to face without bars between us. Something might happen. We might feel some kind of flow between us. It's hard for a layman like yourself to understand that. But getting up face to face with a gorgeous steaming beast like that. It's a mystical thing, Jack. A mystical thing. The cougar. The mountain lion. The catamount. The puma. I first saw him in a zoo when I was no more than ten. Even then I felt a bond between us. I'd like to confront him face to face. No iron bars. Something might happen."

"We'll go up into the Rockies," I said.

"I'd like to confront him before I die."

"We'll go up into the Rockies. That's where he is, crouched in the shadows, maybe waiting for an epiphany of his own. You get a battlefield commission. Sully said so. And you can map out our route."

"I have to do peeps," the girl said.

"The head's back there."

We were silent until she returned; she punched him on the back when she sat down. Then Pike said to me:

"What runs faster, a greyhound or a cheetah?"

"I don't know. I have no idea."

"Think about it. There's no hurry. Take your time. Greyhound or cheetah?"

"I'll have to guess," I said.

"If that's the best you can do."

"I say a greyhound runs faster."

He hit the table and gazed off into the wings, a look of ineffable disgust on his face.

"Tell him, cootie."

"A cheetah," she said.

"How do you know?"

"Cheetah goes seventy miles per," Pike said.

"How do you know how fast a greyhound goes?"

"No living thing, man or beast, can top seventy. Cheetah's the only one. Cheetah goes like the wind."

"Have they ever been matched in a race?"

"Greyhound's never been clocked above thirty-six. Why, a gazelle could trounce a greyhound. I can name any number of animals prepared to demolish the famous greyhound. Gazelle. Pronghorn antelope. Jackrabbit. Any number. Damn but you're stupid."

Pike was fascinated by animals. He liked to promote theoretical races, fights and tests of strength. His facts were often shaky but his convictions were deep and abiding. Nobody who tried to dispute the result of one of his epochal races or snarling culture-circled battles ever got very far. Pike would present a series of what he referred to as verifiable facts and documentations. His face would tense with rage and pain as he tried to demonstrate the obvious truth to his opponent. I don't know what theme he had found in the animal world that moved him to such emotion, maybe just innocence, the child's, the old man's enchantment with an undefiled life and the purest of deaths. Pike was a living schizogram, as were Sullivan, and Bobby Brand, whom I have yet to introduce, and my father and departed mother, and perhaps myself. He was almost gone now. His voice was thick and seemed to overlap itself, words sticking to his tongue. He lit one cigarette while another still burned in the ashtray. Soon I would learn what I could about his teen queen, the abstract cartoon he had rescued from footsteps and rain.

"Why is it you keep your hands under the table all the time?" I said. "You bring them up only to give Pike one of those tender clouts. Then down they go again. What's under the table that's so interesting?"

"Dorothy Lamour and the squid people."

Pike snorted and softly collapsed. I went to the bar and ordered another drink for myself. Zack put down his newspaper and removed the thick spectacles he wore. He poured the drink, then lifted the wet five, sponged down the bar, gave me change and went to sit in a folding chair beneath an overexposed photo of a bridegroom and best man outside the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn.

"What's that?" she said.

"Scotch."

"It's real neat to watch. The ice shines and there's like things going off. Little explosions all over."

"Why do you want to live in a greenhouse?"

"I want to live in a big wet greenhouse with hair growing in it. There'd be like doll's hair and doggy hair growing in all the pots. That would be neat. And anybody who wanted to be there could be there. John and Paul and Mick and the Doors and the Airplane and Bobby and Buffy. We'd all smoke and there'd be lots of audio-visual hardware. Then we would all eat hot fudge sundaes. That would be the neatest thing in the whole world."

"How did you meet Pike?"

"I was at Elephantiasis with a boy from NYU. The vibrations were bad. I was stoned on hash and I weighed about a zillion pounds. It was like being in the back of the blue bus. Then dada came over and bought this boy about a dozen drinks and he went to the toilet and never came out. Then dada took me to his room and we ate a whole Sara Lee chocolate cake and drank a big thing of milk. It was wild."

"My name isn't Jack, by the way. Not that I mind being called Jack. In a way I like it. It's like some wonderful Far Eastern theology where all the minor deities have the same name as the big guy. You make me feel guilty because I drink. Where do you live, by the way?"

"I stay with Lee, Jemmy and Kit."

I reached over and unzipped the jacket. My hand touched her cool breast. I was aware of a small movement behind the bar and I knew that one of Zack's shotglass eyes had lifted from the newspaper. I edged in closer, wedging her knee between my legs. My hand went up from her breast to her neck and face and when I kissed her there was a message returned from that humid mechanical mouth which let me know that whatever we did, here or later, was a matter of the vastest indifference. I did not bother drawing the jacket together and she did not bother noticing.

"Let's get out of here," I said. "We'll go to my place."

"We have to take him home."

"He'll be all right. He gets like this all the time. I have almost a thousand dollars' worth of stereo equipment."

"When I get real high I can feel the space between sounds."

"Let's go," I said. "We'll get some dinner if you like and then go to my place."

"Can he come?"

"He can take care of himself."

"We painted a circle in the middle of our room. We all sit in there when we smoke. It's real great."

"What else do you do?"

"Whatever we want," she said.

"But what?"

"You can do whatever you want."

"But can't you be more exact? I want to know exactly what you're talking about."

"It's simple. It's so simple. You can come back with me if you want. We have some stuff. But first we have to take him home."

I moved back away from her and finished my drink. Heaving slab of cougar-meat. Would I have to help undress him? Pluck off his weary socks with fastidious fingers and tuck him snoring into his army cot? Few things are more depressing than the sight of a drunken friend who happens to be twice your age; so many illusions are tested. He made a noise, then another, small dogs barking in his throat. His head rested on his left forearm. The hair at the back of his neck was light brown and gray. I put my arm over his shoulder.

"What color is the circle?" I said.

"It's red. It's a big red circle and we all sit inside it. You can come if you want. Anybody can come who wants to. You and me and him. We can all go."

I leaned across and zipped up the jacket. I liked her. I had no desire to trample her. She was delicate and trusting, beautiful in her blank way, and my words could not reach the spaces she felt between sounds. But these facts did not give me the right to trample her. Communications theorist and emperor of stereo. I gave her fifteen dollars-for food, I said.

"No, I can't go," I told her. "We'll take him home and that'll be it for the night."

Then I smiled at her foolishly and she answered with the unembellished look of a feeble nun who has begged successfully for money and found no hand quite willing to touch her own.

You can tell something about a woman by listening to her footsteps on a flight of stairs. As she climbs toward your landing and takes the level walk past your door and then begins to climb again, you can say with some assurance whether she is shapely, impulsive, churlish, simpering, tired, witty or unloved. It is interesting to speculate on the curve of her ankles, how her apartment is furnished, whether or not she believes in a supreme being.

The footsteps I heard that night, that early morning, were those of my ex-wife, Meredith, who lived one floor above me and across the hall. As she went by my door I thought I detected a slight hesitation in her stride. I did not move from the chair nor lower the book I was reading. She climbed the next flight slowly, and in the absolute stillness of the building at that late hour the sound of her key in the lock was enough to break one mood and bring on another, and the soft closing of her door was not unlike that breath of sensuality heard between the silences of sleepless nights in rain falling, in voices on the street, in darkness vibrating to the resonance of every small sound. I waited fifteen minutes, then went upstairs. Meredith squinted out at me through the peephole, then opened the door. She was wearing the parrot-colored housedress her parents had sent from Turkey, where her father was now stationed, tending an undisclosed number of tumescent missiles. She had a wonderful tan.

"How was Puerto Rico?"

"I had a marvelous time, David. You really should go down there for a week or two. Sit down. I'll get you something."

"I heard you go by my door. I was having trouble sleeping so I thought I'd come up for a minute or two."

"I went out with the most awful man in the world tonight. All he could talk about was his eight-speaker stereo system and E-type Jaguar."

She brought the drinks over to the sofa and sat next to me. Even though I saw her often during those years I was continually surprised by some of the changes in her outlook and personality since our divorce. She was much more the New York woman now, informed, purposeful, hard to impress. Gone were the cute enthusiasms of the teen-age bride, those sudden flings into space which seemed, so I thought, to be the outer extensions of a childhood marked by wandering. But with the new sophistication there was a concomitant nameless threat. Meredith was not so secure in her maturity that she did not suffer those periods of despondency and doubt which seem to weave through the lives of self-reliant women. She worked as a secretary to the art editor of a newsmagazine. It was a simple enough job, requiring typing and dictation skills, no more than rudimentary intelligence, and yet it prompted her to explore all the museums and art galleries of the city and to spend most of her vacations, and almost all her money, rummaging through the abbeys and chateaus of Europe, all those tourist bins patrolled by guards who look as though they have just deflowered their own daughters. One summer Merry and I had met by prearrangement in Florence, in some bell-swinging piazza, and sipped our orange drinks, so curiously reminiscent of an Eighth Avenue Nedick's, as the tiny invertebrate cars raced by our table, each driver pursuing his private Grand Prix. Meredith's eyes blazed; her arm swept across that vista of stone warriors, philosophers, noblemen and extras. "What meaning!" she cried. "What stupendous meaning!"

"What do you hear from your folks? It's hard to believe they spent four full years in Germany. It went by like that."

"They're both fine," she said. "They want me to come over in the spring and if I can manage it I'd love to go. All those mosques."

"Turkey is a blending of several cultures, I understand."

"So mother says. Incidentally, I dreamed about you last night, David."

"Did you? Did you really?"

"We were sitting in the living room of the house in London where I stayed with my cousin Edwina that time."

"What were we talking about? Do you remember what I said?"

"I don't think we were talking about anything."

"I take it we were fully dressed. Or you would have mentioned something."

"Yes."

"What were we wearing?" I said.

"I don't remember."

"And we were sitting, not standing or walking around."

"I'm sure we were sitting. I was near the window. I was looking out on Lennox Gardens. And you were on the other side of the room."

"What was I doing?"

"You were just sitting there," she said.

"We must have been doing something. We must have said something to each other."

"I don't remember, David."

"Try to remember. It's important."

"Why?"

"Because there might be some kind of clue there. I mean it's not as though I strayed into a labyrinth. It's all part of some design. You put me in your dream and it's important for me to know what mission I was assigned. It's a kind of reprieve to enter someone else's sleep. The dream can tell you that you're not guilty after all. It's like a second chance. There's some kind of valuable clue in there someplace. Now try to remember what we did besides just sit there. Try to remember what we said to each other. It's important."

"I've told you all there is. If there's anything more I'm afraid I've lost it."

"I guess I'm making too much of it," I said. "Okay, let's hear about Puerto Rico and all the fascinating men you met down there."

She put the glass to her lips, looking at me over its rim. Then she decided to tell me.

"There was one. There on business. Extremely nice. You'd like him, David. Dry sense of humor. Very athletic. A photographer. There on assignment for Venture. He was born in Germany, which gave us something to talk about right away, my parents having been there and all. He lives in a converted farmhouse near Darien. Very married. Three sons. You'd just know that someone like Kurt would have all boys. That's the type he is. Athletic. Outdoorsy. Tweed and leather. But very married. We enjoyed each other's company. That was all. Nothing can possibly come of it."

This police-blotter description, meant to conceal the way she felt about him, had precisely the opposite effect; so precisely, in fact, that I wondered whether she had planned it that way. The stratagems of marriage sometimes seem refreshingly artless next to those of ex-marriage. She poured two more drinks and we talked further about Kurt. Meredith liked to confide in me. After some early hedging for form's sake, she would tell me about each of her romances with what seemed to be complete honesty. I enjoyed these discussions. They seemed to generate a real warmth between us, a fine, old and mellow heat, brandy by a fireside. I gave her genuine sympathy and some good advice and when my turn came, as it always did, to stand by that cheery fire and lift that grand old snifter and sing of my own true loves, I told nothing but lies. It was very entertaining. Soon I began to understand the attraction of pathological lying. To construct one's own reality, then bend it to an implausible extreme, was an adventure even more thrilling than the linguistic free falls of the network. I think I went at it fairly well for a novice. I learned that in an atmosphere of seclusion, intimacy, motel-confessional, no lie is too gaudy, no cliche too familiar, no side-trip of the imagination too dramatically scenic. Beyond sheer entertainment value there were exactly ten reasons for lying to her. (1) The manic quality of these stories provided a nice balance to Merry's conventional episodes of the heart and lower glands. (2) The night was swarming with serious young people telling their troubles to each other and I preferred to stand aside from all this empathy and slush. (3) The telling of needless lies to a loved one, or former loved one, stimulates in the liar a complex feeling of regret, guilt, superiority, pity, tenderness and power-a compound I would take downstairs with me and analyze like a vial of splendid chemicals. (4) The fabulist in me, lurking just below the water-line, welcomed the challenge of topping each new lie and looked forward to some distant nexus of perfection, the super-union of all lies into one radiant and transcendental fiction. (5) Related to (4). Man's amoebic inching thrust toward godlike creativity. (6) Being beyond gravity, weightless, in a dream assembled by one's own hands. (7) The sexual excitement aroused in both of us. (8) Boredom. (9) I put something of myself into some of those stories and hoped, in vain as it turned out, to arrive at a definition, one disguised of course by the surrounding absurdity-a definition of myself without the usual anguish such readings entail. (10) There was really nothing to tell her in the way of troubles, romantic or otherwise. The only problem I had was that my whole life was a lesson in the effect of echoes, that I was living in the third person. This would have been hard to explain.

"The dream, David. I just thought of something. Maybe the clue is that we were just sitting there."

"The way we're sitting here."

"Maybe that's it. Maybe I was repressing something."

"Maybe that's it," I said.

Then, right on cue, she went to the window like Olivia de Havilland, so gracefully ill.

"It's still snowing," she said.

Communication between us was extremely precise. For a moment I thought of all the old Burtian and Kirkesque characteristics, the clenched emphatic fist, majestic teeth, angry hand brushing the hair, the surprise of a colossal smile, a smile as rich and full as a field of sun-cut Kansas wheat, and then a touch of passionate sadness, low flame in the eyes. Kirk as Van Gogh. Burt as the Birdman of Alcatraz. It was a comfortable feeling to be back in the simpleminded past. I noticed two new prints on the wall. I couldn't identify the artists but their subject was the same, expressionistic Germany, thick black plague and guilt, and I felt almost sure she had become interested in German painting because of her photographer friend, the man's man of the great outdoors. I moved toward her and the moment my hand touched her hip, loose and soft and lazy inside the housedress, I thought of the girl I had said goodnight to only several hours before, and of the circle she would resume with her sisters or brotherly lovers, the circle I had been afraid to enter. Meredith nude by the window was a known quantity. I took off my shirt.

Minutes later we were in bed and there was the feeling of a strange conspiracy. There was gratitude between us then, communication, mutual willingness to honor our conspiracy. And at the end, the fevers of our breaths mingling, what I knew more than anything was the feeling of coming back to an old and affectionate house. It was the twenty-first time we had made love in the five years since our divorce.

I carried in the portable TV and we watched a movie for half an hour or so. It was one of those old English films in which people are always promising to meet at Victoria Station the moment the war is over. She fell alseep then, on her belly, one leg draped over my thigh, her all-American ass classic and twinkling, campus-worthy as ever. My head went to one side and I was just beginning to go to black, in network parlance, when I heard footsteps in the hall below and the sound of crinkling paper. I knew that the journalist who shared the second floor with me was sneaking across the hall to put one of his garbage bags outside my door. Whenever he had just one bag for the janitor's morning pickup he left it by his own door; more than one bag, I got the surplus. I imagined his thin dry figure, in Punch-and-Judy pajamas and brown peeling slippers, hunching its way along the wall, teeth clamped tight and face all knuckled up. There are things nobody understands. In the last analysis it is the unseen janitor who maintains power over us all.

I slipped out from under her leg and turned off the TV. I went naked down the stairs, carrying my shoes and clothing. I wanted to wake up alone; it was a characteristic of mine, which many women learned to despise down through the years. My apartment welcomed me, dim and silent, the red-wine flavor of paintings and rugs, the fireplace and oak paneling, the black leather upholstery, old and comfortably cracked, the dull copper mugs on the mantelpiece and the burnished ale tone of the desk lamp-all warm and familiar and needing no acknowledgment, all reminding me that solitude asks no pledges of anyone. I took a shower and went to bed.

4

Weede Denney's head, prematurely bald and freckle-brown, repeated the suave circular bareness of his coffee table. It was as though the office decorator had devised them both, head and table, in a triumphant demonstration of ideal harmony between an executive and his furnishings. He stood for a second, dipped his knees slightly-something my father always did when his underwear got stuck in some netherland crevice, instructing me, a mere boy, that this was the civilized alternative to manual extrication, that boorish hobby of the underprivileged and the insane-and then sat down again in the black and ivory barber chair, refreshed and jacketless, his steel-drum chest eliminating any slight pleat or wrinkle from the muted blue shirt he was wearing. It was nine sharp, time for the Friday review, and we were all there, with pencils and note pads: Richter Janes, Mars Tyler, Walter Faye, Jones Perkins, Grove Palmer, Paul Joyner, Quincy Willet, Ted Warburton, and Reeves Chubb, who was wearing the same shirt, tie and suit he had worn the day before. Weede's secretary came in and took coffee requests, a process that consumed at least five minutes, most of them devoted to a mass clarification of Reeves Chubb's order, which included a large coffee, black, one sugar cube; a cream puff but not the kind with chocolate frosting; a fruit cup without the cherries if that was possible; and a packet of mentholated plastic-tipped cigars. Weede's face tightened somewhat during this scene and when it came my turn to order I graciously declined, saying I had already eaten my breakfast, and was rewarded for this lie by a rare Weedean pope-nod.

"Let's begin," he said. "Grove, I think we'll start with you. Ratings on the warcasts are way down."

"I've been in Tripoli," Grove Palmer said.

"Of course you have. No inference meant or intended. But the problem is there and we have to face it. Pressure is being exerted."

"I'm in favor of live satellite pickup. I've been in favor of live satellite pickup since my pre-Tripoli days."

"We'd never get permission," Quincy said.

"Don't bet on it."

"It's ghoulish," Warburton said.

"As Weede says, the problem is there and we have to face it. They're exerting pressure. I say let's exert pressure in return. Hepworth bought the half-hour for impact frequency. I say let's give it to him. I think we can get clearance for certain battle zones. Obviously you don't want to use tight shots if you can help it. And in any kind of live situation you don't want to use the kind of hard rock background we've been into. But in the brief time since my return from Tripoli, I've done some exploratory work and I think we can get clearance in zones where the tide is in our favor."

"It's ghoulish beyond belief," Warburtori said.

Warburton was the oldest man in the room and, as such, had assumed the position of tribal conscience. This was done with the unspoken approval of everyone. He was the eldest among us, the most informed, the tallest and grayest, the least feared in terms of power potential, idea smuggling and sheer treachery for its own sake, and, as everyone had undoubtedly heard in the twenty-some-odd hours since Jones Perkins passed the word to Reeves Chubb, the victim of a rare blood disease. Nobody ever paid the slightest attention to Warburton's pleas on behalf of humanity and good taste but we all felt, I think, that he was indispensable. He elevated our petty issues to a cosmological level and by so doing made it easier for us to ignore the whole thing on the grounds that we weren't qualified to deal with such high moral questions. It was nice to have Warburton around. He was so tall and gray and dignified. He rounded out the group photo we carried around in our calfskin heads. Without Warburton, we might have been a delegation of insurance salesmen at the annual get-together in Atlantic City-top men, of course, each a member of the million-dollar club, but still insurance agents; with Warburton (third row, center), we were the United States diplomatic mission to the Court of St. James's. Weede Denney referred to him both privately and publicly as his secretary of state. This remark was always accompanied by one of Weede's breathsucking chuckles, meant to indicate he was well aware that the joke was really on him. As the meeting began to melt away in my inner ear-drone-fests, I called these Friday affairs-I jotted down my version of the memo Weede would compose when poor Warburton died.

Re: Theodore Francis Warburton

It is always a sad occasion to lose an old and trusted employee. Theodore Francis (Ted) Warburton was more than that. He was a valuable friend, an invaluable advisor, a staunch advocate of the basic decency of man. Such qualities are rare today. I, for one, consider his passing a great personal loss. It is not often that we come across a man who possesses Ted's humanistic approach to the problems of our age. His untimely death diminishes all of us. I know everyone joins me in wishing his widow the very deepest of sympathies. No man is an island. We owe God a death. The torch has been passed. Ave atque vale.

"Let me ask you this," Mars Tyler said. "What's wrong with Grace Tully?"

"Old image," Walter Faye said.

"Exactly my point. Exactly what we need."

"Her appeal is vegetable. The vegetable kingdom cherishes her. She's their vegetable queen. Look, they're sitting there with twenty-two pounds of the Sunday Times spread all over the floor. The man is about forty-seven years old, wears glasses, never buys a paperback book that costs less than two and a quarter. He's leafing through the special men's wear section, having fantasies about a gold mohair dinner jacket. The woman is sitting there with the magazine section, wondering why the fuck somebody doesn't call them up and invite them over for whisky sours because it's so goddamn boring hanging around the house reading about ghettos and urban sprawl. That's the vegetable kingdom."

"Apropos of nothing," Paul Joyner said, "I understand Grace Tully makes it with anybody and everybody-man, woman or beast of the field."

"Let me ask you this," Mars said. "One, how does the vegetable kingdom differ from any other segment of the audience? Two, I still don't see why Grace Tully and her old image, as you call it, isn't exactly what we need for this particular sector as you yourself defined it. Three-we'll come back to three."

"The vegetable kingdom sits and stares," Walter said. "The animal kingdom just scratches. Basically it's as simple as that."

"There's something counter-productive about this discussion," Quincy said.

"Point well taken," Weede said.

"What was three?" Walter said. "You said there were three points."

"Let's come back to this," Weede said. "I want to generate a little heat on the Morgenthau thing."

"The Morgenthau thing is just absolutely fine," Jones Perkins said.

"What about Morgenthau himself?"

"What about Morgenthau himself," Jones said. "Well, he has just about made up his mind to do it and get it done and the hell with the haircream people."

"But has he definitely committed?"

"I would say he has just about definitely committed."

"In other words we have rounded the buoy."

"Weede, I would go even further than that. I would say he has just about definitely committed."

"Would you say in your own mind that the haircream people do or do not enter into it?"

"The haircream people definitely do not enter into it as far as I can see at this juncture, pending final word from Morgenthau himself when he returns from the islands."

"Which islands?"

"Which islands," Jones said. "I'll get on that right away."

"Let's move to World War III," Weede said.

"Apropos of Grace Tully," Joyner said. "I have it on good authority that back in the old days she used to make it with some of the biggest names on the Coast. Both coasts in fact."

"Let's get together," Weede said. "What I want to know at this juncture is whether the World War III idea is any more viable than it was a week ago in the light of recent developments on the international scene."

"At this juncture," Richter Janes said, "the World War III idea is about forty percent less viable than it was a week ago."

"That's what I wanted to know."

"What I want to know," Walter Faye said, "is why we can't show the toilet bowl in the effects-of-solitude prison thing. We can show toilet bowls in prime time. Why not in the afternoon is what I want to know."

"Kids might be watching," Weede said. "And I don't think the subject is germane at this point. I can't imagine any idea conceived by this unit which would necessitate the on-camera appearance of a toilet bowl. Besides, if we're not going to show the thing in use, there's no reason to show it at all. I believe it was one of the Sitwells who said if there's a gun hanging over the mantelpiece in act one, it had better be fired by the final curtain. Or words to that effect."

"Why can't we show the thing in use?" Walter Faye said. "Just once I'd like to see somebody on TV take a tremendous steaming piss. It could even have dramatic justification. We could think up some reason to make a pissing scene necessary. Maybe our protagonist has to get some poison out of his system; or, if it's a documentary about some disease of the liver or bladder, we could actually evoke some sympathy for our guy by showing how painful it is for him to take a simple piss. I wouldn't care where the camera was. We could stay on his face. The important thing is the sound. If we could just get that sound on the airwaves, just once, I honestly think we could take credit for expanding the consciousness of our nation to some small degree."

"Yes," Weede Denney said. "It would be almost as good as Ruby shooting Oswald."

The room relaxed, appreciating the jagged wit of this remark, and we all painted one more kill on Weede's already impressive fuselage. He lowered his barber chair two hydraulic notches and reached for the pack of cigarettes on the coffee table. Mrs. Kling, his secretary, came in then with a large breakfast tray and began distributing the coffee. I watched the construction workers in the building across the street. Richter Janes was sitting next to me, waiting for the coffee to reach him.

"Most of the high-steel men in this city are Mohawks," he said. "They all live out in Brooklyn someplace. There's a whole colony out there. They specialize in the high dangerous stuff. Any building more than thirty stories, you know those are Mohawks you see up there."

"It must have something to do with their inherent catlike agility and superb sense of balance," I said.

We were whispering for some reason.

"There was an Indian in my fraternity back at school. Nicest, quietest guy you'd ever want to meet."

"What was his time for the hundred?"

"Let's break bread some time," Richter said. "I'd like to pick your brain on a project of mine. I've been hearing good things about you."

"From whom?" I said.

"Word gets around," he whispered mysteriously.

Mrs. Kling left and the meeting resumed. At the network, people were always telling other people they had heard good things about them. It was part of the company's unofficial program of relentless cordiality. And since our business by its nature was committed to the very flexible logic of trends, there always came the time when the bearer of glad tidings became the recipient. Each of us, sooner or later, became a trend in himself; each had his week-long cycle of glory. Richter Janes' remark suggested that this might be the beginning of the David Bell trend. Richter himself had been a trend only a few months before; during his trend, which lasted a week or so, people popped into my office or sidled up to me in the corridor on a number of occasions to comment on what a good job Richter Janes was doing, how many good things they had heard about him, and how they had told him, just that morning, about some of the good things they had heard. I was never able to figure out how these trends started, who started them, or how the word spread. They seemed spontaneous enough and I found it hard to believe that top management would devise the whole thing, designate a trend-man of the month, someone whose morale needed boosting, and then instruct paid trendsetters to make spot remarks and chance comments concerning the good things they had heard about him. Up to that point I had never been a trend and had never felt any particular need to be one. Almost everyone sitting in Weede's office at that moment had been a trend at some time or another, but never, as far as I knew, more than once. In a given year there were usually nine or ten trend people. The trends ended as they had begun, with mystifying suddenness, and the person who had just been trendexed seemed a bit forlorn when it was all over, the gloss and neon gone, the numbers filed away, all the screens snowing and the airwaves bent with static.

"Quincy and Dave," Weede said. "Ball's in your court."

There was fatherly amusement in his voice. Apparently the destruction of Walter Faye had put him in good spirits. I had no idea what I was going to say since I had accomplished absolutely nothing all week. I thought I might simply paraphrase my remarks of the previous meeting, hedging and improvising as I went along, but there wasn't much chance of making that kind of escape. It had been tried hundreds of times and everyone was familiar with the clawprints and scent.

"Quincy, why don't you start the ball rolling?" I said.

"The Navaho project."

"The Navaho project," I said.

"There are long- and short-range problems," Quincy said. "Who's going out there, for how long, and will the Indians cooperate? I've been in touch with the Bureau of Indian Affairs."

"We both have."

"They'd like to know more before they commit."

"The Indians don't want pity," I said. "They want dignity."

"I got the same impression. We must have talked to some of the same people."

"They don't want pity in any shape or form. They want dignity. I think Richter can tell us more about that. Richter actually knows an Indian. Old fraternity brother."

"We're not actually in touch anymore. It's been more than fifteen years since college and I didn't really know the gentleman all that well. He was a nice quiet boy. I definitely remember that much about him. He was five-ten or eleven, weighed about one-sixty, lean as a whip, not an ounce of fat on him. He wasn't actually copper-colored if I remember correctly. If I remember correctly he was actually only three-eighths Indian. Three-eighths or four-eighths Indian. Crow I think he was. Crow or Blackfoot. But he was definitely one of the nicest, quietest fellas you'd ever want to meet. That much I'm sure about. It's absolutely vivid in my mind."

"Would you say this man wanted pity or dignity?"

"Dignity, Dave. There's not the slightest doubt in my mind. It was definitely dignity."

"Go, Quincy," I said.

"The thing of it is: Who's going out there, when, and for how long? If we want blizzards we want to get cracking. We want to get this thing nailed to the mast before any more grass grows under our feet."

"I've been in almost constant touch with the weather bureau," I said. "I'm trying to pin them down on some kind of long-range forecast for that sector of the country."

"What sector?" Jones Perkins said.

"Where the Navahos are."

"Where are they?"

"Quincy, you're the geography expert."

"Look, it's not as though we'll have any trouble finding them. The reservation is bigger than some states. It's even bigger than some countries, some of the smaller postage-stamp kingdoms in Europe. There's no doubt in my mind that it's bigger than Monaco for instance."

"Central Park is bigger than Monaco," Reeves Chubb said.

"Cocksucker," Quincy muttered.

"It's out around Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and/or Colorado, " Paul Joyner said. "I happen to know that for a fact."

"Right," I said. "And as I understand it the area has some fine cliff dwellings and pueblo ruins that we can use as natural backdrops. Monument Valley, in point of fact, lies right within the boundaries of the reservation, or so I've been led to believe. It's a stark, beautiful, moonscape-type place."

"Why do we want blizzards?" Warburton said.

"We want to show that despite all the problems, they're making progress. Blizzards are one of the problems."

"I shouldn't have thought you'd need a blizzard. Poverty and disease speak eloquently in their own right."

"It can't do any harm," Quincy said.

"Ted may have a point," I said. "The other major thing that pertains to me directly is the 'Soliloquy' thing. Everything is fine on that score. The show has been an airtight lead-pipe cinch from the very outset. Critics have loved it, by and large, and mail has been running four-to-one pro."

"I've never liked that title much," Reeves Chubb said. "It's pseudo something or other. I brought it up at dinner the other evening. We have some house guests out and I wanted to get their thinking on it. I taped the whole discussion in case you, Dave, or you, Quincy, wanted to hear it. They're an extremely well-informed couple. Kate and Phil Thomforde. He's done things with McAndrew at Amherst."

"Weede thought up the title."

"Did I?" Weede said. "One of my less resounding successes apparently, at least as far as Mr. Chubb is concerned. Regrettably, Dave, I don't think the program will survive. Sometimes it's difficult to break new ground without getting dirt in somebody's eye. The sponsor has chosen not to renew and there's been no interest elsewhere. Dave, you know I always go to bat for my people and I assure you this instance was no exception. I tried my damnedest to get Larry Livingston upstairs to convince Stennis to let the network pick up the tab. Livingston said quite frankly-and you have to admire his honesty-that the show is a crashing bore. He said there was no point in seeing Stennis about it because Stennis-and this mustn't go any further than this room-Stennis has problems of an entirely different kind. The show was good. I say that unequivocally. But Chip Moerdler over at Brite-Write said it wasn't selling any ballpoint pens. In this business you have to learn to expect disappointments. But don't go away mad, David. We have every intention of putting your not inconsiderable talents to further and better use. I'll be telling you more about this as soon as the Navahos are in the can."

"Chip Moerdler is a thundering ignoramus," Warburton said. "I've had dealings with that man. He wouldn't know quality if it struck him a blow in the solar plexus."

"Well and good," Weede said. "But you can't argue with a sales chart. Now I think we had better press on. There's one more bit of business that concerns you, Dave. That's the laser beam project."

"I've given Carter Hemmings a free hand with that. He seems to be something of an expert on the subject and I thought it was about time he got his feet wet. He's several years older than I am, you know, and sometimes it's best, for the sake of a man's morale in a case like this, to let him develop something on his own. It's always somewhat embarrassing for me to explain to Carter why he isn't included in these Friday meetings of ours. His impatience is understandable and I'm sure it won't be long before he joins us in solemn conclave. At any rate, Weede, Carter said he's got the laser beam thing hammered into top shape. When I spoke to him last evening he said he wanted to see you about it first thing in the morning. He said it's in absolutely stunning shape. Virtually ready to go."

"He didn't talk to me."

"I guess I'll have to resort to pressure."

And then, for no reason at all, I slid my foot several inches across the rug, and kicked over the empty coffee cup beneath Richter Janes' chair. I put my heel on it and crushed it. Nobody seemed to notice. I felt sick and exhausted. I wanted to be back in Meredith's warm musky bed, lost in the hollow of her breasts, swimming through fish-silver rooms, fathomless, deep in the shipwreck of sleep. I wanted to be with Sullivan in some lunar western wilderness, listening to Mingus on the car radio, and Ornette Coleman with his paintbrush horn, and Sullivan's arms crossed on her chest in sarcophagus fashion, her invisibly taped features; going flat-out across the northern plains, climbing, Bartók in the Rockies, cowboy songs and the nasal grassy drawl of banjos, and there is Oregon, the seal-slick distant sea. That's what I wanted. But I sat in Weede Denney's huge office, in the blue chair by the window, feeling sick and exhausted.

"Now it's time to hear from our resident China-watcher. Look smart, Mr. Chubb. How is the China thing coming along?"

"Weede, it's shaping up as the best public affairs series I've ever been involved in. I've already discussed it with seven or eight top people in the State Department. I've got calls in to six universities and two foundations. I've been putting in nights and weekends. My secretary has some kind of female thing and I've had to borrow Chandler Bates' secretary from time to time. The material is rolling in. Did you know that China had mastered most of the arts and sciences at a time when the Europeans were still combing fleas out of each other's hair? My wife thinks I'm working too hard. This is a big opportunity for us. China is a riddle. It's an enigma. Everything is being typed up. Mao Tse-tung and his followers walked six thousand miles to a mountain stronghold when what's his name was chasing them. The Chink with the wife who went to Wellesley. As soon as all the stuff is typed up and proofread and mimeoed, I'd like to get everybody's opinion on how it looks. Chandler Bates' secretary is slow so I don't know when it'll be ready. I'm very excited about this series. The Yangtze River is three thousand four hundred and thirty miles long."

"What's the series going to be about?" Warburton said.

"The whole big thing. China inside out."

"Will it say something we haven't already heard countless times?"

"There's a very real prospect of some exciting filmclips."

"Taken from a tall hill in Hong Kong, no doubt."

"The series will have a definite viewpoint. The stuff I'm getting typed up points that out very clearly."

"Points what out?"

"That a viewpoint is necessary."

"What viewpoint?"

"Yeah, what viewpoint?" Quincy said.

"I'm working on that with the State Department. They've been extremely cooperative."

Warburton said: "I'd like to quote Kafka at this juncture. 'Every fellow-countryman was a brother for whom one was building a wall of protection, and who would return lifelong thanks for it with all he had and did. Unity! Unity! Shoulder to shoulder, a ring of brothers, a current of blood no longer confined within the narrow circulation of one body, but sweetly rolling and yet ever returning throughout the endless leagues of China.' That, I submit, is your viewpoint."

"Ted, that's wonderful," Weede said. "I think you've really given Reeves something he can sink his teeth into. The part about unity-unity is splendid. It encapsulates all the surging drama of a land mass whose people we can only guess at. Where did you buy that tie?"

"It really sings, Ted. Maybe your girl can type it up for me. That part about the endless leagues of China is almost as good as unity-unity. Might be a title in there somewhere."

"Might indeed," Weede Denney said.

The meeting droned on. I watched Warburton's face. No, I could not have mistaken the flicker of mirth that worked at the corners of his mouth. I settled into the twilight, the lagoon, the mineshaft. A pigeon crossed the window ledge, nodding insanely, a fat prim spinster out for a stroll in Providence, Rhode Island, and then a distant boom of demolition sent it cracking into the air. I felt a tremor of pain at my temple. I tried to think of the Christmas shopping I still had to do. I would spend all day Saturday shopping for gifts and wrapping packages. I would buy something for Meredith and her parents; for my father; for Sullivan; for Binky; for my sister Jane and her children in Jacksonville; for three girls I had been seeing on and off; not for B.G. Haines; not for my sister Mary unseen and unheard from in years. I would take extra time and care wrapping the packages intended for Merry's parents and for Jane and her children. (The concept of distances has always stunned me-meridians, latitudes, international datelines; swinging with the arc of the earth, while I am forever stationary, all distant places seem elusive to me, sliding away and under, hard to get mail to. For this reason I have always tended to be over-reverent toward parcels which are destined to travel hundreds or thousands of miles, as if they were carrier pigeons taking secret messages to the plucky guerrillas in the hills.) Then I had a mental picture of my sister Mary. She is sitting in a laundromat in Topeka, Kansas. She is smoking a kingsize filtertip cigarette and waiting for the clothes to dry. She is wearing a gray cotton dress. There was no reason for me to think of her in that particular city or state or place of business, in that gray and whitewashed hell, clothes spiraling like mechanical embryos in experimental bellies, and yet I felt it was a true vision broadcast to me in some extrasensory way. It made me unaccountably sad. The entire left side of my head was radiating with pain. There was another explosion several blocks away. The voices buzzed in and out of dark hives. I looked at his face again. Then, suddenly, it struck me, with all the mindblazing beauty of a brilliant astronomical calculation. Warburton was Trotsky.

"I believe that covers everything," Weede Denney said. "I'm taking a big silver bird to the Coast this afternoon. I should be back Wednesday. Any problems, Mrs. Kling knows how to reach me. Have a nice weekend and a pleasant Christmas."

"Officially sanctioned," somebody said as a footnote to something.

Weede went into the private toilet adjoining his office. We picked up the paper cups, moved the chairs to their original positions and tidied up in general, reluctant to leave these small tasks to Mrs. Kling, who over the years had managed to become one of the most feared individuals in the company. On the way to my office I stopped by Hallie Lewin's desk and massaged her neck. She was typing a memo marked confidential. I could see that my name was not on the routing list.

"How was the meeting, David?"

"Ended in the usual fistfight. What do you want for Christmas, Hallie?"

"An abortion," she said.

"What's that you're typing?"

"Get away. You're not supposed to look at that."

"Is it about me?" I said, moving my hands down her back.

"You're the last person around here who has anything to worry about. Really. I've been hearing good things about you, David."

I followed Quincy Willet and Jones Perkins down the corridor, snapping my fingers lightly and bouncing on my toes. Quincy needed a haircut.

"Did you hear?" Jones said. "Merrill hired a Negro. Blaisdell met him yesterday. Said he seems like a nice clean-cut guy."

"Let's go look at him," Quincy said.

I went around to my office. Binky followed me in. She wasn't wearing a brassiere, I noticed. She skipped over to the sofa and bounced on it a few times before settling down. She always let out a bit on Friday. I sat behind the desk.

"What's new?" I said.

"Somebody named Wendy Judd called. She wants you to call back."

"What else?"

"Warren Beasley called. No message."

"What else?"

"Your father wants you to meet him at the Grand Prix at twelve-thirty."

"What else?"

"That's all," she said. "How was the meeting?"

"Ended in the usual fistfight. Phelps Lawrence didn't show up. I guess they gave him the news already."

"Have you heard the latest? It's really getting wild."

"What?" I said.

"Mars Tyler and Reeves Chubb."

"What about them?"

"The ax."

"Where'd you hear that?"

"I'm not supposed to tell," she said.

"Binky baby."

"Hallie Lewin told me about Reeves. Penny Holton told me about Mars."

"Who's Penny Holton?"

"Carter Hemmings' secretary."

"The one with stereophonic tits?"

"David. Don't be crappy now."

"Her breasts point to opposite ends of the room."

"Isn't it something though?" Binky said.

"That's not all," I said. "Carter Hemmings may be next. It's just a rumor right now so don't say anything."

"I won't."

"Also I noticed that Chandler Bates had his door closed when I went by his office just a minute ago. I mentioned it casually to Jody and she said it's been closed all morning."

"What do you think it means?"

"He's either firing somebody or getting fired himself."

"It can't be that Chandler's getting fired," she said. "He's buddy-buddy with Livingston. He's Livingston's fair-haired boy. Livingston's the one who hired him away from the CBC."

"I heard Livingston's being phased out."

"That's too much."

"Like an obsolete medium-range bomber," I said. "Keep it under your hat."

"You'd think they'd have some kind of Christmas spirit. What a lousy time for a purge."

"Enough chitchat. Get Carter Hemmings in here and tell him to step lively."

She went out and I called Sullivan. The phone rang eight times and she didn't answer. I let it ring some more.

("Dear God, I have to get out of here," I said into the mouthpiece.)

Finally I hung up. Carter Hemmings came in then. He made his way to the sofa, moving sideways and in a very tentative manner, hunched slightly, feudal and obsequious.

"Carter, I thought we agreed that you were going to see Weede this morning with some kind of progress report on the laser beam thing."

"The way I understood it, Dave, I was supposed to see you first thing in the morning. But when I came by your office, Binky said you weren't in yet. I came back ten minutes later and she said you had just gone to Weede's office for the meeting."

"Your name came up during the drone-fest, Carter. Weede said he's going to put your ass in a sling if you're not careful. What do you hear from B.G. Haines? She told me she had a rotten time that night. I haven't been hearing good things about you, Carter. Everybody has to pull his weight. You'll find that Weede can be ruthless when the occasion warrants. Your secretary is a fucking blabbermouth. I have work to do now."

He left. I tore up the notes I had taken during the meeting. I took a box of paper clips out of the middle drawer and began fitting one clip inside another, making a chain. In ten minutes or so I fastened about one hundred paper clips. Then I fitted together the two at each end. This gave me a circle, which I spread before me on the desk. I put nine pencils inside the circle, arranging them in three triangles of three pencils each. I put an eraser inside each triangle. Then I took the torn note paper, dropped it into an ashtray, lit a match and set the paper on fire. I placed the ashtray with the burning paper at a point roughly equidistant from the nearest corner of each triangle and at the approximate center of the circle. When the fire was about to go out I tore up more paper and tossed it into the ashtray. I kept doing this until Binky came in to get her coat, which she always hung behind my door.

"Lunchtime already?"

"What's that?" she said.

"Demonology."

She came around to my side of the desk for a closer look. I slumped in the chair, leaned over and put my hand on her calf, making slow figure eights with the tips of my fingers.

"It's weird, David."

"Works quite well, I think. Note the circular ashtray. Circles within circles. Like the pain in my head. The erasers don't do much for it though. Next time you're in the supply room see if they have any triangular erasers. This is serious stuff"

"What's it supposed to mean?"

"It's a calling forth of the powers of darkness. Is Hallie Lewin pregnant or was she just kidding?"

My hand was at the soft cove behind the knee which, when the leg is bent, has always seemed to me one of the very best places on a woman's body; then, as if obliging my bias, she shifted her weight to that leg, the left, so that her knee, answering the shift and in complete control of it, buckled slightly, creating that scooped-out and supremely tender indentation for the rent-free pleasure of my hand. Weede Denney was standing in the doorway.

"Come on in, Weede," I said. "Say, how's your wife these days?"

Binky edged away from me. I could see the doors opening in the dark room in my mind, three, four, five doors opening, and fresh light planking down across the floor. In the past I had always been able to control the doors but now they seemed to swing open freely, wind-driven, banging the walls. Control was still possible but I did not try to attain it. Light began to fill the room and I thought I might reach eight doors, a new record.

"Didn't mean to disturb you," Weede said, flushing somewhat. "Just wanted to see you for a moment or two; it can wait."

"Binky, I don't know if you've ever met Mrs. Denney. She's an absolutely intrepid woman. Weede, tell Binky about the time Mrs. Denney walked right up to a family of hippos during your camera safari in Kenya. She just had to have that picture and she didn't care a whit about her personal safety. Weede told us about it at lunch yesterday. I can't wait to see those slides, Weede. Binky, I think you should see them too. Weede has promised to invite us up for a showing some time soon. Binky's a photography buff, Weede. Weede has quite a collection of photos, Binky."

"I'd love to see them," Binky said. "Well, I've got a lunch date with Jody Moore and she hates to be kept waiting."

She left, putting on her coat as she walked out, and Weede moved clear of the doorway as she made her exit. One touch, he seemed to fear, would reduce them both to a state of nervous collapse. I tried to close the doors. They would not close. He walked up to the desk, put both hands flat on the far edge and leaned toward me.

"I want to ask you something," he said. "It concerns a matter of some delicacy. I understand you're tuned in to many of the undercurrents. What either of us says here mustn't go any further than this office. Is Reeves Chubb a homosexual? You don't have to answer if you don't want to."

"There have been rumors to that effect. Somebody wrote something to that effect on the wall in the thirty-seventh-floor men's room."

"I'd like to take a look at that."

"It's not there anymore," I said. "This was last week. It was written with a red crayon above the urinals. It looked like Quincy Willet's handwriting. Those two don't exactly hit it off, you know."

"What precisely did it say? This may be important."

"I don't think I care to repeat it, Weede."

"Was it rough?"

"The roughest."

"We're two mature people, Dave. I'll tell you why I brought this up in the first place. I know I can trust you to keep any privileged material within the four walls of this room."

"Shall I close the door?" I said.

"By all means. I should have thought of that myself."

As I swung the door shut Quincy passed my office and gave me a questioning glance. Weede went over to the sofa and I returned to the chair behind the desk.

"As you know, Dave, we hire people on the basis of ability alone. This has always been the network's policy. Personally I have no interest in a man's private life. What a man does in his free time is no concern of mine, within reason."

"I can attest to that, Weede."

"But there's another issue at stake here. The State Department doesn't want any queers working on the China thing. Far be it from me to challenge the thinking of people whose most vital concern is our own national security. A meeting was held in a midtown hotel last week. For the most part it was inconclusive. Reeves is a married man, you know."

"Sometimes that happens," I said.

"Exactly, Dave. Those people at State are sharp. They tell some amazing stories. We spent a whole afternoon discussing it."

"It's a shadow world. It's a sickness. It can happen to anyone.

"Did you know that Reeves sleeps in his office two or three nights a week? Something like that makes you wonder. What does his -wife think about something like that?"

"There's a rumor going around that Jones Perkins might be bisex. I don't necessarily mean he goes both ways. It's just that some of his secondary sexual characteristics are thought to be a bit suspicious. He might actually be both ways if you get the distinction. But it's just a rumor at this point."

"I give no credence to stories like that."

"Only a fool would."

"Well, I just wanted to get your thinking on the subject, Dave. I hope it turns out to be nothing at all."

"Weede, one of the very best ways to arrive at some kind of conclusive determination in a situation like this with a man's whole future at stake is simply to think back on it. Think back on Reeves. Think of small incidents, anecdotes he's told, his reactions to certain words or phrases, the way he holds those little cigars of his, favorite expressions he uses, his sensibilities, his literary preferences, the amount of time he spends in the John, the kind of shoes he wears. It all has a bearing. Now then. Can I work on the Navaho thing on my own?"

"Quincy giving you trouble?"

"He has marital problems. His mind is preoccupied."

"I'll take it under advisement, Dave."

"Thanks much."

"Let you know more when I get back from the Coast," he said.

"Maybe we can break bread."

All the doors were open. I felt I was going insane. The entire conversation seemed to be taking place in a dream and I truly could not believe what we were saying to each other. The headache had become a ringing numbness, like that caused by a shot of Novocain. I had ceased to exercise the slightest control over my remarks and I didn't care anymore. It was neither a good nor a bad feeling. It was hardly a feeling at all. My head seemed to be a telephone delivering an endless busy signal.

"Are you sure you can't tell me what the red crayon said in the bathroom? It may be important."

"Reeves Chubb climbs palm trees to suck off sleeping apes."

I took the elevator down and walked the two blocks to the Grand Prix. I didn't wear a coat. I never wore a coat when I went to lunch, no matter how cold it was. JFK.

The restaurant's decor was automotive. My father was already there, sitting at a corner table. His stocky figure, in fine British tweeds, seemed to dominate that part of the room. He was shouting friendly abuse to someone at a nearby table. I watched for a moment. He ran his hand over his head, over the thinning hair, then toyed with the cutlery. He had a new pair of glasses, I noticed, black-rimmed and intimidating. His face did not have the strength of sharp definition, being fairly anonymous, but there was a blunt authority in his eyes which could not be ignored. We did not look at all alike.

My father had just turned fifty-five, a fact which seemed to have transformed him, virtually overnight, into a role of elder statesman. Prior to our meeting in the restaurant I had seen him just once since his birthday. On that occasion, a drink after work, he had seemed very conscious of his elbows. When he spoke he would pivot on the barstool and lean toward me with both elbows flung out and up like delta wings. At other times, head hanging loosely over his drink, he would raise his right index finger and then use it to tap his left elbow, which lay bent on the bar. He did this only when making an important point and I wondered whether the significance of his remark might be fully uncovered only by opening up the elbow and picking with a delicate surgical instrument among its connective tissues. That evening he had made me think of John Foster Dulles and Casey Stengel, two elder statesmen who knew how to use their elbows.

"Sorry I'm late, dad. Merry Christmas."

"I hear Stennis is in trouble," he said. "I never liked that son of a bitch. How much does he make? Squatez-vous, kid. We can have only one drink. I've got a two o'clock client meeting."

"I didn't know you knew Stennis."

"We're agency-of-record for the mental illness series everybody's talking about. Stennis told us the ten-second spots we've been running are in bad taste considering the subject matter of the program. He said the network has been getting complaints. You know what I'm talking about, the animated jingles. We'll have two dry martinis on the rocks, waiter. Then wait ten minutes and bring us the boeuf Bourguignon. We won't have time for dessert or coffee."

"What are your plans for Christmas day?" I said. "I thought I might drive up to the house."

"Fine, sport, do that. Bring a girl along. We'll have a few drinks and drive up to the Admiral Benbow for some turkey. Your mother used to make a swell turkey. I should sell that house but I can't. How's Merry these days? I miss that girl. Damn sweet kid."

"She's fine, dad."

"Listen, I don't deny I've done some screwing around in my time. Man's not worth much if he doesn't get the urge now and then. But how can I marry some big-hipped peroxide bitch after all those years living with your mother? I married your mother when I was twenty-two years old. We lived in a cold-water flat on upper Broadway. When Mary was born I went out and got drunk. Forget the nostalgia. Those were rotten days, pally. Now I've reached the age when a man feels he has to make some kind of summing up. But screw golf. It's sure death for someone like me. Everybody wants me to go out and play golf with them. The last seven, eight years, since your mother's death, all I hear is golf. I work all weekend, either home or in the office. Work is better than death. Look, I've got a little thing going with my secretary. What good does it do? Can I depend on something like her for the long haul? I said on the rocks, waiter."

"How old is she?" I said.

"I don't know, about twenty-four. When you get to be my age, they all look the same. If you want to go out with her, I'll fix it up."

"What's she like?"

"She goes down," he whispered.

"That's not what I mean."

"You're trying to find out if she's suitable for me. That's all right. I don't mind. I respect your views, kid. But I'm the last of the old school in this business. I've got six account men and nine assistant account men working for me. Harvard Business School. I wouldn't give them the sweat off my balls if they needed it to press their pants. And I'll tell you something else. They respect me. And I'll tell you why. They respect me because they know I can do their jobs better than they can. You need a little color in this business. All the account guys in our shop look like laboratory specimens soaking in formaldehyde. If you know your job you can afford to be yourself, up to a point. I learned that many years ago. They put four of those ugly gray padded chairs in my office. I threw them out the window into an alley. You know how word travels on the Avenue. Inside a week I had six new job offers. Client thinks I'm the greatest thing ever came down the pike. We have lunch every Tuesday at the Yale Club. Hell of a nice guy. Prince among men. Played football and lacrosse in college. I sent him to my tailor."

"Here we are," I said. "Drink up. Merry Christmas."

"Merry Christmas, Dave. God bless you."

My father collected reels of TV commercials. The basement of the house in Old Holly was full of these reels, carefully filed and cross-indexed as to length, type of product, audience recall, product identification and a number of other categories. The index cards filled two file cabinets and the reels themselves stood upright in hundreds of numbered slots in a series of floor-to-ceiling filmshelves which he had designed and built himself. The wine cellar, my mother used to call it. He had a screen and projector and he spent several nights a week viewing the commercials and making notes. He had been doing this for many years. He considered it part of his job. His purpose, he told the family, was to find the common threads and nuances of those commercials which had achieved high test ratings; to learn the relationship between certain kinds of commercials and their impact in the marketplace, as he called it. We spent many of our adolescent nights, Mary and Jane and I, sitting in that dark basement watching television commercials. We looked forward to seeing every new reel he brought home. While my mother wandered through the large old house, the rest of us slouched in the flickering basement and argued about which new commercial was best. My father used to arbitrate our bitter disputes. It doesn't matter how funny or pretty a commercial is, he used to say; if it doesn't move the merchandise off the shelves, it's not doing the job; it has to move the merch. And now, as the waiter put our plates before us, I thought of him standing by the projector as the first new reel of the evening thrust its image through the dust-drizzling church-light toward the screen, an alphabet boy eating freckled soup perhaps, a man carving his Thanksgiving teeth, the tongues of seven naked housewives lapping at a bowl of dog food. I wished he were dead. It was the first honest thought which had entered my mind all day. My freedom depended on his death.

"Why is it that all the advertising people I've ever known want to get out?" I said. "They all want to build their own schooners, plank by plank, and sail to the Tasman Sea. I know a copywriter at Creighton Insko Dale. At lunch one day he started to cry."

"I love the business," my father said. "It's dog eat dog. It's a crap game in an alley for six million bucks. Where else can a man like me make the kind of money I make? I have the right brand image. You know that as well as I do. Wall Street would kick me out on my ass. But at my age I don't worry about money anymore. I've been reading Tolstoy. Every man feels he has a novel in him. He feels he has a novel and a Eurasian mistress. Tolstoy makes me want to write a novel. Your mother was ill a good deal of the time but she had something these bitches today couldn't touch. My secretary? Maxine? She has soap under her fingernails. Seven out of eight times I look at her fingernails I see little slivers of soap.

Compare that with your mother. At my age you come to realize that you did everything wrong. No matter who you are, everything you did was wrong. Maybe I'll turn Catholic."

"I didn't know you were thinking along those lines."

"There's something there," he said to his elbow. "I've been doing a lot of reading. I was never much for religion but there's something there. You know the Catholic church in Old Holly, Sacred Bones or whatever it's called? I called up the head priest one night, the pastor, and we had an interesting talk. Hell of a nice guy. He knew who I was. He told me all about the human soul. The soul has a transcendental connection to the body. It informs the body. The soul becomes aware of its own essence after it separates from the body. Once you're dead, your soul can be directly illuminated by God. I sent him a case of Johnnie Walker Red."

"What time is it?" I said.

"Yeah, I have to get going. Listen, sport, see what you can find out about Stennis. Find out how much he makes."

It was snowing again and people moved head-down, clutching their hats, shouldering into the wind. I walked across the wide gray lobby. In a far corner there was an exhibit of prize-winning war photographs. One of them was an immense color blow-up, about ten feet high and twenty feet wide. In the center of the picture was a woman holding a dead child in her arms, and behind her and on either side were eight other children; some of them looked at the woman while others were smiling and waving, apparently at the camera. A young man was down on one knee in the middle of the lobby, photographing the photograph. I stood behind him for a moment and the effect was unforgettable. Time and distance were annihilated and it seemed that the children were smiling and waving at him. Such is the prestige of the camera, its almost religious authority, its hypnotic power to command reverence from subject and bystander alike, that I stood absolutely motionless until the young man snapped the picture. It was as though I feared that any small movement on my part might distract one of those bandaged children and possibly ruin the photograph.

I continued across the lobby. Three network people, a few yards ahead of me, stamped their feet as they walked, trying to get the snow off their shoes. Just then Weede Denney emerged from an elevator bank and headed toward us, hat in one hand, suitcase in the other, wearing his Japanese smile. I moved up closer to the other three men and also stamped my feet.

"Gentlemen."

"Weede."

"Weede."

"Weede."

"Weede."

There were nine or ten people on the elevator. Nobody said anything. There was a Christmas carol coming over the Muzak. When we reached the twentieth floor I took the emergency telephone out of its small tinplate compartment. But I couldn't think of anything funny to say and so I put it back. Binky wasn't at her desk. I went into the office and dialed Tana Elkbridge's extension. She was a secretary in the news division, married seven years. Our affair was a month old. It had begun at a party when she asked me if I would care to read some of her short pieces. I had no idea what she was talking about. Her short pieces turned out to be prose poems, the kind of thing student nurses write before they see their first amputation. Tana was dark and magnificently shaped and wore her hair in braids. Her boss answered the phone and I hung up immediately. I had done this at least a dozen times since joining the network. It is a debasing experience but when you are having an affair with a married woman, or when you yourself are married, it is better not to take chances. Her boss was a lean nervous man and I could imagine his irritation, the ungovernable mutiny of his starved features, as that inimical click went off in his ear. It gave me no pleasure. Quincy came in, closed the door behind him, walked slowly across the room and put one ample haunch on the corner of my desk, the upper part of his thigh flattening and spreading, and I thought of a science-fiction organism pulsating menacingly in some neglected corner of a laboratory. "Was that Weede in here just before lunch?"

"No."

"That was Weede," he said. "Listen, how come he's going to the Coast? People don't usually go on business trips just before Christmas. It must be something important. Did he say anything about it?"

"Quincy, I'd tell you if I could. But it's privileged material."

"Come on, Dave. How long have I known you? We've come up through this thing together. You've seen my wife naked how many times?"

"I can't say a word."

"Well, is he taking Kitty along with him at least? I can't believe he'd let his wife stay behind over Christmas. It can't be that important."

"They're having marital problems," I said.

"A lot of things are happening around here. Just before lunch I picked up my phone and I could hear voices. The wires must have got crossed. It was Walter Faye talking to somebody I didn't recognize. Walter was giving him the salaries of everybody in Weede's unit. Reeves Chubb makes more than we do."

The door of Quincy's office was orange and his sofa was dark gray. Some of us in Weede's group had doors of the same color but sofas of a different color. Some had identical sofas but different doors. Weede himself was the only one who had a red sofa. Weede and Ted Warburton were the only ones with black doors. Warburton's sofa was dark green and so was Mars Tyler's door. But Mars Tyler's sofa was ecru, a shade lighter than Grove Palmer's door. I had all this down on paper. On slow afternoons I used to study it, trying to find a pattern. I thought there might be a subtle color scheme designed by management and based on a man's salary, ability, and prospects for advancement or decline. Why did no two people have identical sofas and doors? Why was Ted Warburton allowed to have a black door when the only other black door belonged to Weede Denney? Why was Reeves Chubb the only one with a primrose sofa? Why was Paul Joyner's perfectly good maroon sofa replaced by a royal blue one? Why was my sofa the same color as Weede's door? There were others who felt as I did. When Paul Joyner walked in to find a new sofa in his office he immediately started a rumor that he was being fired. But this sofa incident had taken place two years prior to the current rumor, the origins of which were never disclosed. He had not been fired; it was not that easy to find the connection. The connection was tenuous but I was sure it was there. At least a dozen times I had taken that piece of paper out of my files and tried to correlate a man's standing with the color of his door and sofa. There had to be a key. If only I could find it. What I would do when and if I found it was a question that did not disturb me. I would do something. I would change something. I would have protection. I would know the riddle.

"I had Mexican food for lunch," Quincy said. "I have to go to a meeting in Livingston-that-son-of-a-bitch's office in five minutes. Smell my breath, will you?"

He leaned over and exhaled.

"It's fine," I said. "Rose petals."

"Tacos are hard to get off your breath. I brushed my teeth twice."

"Okay," I said. "Now you smell my breath."

He leaned over again.

"No problem," he said. "Not the slightest little inkling."

We were both lying. Half an hour later Binky came in, hung her coat behind the door and went right out again. I dialed her extension.

"Miss Lister."

"Welcome back to the animal farm," I said. "Are you mad at me? Wait'll you see what I'm getting you for Christmas.

You're the best secretary I've ever had. Cross my heart and piss in a ditch."

"What was that all about?" she said. "I didn't understand what you were trying to do. I went out and got stoned on bloody marys."

"I'm sorry, Bink. I've been tense and neuralgic. I really have. I've been here seven years. It gets to you. Come in for a minute."

"No."

"You're the only friend I have in this place."

"I told Jody what happened. She thinks you're cracking up."

"My coat and yours, Binky. Hanging together behind the door. Thunderin' jasus, a grand feeling it is to know our respective bearskins are huddling back there in the darkness. Darlin', will you be coming in now for just a pop of the cork? I've been reading the Irish playwrights. C'mon, Bink."

"No."

"Bejasus, Binky. Your truly winning calf. That tiny secret grotto behind your knee."

"Drop dead, David."

I wanted to go home and sleep but it was too dangerous to leave this early. Although Weede had gone, Mrs. Kling had not, and it was her practice to make spot checks whenever he was out of the office. I closed the door. I got out the bottle of Cutty Sark I kept hidden in the cabinet, poured out half a glass and drank it neat in four swallows. Then I crumpled a piece of paper into a tight little ball and tossed it toward the wastebasket. Two points. I retrieved the ball and started practicing my hook shot. I moved slowly over the rug in a minstrel shuffle and as my right hand made dribbling motions I expelled air from my nose, synchronizing breath with dribble; and then, my back to the basket, I lifted the right leg, raised the left arm slightly for balance, and swung the right arm over my head and let loose a fifteen-footer.

"Swish," I said.

I changed to foul shots for a while, then to left-hand hooks and finally to the breathtakingly intricate pattern of my double headfake turn-around jump shot. In that cloistered office I played my silent game. I experienced no sense of boyish self-amusement. No, I played quite seriously, my tie bellying out at each jump shot, sweat blossoming under my arms. No one, not even Binky, knew about these basketball games. I had been my team's leading scorer in prep school; first in scoring, last in assists. Since then the game had followed me, the high amber shine of the gymnasium floor, the squeak of rubber sneakers, the crowd, the crowd, and at parties years later I would turn a cocktail peanut between my fingers and gaze at a distant fishbowl. Basketball has always seemed to me the most American of sports, a smalltown thing, two kids in a driveway and a daddy-built backboard. And now I jumped, released and missed. I picked up the paper ball, stepped back ten feet for an easy one-hander, and missed again. Six times I missed from that distance. The phone rang and I shot again and missed again. I knew I wouldn't answer the phone until I had made that simple shot. I was perspiring heavily as I fired twice more and missed both times. Cursing, I picked up the ball again. The ringing stopped and I figured that Binky had answered on her phone. I went back to precisely the same spot. This time I hit. I stood there for a moment, trembling, then went to the sofa and dropped. The door opened and Binky came in.

"That was Warren Beasley again," she said. "Why didn't you answer your phone? You look rotten."

"Smell my breath."

"It stinks."

"I knew it," I said. "That bastard Quincy."

"Mr. Beasley said to tell you he didn't call."

"What do you mean?"

"That was his message. He didn't call. But he'll call back."

"I think I'll have another drink," I said. "Join me?"

"What do you have?"

"Scotch."

"On top of bloody marys?" she said.

"Don't be fastidious. These are urgent pleasure-grabbing times, or don't you know there's a war on."

I got another glass from the cabinet and blew out the dust, a shoulder-bolstered Sterling Hayden holed up in a rooming house. I poured the two drinks.

"I don't think I could take it straight, David."

"I think there's some froggy water left in that carafe."

"I'd better close the door," she said.

We drank in silence. It was very warm in the office and sleet struck the window at intervals. I expected Mrs. Kling to walk in at any minute. I imagined her sitting now in Weede's office, watching television, a cigarette planted in the center of her mouth, knees angled out, hands coupled on abdomen. During an office party several years before I had gone into Walter Faye's office, pursuing a rumor of striptease and frolic, and there had stood Mrs. Kling, alone and unaware of me, standing rigid, shoeless and blouseless, brassiered like a bank vault almost neck to navel, her left foot forward, two clenched fists raised before her, left guarding the face, right lower, the classic Queensberry stance of the pier brawlers. It had been one of those moments for which an explanation evades the mind forever, an underwater moment tilted and warped by a rapture of the deep. Much later, shod and bloused again, she returned to the party. And then, as if to demonstrate the excellent craftsmanship of her digestive tract, its grinding and juicing abilities, she heaved all over a cluttered desk, thus creating, simultaneously, both a legend and a monument to that legend, the Thelma Kling Memorial Desk.

Binky curled up on the sofa and went to sleep, a rippling child-snore rolling off her lips. I finished my drink and saw that the bottle was empty. For a second, seriously, I thought of taking off my clothes and then undressing her as well. Instead I lifted her coat from its hanger and covered her with it, aware that the room was well heated but feeling an overwhelming need to display some tenderness, if only in this trite way. The phone rang.

"Hello, Tab. I was in Hollywood recently. I drove my car into a palm tree and twelve guys fell out. They all looked exactly like you. Norman Rockwell soda jerks."

"Hello, Warren."

"When I called before, your secretary said you were in the office committing suicide. I called back hoping I'd be the last person to speak to you alive. Warren Beasley, the controversial radio personality, was probably the last person to talk to the popular young television executive. Mr. Beasley said that Bell, twenty-eight, had been despondent over the loss of his old fielder's glove. The deceased bore a strong facial resemblance to a number of Hollywood stars known for their interchangeability. His body will be sent airmail express to the West Coast for possible casting in a new movie Spectacular based on the siege of Leningrad."

"You sound as morbidly chipper as ever," I said.

"I'm calling to invite you to my wedding. If all precedents hold, the honeymoon promises to be a veritable jubilee of ejaculatio praecox."

Warren Beasley had his own radio program on a local station. It was called "Death Is Just Around the Corner," and it was broadcast from two to five in the morning. I had listened to the program, or at least parts of it, close to a hundred times, and not once on all those occasions had I heard Warren repeat himself to any extensive degree. He invited no guests, played no records and gave no news bulletins, except of his own making. The show had ten or twelve steady sponsors and many irregulars-hair restorers, makers of artificial limbs, ear-piercing shops, a metaphysician in Long Island City, an illuminator of manuscripts and scrolls, several dog kennels. Most of the sponsors wrote their own commercials and they were usually read by Warren in what can only be called a mounting orgasmic frenzy. Warren also delivered commercials for nonexistent products. He talked for three solid hours every morning but Monday, sometimes with style, humor and intelligence, sometimes with scatological glee, sometimes in the bitter self-pitying tone of a genuinely desperate man. Warren had a brilliant mind, I thought, but he was completely irresponsible and it wasn't easy to characterize his audience. "Death" had more than its share of freak-appeal and it probably attracted most of the area's neo-Nazis, transsexuals, interplanetary travelers, coprophiles, whip and chain collectors, astral seers, blood-drinkers and morgue attendants-all the caffeine dregs of a century of national insomnia. His frequent use of obscenity, both primitive and surreal, had drawn no comment from the FCC, either because they were not listening or because the time had finally come for the electrical transmission of wordsex into America's silent bedrooms. Naturally Warren was considered a prophet by some, a menace by others. He encouraged neither view; nor did he encourage that sentiment of unity and common purpose, that sense of underground comradeship, which his listeners undoubtedly shared. Too much like the Masons, he said. Warren had started in broadcasting many years before as a weatherman on a Los Angeles TV station. He had managed to acquire a kinescope of what turned out to be his last program and he showed it to me one evening in a screening room at the network. What I recall most vividly are his eyes, relentlessly drilling, trying to pierce the prohibitive limbo so familiar to those who have stood before a camera in a small studio. He was able to speak for almost a full minute before somebody woke up and cut him off. He began by saying that there was no weather in Los Angeles and there never had been. The true weather was in ourselves; the true weather report had been concealed from the public all these years. Storm warnings up and down the subconscious. Ten-foot drifts along the outlying areas of the soul. Winds of gale force should reach the suburban psyche by midnight. There will be no flights in or out of the major idports. Then he had done a tapdance and sung a lyric that went "hey jig-a-jig go fuck a rubber pig." He had come a long way since then. His total earnings were close to a hundred thousand a year. Several national magazines had done stories on him. He accepted invitations to appear on many television talk shows. He had written a nonbook. Educated by Jesuits for eight years, Warren was able to regard his money, his notoriety, his four ex-wives with a combination of dispassionate wit, profound distress and a monumental Thomistic sense of the divine logic behind it all.

"Not again," I said.

"It's the real thing this time, Tab. She's got big pink Renoir tits and she can cook. But I fear her crotch is haunted by the ghost of Joan of Arc, that prissy little suffragette. We're going to Dublin on our honeymoon, which may sound self-defeating, but I've always wanted to do something like that."

"When's the wedding? I wouldn't think of missing it."

"It's on her lunch hour," he said. "Tuesday, noon, Supreme Court Building. She's a dental hygienist. She cleans your teeth before Dr. Dachau takes over with all his dangling pain-utensils. She has to be back in the office by one-thirty but he's giving her a week off beginning the next day so I can fly her to old Dub and pretend she's Molly Bloom, the only woman I've ever really wanted to scissor with. The fantasies are taking over my life."

"Warren, isn't this the third dental hygienist you've married?"

"Second," he said. "The one you're thinking of was a radiologist. Tried to zap my gonads once or twice. Tuesday then."

I read two pages of a script about the melting of the polar ice caps and then called my father. His secretary said he would be with me in a minute. I tried to picture the soap beneath her fingernails.

"Hiya, pally. What's new?"

"Stennis makes forty-five," I said.

"That's all? You're sure?"

"Unimpeachable source."

"God bless you, sport."

A few minutes later the phone rang. As I lifted the receiver Binky shifted positions and the coat slipped onto the floor and her skirt moved up her leg, making that fine hushing sound, and twisted nicely around her thighs. The telephone was quacking and I plugged it into my head.

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

"David, why didn't you call me back? You are coming this evening, aren't you?"

"What do you want for Christmas, Wendy?"

"I won't say it over the phone. But if you were here, dar-ling."

"You're just lonely," I said.

"Remember college, David? Wasn't it wild? You're one of my oldest and dearest friends. Please come to my dinner party tonight. You can leave early if you want to. Do you still have your T-Bird and those super poems you used to write? You have no idea how upset I was when you showed up with a wife that last year. Listen, I have to tell you this one final thing. Are you listening? I got a card from my ex today. You wouldn't believe where he's spending the holidays."

There were thirty-six small holes in the mouthpiece of my telephone. They were arranged in three circles of six, twelve, and eighteen holes each. There were only six holes in the earpiece. This disparity seemed significant but I didn't know exactly why. My eyes were on the sleeping girl on my sofa while my mouth and ear were engaged with the mouth and ear of Wendy Judd. I felt I was being sucked into the telephone. Only my eyes seemed to resist the whistling tunnel pressure of those forty-two holes. Wendy's mouth, enormous and frenzied, was burning at my ear; as I listened, my hand moved to that part of my thigh which corresponded to the area below the hem of Binky's skirt which my eyes had selected a moment before. My senses, it seemed, were scattering, eyes and hand allied, mouth and ears receding into the phone, drawn by the urgent voice, by the image I could not envision; and then, fiercely and strangely excited, I moved my hand across my lap and did a mad kind of loin dance, not moving from the chair, not taking my eyes from that land and sea arrangement of dress and leg, not resisting the tunneling lure of the telephone, the place where Wendy dwelt, unimaginably desirable, a victory of mouth and ear. It was my secretary who gave flesh to the disassembled words, who modeled for me the image on the other end of the wire, the picture I couldn't see without her help. I closed my eyes, feeling it was all too much, too involving, and cut across Wendy in mid-sentence, an incivility I knew she would not mind.

"I'll be there," I said.

I hung up and immediately called Sullivan. She answered after the seventh ring. I felt a sudden chill, the vast white silence of my mother's deathbed, candlewax and linen, her enormous eyes, the breathing shallow and bad. Beneath the blanket her body was little more than ash, crumbs of bone; her hands were dry kindling. Death became her well, so horribly well, and when I heard the bells of an ice cream truck I had almost laughed. American sky-chariot come to take mother to the mansion with the familiar orange roof and the twenty-eight flavors. I had almost, but not quite, laughed; and then the chill had entered and she died.

"I have to get out of here, Sully."

"David?"

"I no longer control the doors. Words blow in and out. I can hear them perfectly, with really astounding clarity, but I can't believe they're coming from my mouth. I think it's time to leave."

"Nothing will be solved out there, you know. It's just telephone poles stringing together the cities. Those distances out there will only confuse you."

"I had lunch with a friend recently. He cried. He wanted to build a boat and sail to Tasmania. I laughed at him. A week later he had a cerebral hemorrhage. We learn nothing from the stereotypes around us, not even that we're all the same."

"I know what your problem is. You don't have any Jewish friends. Why don't you come on over tonight? I'm working on something new. I'd like you to take a look at it."

"I'll be there," I said.

I put down the phone. The door opened slightly, revealing the condensed figure of Mrs. Kling, six inches wide, armless and hipless. With the door open just a crack I didn't know whether she could see Binky on the sofa.

"Somebody took my stapler," she said. "It was on my desk when I went into Mr. Denney's office. Now it's gone. I've had it for nine years. My name is Scotch-taped to the bottom of it. I'm telling everybody that if it's not back on my desk by nine sharp on Monday morning there'll be trouble. That gives all of you the whole weekend to make up your mind."

"Reeves Chubb took it. I saw him."

"You're lying. Don't think I don't know how much lying goes on around here. What's she doing on your sofa with her legs like that?"

"She gets these mild attacks," I said. "It's some kind of minor diabetes thing. No cause for concern, Mrs. K."

"I can see bare flesh above her stockings. Why are your hands under the desk?"

"I was just picking some loose skin off my fingers. You know the way the skin gets loose around the fingernails. I was kidding before about Reeves taking your stapler. Walter Faye took it. Say, I like your shoes, Mrs. K. I didn't know Dr. Scholl's had merged with Walt Disney Productions."

After she left I dialed Ted Warburton's extension.

"Warburton here."

"Hello, Ted. It's Dave Bell. I just wanted to say that I enjoyed that remark you made about Chip Moerdler. It's most gratifying to be supported by a man of your stature. What was it you called him-an ignominious baboon?"

"A thundering ignoramus."

"Superb," I said.

"I was sorry to hear your show is being cancelled. It had its faults but it was one of the few programs I made it a point to watch. Don't be disappointed, Dave. You're young and able. One of the turks. I've been hearing good things about you."

"Coming from you, Ted, those are encouraging words indeed. "

"I shouldn't have thought you'd need any encouragement, particularly from an old buzzard like me."

"How long have you been living here, Ted? I've been meaning to ask."

"Since 1951," he said. "I had always hoped to retire to England one day. But in a few months I'll probably be dead. My wife is American, you know."

"No, I didn't."

"You'll have to come over for dinner some night. We weren't able to have children."

"Ted, there's one other thing I'd like to ask you. Did you read the Mad Memo-Writer's latest effort? The St. Augustine quote? Actually I don't usually refer to him as the Mad Memo-Writer. I call him Trotsky. It seems appropriate somehow."

"Trotsky," he said. "Quite good. I like that."

"What I wanted to ask you was whether you could clear up the meaning of that particular quotation for me. You're really the only one around here who might conceivably shed some light."

"I don't think I know precisely what you're talking about."

"The St. Augustine thing. And never can a man be more disastrously in death than when death itself shall be deathless. I've committed it to memory. It overwhelms me. I'm not sure why but it just hits me. It knocks me out."

"It is a somewhat killing remark, isn't it? But I don't see why you think I can unravel it for you. I'm the kind of man who likes to rest his wits with anagrams. Theology is a bit out of my line."

"The endless leagues of China," I said.

"I don't understand."

"You recited that passage from Kafka to confuse them. I was watching your face. You were playing a game with them."

"Weede is an overbearing jabberwock and Reeves Chubb is beyond all hope of redemption; nevertheless, one is my superior and the other a fellow human being entitled to cherish the illusion of his dignity, if nothing more. I abhor deceit and trickery in others and I try to the best of my waning ability to exclude these particularly shabby vices from my own repertoire. No, young man, I was playing no game. I'm afraid you misinterpreted whatever it was you saw on my face."

"In that case I apologize, Ted. I guess I tied the two things together. The memo and your remarks about China. I thought there was a connection."

"You were mistaken. I'm not who you think I am. I'm a man trying to do a job of work and having a bloody difficult time of it if you want to know the truth. These tiresome phone calls don't help any. People ring me up automatically when they need an answer to some infantile question or a question for some ungodly answer. I am not the research department. I am not dial-a-prayer. And I most assuredly am not the Bishop of Hippo."

"I'm sorry, Ted. I really am. Please forgive me."

"We are endlessly dying," Warburton said. "We begin dying when we are born. A short time later we die. By universal consent, more or less, this is known as death. In time the so-called resurrection of the body takes place. Soul and body become joined in what we have already defined as the state of death. But although we are in the state of death we are not dead because body and soul are intact once again and there is no recourse but to resume the process of dying. Or, if you will, the process of living-the words are interchangeable really. And since this process of dying goes on for all eternity we cannot be said to be waiting for death. Nor are we looking back on death, for the simple reason that we cannot look back on something which is not there but here. In this paradoxical, redundant and somewhat comical passage, what Augustine is getting at beyond all the gibberish is that death never dies and that man shall remain forever in the state of death. There is always the chance, of course, that I have misunderstood every word. I managed to obtain a key to the multilith room. I run off the copies after midnight and then distribute them. If I'm not able to get it all done before daybreak, I distribute the remaining copies during lunchtime, as was the case yesterday. I work quickly and stealthily. Naturally I am above suspicion."

He hung up. I kept the phone at my ear for a long moment, almost expecting his voice to return, drumming and bagpip-ing, overwhelming the animistic buzz of the telephone. Then I returned the receiver to its cradle and went for a walk. All the office doors were closed and I opened them one by one as I progressed through the corridors. Jones Perkins was down on one knee, golf club in hand, lining up a seven-foot putt; a tipped-over paper container served as cup. Walter Faye was reading the Kama Sutra to his secretary. Mars Tyler was at his desk, running a strand of dental floss between his teeth. Reeves Chubb was in the process of changing his shirt. Richter Janes and Grove Palmer were pitching quarters to the wall. Quincy Willet was having his shoes shined by the freelance bootblack. Paul Joyner sat on his royal blue sofa, barefoot, in the lotus position. I was like a movie camera catching documentary glimpses of everyday life in a prison, on an aircraft carrier, in a home for the criminally insane. Phelps Lawrence had gone but his secretary, Ellen Quint, was in his office, his ex-office, pacing, eyes red, hair ribbon undone. Carter Hemmings was strumming his guitar. Nobody was in Chandler Bates' office and I did not open Ted Warburton's door.

Then I saw Jennifer Fine turning a corner and I went into the men's room. Later I went back to my office, woke up Binky and told her to go home. As she put on her coat she nearly fell, stone zombie drunk, and I had to help her to the elevator. On the way back I stopped at Jody Moore's desk and we talked about her upcoming trip to Indonesia. Then I got my coat and went down to the Gut Bucket. The bartender Leon, who was studying to be an actor, ignored me for five minutes while he talked to a girl wearing an eyepatch and a zoot suit. Finally he sauntered over, set both hands flat on the bar and gave me his ironical Marlonesque cowboy grin.

"The usual," I said.

"Now what would that be?"

"I thought you were Monty. Monty usually works this end of the bar. Cutty Sark on the rocks. It's so goddamn dark in here."

"One Cutty it is."

I was on my second drink when five or six network people came in, laughing and stomping, all gloved, scarved and rosy. They joined me at the bar. The men shook hands with me and the women kissed me. We were there for about two hours, in our coats and rubber boots, standing in snow puddles. I bought the last three rounds and then they left, complaining about trains and taxis, cursing the husbands who would be waiting for dinner to be cooked, the wives and Volkswagens meeting the trains, the children demanding their gifts, the boyfriends who would be jealous, the pets who would claw the furniture, the relatives who would be arriving, the time, the season, the epoch, the age. I told them to have a nice weekend. Then I had another drink, drew a smile from the girl in the eyepatch and departed without leaving a tip.

Wendy Judd lived in the east eighties, an area which always made me think of a drugstore stretching to infinity. Her building was called Modigliani Terrace Apts. The lobby was bleached in fluorescent lighting and decorated with gold-fringed mirrors and balding tapestries. There was a pool, full of cigarette butts, with a graceful stone naiad standing in the middle, rusty water trickling from her navel. Murals depicted Montmartre, Fort Lauderdale and Mount Fujiyama. The doorman asked my name and then called Wendy on the intercom and announced me. In the elevator was a printed notice pointing out that for the safety and convenience of the tenants there were hidden TV cameras in all the elevators as well as in the laundry room and in both the Giacometti and Lipchitz sculpture gardens. I walked down a long corridor. There was a Christmas wreath on Wendy's door with a note pinned to it that read: Dis is de place. She ushered me in, missing my mouth with a pigeon kiss. Then I had to stand at the entrance to the living room while she called off the names of the other guests, adding coy biographical notes. They nodded when introduced, one of the ladies raising her hand with kindergarten brightness, the men lifting their rumps from sofa and chairs like pianos that do not wish to be hoisted. Wendy took my coat.

"And this is David Bell, one of my ex-lovers," she said. "Isn't he something, girls? Pow."

Her apartment was decorated with revolutionary wall posters in Chinese script. There were smooth brown Buddhas sitting on the bookshelves along with several shiny volumes of Oriental art reproductions and a number of miniature samurai swords that seemed to be part of an ashtray arrangement. In addition to Wendy and myself, there were four men and four women in the room. None of them appeared to be beautiful, handsome or talented. I sensed tremendous hostility.

I sat on the sofa next to a girl whose left leg was in a cast.

"What do you do?" she said.

"I do things with McAndrew at Amherst."

"Have I heard of him?"

"No," I said.

"If you're wondering about the leg, I broke it skiing."

"I was about to ask."

"Are you a good lover?" she said.

"Even a hawk is an eagle among crows."

"You're real quick. I won't mess with you anymore. You're too quick for me. I was trying to get you off balance and you come up with a terrific line probably from some great old Randolph Scott movie in that green Technicolor. Where do you drink? We all drink at the Bow-Wow on Second Avenue.

The bartender's name is Roone. He's real quick too. Some of the things he says. Too much. But I don't like him visually. We're all sharing a house at Fire Island this summer. There's a half a share left. If you're interested, tell Barry or Spike. A half a share costs a hundred and sixty. Then you chip in for food, liquor and incidentals. Bring a blanket because it gets cold at night. The house we're getting this year is just one house down from the dunes. Are you a Scorpio by any chance?"

Then Wendy walked in, dragged a chair to the middle of the room and straddled it in the manner of a Berlin nightclub singer in the disillusioned twenties.

"I'm so delighted David could come tonight. David Bell is the only one who can save me. We were lovers in college. David had this white Thunderbird and we used to drive into the desert and take our clothes off. Pow. Where can you do that in New York? I went up to one of the sundecks in my blue bikini last August and they wouldn't even let me take off the top. In Panama City I had a lover who had David's eyes. It was fantastically uncanny. But he was a freak in everything else. I couldn't believe this man. He was some kind of banana agent and he had this thing about tarantulas. We were in a restaurant once and he said what if a big furry tarantula suddenly crawls out of your food; what will you do; you have to be ready for something like that in this part of the world. I've had some freaky lovers. Antony Ambrose wanted to put me to work in a SoHo striptease joint because of my breasts. I couldn't believe that man. When we split up he told me thanks for the mammaries."

I went into the bathroom. There were books, woodcuts, a magazine rack, two scatter rugs, a small bronze gong. I sat on the rim of the tub and flipped through a magazine article about the war. Each page of the article was adorned with color photographs. Opposite a picture of several decapitated villagers was a full-page advertisement for a new kind of panty-girdle. The model was extraordinarily lovely, a tall dove-colored girl holding a camel whip. The copy said this high-fashiony girdle clings to your bodyskin and comes in three huggy colors. I turned to a brandy ad. A woman in a white evening dress was walking a leashed panther across the lawn of a Newport estate. The war article covered about fifteen pages, the text set in very small type. I realized the bathtub was full of water bugs. I went into the kitchen and Wendy turned and then we were all over each other, heavy and ravenous, jammed into a corner, and what I saw in my mind was Binky asleep on my sofa.

Dinner was chicken and rice. We sat around the living room, plates on knees, and searched each other's raincloud faces for some clue to our dilemma. I counted the greeting cards which Wendy had placed on exhibit throughout the room. There were sixty-four of them.

"There are water bugs in your bathtub," I said.

"That's impossible," Wendy said, her mouth puffed with rice, and I was sure that all ten of us shared a skittering image of quick black creatures nesting in every scoop of rice in every bowl.

"I tried to count them but there were too many."

"This is a new building. It has a sanitary code you wouldn't believe. David is just being macabre, everyone. It's his own special brand of humor. Just go on eating and don't worry about a thing. Once a week they clean and scrub every inch of this building from top to bottom with the most modern equipment available."

"There were at least twenty," I said. "You have to be ready for something like that in this part of the world. I'm sure they've been scanned on the radar by this time. One of them was having babies."

Dessert was a nervous affair. The women did not remain seated and even avoided standing in one spot for more than a few minutes at a time. I said I had to catch a big silver bird to the Coast early the next morning and Wendy saw me to the door. She reprimanded me for being naughty and then, tongue to my ear, promised me a night of canal-zone pleasures if only I would remain. The elevator was not working and I had to walk down sixteen flights. It was snowing heavily. On Second Avenue dozens of off-duty cabs went by. Finally one of them pulled up. I got in and the driver batted down the flag and started off toward lower Manhattan at high speed in the total snow.

Sullivan lived in a top-floor loft on Greene Street. Her reputation was growing locally and I felt it wouldn't be long before the critics and art marketeers and all those natty little gallery men with vicious shoes and dagger sideburns recognized that she belonged in the top rank of American sculptors. She worked in mahogany, epoxy and automobile paint. In her own words, everything she did pursued a curve. The smoothness of her shapes and the dull blunt colors she used seemed to suggest a horrible softness, that of slugs or worms, boneless things curling at the edge of one's sleep. Several people had told her they were afraid to touch her pieces of wood and this pleased her but only to a point; she said her highest ambition was to give people the feeling that they were eating small live wet amphibians. The Whitney owned two of Sullivan's works and private collectors accounted for about ten more. At least thirty had been bought by various corporations. A chemical firm in Muncie had recently purchased three of her smaller things and placed them in the lobby. This had surprised and delighted me. Like all those who loiter around talent I tended to overpraise Sullivan and to consider her work one of the essential measures in the salvation of the republic, and it did not seem impossible to me that Indiana might rise to new spiritual heights thanks to Sullivan's three pieces of carefully handcrafted afterbirth. She told me not to get too excited. The chemical firm was merely trying to improve its image; they had even sent a number of their executives to a mountain retreat where they walked around in sandals and togas; and it was all a tax gimmick anyway. I had met Sullivan when our unit at the network did a half-hour filmed report on something we called the phenomenon of power-art, meaning art produced by electric tools. Two minutes were devoted to Sullivan and her fantastic studio. It took almost a whole day to film this segment and she and I spent a good part of it in conversation. She said she liked me because I was so beautiful and sad, so squarely in the American tradition. Only Sullivan, I believed, could save me.

The front door was off its hinges. It stood in the tiled hallway with the word door painted white across the glass pane which composed its upper half. I walked up the first flight. The two doors were marked good and evil. I kept climbing. The tiled steps were rounded and black at the edges. I passed four more doors. One was labeled breast and the others were marked justice, martyrdom and river. Climbing the final flight to Sullivan's loft, I smelled something terrible blowing through the building, some presence that carried with it a sudden vivid evocation of open wounds, swamp, panic and disease, the stench of a retreating army, and it was so strange and pervasive that I knew I must make a joke of it, as I did, ultimately, with all those things I did not understand, and so I assembled an opening remark to toss at Sullivan. The remark would be both clever and graphic and I was still working on the exact phrasing when I opened the unmarked door and walked into the room.

She was not there. Seven coiled shapes, hulking and purgatorial, stood around the loft. They were much larger than anything she had done before and far more complex, wheels inside wheels, scythes rising from the rounded edge of a ludicrous shield, men or burial urns, industrial menace of cogs and inner clocks, a massive butter churn, all fearful, indefinable in the end, looming and never still, her long soul in wood. To shape, bond and coat. She said it was the blessing of God, the final grace, to have given us opposable thumbs. I could never enter Sullivan's studio without feeling that I had just stepped, unwillingly, into an alien country, one visited in the past but with a landscape that remained no more than the barest of memories. There were first the shapes circling in and out of their own smooth contours. There were the two spotlights placed on pedestals at opposite ends of the room. There was the wood-dust covering everything and then the hungry tools with teeth and claws, the radial-arm saw and saber saw, the orbital sander, the huge band saw and stationary sander, all their wires looped in the dust. There was, finally, most alien, the membranous chemical material which covered the walls and ceiling. Similar to the kind of wrapping used to keep sandwiches fresh, but somewhat more dull and opaque, this material was not wallpapered on in sections; it was a single tentlike unit, clinging, billowing slightly at times, bubbled with air pockets between itself and the walls. One rectangular section corresponding to the length and width of the door had been cut away so that people could enter and leave. The thing had been placed in the loft by the previous tenant, a Swiss inventor and collagist who was totally, rampagingly mad as only the Swiss can be. He referred to this, his lifework, as the Cocoon, and to himself as the Cocoonist. It had been his hope to fashion an environment that would be a work of life as opposed to one of art, an organism insulated from the hostile outer topography, a clump of palpitating caterpillars, a micro world, a man beyond the man who made it. The material, after all, was made of chemical substances and therefore could be said to possess some basic life-force different in degree but not in essence from that shared by all things which crawled or walked. This is what he told Sullivan and this is what Sullivan told me. The Cocoon had been just the beginning of his work but soon after it was floated into the loft he ran out of money, got into trouble with the landlord for setting fire to an alley cat as part of a formal satanic ritual and finally borrowed enough money to book passage on a freighter bound for North Africa, departing in a pair of Sullivan's flyless dungarees and the Lady Hathaway shirt I had given her as a birthday present.

The membrane had microscopic pores which enabled air to enter. Natural light could barely penetrate but the spotlights were an adequate substitute. Sullivan preferred them actually, claiming that sunlight was overrated. I put my fingers to one of the pieces of sculpture; the paint was dry, a deep gray; the others were browns of varying flat tones, a black and bone-white, a glacial silver. The three windows in the loft, pale and wavering behind the skin of the sandwich wrap, were shut tight, and yet the wrapping undulated as if grazed by a sea breeze. Some of the smaller power tools lay on a workbench. I went from figure to figure, thumbing each one, running the back of my hand over the bending surfaces. The building was quiet. I wondered why this one door had not been marked; to give a door the name River was an act of odd joy, or poetry, or childhood. I thought of the river in Old Holly then, and then of leaves, palms up, turning in a gentle current above the long, still, suspended fish with silver-dollar eyes, and then the woman ironing clothes in the shingled house, standing in her slip, the blinds not quite shut, and the September music of that warm night, elms and leisures of a dark street when the lawns smell of sweet wet grass and you are a boy, the hopelessness of lust, her bare arms and the shine of silk moving as her slow body moved, twice my age at least, ironing with the smooth movements of a lioness caressing her cubs, and I held to a tree and watched for an hour or more, twice my age, her light brown hair, lazy eyes, the softness of her face, never seen before and never since. All I wanted now was sleep.

A stained chunk of foam rubber, the remains of a mattress, lay under the workbench. I dragged it out and rolled my body into a ball and went immediately to sleep inside the plastic envelope of that room. Sins and rivers passed through my dreams, underwater faces fish-staring in my mind. I woke up to silence and chill, the accusations of the klieg lights. The city was full of people searching for the man or woman who might save them. My body stank of cold sweat, liquor and fear. The loft seemed endless, a scene lifted from the sandy bottom of a dream. A shape in the shape of my mother was forming in the doorway.

5

I was wearing green military-advisor sunglasses, a pair of wolf-hide moccasins, black chinos, a tight T-shirt and a khaki fatigue cap cocked low over my eyes. Pike was sprawled in the back seat and Sullivan was at my side watching New England un-bury itself from the last snow of winter bleeding now into the earth. The radio was announcing a sale on ground round steak and then some old-time rock came on, lush and mystical, cockney voices wailing through a prayer wheel of electric sitars, and we roared past Boston in a low cloud of crematory smoke. The windows were closed and the heater on and I moaned and chanted in the wrap-around fallopian coziness of my red Mustang, an infinitely more religious vehicle than the T-Bird I had owned in college. All America was on the verge of spring and the countryside was coming to glory, what we could see of the countryside through the smoke and billboards. There is nothing more thrilling than the first days of a long journey on wheels into the slavering mouth of an incredible and restless country. I shouted as I drove, exceeded speed limits, quoted poetry and folksong. Proper old Boston was behind us, its churches and gang killings, and ahead was Maine where surf blew over the rocks, where ruddy lobster-men in yellow hats and hip boots crackled with tales of the deep. We stopped in Salem for lunch and then visited the House of the Seven Gables, where the pretty little guide would not accompany us up the secret staircase, fearing quick cougar paws in the dark, and in late afternoon we reached the coast of Maine and saw a black apocalyptic storm clenched over the ocean, the air cool and tense, about to break, and when it came I thought the car might bust wide open and Pike woke up thinking we were all about to die and then told us about the great elliptical migrations of the cranes of Europe. I spurred the frisky Mustang past hundreds of bungalows, guest cottages and motels, twenty-five hundred miles from Marlboro country, and neon lobster phantasms swam across the wet road. It was evening when we got to Millsgate, a small white town on Penobscot Bay. The rain had stopped and we had dinner in a fishnet restaurant and then set out on foot to search for Bobby Brand's ascetic garage, Brand in exile, Brand junkless, Brand writing the novel that would detonate in the gut of America like a fiery bacterial bombshell. We went up a small hill, walking in the middle of the street. There were no cars, no sounds at all, and the air was so sharp it seemed to scratch the lungs. Four dogs came toward us and Pike barked at them but they just trotted by. The moon was full, obscured every few seconds by long swift clouds, and the whole sky seemed to be breathing. At the top of the hill I found the street we were looking for and we turned left and walked past the village green. A row of white houses flanked one side of the green; opposite the houses was a white clapboard church with a steeple. The high school was set back at the far end of the lawn, facing the street. Several porchlights were on and we could see the cannon and the black pocked balls stacked on the grass beside it. Up ahead there was a gap in the trees and I looked down to the water which was streaked silver from the moon and from the white lights of the houses set in the woods above the small coves on either side of the bay.

"New England is the most sexless place in the hemisphere," Sullivan said. "It has the sex appeal of Hyde Park in London on a warm afternoon when they all take off their shirts and collapse on the grass and then you understand why they had to go to Africa to get their kicks."

We reached the garage.

"To be human is to go through stages," Brand said. "I've been through them all. But that's over now. I eat, sleep and write. I'm all through shooting smack. I'm all through dropping acid. I'm working all that New York insanity and violence out of my system. I go over to the high school and play basketball with the kids. It's beautiful here and this is where I am. I'm purifying myself. You can help me, Davy. My brain needs cleaning out. I think the way I talk. The way I'm trying not to talk anymore. You can help me get rid of the slang. You have my permission to correct me whenever I fail back into the old drug argot or military talk. One of the things I've figured out for myself up here in exile is that there's too much slang in my head. It's insidious. It leads to violence. You can help, Davy. I want to be colorless."

We were sitting around a small table in his camper, inside the garage, drinking instant Maxwell House. The main part of the camper was plastic, designed to fit over the cab and back of a Ford F-250 pickup truck. The truck itself was black, the rest of the unit a dark gray with black trim around the windows and door. Inside were three bunks, a table, a hotplate and a typewriter; this was where Brand lived. I had met him years before when Merry and I went out to East Hampton one weekend. He seemed to be a one-man dispensary of meth, acid, hashish and various amphetamines. I was drawn to Brand. He represented the danger that was lacking in my life, real danger, not the plastic stuff available in great quantities at the network or the celluloid peril of those movie roles with which I challenged the premise of my marriage. All the bright young men of Madison Avenue searched for some facsimile of danger, some black root which might crack the foundation of their basic Episcopalianism, and we looked to the milder psychedelics, the study of karate, the weekend skydiving club, the sports-car rally. That weekend Brand gave me a tab to slip under my tongue, a ticket to unapproachable regions, and what I remember is the sight of myself at the age of sixty, mangled larvae clinging to the bleak flesh, the pit, the hellish comedy of my face; and that was the last occasion, save one, on which I tried to cross the swamp all alone. Brand had gone from Yale straight into the Air Force, where he flew an F-4 fighter-bomber over the elephant grass of a disappearing province. After his discharge (which may have been medical) he lived in a rooming house in the West Nineties shooting heroin and cocaine, then drifted into peace movements of the sing-along type and finally discovered acid, political activism and writing. Brand was roughly my age. He was tall, had sandy hair, wore glasses, was likable and frightening, lived off his family most of the time, seemed to change his personality every few weeks and sometimes minutes, could easily be visualized lying on a bed in a college dorm wearing a sweatshirt, denims, loafers and white socks, reading an economics textbook, dreaming of spoons and blue flame. He had a pair of copulating dogs tattooed on his right forearm.

"My aunt Mildred owns this garage. She lives right down the street but she's in Bangor now finishing up some legal business. Too bad you can't meet her. She plays the clarinet."

"When do we leave?" I said.

"Tomorrow's fine with me. I've leaving my manuscript behind. It needs a rest. Did you bring your camera?"

"It's in the car. I've also got a battery-operated tape recorder. And Sullivan brought along her fantastic NordMende fifteen-band portable radio. It gets the whole world."

"That's great."

"Do we sleep here tonight?" Sullivan said.

"We may as well get used to it," I said.

"We don't have to. Mildred left me the keys to her house. We'll be less crowded there. She's always asking me to move in with her but I tell her the garage is magical. It's full of emanations. I can't write anywhere but here. When do you have to be in Arizona?"

"Three weeks from yesterday. If all goes well, the crew will have everything set up by the time I get there. I hope you'll all decide to hang around while we're shooting. I don't know whether I'll be able to drive back with you. Most likely I'll have to fly. Pike, you and Sully can pick up my car here and take it back for me."

"My license expired eighteen years ago," Pike said.

We got our bags from the car and walked over to Brand's aunt's house. It was a fine old house, the place where everyone's grandmother lives in television commercials, full of other people's memories and yet warmed by a mood of love and simplicity that was universal. Starched lean men and little girls with straight blond hair looked darkly from photographs hung in the hallway. The living room was all chintz and needlepoint and bible kindness, wallpapered with faded yellow roses and soaked in an odor of old bodies rocking toward sleep. Brand took Sullivan and Pike upstairs and I wandered through the kitchen and pantry, feeling I had come to the heart of something, to the secret of the terror of small towns on Sunday, the eucharistic silence of coffee and buns after the long walk back from church. How long had it been since I had stood in a pantry at midnight, the dark shelves lined with cookie jars, jam and spices? Taste and smell can safecrack memory in the shadow of an instant, and in that pantry, nibbling dry cookies with the compulsive fervor of a penitent seeking the message of his past, I returned to a tight hot room in another town, the idle perfume of a summer.

I turned off the lights and went upstairs. Brand and Pike were sharing one of the bedrooms. They sat on their beds, the career soldier and the recruit, untying shoelaces, yawning, yanking T-shirts over their heads. Brand told me the other bedroom was at the far end of the hall and as I left them I heard Pike begin his account of the wanton slaughter of the buffalo in the eighteen sixties and seventies, herds three miles long and two miles wide decimated by Sunday huntsmen firing from trains. Sullivan was already in bed, reading her Yeats. The room obviously had not been used for a while and it was bare except for the lamp, the small table on which it stood, one chair, Sullivan's bed, and the cot where I would be sleeping. The roof sloped down over this part of the house and my cot was at the shallow end of the room. Sullivan turned off the light and I undressed, standing naked for a few seconds next to the cot, wondering whether she could see me. It felt wonderful to be sleeping in the same room as Sullivan. I slipped between the cold sheets. The ceiling angled down right over me and I raised my arm and touched it with my fingertips. All children, I thought, should be permitted to sleep in such a room; the child loves nooks and odd angles and is frightened into nightmare by equidistance, by parallel planes which conceal nothing.

"Pike is telling about the bison."

"His saddest tale," she said.

"We'll be out there soon."

"David on the way to Oz."

"I wonder if there are any Arapahoes still left. Or Chiricahuas. My favorite tribe. The Chiricahua Apaches. Burt Lancaster with that paisley headband."

"Will you get your blizzard?"

"I guess not. It'll be April soon."

"Desert flowers will be blooming."

"Did you ever notice? Darkness seems to make people speak in short sentences."

"Yes," she said. "And when the lights come on, we open up and ramble and say absolutely nothing. But in bed in the dark we're urged on by the monkey waiting in our sleep."

"What monkey?"

"We become documentary. We become newsreels telling what we think is the truth. Our listener is really no more than a fragment of the dark. The true audience is darkness itself. We unwrap our lives to it, trying to appease the monkey."

"What monkey?" I said.

"The Viennese monkey. But what we say really adds up to little more than empty daytime chatter. It's nothing compared to the revelation yet to come."

"Which is?"

"The single unending sentence."

"Sleep and dream."

"Yes."

"Tell me a story," I said.

"What kind?"

"About the great golden West and the Indians and the big outdoor soul of America."

"Do I have to speak in short sentences?"

"No."

"I have just the thing," she said. "It's about a wise old holy man of the Oglala Sioux and what he said to me once on a moonlit night."

"Is this for real or are you going to make it up as you go along?"

"This is for real," Sullivan said.

"Tell me then."

"He was a hundred years old and he looked like the stump of an oak tree. As a boy he had fought at the Little Bighorn with Crazy Horse. Even then he had disliked bloodshed and he spent most of the years of his adulthood fasting and praying. Some time ago, through the good offices of an anthropologist who had once been a friend of my father, I was permitted to visit Black Knife in his shack in the hills of South Dakota. I asked him a few polite questions which he chose to ignore, displaying at the very outset a splendid contempt for the amenities. He puffed on an ugly old corncob pipe. I think it must have been filled with mud and wet leaves. Then I asked him if things had changed much since he was a boy. He said that was the most intelligent question anyone had ever asked him. Things had changed hardly at all. Only materials had changed, technologies; we were still the same nation of ascetics, efficiency experts, haters of waste. We have been redesigning our landscape all these years to cut out unneeded objects such as trees, mountains and all those buildings which do not make practical use of every inch of space. The ascetic hates waste. We plan the destruction of everything which does not serve the cause of efficiency. Hard to believe, he said, that we are ascetics. But we are, more than all the fake saints across the sea."

"He said this to you, this old Sioux mystic?" "He kept well abreast of things with newspapers and periodicals."

"Go on."

"What we really want to do, he said, deep in the secret recesses of our heart, all of us, is to destroy the forests, white saltbox houses, covered bridges, brownstones, azalea gardens, big red barns, colonial inns, riverboats, whaling villages, cider mills, waterwheels, antebellum mansions, log cabins, lovely old churches and snug little railroad depots. All of us secretly favor this destruction, even conservationists, even those embattled individuals who make a career out of picketing graceful and historic old buildings to protest their demolition. It's what we are. Straight lines and right angles. We feel a private thrill, admit it, at the sight of beauty in flames. We wish to blast all the fine old things to oblivion and replace them with tasteless identical structures. Boxes of cancer cells. Neat gray chambers for meditation and the reading of advertisements. Imagine the fantastic prairie motels we could build if only we would give in completely to the demons of our true nature; imagine the automobiles that might take us from motel to motel; imagine the monolithic fifty-story machines for disposing of the victims of automobile accidents without the bother of funerals and the waste of tombstones or sepulchres. Let the police run wild. Let the mad leaders of our nation destroy whomever they choose. That's what we really want, Black Knife told me. We want to be totally engulfed by all the so-called worst elements of our national life and character. We want to wallow in the terrible gleaming mudcunt of Mother America. (That's what he said.) We want to come to terms with the false anger we so often display at the increasing signs of sterility and violence in our culture. Kill the old brownstones and ornate railroad terminals. Kill the rotten stinking smalltown courthouses. Blow up the Brooklyn Bridge. Blow up Nantucket. Blow up the Blue Ridge Parkway. We must realize we are living in Megamerica. Neon, fiber glass, Plexiglass, polyurethane, Mylar, Acrylite."

"Was his shack located on a windy mountain top? And had you gone there to find out the true meaning of life?"

"San Francisco would be completely leveled," Sullivan said. "Georgetown would be razed. In their place we would construct motels and houses that were identical in every detail. The new San Francisco would have no hills. The coast of Maine would be indistinguishable from Des Moines, Iowa. In the new gray Washington all the senators would spend eight hours a day in their identical offices, chained to radiators, being flogged by French tarts. This is known as the philosophy lesson, wisdom of the old world, the culture we so badly lack. Nobody would ever sweat. Sweating is wastefulness. If you were caught sweating you would be shot on sight. The air conditioners in every room in the country would be permanently set at fifty degrees fahrenheit. There would be no way to turn them off."

"What else did he say?"

"He said that all the new universities would consist of only one small room. It would work this way. At the beginning of each semester the entire student body-which would have to number at least five hundred thousand in order to give the computers enough to do-would assemble in a large open space in front of a TV camera. They would be televised and put on videotape. In a separate operation the instructors would also be videotaped, individually. Then two TV sets would be placed in the single room which represented the university. The room would be in a small blockhouse at the edge of a thirty-six-lane freeway; this proximity would help facilitate transmission of electronic equipment. Oh, there might be some banners on the wall and maybe a plaque or two, but aside from these the only things in the room would be the TV sets. At nine o'clock in the morning of the first day of classes, a computer would turn on the two television sets, which would be facing each other. The videotape of the students would then watch the videotape of the instructors. Eventually the system could be refined so that there would be only one university in the whole country."

"Frankly I think Black Knife is a little bit out of date." "The biggest surprise was yet to come. Black Knife went on to say, with a full moon above us, that this massive surrender to our deepest dreams and impulses would be the best thing that could happen. After all, it was the true expression of ourselves in the most profound darkness of our beings. We would attain complete self-realization. We would set forth on the world's longest march of vulgarity, evil and decadence. We would establish the greatest superstate of them all. The world would be on its knees before our crazed power-if it isn't already. And then, having set one foot into the mud, one foot and three toes, we would stop for a moment, take a look around, and decide whether to sink further and eventually die or whether to return to firm land and begin again, living off roots and berries but no symbols, shedding the ascetic curse, letting the buffalo run free, knowing everything a nation can know about itself and proceeding with the benefit of this knowledge and the awareness that we have chosen not to die. It's worth the risk, he said, for if we took the latter course we would become, finally, the America that fulfills all of its possibilities. The America that belongs to the world. The America we thought we lived in when we were children. Small children. Very small children indeed."

"And he told you all this. This broken-down swatch of buffalo hide."

"It was a cold night," she said. "And the moon was full."

In the morning it rained. I was the last one down. It felt good to sit in the kitchen, yawning, and smell coffee and bacon and hear rain slanting through the trees. I watched the others move from stove to refrigerator and back, bumping into each other, barely awake and walking through webs.

"What do you do for a living?" Brand said.

"That's a mute point," Pike said.

"Why don't you tell him?" I said.

"I'm a humanist of animals."

"Tell him," Sullivan said.

"I'm the proprietor of an electrical appliance repair shop on Fourteenth Street."

"Tell him what you specialize in."

"Toasters with doors and prewar radios. I have problems with pop-up things and things that are combinations of things like clock-radios or radio-phonographs. You have to read to keep up-to-date. I haven't read a book in twenty years. I don't have a head for numbers. I don't like voltage. My shop is small and I do what I can to encourage people to keep out."

"I have a head for numbers," I said. "Numbers fascinate me. Numbers have power. The whole country runs on numbers. I love to count things. I love to add and subtract. Everybody has numbers. Everybody is a number. Is that so terrible? Maybe it is. I frankly don't know."

"Listen up now," Pike said.

"Everybody start eating," Sullivan said. "I plan to fry myself an absolutely perfect egg. An astonishing egg. Perfect whites and yellows. Tone, texture, integrity."

"I want everybody to listen up now because this is important. In a fair fight who would emerge victorious, a tiger or a polar bear? Now the tiger is a fast powerful sinewy animal that has everything it takes to make a good hunter and killer. The tiger is classic. But you'll be making a big mistake if you underrate the polar bear. Polar bear can take off your arm with one lazy swipe of the paw. Polar bear has amazing speed for his size and he can camouflage himself in the snow. Natural selection is the name we give to this phenomenon. Tiger or polar bear."

"Where are they fighting?" Brand said.

"What do you mean?"

"If they're fighting in the arctic circle you have to favor the polar bear. In the jungle the tiger is the big stud. Nobody messes with the tiger on his own turf. He's the main man, the big bopper."

"Look, Jack, they're just fighting. It could be anywhere. Who can beat who is the thing we're concerned with."

"Let me posit something here," Brand said. "If a middleweight from Akron goes to defend his title in Panama City against a local boy, the bookmakers take cognizance of that fact. Odds are laid accordingly. Now perhaps my analogy limps. Perhaps it limps. Nevertheless you station a tiger on an ice floe against some big white mother and he'll keep slipping around on his hindquarters while the polar bear tears him apart. Vice versa in the jungle. Bear would collapse from heat prostration. You can't have them fighting in a vacuum. And you can't pick a neutral site either, like the desert or the mountains, because then both of them will be out of their natural elements and the fight won't be a true test of their abilities. The contest is much too hypothetical to be given serious consideration."

Pike ate his breakfast in silence. His eyes schemed like dice. An entire philosophy had been questioned, its precepts put in grave doubt, and some serious thinking had to be done, some material reassembled, before he could meet his antagonist in open debate. Sullivan filled the moody silence by announcing that my digression on numbers was somewhat less than Euclidean in its sweep and purity; that one of my main faults was a tendency to get blinded by the neon of an idea, never reaching truly inside it; that to follow a number to infinity was not necessarily to arrive at God. With her fork she bisected a crisp slice of bacon, a piece so brittle the fork barely had to touch it; she then halved the two fragments, then the smaller four, then the resulting eight, and so on, working with the quietly fanatical precision of all those people whose job it is to divide small things into smaller things, who live on the rim of insanity; finally there was nothing left of the slice but a hundred decimal points. Did the bacon represent the insignificance of numbers; the futile quest for infinity; the indivisible nature of God as opposed to the fractional promiscuity of numbers? Was it all a lesson in prime matter and substantial form: Were the bits of bacon supposed to be numbers and the fried egg God? Brand looked on in fascination. I finished eating and went upstairs. I found a telephone and called Binky, collect, at the office.

"What's new?"

"Too much," she said.

"What?"

"Reeves Chubb, Carter Hemmings, Mars Tyler, Quincy Willet, Paul Joyner, Chandler Bates and Walter Faye."

"Axed?" I said.

"Sandbagged, throttled and axed. Drawn and quartered. It's official."

"Jumping mother balls. A mass execution. The magnificent seven gunned down at the OK Corral. Some sweaty little infighting among the survivors, what?"

"I think you're getting promoted," Binky said. "It's just a rumor at this point but Jody thinks it's on the level."

"Protect my interests, Bink, and I'll take you to the top with me. We'll be like Gary Grant and Roz Russell. Sipping martinis in my penthouse office. Has Weede begun hiring new people yet?"

"Just one so far."

"What's his name?"

"Harris Hodge."

"How old is he?" I said.

"I don't know, David. He won't be starting until next week. I haven't even seen him yet."

"Find out how old he is. I'll call you in a few days. Do you miss me?"

"I have to hang up now," she said.

I went into the bathroom, took off my shirt and began shaving my chest with an electric razor. It was a ritual cleansing of the body, a prelude to the sacred journey. The rain had stopped. I was happy. Through the bathroom window, as I shaved, I could see most of the town of Millsgate, white houses massed in a jest of innocence, fresh sunlight on the steeple. A girl went along the street skipping rope, head back, eyes seeking the break in the clouds; two white sloops, heeling severely, played at the mouth of the bay. I tried to imagine, to remember really, what it was like to live without the terminal fears of the city, for I had loved a town once without knowing it, and the love would not release me. There was a vein of murder snaking across the continent beneath highways, smokestacks, oilrigs and gasworks, a casual savagery fed by the mute cities, and I wondered what impossible distance must be traveled to get from there to here, what language crossed, how many levels of being. My hair went willingly into the fish-mouth of the razor.

A woman came down the steps of an old house. She wore a blue dress and carried pruning shears. I stopped shaving to watch her. She was close to forty, I guessed, fair-skinned, wearing flat heels, appealing in the almost abstract way a waitress is appealing in her plain white dress and the easy cadence of her body as she walks away from your table. The woman began to trim the hedge, handling the large shears with uncommon ease, and then, perhaps feeling the intensity of my stare, she looked up and saw me. I did not move and soon she went back to work, humming softly, proceeding along the hedge, her arms beating, somewhat like a bird discovering flight. I watched her for a least half an hour. She would never know it, of course, but she had given me the strangest, darkest, most horrifying idea of my life. It was an idea for a film I might make somewhere out there among the lost towns of America.

They were waiting for me. Brand locked the house and we carried our suitcases to the garage and put them in the camper. Then I trotted down to my car and drove it to the garage. I transferred my movie camera and tape recorder to the camper. Brand backed the F-250 out as we stood on the sidewalk counting the dents and bruises. Then he came out to give it one final look, circling slowly with a thoughtful expression on his face. He adjusted his glasses, blinking rapidly into the sun.

"She's ready, Davy," he said. "The old plastic bitch is ready to roll. You're the captain. Which way are we going?"

"West," I said. "Aim her more or less to the west."

I put my car in the garage and Brand locked up. We flipped coins and it was determined that I would ride up front with him for the first fifty miles. We assumed our respective posts. The school bell began to ring. Brand put the camper into gear.