Broom of the System

12. 1990

/a/

“Perhaps I’ll try another crustless Hellman‘s-less ham sandwich, with you taking whatever steps might be possible to minimize the saltiness of the ham.”

“….”

“And a Canadian Club and distilled water.”

“Sure. How about Lenore? Is Lenore asleep?”

“Fnoof, fnoof fnoof.”

“So it would seem.”

“Sir, how about you? Would you like anything?”

“Ma‘am, while I take a minute to formulate a suitable answer to that, you could bring me a beer. I don’t need a glass.”

“All righty.”

“Thank you, miss.”

“….”

“Who the hell is that?”

“I think her name is Jennifer. She’s the Stonecipheco stewardess.”

“Hang me upside down if that’s not the beautifulest goddamn stewardess I ever saw. Would I like anything, she says.”

“Ahem. Lenore has given me to understand that Jennifer is married to the Stonecipheco pilot, in whose hands our lives at the moment happen to rest.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Would you care for some gum?”

“Not if I got beer coming. You sure chew a lot of gum, R.V.”

“I have ear trouble on planes. Normally I loathe gum.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Not to mention planes themselves.”

“Ho there, Lenore. You up?”

“Fnoof.”

“I so envy people who can sleep on planes, Andrew.”

“She sure is a nice sleeper. My wife, when she sleeps, sometimes her mouth hangs open. Sometimes a little bit of spit comes out of her mouth and gets on the pillow. I hate that.”

“Lenore is a lovely sleeper.”

“Look, R.V., does Lenore remember me or not? Like I said, I’m just positive it was her I met that night I met my wife. I was a little bit trashed, but still.”

“She hasn’t said anything to me. An appropriate context for discussing the issue didn’t arise, last night. She fell asleep almost immediately.”

“Those Howard Johnson’s beds are comfortable all right. Howard Johnson’s kicks ass. I appreciated the room, and the dinner, and the use of the razor. The Flange just about cleaned me out. I can’t believe I was too stupid to bring more money up with me.”

“Not a problem at all. Stonecipheco will absorb it. Consider it an advance.”

“Except the thing is, I’ve been thinkin’ about it… hey, thanks, looks great. The beer, too. Heh-heh.”

“….”

“Thank you, miss. I believe that will be all for now.”

“Just ring if you want anything.”

“Thank you.”

“Just ring, she says. She’s a tease, ain’t she? Lord, though, look at that. That’s a first-rate pooper, under that skirt.”

“Crusts, again. The girl seems incapable of removing crusts.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Please go on with what you were saying.”

“Well, I was thinkin’ about the night I think I met Lenore, the night I met Melinda-Sue, and what happened was me and this other guy, who turned out later on to be a real loser, we went over to Mount Holyoke, and kind of barged on into these girls’ rooms, for a kind of fraternity thing. I don’t quite remember what.”

“….”

“And I remember I think Lenore got pissed off. She was real young and I don’t think she knew the whole story. I remember she threw a shoe at the guy I was with.”

“A shoe?”

“Yup. And she told Melinda-Sue she had ugly feet.”

“Shoes and feet, again.”

“Yup. So I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to act, if I should just pretend like I don’t know her, either, or what. I can’t tell if she’s still pissed off after all these years or not.”

“Real, sustained anger in Lenore is quite rare, I’ve found. Embarrassment, though, is not. I would be willing to bet that Lenore is simply embarrassed. When she’s embarrassed about something, she tends to pretend it doesn’t exist.”

“You think that’s why she sort of acts like she don’t remember me, from that night, or Melinda-Sue?”

“It’s very possible.”

“You say she works at Frequent and Vigorous too? So I’ll be workin’ with her?”

“Not directly. As of before we left, she answered telephones, at the Frequent and Vigorous switchboard, in the lobby, downstairs. But on this trip I’ve had a bit of an inspiration, I think.”

“An inspiration?”

“Yes. I think I’ve come to see that the switchboard is not a full-time place for a woman of Lenore’s capacities. She is chafing, I’m almost certain.”

“Chafing?”

“Yes. I’ve come to see that it all adds up. The context is right. Lenore is chafing. She likes stories. To the extent that she understands herself, it’s as having something like a literary sensibility. And you and I, here most significantly I, will at least for a while be occupied with the Stonecipheco project account. The crux is that I plan to put Lenore on my personal staff, part-time, as a reader.”

“A reader?”

“Yes, of pieces submitted to the high-quality literary review of which I am editor, the Frequent Review. She can weed out the more obviously pathetic or inappropriate submissions, and save me valuable weeding-time, which you and I can spend on the Corfu project.”

“Hell of an idea, R.V.”

“I rather think so myself.”

“Yes indeedy.”

“Of course I’ll have to make sure that her sensibilities are keened to precisely the right pitch for the Review…”

“So we’ll be workin’ with her, but not exactly with her.”

“As far as you go, that is right.”

“Which works out good, because I’m not supposed to say what it is I’m workin’ on, to her.”

“Yes, unfortunately.”

“And if she asks, I have to say I’m… let me look at this… I’m supposed to say I’m translating this thing called ‘Norslan: The Third-World Herbicide That Likes People’ into idiomatic modern Greek.”

“Correct.”

“But except we still haven’t come to why exactly I have to say all this shit if she asks. If she’s just an employee, how come it matters? And what does she care if we’re tryin’ to sell nuclear baby food on Corfu?”

“This is unfortunately not entirely clear to me, Andrew, and just let me say I’m far from qualmless about the whole situation.”

“….”

“You are of course already aware that Stonecipheco is controlled by the Beadsman family, to a nearly exhaustive extent, and I’ll now inform you that Mr. Stonecipher Beadsman has stipulated in our contract that Lenore not know what is up in terms of Frequent and Vigorous involvement in the project until he wishes her to.”

“And you don’t find that just a tinch unusual?”

“Charitable speculation about Mr. Beadsman’s reasoning might suggest that he doesn’t want to involve Lenore in any more unpleasantness than is necessary. Suffice to say that the whole Corfu marketing venture is bound up with some family turbulence that’s worrying Lenore a lot, right now. Which turbulence is the main reason she and I came to Amherst, at all, so that Lenore might speak with her brother…”

“The kid we had dinner with at Aqua Vitae.”

“Yes. Stonecipher LaVache Beadsman.”

“He was pretty goddamn wild, I thought. ‘Course I have to admit I was kind of wasted. We drank all that in the Flange, and then you dragged me all over hell’s half acre through those crowds in the forest. Shit I drank went to my head and roosted. He was wild, though, I could tell.”

“He’s had rather a rough time of it.”

“Satanic little dung beetle, too.”

“Dung beetle?”

“Little dude looked like the devil. And what was all that about talkin’ about his leg like it was another person? He would like address comments to his fucking leg. What was all that about?”

“Lenore’s brother has only one leg. One of LaVache’s legs is artificial.”

“No shit.”

“None whatsoever. Couldn’t you tell?”

“He limped some, and he sat weird, but no.”

“He was wearing slacks at dinner. But he was wearing shorts when we first met him, on the hill. You didn’t see his leg then?”

“R.V., that hill got blacker than a panther’s ass when we got up top. The sun went right the hell down. It was darker than shit. I was wasted, too. I wouldn’t have been able to even see Lenore, if she hadn’t had that white dress on. And plus then I had to run right down to get my car over to Coach‘s, so I never really saw the sucker in shorts. I sure am sorry, though.”

“No need to be sorry. I was simply informing you of a fact.”

“Christ. What happened to his leg, then? How come they chopped it off?”

“No one chopped his leg off. LaVache was minus a leg from birth.”

“No shit. What, like a birth defect or something?”

“Not exactly.”

“What, then?”

“God, we’re over Lake Erie, now. This is my least favorite part of the trip, by far. My ears are also hurting like hell.”

“Too bad. That’s Lake Erie, huh?”

“Unfortunately.”

“Water’s kind of a funny color.”

“I’m sure whatever percentage of the lake is water is a perfectly lovely color. The percentage is however unfortunately quite small.”

“How come there’s no waves? How come the water doesn’t move?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“So what’s this about the kid’s leg, then? Legs don’t just disappear for no reason.”

“That’s obviously true.”

“….”

“Lenore is still asleep, isn’t she?”

“Fnoof.”

“Yup.”

“Lenore hates to be told about.”

“The leg story isn’t about her, though, is it?”

“What happened was that after the first three Beadsman children were born, Mrs. Beadsman’s health apparently got a bit ticklish. Nothing physically major — just a touch of anemia, or something like that. Mr. Stonecipher Beadsman III, Lenore’s father, however, through a troublingly ambiguous process of reasoning, came to the conclusion that Mrs. Beadsman was no longer entirely able to care for her children adequately, so at a certain point he hired a governess, a Miss Malig, a stunningly beautiful woman — she’s now an unbelievable battle-ax, with calves like chums, but back then she was apparently stunningly beautiful — which hiring itself represented a significant corporate coup, because Miss Malig had only the year before been named Miss Gerber in the annual Gerber Quality Brands beauty pageant, and Mr. Robert Gerber, Mr. Beadsman’s old college friend — Amherst, by the way, ‘61—and sworn corporate enemy, had been wild about her, and there had been rumors that he was going to divorce his striking Brazilian wife Paquita to devote all his time to the pursuit of Nancy Malig, but Mr. Beadsman, somehow, through maneuvers to this day unclear, spirited her away, and installed her in his home, at an exorbitant salary, ostensibly to take care of Clarice and John and Lenore.”

“What does all this have to do with legs?”

“What happened was that this hiring of Nancy Malig — with whom by the way Mr. Beadsman almost certainly began having an immoderate sexual affair that may very well continue to this day— and the at least partial separation from her children such a hiring represented and entailed, made Mrs. Beadsman, who had always been naturally rather melancholy, intensely sad. And the intense sadness had further non-good consequences for her health, now by implication emotional health, as well as physical. And so Mr. Beadsman, by now inarguably to some extent under Miss Malig’s erotic spell, and in any event naturally disposed to be very weird indeed about his children, and obsessed with the future of the family, and of Stonecipheco, Inc., even though at that point he was still only a vice president, since his father had not yet died in a Jell-O accident, and in any event disposed to be constantly giving his three children all sorts of specially developed standardized tests, academic and psychological, to begin the process of determining on whom the mantle of corporate power would someday devolve, became convinced somehow that Mrs. Beadsman’s mere presence was a harmful thing for the children, and thus the family, and thus the Company, and he began to take active steps to keep the children away from her altogether, which steps consisted of, a, expanding and combining the three children’s rooms into an immense impregnable combination nursery and playroom and bedroom and dining room, et cetera, with a heavy boltable iron door, and its own restroom facilities, and a dumbwaiter link to the kitchen, and so on, a maneuver which in intended effect isolated the children and Miss Malig in one wing of the Beadsman home in Shaker Heights, the east wing, an almost tower-ish extension of the house, with a lovely white trellis draped with dusky green vines running up the outer wall to the windows, a wing I’ve obviously personally seen, given this description. So the children, under Miss Malig’s malevolent eye, were isolated from the rest of the house, through which the now more than a little troubled Mrs. Beadsman would roam, in a flowing white cotton dress, often in the company of Mrs. Lenore Beadsman, Mr. Beadsman’s grandmother, who usually as a rule kept to her study, poring over meaningless tomes she’d been exposed to in her days as a student, which she still in effect was, a student, that is Mrs. Lenore Beadsman kept to her study until the mother-separated-from-children situation began really to assert itself, and old Lenore began to perceive the evilness of the Stonecipher-Malig liaison, and so would roam the house with Mrs. Beadsman, Patrice, also in a flowing white dress, trying to help Patrice think of ways to get in to see the children.”

“….”

“That is they roamed until Mr. Beadsman took step b, which consisted of demanding that Patrice Beadsman become a world-class contract bridge player — she’d been quite a spectacular bridge player in college — so as to get her out of the house and away from the children and him and Miss Malig. And so he arranges to have built a special little bungalow in the back of the house, for Patrice to by and large live in, and to practice bridge in, every moment, and he enters her in all sorts of world-class bridge tournaments, and hires a coach and partner for her, Blanchard Foamwhistle, a world-class contract bridge player, and, interestingly enough, the father of the man who is now Mr. Beadsman’s executive secretary at Stonecipheco. And Foamwhistle is paid an exorbitant salary, and he and Patrice are confined for days at a time to the bridge bungalow, ostensibly working on bridge strategy and bridge theory, and soon Patrice becomes mysteriously once again pregnant, and it is to me unclear whether she became pregnant by Foamwhistle or by Mr. Beadsman, although Mr. Beadsman gave no indication that he suspected anything sexually amiss, and in any event announced his intention to name the baby — which baby would without a doubt, he maintained, be a boy — Stonecipher, and he instructs Miss Malig to set up another crib in the impregnable east wing fortress.”

“You got this shit down, don’t you?”

“You want your question answered or not?”

“I guess.”

“Well that’s what I’m attempting.”

“….”

“And so by this time Mrs. Beadsman’s pregnancy, with its attendant hormonal and general chemical consequences, together with the original unhappiness and troubles, together with the continued isolation of the children, who are as a matter of routine hustled right up to the east wing tower after school, while Foamwhistle, on Mr. Beadsman’s high-paid instructions, keeps Patrice confined as best he can in the bridge bungalow, together with the obviously planned additional isolation of the baby, too, when it’s born, all combine to make Mrs. Beadsman understandably even more intensely unhappy, and frantic, and disoriented, and emotionally not a little unwell. And this has truly disastrous consequences for her contract bridge, a game which you may or may not know demands a clear undistracted mind and nerves of steel and absolute emotional soundness, and Patrice and Foamwhistle lose in the first round of every single world-class bridge tournament they enter, even though Foamwhistle is acknowledged to be one of the world’s very finest contract bridge players, which gives you some idea of the truly pathetic state of Patrice’s bridge, and soon they no longer even legitimately qualify for the world-class tournaments, because they get annihilated all the time, but Stonecipher Beadsman persistently bribes and coerces various tournament officials into continuing to admit Patrice and Foamwhistle to the tournaments, which the already frazzled Patrice finds excruciatingly embarrassing, and so becomes even more frazzled, and so on.”

“….”

“And this goes on until about the eighth or ninth month of Patrice’s pregnancy, and finally she and Foamwhistle get absolutely demolished in the preliminary round of a marginally world-class tournament in Dayton, by two eight-year-old contract bridge prodigies who wear matching beanies with propellers on top, and who deny Patrice and Foamwhistle even one trick, which represents a true thumping of ass, in bridge, and Patrice comes home, huge with child, and wildly frazzled, and deeply humiliated, and immediately on her arrival she runs into the east wing and up the tower stairs and pounds on the iron door of the children’s impregnable ward, pleading for entry, and apparently little Lenore on the other side pounds back, but Stonecipher Beadsman appears at the door and says that Patrice is obviously in no condition to have anything but a bad effect on the children, who are at this point undergoing a battery of intricate standardized psychological tests administered by Miss Malig to help see which one is best suited to assume control of Stonecipheco one day, and the tests are at the final and most critical stage, Stonecipher says, and so he demands that Patrice return to the bridge bungalow with Foamwhistle, to practice, and he orders Foamwhistle to keep her confined as best he can, and so she’s installed back in the bungalow with only a card table and some decks of cards, and of course Foamwhistle.

“And to Foamwhistle’s enormous consternation and pity Patrice begins beating her head against the edge of the card table, crying out that if she can’t see the children she’s going to die, and she’s totally hysterical, and in a very bad way, and Foamwhistle’s heart almost breaks — that there is some sort of ambiguous emotional connection between Patrice and Foamwhistle is by this time hardly open to doubt — and his heart is breaking, and he decides to do his best to help Patrice see the children, at least for a moment, and he asks her what he can do to help. And Patrice looks at him with doe-like gratitude and trust, and tells him that she’s been thinking, and that if he can just somehow arrange to get one of the outside windows of the children’s east-wing nursery fortress unlocked, she can scale the white trellis running up the outer wall of the east wing and pop in to see the children, and touch them, if only briefly, before anyone can stop her. A really bad idea, for a woman huge with child, and actually, you are probably beginning to intuit, an ominous and disastrous idea. But Foamwhistle, who is vicariously frazzled by Patrice’s clear emotional distress, unwisely agrees to do it. And so he waits until the children’s nap time, and then goes to the nursery fortress and shouts through the door to Miss Malig that Patrice is asleep, too, and that he wants to come in and give Miss Malig a contract bridge lesson, and also maybe fool around, a bit — who knows what all was going on by that time — and Miss Malig lets him in, and at some point, when her attention is diverted, Foamwhistle goes to the window and unlocks it and opens it ever so slightly — this was in May, by the way, of ‘72, just as I was moving to Scarsdale — and but anyhow Foamwhistle slips out of the ever-so-slightly opened window a card — the Queen of Spades — which is the pre-arranged signal to Patrice that all is set, and the card flutters down through the soft May air to Patrice, there in her white dress at the bottom of the trellis.”

“Are you bullshitting me, here, R.V.? I mean come on.”

“Since I sense impatience on your part, I’ll make a long story short by saying that Patrice attempts to scale the trellis to the open window, and that, near the top, her pregnant weight pulls the troublingly weak and unsteady trellis away from the tower wall, and the trellis breaks, and, with a shriek, Patrice falls a significantly and disastrously long way to the ground, and lands on her pregnant belly, and spontaneously gives explosive birth to LaVache, which is to say Stonecipher, who lands several yards away in a flowerbed, minus a leg, the leg in question, which was tom off in LaVache’s explosive ejaculation from Patrice’s womb, and both infant and mother are grievously hurt, and in a horrible way, but Foamwhistle hears Patrice’s shriek and runs to the window and looks down and bites his knuckle in grief and relocks the window and calls ambulances and fire engines and rushes down to administer the appropriate sustaining first-aid, and Patrice and LaVache are rushed to the hospital, and both survive, but Patrice is now hopelessly emotionally troubled, out of her head, to be more exact, and she has to be institutionalized, and spends the rest of the time between then and now in and out of institutions, and is as a matter of fact in one now, in Wisconsin.”

“Shit on fire.”

“In any event, hence LaVache’s leglessness.”

“Holy shit.”

“And once Patrice is psychologically out of the picture — about which Stonecipher the father apparently feels little guilt, since he, presumably through the filter of Miss Malig’s erotic spell, had already perceived Patrice as off her nut for some time — once she’s out of the house, more or less for good, the physical and emotional isolation of the children gradually stops, and Miss Malig eventually lets them live semi-normal, childish lives, including Little League and Brown ies and slumber parties, et cetera, when they’re not busy being tested, but in all events by this time all sorts of damage has been done, to the family and the individual family-members.”

“Not to mention the poor little satanic sucker’s leg.”

“Right.”

“Christ on a Kawasaki.”

“Fnoof.”

“….”

“Lenore tell you all that?”

“I think we’re getting close. I sense the closeness of Cleveland. Can you smell that? A smell like removing the lid from a pot of something that’s been left in one’s refrigerator just a little too long?”

“Can’t say as I smell anything but beer and Wrigley’s Spearmint, R.V.”

“I’m just acutely sensitive to the odor of Cleveland, I suppose. I have a monstrously sensitive sense of smell.”

“….”

“Though not as sensitive as some people I could name.”

“So what books have y‘all published? Have I likely read some books you put out?”

“We’re definitely getting close. See all the dead fish? The density of the fish goes up significantly as we approach shore. It looks as if I’m to be spared a sludge-death yet again.”

“Uh-huh.”

“….”

“So you think I can get a temporary room at this house Lenore lives at, right?”

“I’m practically positive. The young lady who lives directly below Lenore and her roommate Ms. Mandible will be involuntarily out of her apartment for at least three months, guaranteed. Mrs. Tissaw will be predictably anxious to ensure occupancy and so rent payment for that period.”

“How come you know for sure the little lady’s gone for three months?”

“She works for Lenore’s sister, Clarice, who now owns a chain of tanning parlors in the area. There was a horrible accident. The girl will be all right, but will require at least three months of hospitalization and continual Noxzema treatments.”

“You mean…?”

“Yes. Tanning accident.”

“Bad news.”

“Yes. But at least an available apartment, cheap. And your assignment with the firm cannot possibly last for more than three months, barring utter disaster.”

“OK by me.”

“Andrew, listen, may I ask a question?”

“Shoot.”

“Will Mindy be coming out to join you? You have told her the developments — she does know where you’re going to be, doesn’t she? What exactly is the Mindy situation?”

“R.V., look and listen. It’s like I told you, I just felt like I had to get out for a while. Breathe some temporarily Melinda-Sue-free air. She and I had a bit of a tiff before I drove up to school, I make no bones. But it’s more’n that. To my mind there’s just this temporary lack of wonderfulness about our whole relationship.”

“….”

“So things are just temporarily up in the air.”

“….”

“And no, I didn’t exactly call her from school, I didn’t tell her I’d run into y‘all and was coming out here to do some work. But she’ll be able to find out when she wants. I had to leave my car with Coach Zandagnio, who was my lacrosse coach, and sort of my mentor, at school, and I told him the whole story. And Melinda-Sue knows that if anybody knows where I would have gone from school, it’s old Stenetore, ’cause she knew him too, he went to our wedding when she got out of school; he gave us a gravy boat.”

“You played lacrosse at Amherst?”

“I was a lacrosse-playing fool.”

“Always struck me as a staggeringly savage game.”

“A truly and completely kick-ass game. A game that kicks ass.”

“I see.”

“….”

“Lenore darling, are you awake?”

“Fnoof.”

“Girl can do some serious sleeping.”

“May I be explicit, here, for a moment, Wang-Dang?”

“Draw and fire, R. V.”

“I am passionately, fiercely, and completely in love with Lenore. She is not quite as explicitly my fiancée as I may have inadvertently led you to believe in the Flange, but she is nevertheless mine. I have a bit of a jealousy problem, I’m told. My setting in motion the process of your possibly temporarily sharing a building with Lenore, actually, to be honest, my inviting you to come and temporarily enter our lives and work for Frequent and Vigorous, at all, was predicated on the understandable assumption that you were emotionally involved with and attached to Mindy Metalman, a woman who, just let me say in all candor, strikes me as the sort of woman an attachment to whom on, for example, my part would leave me completely uninterested in any and all of the world’s other females. Do you get my drift?”

“Go on.”

“Then the drift now becomes a tide, and I say that, in light of what I now know, given what seems to be at least a partial and temporary unattachment to your wife, Mindy, a past that includes an acquaintance with Lenore, under whatever circumstances, prior to my own, and at least clear verbal evidence of vigorous hormonal activity on your part, I feel I can be truly comfortable only in the context of an explicit recognition on your part of the fact that Lenore is mine, and thus out of bounds, that as I am to be regarded as a sort of brother, or uncle, whatever you will, so Lenore is to be regarded by you as a sort of sister, or aunt, with whom any sort of attempted romantic involvement is and would be entirely unthinkable.”

“….”

“There.”

“Damned if you’re not the most articulate little rooster I ever heard crow.”

“….”

“I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a tiny bit hurt by the idea that I might do something like what you’re afraid of to a Psi Phi brother, to an Amherst uncle. But to put your mind at rest… your mind isn’t quite at rest, here, is it?”

“It can be put so with utter ease, by you.”

“OK, then let me just say, right here, that I give you my word of honor as an alumni of the single finest undergraduate institution in the land that I will not harbor any but the most honorable of thoughts toward your woman.”

“I’m all too aware that it’s silly, but could you promise not to take her away?”

“R.V., I promise not to take her away.”

“Thank you. Well there. That’s out of the way.”

“You all right? Your forehead’s wet as hell. You want to use my hankie?”

“No thank you. I have my own.”

“Gentlemen, the captain asks that you please refasten your seat belts for landing.”

“My ears are rumbling like mad.”

“You wouldn’t by any chance want to help me with my particular belt, here, ma‘am, would you?”

“Ixnay — ilotpay.”

“….”

“Fnoof.”

“Lenore.”

“Fnoof. What?”

“Damned if you can’t sleep up a storm, Lenore.”

“What time is it?”

“We’re apparently preparing to land.”

“Boy am I tired.”

“Sweet dreams?”

“I’m not sure. My mouth tastes like a barn. I would kill for a shower. ”

“Have some gum.”

“Want to try some Skoal?”

“Not for anything in the world.”

“Lenore, my ears are in their own private hell.”

“Poor Rick. What can I do to help?”

“Perhaps a bit of a temple massage…”

“Let me just get my big old carcass out of the way, here…”

/b/

By the time Rick dropped Lenore and Wang-Dang Lang off near the Tissaws’ it was almost four, and beginning to mist a little, so that even though it wasn’t very cold Lenore could see her breath, and Lang’s. Rick dashed off to attend to some affairs at Frequent and Vigorous, but promised, as he dropped them a few hundred yards from the oral surgeon’s big gray house, to be back as soon as possible to take them both to dinner.

“Super,” said Lenore.

“Straight up,” said Lang.

The reason Rick had to drop Lenore and Lang off near, rather than at, the Tissaws’ was that the street all around the house was totally clogged with cars, and especially vans. A lot of the vans were white, with the ornate letters P.W.G. on the sides, in red. Lenore had never seen the street so crowded.

“I’ve just never seen the street so crowded,” Lenore said.

“Don’t suppose all these folks are here to try to sublet Misty Schwartz’s room, do you?” said Lang.

“Not a chance.”

“Must be a really bitching party going on around here, then,” said Lang.

“On a Tuesday afternoon?”

“My kind of neighborhood.”

As they went up the walk, Lenore saw that the Tissaws’ front door was propped partly open by a network of thick black cables that led out from the backs of two of the white P.W.G. vans — vans parked halfway onto the grass of the Tissaws’ lawn — and disappeared into the house. Lenore all of a sudden heard what was unmistakably Candy Mandible shout something from her third-story window, a window that looked strangely lit up, right now, and actually had a bit of a tiny rainbow-doughnut around it in the cool wet air, and then from the front porch Lenore heard Candy running down the stairs of the house to meet them at the door.

“Lenore I swear to God you will just not believe it,” said Candy.

“What the heck is going on here?” Lenore said, looking around. “Are we having sewer trouble?”

“Not exactly, come on, it’s Vlad the Impaler,” Candy said, starting to try to pull Lenore toward the stairs, up which the black cables from the vans ran and disappeared from sight. Candy was wearing that violet dress.

“Hey, ho, and hello,” Lang said to Candy. He hefted the suitcases.

“Hi,” said Candy, barely looking at Lang. “Lenore, come on. You’ll flip and die!”

“What can Vlad the Impaler have to do with vans and letters and cables?”

“Mrs. Tissaw heard him say things, God knows what, really, and she just freaked out.” One of the shoulder straps of the violet dress had slipped off Candy’s shoulder. Lang hefted the suitcases again. “She’s getting him on television. Well, religious television, on cable. But still, television.”

“Television?”

“Vlad the Impaler?” said Wang-Dang Lang.

“My bird,” Lenore said. “Who is now troublingly and also obscenely able to talk.” She turned to Candy. “Who gave permission for him to get put on television?”

“Mrs. Tissaw says it’s in lieu of the bill for the chewed wall and the guano-damage to the floor, which she knows you can’t pay because she talked to Prietht at the board and Prietht very helpfully told her you’re broke…” Candy stopped and looked up the staircase. There was noise from the third floor. Lots of it. “But look,” she said, “come on, they’re going to make him a star, they say. They say literally. ”

“Literally? A star? Of what?”

“Come on. ”

Lenore let herself be pulled. Lang followed her and Candy up the stairs with the suitcases, watching their bottoms.

/c/

“Friends, as subscribing members of the Reverend Hart Lee Syke’s Partners With God Club you can expect the entry of the Almighty into your own personal life in twenty-four hours or less,” Vlad the Impaler was saying, staring blankly into a lavishly unfamiliar little unsmeared mirror perimetered with tiny light bulbs. Lenore’s own personal room was full of television cameras and towering metal lamps, and bright-white light. The room was cruising at about a hundred degrees. Thick black cables, and panels with colored lights winking on and off, and sunglasses were everywhere. The brown velvet chair, the uneven-legged desk chair, the bed, and all the black corduroy cushions on the windowsills were occupied by people holding various sorts of electronic equipment, or thick sheaves of paper, and all smoking, and all tapping cigarette ashes onto the floor. Vlad the Impaler was in his cage, his enormous feet hooked over the arms of a tiny director’s chair, licking tentatively at the hot surface of his lit-up mirror. A truly enormous gray box of a television camera, with a little red light on top, was trained on him. Pushed back onto Vlad’s spiky pink mohawk Lenore thought she could see a tiny pair of sunglasses. Vlad the Impaler’s old smeared mirror, on its chain of Frequent and Vigorous paper clips, was gone.

“Holy shit,” said Lenore.

“You wouldn’t believe what’s been happening,” said Candy.

“One hell of a dress, there, ma‘am,” Lang said to Candy. “A. S. Lang, here.”

“Perfect! Perfect!” came shouts from a huge man with a white leather body suit, and an enormous beehive of sculptured black hair, and several chins. Red sequins on the chest of his body suit formed the letters P.W.G.

“Love it! Love that bird!” the man was yelling.

“Cut!” yelled somebody else, from the middle of the mob near the windows. The windows were smeared with steam, from breath.

“Twist my major limbs if that’s not Hart Lee Sykes himself,” Wang-Dang Lang said, staring at the man in white leather.

“Who?” said Lenore.

“It is, that’s Hart Lee Sykes,” said Candy. She got close to Lenore’s ear to make herself heard. “He’s this truly enormous wheel at CBN, the Christian Broadcasting Network? He used to host this show called ‘Real People and Animals of Profound Religious Significance,’ a sort of religious spin-off of ‘Real People.’ But now he hosts this incredibly successful show on cable called ‘The Partners With God Club.’ ”

“He’s A-OK,” Lang said to Lenore, setting down the suitcases amid a litter of Styrofoam cups and candy wrappers and butts. “My Daddy watches his show all the time. My Daddy thinks Hart Lee’s the spiritual balls.”

“Who are you?” Candy said to Lang.

“This is Andrew Sealander Lang,” said Lenore, “a friend of Rick’s and now a very temporary F and V employee. I’m supposed to get Mrs. Tissaw to rent him Misty’s room while she’s in the hospital.”

“And a friend of you fine ladies, now, too, I hope,” said Lang. “I—”

“Inside out! A camel! The bird has been touched by Auden!” shrieked Vlad the Impaler. A sound-man yelped and tore off his headphones.

“No, no, no!” screamed Hart Lee Sykes, stamping a pointy-toed cowboy boot on the wooden floor. “The next line is ‘All contributing subscriptions are tax-deductible.’ Cindy honey… where’s Cindy?” Hart Lee Sykes spotted Candy by the door with Lenore and Lang and made his way over as all heads turned toward them. Lenore began to edge toward the door. Sykes towered over all of them, even Lang. To Candy he said, “Cindy honey, you’ve simply got to make the miraculous little incarnation behave. Now if you‘ll—”

“Reverend Sykes, this is finally Lenore Beadsman, who owns Vlad,” Candy said, preempting Lenore’s flight with an iron hand at the small of her back.

The Reverend stopped, turned to Lenore, seemed almost to be getting ready to bow. “Miss Beadsman, at ever so long last. The owner, to the extent that any single man can be called the owner, of this animal — dare I say animal? — touched by the Lord and guided by His hand to His humble servant, me.” Sykes’s voice had risen from whisper to shout. A murmer went through the room from the people looking through scripts and checking equipment.

“Jesus knew the sex was great!” squawked Vlad the Impaler.

“A pleasure to meet you, and a sincere expression of the profoundest gratitude for allowing us into your home and into the presence of an animal of vital theological importance,” Sykes was saying to Lenore, ignoring Lang’s outstretched hand. “Our friend Mrs. Tilsit has told me all about you and your profound relationship with your profound pet.”

“Tissaw,” said Candy Mandible.

“Tissaw.” Sykes smiled. “A bird through which the voice of the Lord has been personally heard by me to cry out for exposure to the American people, through the medium of, again, to my profound and humble honor, me.”

“Hmmm,” Lenore said.

“Lenore, Lenore,” twittered Vlad the Impaler. “Make me come. I need space, as a person. Let’s get rid of this disgusting unprofessional mirror. You will be a star in the electronic firmament of American evangelical theology! Like Charlotte’s Web!”

“Boy, he’s gotten even worse,” Lenore said to Candy.

“Worse?” cried Hart Lee Sykes. “Worse? The lady jests with us all, friends. Miss surely you are aware that your feathered companion has been touched by the hand of the Lord Himself.”

“Probably bit it, then,” muttered Lenore.

“Mmm-hmmm,” the crowd of technicians was rumbling at Sykes.

“… that he represents a theological development of the very highest order, a manifestation of the earthly intervention and influence of the Almighty comparable in significance to the weeping fir tree of Yrzc, Poland, and the cruciform tar-pit formations of Sierra Leone! Worse, she jests!”

The crowd of technicians laughed.

“Hart Lee, sweetheart,” crooned Vlad the Impaler.

“You live here too?” Lang whispered to Candy.

“Sshh,” Candy hissed. Lang grinned and put his finger to his lips, nodding.

“Mrs. Tissaw told you to put Vlad the Impaler on religious television?” Lenore was saying to Reverend Sykes. Vlad the Impaler was going to the bathroom on his little director’s chair.

“My little friend, the directive to afford this creature exposure to an American populace crying out for divine direction and reaffir mation came from a source far, far higher than Mrs. Tyson, or you, or I!” cried Sykes, standing on tiptoe in his pointed boots.

Lenore stared at Sykes. “Not my father.”

“Exactly, young Miss. The Father of us all!” Sykes looked around him. “I am the recipient of the mandate which all true humble servants of the Lord pray for, all their miserable lives. Thank you. Thank you.” Sykes made motions toward trying to kiss Lenore’s hand.

“It’s Tissaw,” Candy said wearily. Sykes gave her the fish-eye.

“Andrew Sealander Lang, here, padre,” Lang said to Sykes, taking the Reverend’s pudgy hand from Lenore’s and shaking it. “One of Ms. Beadsman’s closest friends and a deep admirer of her bird, and of your show, sir.”

The Reverend shook Lang’s hand without looking at him. He stared into Lenore’s eyes. Lenore could smell his breath. “Miss Beadsman, you are in a position to aid us in delivering to the American people and to the world the Lord’s true contemporary message, through His chosen feathered vehicle.”

“Look, I’m afraid I just don’t understand what you’re talking about,” said Lenore. “There’s a pretty troubling explanation for Vlad’s talking, I’m afraid, that shouldn‘t—”

“The only even remotely problematic problem is that the Lord is moving in such very mysterious ways through your pet that the miraculous little thing isn’t saying quite what requires to be said, quite as quickly as he might, given the extreme expense involved in delivering the message of the Lord these days,”said the Reverend. “The bird in its secular aspect seems to be so understandably caught up in the ecstasy of the Lord’s verbal presence within him that he goes far beyond what actually needs and is proper to be said, given the import of the mission.”

“Little fucker sounds pretty healthy to me,” said Vlad the Impaler, crunching a sunflower seed.

“A case in point,” the Reverend said solemnly to Lenore. “What you find yourself in a position to do is to help the bird deliver the message intended and required. His next line in the relevant initial message is, ‘All contributing subscriptions are tax-deductible.’ ” The Reverend’s smile reached almost to his ears. “If you could simply use your privileged position to reemphasize to the bird the vital importance of his mission, and prompt him to deliver the lines he’s directed by our Father through me to deliver, and also perhaps get him to stop biting the makeup-man…” Sykes gestured toward a pale man with a bandaged hand.

“I still don’t get it,” said Lenore.

“May I, Reverend?” Candy said, trying to ignore something Lang was whispering into her ear.

“By all means.” Sykes folded his arms and tapped a pointed boot on the floor. The director looked at his watch.

“What apparently happened was that Mrs. Tissaw was in here dusting,” Candy said, “two days ago, the day you went right from the switchboard to Clarice’s and then I guess to Rick‘s, ’cause you sure weren’t around, and I was out too, because Nick Allied and I finally…”

“Ahem,” said the Reverend.

“Anyway,” Candy said, “Mrs. Tissaw was in here, and she heard the little… the bird, and he I guess was saying religious stuff…”

“Of the profoundest importance,” Sykes added.

“… and she just had a complete spasm, from excitement, and she called ‘Real People,’ to try to get them to come have a look at him, because he’d supposedly been squawking something about ‘Real People’…”

“Well Candy you know how come he was saying that,” Lenore said.

“We all know tonight,” said Sykes, nodding solemnly. Affirmation-noise swelled from the cigarette smoke above the technicians’ heads.

Candy rolled her eyes. “And I guess ‘Real People’ figured he wasn’t their cup of tea, weird-mixture-of-Biblical-and-obscene-stuff-wise, but the guy in charge told the guy on the phone to tell her to call CBN…”

“Which is of course me,” Sykes said.

“And she did, and they flew somebody out here from the Reverend’s office,” Candy said. “And this was yesterday, when you were obviously totally out of town, and your Dad’s office said your brother didn’t have a phone, and that you were unreachable.”

“LaVache and his stupid lymph node,” muttered Lenore.

“But anyway the guy came and had a look, and I guess Vlad was just in incredible form, that day.”

“As was of course meant from the beginning to be,” said the Reverend.

“And but anyway the guy from ‘Partners With God Club’ saw him, and I guess just did a spiritual back-flip, and spasmed his way over to the phone, with Mrs. Tissaw like wringing her hands for joy beside him…”

“No need to embellish, Cindy,” said Sykes, looking with annoyance over at Wang-Dang Lang, who was at the cage, poking at Vlad the Impaler through the bars with a section of Styrofoam cup, while Vlad eyed him beadily.

“And first the guy tried to call me, at work, to get me to try to call you, at Mrs. Tissaw’s surprisingly considerate suggestion, but I guess they never could get through, because the phone-situation at F and V is still really biting the big wazoo…”

“Ahem,” said Sykes.

“But obviously if you were phoneless I wouldn’t have been able to reach you anyway, but anyway they tried, and then the guy of course called ‘Partners With God Club’ headquarters, and more or less told Father Sykes the story, and I guess they all decided old Vlad was much hotter stuff than just for ’Real Religious People’ or whatever, and the Reverend hightailed it up here from Atlanta… ”

“And the rest you can of course glean from what you see and feel here tonight,” said Sykes. “So then, if you’ll simply indicate to the bird its appointed lines, we can—”

“So it looks like Mrs. Tissaw is who I ought to talk to,” Lenore said. “Because if she thinks she can just put a drugged bird on television, without even—”

“Drugged with the intoxicating overdue message of the very Lord Himself!” Sykes cried. Lang suddenly yelled as Vlad latched onto his finger. The sound-man rushed over to get him loose.

“So where is Mrs. Tissaw, is the big question,” said Lenore. “Maybe I could grab a quick shower, and then she and I could just sit down, and—”

“Mrs. Tissaw is out shopping,” Sykes beamed.

“Father Sykes’s agent gave her a really disturbing amount of money, as like an advance,” said Candy.

“We sow to reap, here in America,” Sykes said, drawing the loudest affirmation yet from the technicians.

“She’s out buying clothes, and girdles, and getting her hair tinted,” Candy said. “She’s getting ready to take Vlad the Impaler down to Atlanta with the Father.”

“She’s going to what?”

“The bird will be the first cohost in the history of the ‘Partners With God Club’!” Sykes cried, pointing a finger at the ceiling. Lang, who was back by Candy with a Kleenex around his finger, looked up to see what Sykes was pointing at.

“Sow to reap!” shrieked Vlad the Impaler.

“Mrs. Tissaw says she gets the bird temporarily in return for the chewed wall, and damage from Vlad pooping on the floor, which she says is more damage than you can pay for,” said Candy. “So she says she’ll temporarily just take Vlad instead. Her husband’s backing her up, just to get her out of town for a while, I think.”

“The bird belongs to the ages, now,” the Reverend said quietly.

“Not legally, though, if you guys want to have things get unpleasant,” Candy said, putting her arm around Lenore, who continued to edge toward the door.

“Of course, Mrs. Simpson needn’t come at all, if you wish as would be only natural to accompany the chosen vehicle yourself into the new epoch it’s made possible,” Sykes said to Lenore.

“Does this mean I don’t get the apartment?” said Lang.

“Bathroom,” Lenore squeaked faintly in Candy’s ear.

“All contributing subscriptions are deductible! Like this!” said Vlad the Impaler.

“At last!” Sykes cried. He flew to the cage.

“Action!” yelled the director.

“Lay your sleeping head, my deductible love!”

“Miss Beaksman, hear the mandate!” thundered Sykes. The camera zoomed in, filling everything.

The hallway was cool and empty, after her room. Lenore wedged the bathroom door shut with the toe of a sneaker. She looked at the painted parrots on the shower curtain.

“You say one word, and there’s going to be lunging like nobody’s ever seen.”

13. 1990

“So you’re upset, then.”

“I think I’m too tired to be upset. I don’t know why I’m so tired.”

“Like your brother.”

“Which brother? The one who’s flapped all the time, or the anorexic one who we’ve had to watch go around the bend for years and now just disappears and is maybe dead for all I know? I just want to sleep. Just put your arm… like that. Thank you.”

“I thought you said the thing with John was that he was so reluctant to be in any way involved with anything’s death that he usually refused to eat, since every eating entails a death. That’s not anorexia.”

“It is, sort of, if you think about it.”

“And that he had a horizontal proof of the indisputability of the proposition that one should never kill, for whatever reason.”

“A diagonal proof.”

“Diagonal proof.”

“I guess.”

“He… want it published, maybe?”

“I doubt he ever wrote it down, since that would involve paper, and so trees, et cetera.”

“Quite a fellow. A certain nobility.”

“I don’t really even know him. He’s like this stranger who drops in from Auschwitz every Christmas. He’s also lately been very weirdly religious. He told me he wants to write this book arguing that Christianity is the universe’s way of punishing itself, that what Christianity is, really, is the offer of an irresistible reward in exchange for an unperformable service.”

“Obvious problems involved in actually writing the thing, of course.”

“I think I’m even more worried about John than I am about Lenore.”

“I certainly know one particular feathered animal I wouldn’t mind him eating.”

“That’s not even a tiny bit funny, Rick.”

“I’m sorry. To be honest, though, I think it will be good for you, to have the bird out of your hair, so to speak, until this nursing-home and thin-brother business gets cleared up.”

“Poor Vlad the Impaler. All he ever wanted was a mirror and some food and a dish to go to the bathroom in.”

“A dish he used with distressing infrequency, remember.”

“I just can’t believe Mrs. Tissaw was saying he’d done thousands of dollars of damage to the room. That’s just a lie. She was standing there lying to me.”

“She’s clearly in some sort of religious ecstasy. People in religious ecstasies put live snakes in their mouths. Mate with the eyesockets of rotting skulls. Smear themselves with dung. Bird-damage delusions are small potatoes.”

“I’ve never had a shower feel any better than that shower did.”

“You must have been in there quite a while, for them to have time to spirit the bird away before you returned.”

“No one spirited anyone away. They just had him down in a van. And actually I guess that was sort of good, because it at least in a way took the decision out of my hands, right then. So I didn’t have to make any split-second decisions with those white-hot TV lights on me, which would have been spasm city.”

“But you laid down the law that it’s just for a month.”

“Candy and I squeaked faintly that it’s just for thirty shows as they all peeled away in their dumb vans, with the antennas. I told Mrs. Tissaw that if it’s more than a month without my permission I’ll take legal action. But I don’t think she was too impressed.”

“We will take action, if necessary. We can use that man F and V has on retainer. God knows he owes us some sort of work for his fee. Or I’ll get us one on our own, and pay for it. The bird is after all legally mine, remember.”

“What do you mean? You gave him to me for Christmas. I said that was the best Christmas present I’d ever gotten, remember?”

“And plus you hate Vlad the Impaler. You make that clear all the time.”

“I’ll admit I regret buying him for you. But, legally speaking, I have the receipt from Fuss ‘n’ Feathers pet shop. And, more to the point, as you may recall, on the relevant Christmas I did give you what you asked for, while you did not give me what I asked for. Had there been some sort of emotionally fulfilling Christmas exchange, that would have been one thing. As it was, it was one-sided. I never received my gift. Thus in some emotional dash legal deep sense the bird remains technically mine.”

“You said you liked the beret I gave you.”

“But it’s not what I asked for.”

“Look, we’ve been through this. I told you I just won’t do that stuff. If you cared in any non-creepy way, you’d only want to do what I want to do. And I don’t want to be tied up, and I’m sure not going to hit your bottom with any paddles. It’s just sick.”

“You don’t understand. Any possible sickness is obviated by the motivation behind it, as tried—”

“Incredibly dangerous territory, Rick. Let’s abort.”

“If you really loved me you’d let me.”

“That’s not even going to get dignified.”

“You do love me.”

“Let’s not do this.”

“….”

“….”

“Anyway, the point is that my emotional and economic and legal resources are behind you all the way. As it were. And don’t think this has anything to do with any royalties. You can keep all the royalties Swaggert promised you, though I must say I think the figure’s got to be a little inflated.”

“Sykes.”

“Sykes. He really wore white leather, with letters on the chest?”

“It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so obscene. And I hated his cowboy boots.”

“Footwear, again.”

“And Lang was being incredibly obnoxious to Candy, I thought. His tongue was swinging down around his knees, practically. God knows what all happened after we dropped him back off.”

“Nothing she won’t want to happen.”

“You’re mean. Anyway she’s snagged the president of Allied Sausage Casings himself, now, she told me. Nick Allied. She finally bagged him, she said. She wore that violet dress about a week in a row. That dress is way too small for her.”

“And of course when push comes to shove Lang is married, as well, to your—”

“The worst thing about the Vlad thing is going to be the embarrassment. The money, well I don’t know what to think about any money-promises. But Sykes’s career is going to be shot for sure when Dad and Neil Obstat come out with the pineal food and the talking business becomes clear and people make the connection that he’s my bird, and I’m related to Dad. And eventually the police are just going to have to get called about Gramma, and the other residents and staff, and then there’ll be newspapers. It’s going to look like Sykes tried to put something over on all those poor people who like send his club their medicine money every week so they can be partners with God or whatever. It’s going to look like I maybe helped him perpetrate a fraud.”

“You tried to tell him, Lenore.”

“It was totally impossible. He was incapable of listening. I’d mention the word ‘father,’ and off he’d go, stomping his foot and pointing his finger at the ceiling. And he had horrible breath. I think maybe the worst breath I’ve ever smelled, on anybody. He absolutely dwarfed ludith, who was the previous champion.”

“I loathe Prietht.”

“….”

“At least Lang got the room. He’ll be of help to me.”

“And you know I’m going to miss him. I liked bitching about his mirror with Candy. I didn’t mind vacuuming his seeds and his gunk. And I really didn’t even mind hearing him say obscene stuff. His talking was almost sort of nice.”

“What are your thoughts on Lang, overall?”

“Although there was something cruel about it — it was almost like Gramma was being deliberately cruel. She got me all used to hearing her talk to me all the time…”

“He’s not what we’re used to, but I do feel affinities.”

“… and then off she goes, and takes off, and won’t talk to me, but fixes it so that now Vlad talks to me, except all Vlad can really do is repeat what I say to him, and even that not too well…”

“Not precisely sure why I feel affinities, but I do. Two inside outsiders…”

“… so that it’s like I’m sort of talking to myself, alone, now, except even more so, because there’s now this little feathered pseudo-myself outside me that constantly reminds me it’s just myself I’m talking to, only.”

“Except of course not anymore, now, right? Thanks to Mrs. Tissaw and the evangelist.”

“I guess so.”

“And what am I, Lenore, in terms of talking? Am I a mannequin? Am I a Bloemker-doll?”

“You know what I mean, Rick. I’m grateful for you. You know I am.”

“So you do love me, then. I do have you, after all.”

“You know I hate this ‘having’ stuff.”

“So I’ll settle for the fact that you love me.”

“All right, you can settle for it.”

“So you do love me.”

“What did I just say?”

“What did you just say, Lenore? As usual I’m really not sure. I certainly didn’t hear the word ‘love’ exit your mouth.”

“Some words have to be explicitly uttered, Lenore. Only by actually uttering certain words does one really do what one says. ‘Love’ is one of those words, performative words. Some words can literally make things real.”

“You and Gramma Lenore should get together, is who should get together. I’m sure she’d hit you with all the paddles you want. Bats, mallets, boards with nails in them…”

“For Christ’s sake, Lenore.”

“I do the best I can, Rick.”

“So you do love me.”

“I do the best I can.”

“Meaning exactly what?”

“….”

“So then why do you love me?”

“Oh, gee. I’d really rather not do this now.”

“No, I’m serious, Lenore, why? On the basis of what? I need to know, so that I might try desperately to reinforce those features of me on the basis of which you love me. So that I can have you inside myself, for all time.”

“You could just stop the having-talk, for one thing.”

“Please, please. Oh, please.”

“….”

“I know I’m more than a little neurotic. I know I’m possessive. I know I’m fussy and vaguely effeminate. Largely without chin, neither tall nor strong, balding badly from the center out, so that I’m forced to wear a ridiculous beret — though of course a very nice beret, too.”

“….”

“And sexually intrinsically inadequate, Lenore, let’s please both explicitly face it, for once. I cannot possibly satisfy you. We cannot unite. The Screen Door of Union is for me unenterable. All I can do is flail frantically at your outside. Only at your outside. I cannot be truly inside you, close enough only for the risk of pregnancy, not true fulfillment. Our being together must leave you feeling terribly empty. Not to mention of course more than a little messy.”

“….”

“So why, then? List the features on the basis of which you love me, and I will exercise them unmercifully, until they grow and swell to fill the field of your emotional sight.”

“What is with you?”

“Please tell.”

“Rick, I don’t know. I think you and I maybe just have a different conception of this, you know, this ‘love’ thing.”

“….”

“I think for me there gets to be a sort of reversal, after a while, and then mostly things don’t matter.”

“Reversal? Explain, explain.”

“This is embarrassing.”

“Please.”

“At first you maybe start to like some person on the basis of, you know, features of the person. The way they look, or the way they act, or if they’re smart, or some combination or something. So in the beginning it’s I guess what you call features of the person that make you feel certain ways about the person.”

“Things are not looking at all good, here.”

“But then if you get to where you, you know, love a person, everything sort of reverses. It’s not that you love the person because of certain things about the person anymore; it’s that you love the things about the person because you love the person. It kind of radiates out, instead of in. At least that’s the way… oh, excuse me. That’s the way it seems to me.”

“Oh God. And that’s what’s happened with me? There’s been the reversal?”

“Well Rick it’s just dumb for you to go to like a features-gym and start exercising features. That’s just dumb.”

“So things have indeed reversed, then.”

“….”

“Lenore?”

“Stop trying to pin me, Rick. I feel like a butterfly on a board.”

“But if such a propensity-to-pin is a feature of me, then you must love that feature, if there’s been the reversal.”

“I guess I’m not saying it right. I’d really rather not do this now. I feel all public, saying this stuff.”

“What about, for example, Lang? Do you suppose a Lang-love involves a reversal? Does a Lang ever stop loving on the basis of features and qualities?”

“Especially don’t want to talk about him, OK?”

“Why not?”

“….”

“Don’t just grit your teeth, tell me why not. It’s vital that I know, and surely you see why.”

“No, Rick, I don’t.”

“Why, if the reversal issue remains ambiguous, how am I to feel about you and me and, for instance, just to take an instance, Lang? For here we have, in Lang, a male creature surely far more worthy of love than I, features-wise, if we’re to be objective. Tall, feet easily reaching bar-stool supports, wincingly handsome, easy, loose, mildly funny, widely travelled, wildly wealthy, muscular, intelligent, though in my perception not threateningly so…”

“….”

“And in uncountably many other respects features-love-deserving, Lenore. I’ve been in a men’s room with the man. Do you hear me? I’ve been in a men’s room with the man.”

“I feel like bundling you into the car and rushing you to Dr. Jay’s right this minute. I think new plateaus of spasmodic weirdness are being reached.”

“I must know things, Lenore. You must begin to tell me things, or 1-will implode. I must know whether I have effected the reversal in you. I must know how Lang fits in.”

“What does fitting in have to do with anything?”

“I must know. Lang doesn’t even know whether you remember him or not. He expressed doubts and anxieties on the plane, to me, while you were into your twentieth consecutive hour of sleep.”

“Oh I remember him all right. Don’t worry about my not remembering him.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“I really just don’t want to talk about it. What are you, trying to sell him to me or something? I just would rather not discuss it, and a feature I’d love to see in you right now would be your not wanting to discuss things I don’t want to discuss.”

“The next sound you hear will be that of implosion. Say I’ve effected the reversal in you, Lenore. Please.”

“There a towel around here?”

“No showers, until you tell me things. I’ll do something to the water main.”

“Look, Lang’s a big reason why I got my whole family really mad at me by not going to Mount Holyoke, OK? The time I visited, he and this other guy, with an adolescent, Amish, armpitty beard, came and barged in and banged their heads on the wall and made people sign on their bottoms, bare, and Lang practically molested Mindy Metalman on the spot.”

“They’re married, now, you know.”

“I heard you two talking about it at the Aqua Vitae, Rick. I heard. I heard everything you guys said, when I wasn’t busy keeping Stoney’s head from plopping into his pizza.”

“So there’s been a reverse reversal with Lang. You anti-love him, in the face of all the features that seem to cry out for and necessitate love. And yet through the reversal you love a man approximately one twentieth the man he is…”

“You want to know what I really definitely don’t love? I don’t love this sick obsession with measuring, and demanding that things be said, and pinning, and having, and telling. It’s all one big boiling spasm that makes me more than a little ill, not to mention depressed.”

“So you don’t love me, after all.”

“Maybe I’ll just go down to Atlanta and be with Vlad the Impaler and get my royalty checks while you soak your head for like the next month, OK?”

“….”

“What do you need him for, anyway? What’s his function in all this?”

“Translation, I told you.”

“Norslan herbicide stuff into idiomatic modem Greek? That makes no sense at all.”

“Unfortunately, we’re not always in control of the decisions on the basis of which business is conducted, life lived.”

“How encouraging. But why him? You met him in a bar, is all. Cleveland must be crawling with actual Greeks, from Greece, if you want stuff translated.”

“I’m really not sure why. There are affinities: Amherst, fraternity, the Scarsdale connection. But something… I simply felt… I don’t know how to describe it. That was a strange day.”

“You’re making no sense at all.”

“Please note that what we have here is an inability, rather than an unwillingness, to tell.”

“I just think it will be weird to have him at Frequent and Vigorous. He’s just going to add to the chaos. Walinda will be retroactively on the ceiling about my being gone, once you’re upstairs, and plus Candy was dropping ominous hints about the phone situation.”

“More than a hint-matter, I’m afraid. One of my tasks at the office while you and Lang were ostensibly settling in was to check phones. The story is not a happy one.”

“What do you mean, ‘ostensibly’ settling in? Did 1 detect a tone?”

“I was referring to the unexpected and troubling Vlad matter.”

“Oh.”

“….”

“If poor Vern’s been working double shifts to cover for me, he must not even have a stomach left. You really ought to hire somebody extra, at least to cover, at least while the phone deal is the same.”

“From the payphone near the Cleaveland skeleton, I was in communication with a Mr. Sludgeman at Interactive Cable. He promises the very promptest possible action.”

“I think it’s possible to be prompter than eight days, which is what it’s been. I don’t see what kind of phone company-lets all its tunnel people go off fishing or wherever just when there’s a hideous tunnel problem. And that guy who looks like a negative, who refuses to do tunnels, and says tunnels are nerves, is about zero help.”

“Mr. Sludgeman claims new avenues are being explored. Highly sensitive equipment is being rented, to be brought to bear on the tunnel below the Bombardini Building. Sludgeman alleges the locus of the problem has been identified as Erieview Plaza.”

“Super. Just not at all thrilled about the prospect of answering Den of Pain calls for the next six months.”

“Which brings us to the really central issue of the night.”

“Rick, sleepiness is shooting out of every pore in my body.”

“No chance you’d want to hear a story, then.”

“Time just doesn’t seem right, somehow.”

“A number of interesting ones on my desk right now.”

“….”

“For instance, a man is completly faithful to his wife, but only because he is impotent with all of the truly staggering number of women he tries to be unfaithful with, although he is not at all impotent with the wife. We’re invited to speculate about whether he’s a good man, or a bad man, deep down. Interested?”

“Not… pretty sleepy.”

“You don’t enjoy stories anymore?”

“That’s not it. You do awesome… stories. I’m just either going to sleep or die, here.”

“Well, you may or may not be interested to know…”

“Fffnoof.”

“… that I’ve had a not insignificant inspiration.”

“….”

“Bearing directly on you.”

“Fnoof.”

“And so of course on me.”

“….”

“What an anticlimax.”

14. 1990

/a/

At the Frequent and Vigorous/Bombardini Company switchboard at 10 A.M. on Wednesday were Lenore Beadsman, Candy Mandible, Judith Prietht. Under the switchboard counter, with only his boots visible in the cubicle, was Peter Abbott. Just leaving was an anonymous delivery boy, having delivered to Lenore an enormous enclosing wreath of flowers, red-and-white roses arranged in an interlocking Yin and Yang. The wreath sat atop the switchboard wastebasket, being too big to fit inside. Definitely in the wastebasket, though, was the note that had come with the flowers: “Miss Beadsman. Time grows short. One way or the other you will be part of me.”

There was just no way Lenore was going to sit in her chair with Peter Abbott right under her. She and Candy Mandible stood off, by the door to the cubicle, Candy smoking and making rings. Judith Prietht was frantic at the Bombardini Company board, but she did find time to keep darting looks over at Peter Abbott’s boots as they jiggled with his mysterious efforts. Peter was apparently attaching something to the Frequent and Vigorous switchboard console. Something long and intricate, and expensive, Candy had said. He had had to shut off the F and V console temporarily, which was just fine by Lenore.

Candy was smoking a clove cigarette, which are particularly good for rings, and she also from time to time dropped ashes into the opened bloom of one of the Yin-blossoms. “He is rich, you know,” she said to Lenore.

“That’s not nearly funny,” Lenore said, eyeing the flowers. “I’m thinking of maybe having Dr. Jay call the net people about him for me. At least he’s too big to get down in here anymore. I think. I hope.”

“Rich is not to be dismissed lightly, kiddo,” said Candy. “You may not want to be Stonecipheco-rich, but you can still not mind richness per se.”

“Is that why you’re with Mr. Allied now? Is he going to take you away from all this?” Lenore laughed and gestured.

“Well, we haven’t gotten past the just plain taking stage, yet.” Candy gave a smoky laugh. “This is a real man, Lenore.” She looked at her. “The world is turning out to be full of real, real men.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Candy lowered her voice, and Lenore could see her pupils spread. “I don’t know where you found that Lang guy, but good God.”

“Don’t want to hear about it.” Lenore looked away, at the back of Judith’s head, with a phone attached. “And anyway I’m possibly rich per se now, anyway, thanks to Vlad-royalties. We still need to talk at length about that, Candy. You’re supposed to be my friend. Vlad the Impaler’s friend.”

“Vlad’s probably got a cage entirely lined with full-length mirrors now. Vlad’s probably in a state of constant bird-orgasm.”

“Shit!” came Peter Abbott’s voice from under the console counter.

“Gesundheit,” Judith Prietht said among console-beeps.

“If things don’t work out in a month, Rick and I are going to get him back legally,” Lenore said. “Rick says he’ll hire a lawyer. It turns out Vlad the Impaler is legally his, because he’s got the receipt. He was being weird about Vlad last night.”

Judith Prietht swiveled in her chair; she had hit her Position Busy button. “Listen, Lenore honey…” She blinked and smiled. “Can I call you Lenore?”

“I’m not too sure about Lenore honey, Judith,” said Candy.

Lenore turned to Candy. “How come she’s being so nice today?”

“She wants you to get her Hart Lee Sykes’s autograph,” Candy said, tapping ashes. “She’s a God-Partner, apparently. Big time.”

“If you wouldn’t mind…” Judith started to croon.

“I’m hopefully not going to see Sykes again, Judith,” said Lenore.

“But you could write him,” Judith Prietht said. “You could call him, right from here, and I’d even pay for it if you wanted.”

“Oh, you wouldn’t have to—”

“And could you also ask him to… maybe to…?” Judith looked imploringly at Candy Mandible.

Candy rolled her eyes. “She wants you to get him to say a blessing over a picture of her cat.” Judith came out with a Polaroid and waved it at Lenore, as if Lenore were very far away.

“Judith, how about if I say I’ll do what I can. Maybe I can get Rick to talk to him; he’s going to deal with CBN people, he said.” Lenore stared absently at the soles of Peter Abbott’s boots.

Judith’s Position Release button started flashing that flash that means there are just too many calls piling up. She Accessed and Started In and waded back, blowing a kiss to Lenore.

“We’ve found the way to her heart, at least,” said Candy, making a fist to look at her nails.

Lenore was looking at Candy. “Listen,” she said. “What did you mean good God about Lang? You guys didn’t…?”

Candy watched herself make and unmake a fist. “Yes and no,” she said. “I mean I’m afraid yes we did, and did, and very definitely yes good God.” She saw Lenore’s look. “What can I tell you? I was bored, and Nick was meeting with supermarket chains, and he’ll never know. But no we won‘t, probably, ever again, I don’t think. First because Nick and I are really serious, and I think I’ve got a shot at richness per se, not to mention that Nick is almost a Lang, himself. Did Andy tell you his old college nickname, by the way?”

Lenore dug a bit of stone out of the tread of her sneaker.

“I died laughing,” said Candy.

“Lang is rich per se himself, you might want to know,” Lenore said. “His father owns a mammoth company in Texas. His father is supposedly more or less responsible for the G.O.D.” She looked up at Candy. “And then what about Clint Roxbee-Cox? Clint must be insane with jealously, over you and Mr. Allied.”

“Clint is admittedly not a happy man right now,” Candy said, arranging things in her purse on the switchboard counter. “But he’s a company man. And Nickie is the company. Clint told him he wishes us all the best, although Nick did say he didn’t much care for the way Clint was looking at his throat when he said it.”

“If you want to call Mr. Vigorous now, you can use my phone,” Judith shot over.

“Well Judith I’m supposed to go up and see him after lunch, anyway,” said Lenore. “He’s getting Vern to come in for me this afternoon, for some unclear reason. ”

Candy looked over at the back of Judith’s head, then at Lenore. “The thing is—” She put a hand on Lenore’s arm and guided her into the line of Erieview shadow that creased the edge of the white cubicle. “The other reason why the Lang thing was just one night I think is that it was pretty dam clear he has his eye on somebody else, in a big way.” She looked at Lenore.

Lenore looked at her own wrist, pretended to study it. “Listen, how did you snag Mr. Allied, anyway? You were in despair last week. I want to hear.”

“He wants you, Lenore, really, is who he wants,” Candy said, making sure that Judith couldn’t be listening and then forcing Lenore to look her in the eye. “It was far too clear.”

“Really don’t want to go into it,” Lenore muttered, looking out into the lobby.

“It was just incredibly obvious,” said Candy. “He kept asking all about you, when we could talk. Talked about having met you once, how sorry he was about that, although I never got clear on just what he was sorry for and you’re going to have to fill me in sometime, I’m dying to know. Kept talking about you and Rick, and laughing. Saying stuff about strategic misrepresentation, whatever that is. And even weirder stuff about how he noticed on the plane coming back that your leg wasn’t at all like his leg, wasn’t really even like a regular leg, at all, he said.”

“That was a really leggy trip,” Lenore laughed, edging for the cubicle door. “Listen, maybe I’ll just go up and see Rick right now.”

“Sweetie, it was just too obvious he thought he was using me,” said Candy. “Not that we didn’t have big fun. Not that Schwartz’s room will ever be the same. But I could see how he thought he was trying to get at you through me. And he could do it, Lenore. You get me? He could literally get at you through me. You get me?”

“Ummm… ”

“Rick just better be something entirely else, in his own right, is all I can say,” said Candy.

Lenore looked at her. “Except I thought you said Mr. Allied was unattainable, hence part of the charm. I thought you said he was engaged to some Australian lady.”

Candy laughed and drew on her cigarette, made an oval in the air and speared it. “I sense a sudden shift in the conversation. Well I just saw my big chance, is all. At a company party three days ago. Was it three? When you were in the Heights? I used Clint mercilessly to get to the executive side of the room. The violet dress came through. It got Nick, over hors d‘oeuvres. The dress did it. He was helpless. The dress was awesome.”

“You’re awesome, is who’s awesome.”

“Vidi, vici, veni, is all I can say,” said Candy. “Which is what you could say, too, with a really spectacular specimen, if you wanted. I’d think about it.”

“Rick and I are supposed to be in love, you forget,” Lenore said quietly, back at her wrist.

“What would Vlad the Impaler have to say to that, I wonder,” said Candy. She put out her cigarette in the middle of Yang.

“What a bitch,” Peter Abbott said, emerging stiffly from beneath the console.

“I beg your pardon?” said Candy.

“I’m gonna have some words for those tunnel drips when they get back, is all I can say,” said Peter. He bent and with a grunt dragged an enormous box of exotic tools and cables and wires out from under the white counter. Began arranging items on the box’s shelves.

“I hardly even dare to hope that you just fixed our lines,” said Lenore. The console began to beep the minute Peter plugged it back in; Candy took the call.

Peter was hooking some things onto his belt. “What I’ve done here is to take the first step in Interactive Cable’s plan to restore service and get you some satisfaction.”

“He didn’t fix anything,” Candy shot over. “He just attached something weird and deeply Freudian to the underside of the console, so they can do a tunnel-test or something. In case you’re in any doubt about the phones, I just talked to a Bambi’s Den of Discipline customer wanting to know about inflatable dolls.”

“Inflatable dolls?”

“The first step in a really expensive but ingenious plan Mr. Sludgeman came up with,” Peter Abbott was continuing, bent over his box on the counter. “We’re gonna do tunnel-tests. We’re gonna test your tunnel like nobody’s business.”

“Big whiff,” said Candy Mandible.

“Hey, lady, it is a big whiff,” Peter said. “A really big and nasty whiff, if you’re the one that’s gotta do it. Try to imagine having to test a whole nervous system by trying to stick all sorts of shit in the nerves.”

“You are really the master of the yummy image,” said Lenore.

“Just tell your supervisor, that hen lady, so I don’t have to tell her, ‘cause she scares the stuffing right out of this guy,” said Peter Abbott, jingling his belt nervously, “that what we’re doin’ is hooking all the consoles that utilize lines in your tunnel, the one under this building, hooking all the consoles into this network of testing cable, this cable that we’re gonna feed into the tunnel, to test it. If it’s one of the consoles that’s infecting all the others, we’re gonna know. If it’s something in the tunnel infecting all you guys, we’ll know. We’re gonna like feel the tunnel’s pulse.”

“Feel the pulse of a nerve?”

“Testing’s gonna hopefully start in a few days,” Peter said, picking up the last of his things and hooking them onto his belt. Lenore bent and saw a brightly colored spaghetti of new wires leading down from the base of the console to a plug in the cubicle’s floor. The wires pulsed with a strange sort of violet light.

“That stuff looks really hard to put in,” she said to Peter.

Peter turned and stared into her eyes. Lenore looked back innocently. Peter sighed. “Yeah, it’s a bitch. The tests can’t start till I get all you guys hooked into the test circuit. It’s a son of a bitch. I can only work so fast, and it’s just me, and I’m only gettin’ scale for it.”

“Well, we certainly don’t want to keep you,” Candy said without looking up, handling a request for a wheel of Stilton.

“I’ll see ya. I gotta go insert the exact same stuff over at Bambi’s Den of Discipline now,” Peter said, moving toward the door of the cubicle. “You take it easy.”

“Happy inserting,” said Candy. The jingle of Peter’s belt receded.

“Peter, goodbye!” called Judith Prietht, sitting up a bit to get her head over the top of the cubicle. Peter was gone. The shadow in the huge lobby had almost seemed to move toward him to take him, Lenore saw.

“I’m going to talk to Rick about getting some smaller windows in this lobby,” she said to Candy. “This shadow stuff is starting to really give me the creeps. I don’t like the way the shadow is handling people’s exits.”

“You know who you have to talk to about the Building.” Candy smiled, winked at Lenore, gestured at the flowered wreath on the wastebasket. “The big fromage. El Grandé Yango.”

“Not even potentially funny. Humor not even possible in that.”

Candy laughed and bent to the console.

/b/

“So is all clear, here?”

“No problem I can see, R.V.”

“Can’t possibly take more than two or three months.”

“Less, if we haul ass.”

“If this is ready for distribution by Thanksgiving we’re supposedly in line for a mammoth bonus.”

“Kick-ass.”

“So then, no questions?”

“None I can see, except maybe who that skeleton guy is, out front.”

“Who?”

“That skeleton guy, out front, in the sidewalk, under that mesh?”

“Oh. Well that’s Moses Cleaveland, Andrew.”

“Who?”

“General Moses Cleaveland, the founder of the city of Cleveland.”

“The founder of the city?”

“Yes.”

“With a ‘Reserved Parking’ sign sticking out of his eye?”

“What shall we say? Shall we say that reserved parking respects no man?”

“Say whatever you want. Just seems a tinch disrespectful, is all.”

“Fits with the whole concept, then.” “….”

/c/

8 September

Vance.

Is there any skin, any substance at all, softer than the cheek of a young child as it yields under a late-afternoon caress at the swimming pool? When the child is caped in a towel, thin calves emerging whitely and trailing away into feet with their temporary stains. The skin is so soft, all defenses, all color washed away, white as shell, loose, lips bright red tinged with blue, trembling; the child shivers, in the summer, at the pool, as the sun hints at becoming only implicit, and the hard-haired mothers stare without pity. And the trembling skin is almost translucent, new.

The pool gives birth to clean new red-eyed children, trembling in cotton capes, and then the slightest wetting of any part of the renewed white skin sends up into space a rebirth of the fragrance of rebirth, a clean that survives until the next bath. The new children are to kiss. And the red sun lowers to melt into the blue bath of clean chlorine, and the red-eyed children are lifted out and leave themselves in prints on the paved deck, shrinking. And suntan oil yields to the sterile scent of a new start, at the end of the day, always a new start. And, as with every newness, ears that pain, and eyes that sting and water.

“Lenore, where are you?” Fieldbinder wrote in his journal, a Batman notebook lifted from the toychest of his absent son. “Evelyn, where are you? Bring my Plain Dealer when you come. ”

I’ve had a look at the little bastard who apparently has Lenore’s picture in his wallet. He is in the Stonecipheco staff directory sent me by the phenomenally thorough Mr. Rummage. This Obstat person, this person who went to high school with Lenore, and whose father was a force behind our absurd Desert and is now in Washington aspiring to some greater sillinesses; this young Obstat who is himself an improbable force behind this whole increasingly troubling Corfu-food project. I’ve had a look at him, here in the directory, and I feel ever so much better. Looks to be almost as short as I, and thin, eminently breakable, with watery colorless hair retreating from a head positively dominated and defined by the shape of the skull underneath. The skin stretched tight over that skull. A skull that seems to me perhaps even to threaten to burst through and end the whole charade. Yecch.

So a head the shape of a skull. And tiny little lifeless brown eyes, eyes like little anuses.

I have nothing to fear from an anus-eyed skull-head.

He and Lang are apparently lunching. He and Lang enjoy some sort of connection through Industrial Desert Design. Lang came close to insinuating that he had had congress with Mandible last night, this morning. I must approach him carefully on the subject of the reversal. My ears still hurt me, from the flight, and there are sounds when I swallow.

For once Fieldbinder was actually looking forward to seeing his pathetic psychologist, Dr. J____, with his ridiculous moving chairs, the next day. Fieldbinder had been having a dream that was troubling him a lot. that was troubling him no end.

My father was a large, soft estate attorney who dressed exclusively in flannel in his off-hours. Broad and pale. With boots. And a small boy’s persistent love for throwing stones into deep, empty places, and listening. He spanked. He was one of those parents who spanked. I never once laid an angry hand to Vance Vigorous’s bottom. Maybe that is part of the trouble.

It is a windy day. Clouds scud. The wind whips at Lake Erie, the shaggy lake. My office window is sliced neatly in black. Half. In the lit half, the wind makes Lake Erie shaggy. In the shadow-half it all looks like rotten mayonnaise, there in the distance, squelching brown and white between the pudgy fingers of the wind. What a hideous view.

And where on earth does Norman Bombardini get off putting a sign through the eye of the founder of Cleveland?

Ten minutes, at the outside. I’ll simply keep time on the wall of my office. When the shadow reaches the diploma, she will be here.

/d/

“Is this place great or what?” Neil Obstat, Jr. was saying to Wang-Dang Lang. “Just wait. The bartender sticks his thumb in his eye once an hour. It’s in his contract.”

“And look at the gazongas on that Ginger,” Lang said, tilting his beer bottle. “Never seen any shit like this.”

“We can come back here tonight,” said Obstat. “They’ve got even wilder shit at night. Cleveland at night can get pretty wild.” He sucked at his Twizzler. “Cleveland gets underrated. You guys in the East forget that significant cultural stuff goes on in the Midwest.”

“Nothing insignificant about those gazongas, I’ll tell you that right now.”

Lang and Obstat were in Gilligan’s Isle. It was almost lunchtime. This was lunch. Lang had spent the morning with Rick Vigorous, determining that he would be able to do all his translation work in a week, if he worked at all hard. Lang was looking forward to the next three months. He’d been given the rest of the day off. He’d called Neil Obstat the minute he’d happened to see Rick Vigorous staring at Obstat’s picture in some of the material from Stonecipheco.

“I can’t get over seeing you again, and here in Cleveland,” Obstat was saying. They were at the Professor’s thumb. “And you say you’re not in deserts anymore.”

“Temporarily.”

“Temporarily. You’ve been doing accounting? Just can’t see you as an accountant, big guy.”

“The story behind that has to do with this girl who was just such hot shit that I let her run the show, for a bit of time,” Lang said, crossing and uncrossing his legs on the plastic bench.

“Not Lenore Beadsman.”

“No, course not Lenore Beadsman.” Lang signalled for another beer, and the bartender over there in his white hat gave him a thumbs-up. “My wife,” Lang said to Obstat. “The girl who’s my wife.”

“Really hot, huh?”

“Don’t want to talk about it.”

“Sure.” Obstat sipped his Twizzler. “But you mentioned something about Lenore Beadsman, when you called.”

“Did I?”

“Positive.”

“Huh. Well she works at the place I’m workin’ at, translating your wild shit for you.”

“Stuff is wild, isn’t it?” Obstat squirmed on his seat. “Boy I’m excited, is all I can say. This is the sort of thing a corporate chemist just dreams of. I thought I’d be spending all my time testing pH levels in creamed fruit.”

“I just can’t believe the shit works. Does it really work at all like y‘all are havin’ us say in this ad?”

“Really looks like it does, guy. The Chief has been ga-ga for months. Kids are talking months, maybe years before they would have, in limited tests. We’re talking not only eventual market domination, but a potentially really significant insight into the relation between nutrition and mental development, between what the body needs and the mind can do.”

The bartender, coming over with Lang’s fourth beer, slipped on a strategically placed maraschino cherry and pitched headlong into Ginger’s chest. He missed his eye with his thumb, but did manage to crack his head nastily on the plastic table. Beer flew everywhere.

Obstat laughed and clapped with everyone else, “Aww, Gilligan.” He bent and quickly tied the bartender’s shoelaces together.

“What about my beer?” Lang was saying.

“Coming right up,” the bartender murmured. He was on his feet and moving when the shoelaces got him. He somersaulted into and off of Mrs. Howell’s hair, ending up draped over her pince-nez.

Obstat giggled.

“Immature fucker,” Lang grinned.

“Got to get into the spirit of the place.”

Lang sucked off the last bit of beer in his bottle. “But you say you do know this Beadsman girl, then,” he said to Obstat.

Obstat got serious. “Do I ever,” he said. “I went to high school with her, when we were kids. I’ve had a crush since I was this high. She’s maybe even a reason why I went to work for Stonecipheco. Unconscious or something. Except I had no idea she didn’t like her Dad and didn’t want to go into the Company. I’m pissed. I only got to see her in person again the other day, when we were all in the Chief’s office. The Chief is her Dad. And one of their relatives got us going on the whole pineal project, and now she’s trying to rip us off. But I can still pull it off. Except I think Lenore’s frigid. I made a bit of a dick of myself over her in school, and I was going for heavy eye contact, in the Chiefs office. But she always just looked right through me. I think she’s frigid.”

Lang accepted another beer without looking up. “But hot, though, too.”

Obstat fingered his tie. “Don’t know what it is about her, Wanger. The girl’s just always slayed me. The way she dresses, the not incidental gazonga factor. And her legs. The single most out-of-this. world pair of legs I’ve ever laid eyes on.”

“I was noticin’ those legs,” Lang said, nodding.

“I’ve had this wild fantasy, for who knows how long, about doing her out in the G.O.D.,” Obstat said, looking faraway. He looked back at Lang and blushed a bit. “You been back out there, lately, at all? I’ve been dying to go. I still remember when we planted cacti.”

“We can go any time you want,” said Lang. “I’m gonna buy some sort of car for out here tomorrow, I decided. Lenore’s little boyfriend’s paying me like the money hurt his hand.”

“Boyfriend?”

“This guy named Vigorous, owns the firm we’re at, or at least part of it.” Lang looked off over Obstat’s shoulder, at the Skipper.

“I remember the Chief saying something to her about a Vigorous, in his office,” Obstat said, narrowing his little brown eyes. He dug at his Twizzler’s plastic pineapple jug with a straw.

“He’s a interesting little dung beetle. Doublest chin I ever did see on a human being.” Lang drank deeply. “How’d he get hold of Lenore, I wonder, if she’s so all-fired hot as you say.”

“There is no God in the universe, Wang-Dang,” Obstat said, shaking his big head.

“So I keep getting told. Even though the girl herself owns this wild-ass bird that’s gonna be on religious TV, with padre Sykes, who’s my own personal Daddy’s favorite.” Lang held up a bandaged finger. “Little Fucker damn near took my digit off, yesterday.”

“You were at Lenore’s house, with her bird?”

Lang stared silently at Obstat.

“Well, we know all about the bird thing,” Obstat said, looking away and shaking his head. “We’re shitting all kinds of different bricks over that one. We think what happened was this relative who got us going on the project slipped the thing a pineal mickey. Which means maybe they’re going around slipping it all over the place. Which means other companies could get hold of it. Which has the Chief shitting bricks, believe you me — that along with the fact that the retards in Jars have made something like three times as many jars as we need, or have lids for, even, so the Chief has to try to sell some jars to this chain of medical laboratories, and he‘s—”

“This crap can make animals talk?” Lang interrupted.

“Well, our understanding is the bird doesn’t talk, so much as just repeat.”

“… remember Candy did say something about that.”

“Who?”

“They got peanuts in this bar, at all?”, Lang said. They both looked around. “What kind of self-respectin’ bar doesn’t have peanuts?”

“Coconut I know they’ve got. It’s a mood place.”

“Shit on fire.”

“But anyway we don’t really know what it can do. You ought to hear some of these kids. They can sing like birds.”

“Some joke.”

“No pun intended.”

Lang stared absently into Ginger’s décolletage. “So she’s hot, then, and things with her Daddy aren’t too good.”

“My impression is they aren’t close at all.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Listen, you want to see a picture of her?” Obstat dug for his wallet in the back pocket of his Chinos.

“I know what she looks like,” Lang said. Then he looked up at Obstat in surprise. “You carry her picture?”

“The little lady has smitten me from afar, since way back who knows when,” Obstat said, shaking his head and flipping through his credit cards. “I admit it’s a pitiful situation.”

“This an old picture you got?”

“High school yearbook.”

“Give it here, then.”

Obstat handed over the little wallet photo. In the picture Lenore was sixteen. Her hair was very long. She was smiling broadly, looking off into the nothing reserved especially for yearbook photos.

Lang stared down at the picture. He brushed away a bit of beer foam from the border with a thumb. Lenore smiled at him, through him.

“Looks to be her, all right.”

Obstat was bouncing up and down in his seat. “Listen, stay a few more minutes. It’ll be time for another gag in a while. And have a look at that one over there, at Mary-Ann, with the little guy in the beard and steamed glasses. Looks a little spacey, but talk about your basic gazongas.”

Lang kept looking at the photo. He seemed to be about to say something.

/e/

“Maybe even inclined to say big mistake here, Rick.”

“Don’t be silly. It’s an absolute inspiration. I was positively writhing with excitement at the prospect of telling you, last night. And then of course you conked out. Again.”

“But I like the switchboard. You know that. And it even looks like the lines are going to get fixed soon. They’re going to do tests.”

“Lenore, you are in a position to do me a favor. Actually to help both of us, I think. This will be deeply interesting, I promise. I’ve seen that you’re chafing, at the switchboard, deep down.”

“Beg pardon?”

“You can save me valuable weeding-time.”

“How can Norslan translations take so much time? That’s not a long thing.”

“….”

“And what’s with the light in here right now? This is creepy.”

“Frigging shadow…”

“We need to have a serious talk about the windows in the lobby, too, mister. I’m starting not to care one bit for the way the—”

“Come here a moment. See the way the lake looks like rotten mayonnaise in the shadow-half of the window? Doesn’t that look like rotten mayonnaise?”

“Oh, that’s just sick.”

“But doesn’t it?”

“It really does.”

“I thought so.”

“OK, so what does this involve, then?”

“What?”

“This hopefully very temporary Review job.”

“It simply involves screening a portion of the back submissions to the quarterly, for a time, the time I’m to be frantically busy with the herbicide thing. You’ll be weeding out the more obviously pathetic or inappropriate submissions, and putting asterisks on those that strike you as meriting particular attention and consideration on my part.”

“Hmm.”

“We’ll need to make sure your tastes are keened to the proper pitch for our particular publication, of course…”

“You’re going to keen the pitch of my tastes?”

“Relax. I’m simply going to have you read briefly through a batch I’ve already exposed myself to, and we’ll just see what happens, taste-pitch-wise. You’ll be having a preliminary look at… these.”

“All those are submissions?”

“I shall say that most are. Some few might for all you know have been sent to me by friends for scrutiny and criticism. But I’ve effaced all names.”

“So it’s not all just troubled-college-student stuff?”

“The bulk of it is, to my ever-increasing irritation and distress. But the average collegiate material you should be able to spot a mile off.”

“How come?”

“Oh, dear, many reasons.”

“….“

“What shall we say? Perhaps that it tends to be hideously self-conscious. Mordantly cynical. Or, if not mordantly cynical, then simperingly naive. Or at any rate consistently, off-puttingly pretentious. Not to mention abysmally typed, of course.”

“….”

“It tries too hard, is really all we can say about most of it. There is simply an overwhelming sense of trying too hard. My, you’re looking particularly lovely in this half of the light.”

“Rick, how am I supposed to know if something’s mordant, or simpering? I don’t know anything about literature.”

“A, the vast majority of the material that passes through here is not even potentially literature, and b, good!”

“What’s good?”

“That you ‘know nothing about literature,’ or at least believe that you don’t. It means you’re perfect: fresh, intuitive, shaking the aesthetic chaff out of your hair…”

“There’s something in my hair?”

“It’s when people begin to fancy that they actually know something about literature that they cease to be literarily interesting, or even of any use to those who are. You’re perfect, take it from me.”

“I don’t know…”

“Lenore, what’s with you? Isn’t this the person who sees herself as almost by definition a word person? Who snarls when her literary sensibility is even potentially impugned?”

“I just want to try to keep my personal life and my job as separate as I can. I don’t need Walinda going around saying I got a cushy deal because of you.”

“But here’s your chance to be out of Walinda-range for whole periods of time.”

“And plus, Rick, I just have a bad feeling about the whole thing.”

“Trust me. Help me. Look, let’s take a couple of examples. How about this pathetically typed little item right here? Why don’t you just read the very first bit of it, here, and we’ll…”

“This one?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s see: ‘Dr. Rudolph Carp, one of the world’s leading proc tologists, was doing a standard exam one warm July morning when he suddenly remembered that he had forgotten to put on an examination glove. He looked down with horror at…’—oh, gak.”

“Gak indeed. Material like this can simply immediately be put in the rejection pile, on Mavis’s desk, and she will Xerox a terse little rejection slip to go with the returned manuscript.”

“What’s with these titles? ‘Dance of the Insecure’? ‘To the Mall’? ‘Threnody Jones and the Goat from Below’? ‘The Enema Bandit and the Cosmic Buzzer’? ‘Love’? ‘A Metamorphosis for the Eighties’?”

“That last one is actually rather interesting. A Kafka parody, though sensitively done. Self-loathing-in-the-midst-of-adulation piece. Collegiate, but interesting.”

“ ‘As Greg Sampson awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he discovered that he had been transformed into a rock star. He gazed down at his red, as it were leather-clad, chest, the top of which was sprinkled with sequins and covered with a Fender guitar strapped tightly across his leather shoulders. It was no dream.’ Hmmm.”

“Read it over at your leisure. There are some interesting ones. There’s one about a family trying to decide whether to have the grandmother’s gangrenous feet amputated — you should vibrate sympathetically with that one. There’s one about a boy who puts himself through prep school selling copies of the Physicians’ Desk Reference in the halls. One about a woman who hires herself out at exorbitant rates as a professional worrier and griever for the sick and dying…”

“ ‘Elroy’s problem was that he had a tender pimple, on his forehead, right in the spot where his forehead creased when he looked surprised, which was often.’ Gak. Rejection. ‘So it finally happened. Bob Kelly, busy checking out the rear end of his neighbor. Mrs. Ernst as she bent to retrieve a mitten, ran over his son, Miles, with the snowblower.’ Double gak. Double rejection.”

“Like those instincts, kiddo.”

“ ‘Santo Longine, having learned to shift with a cigarette in his hand, now smoked while he drove.’ ‘The morning that Monroe Fieldbinder came next door to the Slotniks’ to discuss Mr. Costigan was a soft warm Sunday morning in May.’ These seem prima facie OK.”

“Why not start with those. Why not go ahead and start with those — start with that last one. Read through about half the stack… like so. You can use Mavis’s desk until her return from lunch, then you can come in here. I have to run to the typesetter’s this afternoon, and I may be gone for some time. You can have free rein.”

“This one looks sort of interesting, at least potentially. At least

it’s not overtly sick.“

“Which one?”

“….”

“Just see what you think. Go with your feelings, is the vital thing. ”

“Do I get switchboard scale for this?”

“Readers make ten dollars an hour.”

“I’ll just be outside, reading.”

“Have things reversed, Lenore?”

“Hmmm?”

“Nothing. Go. Have fun. Be intuitive.”

“….”

/f/

“Come in. ”

“Good heavens.”

“Come down.”

“Dear me.”

“This way.”

“I’ve got to confess, I thought this was some sort of joke at—”

“It wasn’t. It isn’t.”

“My God, it’s boiling in here. How do you people live? And how am I to walk?”

“Bent over. This way. Hunch your shoulders.”

“Lord.”

“You notice I’m not complaining. We all bend this way naturally. Mrs. Beadsman told me to tell you that as space is bending you now, so time has bent us.”

“….”

“The pain of which you have no idea, God willing. God forbid you should ever be in our state.”

“Rather hope to be in just your state, actually, at some point in the very distant future. Otherwise I… Ow! Otherwise I expect I’ll be even worse off — specifically dead.”

“Well now that’s a very interesting point, which you can take up with Mrs. Beadsman.”

“Am I perhaps going to have a chance to speak to Mrs. Beadsman, then?”

“No.”

“Mrs. Yingst!”

“Hello, Dr. Jay.”

“Well, I must say it seemed difficult to conceive of, but this is—”

“Cut the guano.”

“… cozy, I must—”

“Here are the sessions’ transcripts back. Here is your money. Lenore instructs me to tell you you’re doing a competent job.”

“Competent?”

“That’s what she said.”

“And how long is this to go on? This is eventually going to kill her. You people and I are killing a person from the inside out.”

“That’s exactly wrong. It’s we who are keeping her alive. Can’t you read? You’re even more of an idiot than Lenore maintains.”

“I refuse to submit to this sort of abuse, madam. I am a distinguished professional, a graduate of Harvard University, a respected member of—”

“You’re a pathetic phobic neurotic whom Lenore used her influence to rescue from institutional commitment by your wife, who if you recall objected to being scrubbed with antiseptic every night before bed. We set you up and keep you in soap and peroxide and deodorant. You’ll do what Lenore tells you to do for precisely as long as you’re needed.”

“But this simply cannot keep on indefinitely. The Vigorous aspect, especially. He’s the real problem. Spoken things anger him beyond belief, and I know he’s eventually—”

“Lenore instructs me to instruct you simply to take care of Mr. Vigorous vis à vis Lenore. He’s getting on everyone’s nerves. Do it. You’ll find some material here on a person who—”

“Listen, though. This will only make it worse. He’s going to want to read something by Blentner. He’s a reader. He’s going to want to lay eyes on Blentner’s actual texts. And he’ll ask me for them, and he’ll find out that there is no Blentner, and then what am I to say?”

“There can be a Blentner if you want there to be, if you need there to be.”

“How’s that?”

“You’ll write something, you ninny. You’ll make something up and attach a name to it. What could be simpler? Are you completely dense?”

“Really, I see no need for this sort of—”

“Take your money and go. Here is the material on Vigorous. Go away.”

“Do you two notice anything smelling the tiniest bit peculiar down here? I—”

“Take your nostrils and go.”

“How am I to turn around? It’s too cramped to turn around.”

“Back up. Go backwards. Mrs. Lindenbaum will help you.”

“This way, dear.”

“Good God.”

15. 1990

LOVE

The morning that Monroe Fieldbinder came next door to the Slotniks’ to discuss Mr. Costigan was a soft warm Sunday morning in May. Fieldbinder moved up the Slotniks’ rough red brick front walk, through some damp unraked clippings from yesterday’s first-of-the-season bagless mow, and prepared to press their lighted doorbell, one with a “Full Housepower” decal beneath it, just like the former decal on Fieldbinder’s former home, and then paused for just a moment to extract a bit of grass from his pant cuff.

The Slotniks sat in their dining room, in robes and leather slippers and woolly footmuffs, amid plates with bits of French-toast scraps loose and heavy with absorbed syrup, reading the Sunday paper, with maple stickiness at thumbs and mouth-corners.

The melody of the Slotniks’ doorbell took time. It was still playing when Evelyn Slotnik opened the front door. Fieldbinder stood on the stoop. Evelyn’s hands went involuntarily to her hair, her eyes to her feet, in woolly footmuffs, beneath unshaved ankles. And then context came in, and she looked away from herself, at Fieldbinder.

Fieldbinder was dressed to harm, in a light English raincoat and razor slacks, black shoes, subway shine. There was a briefcase. Evelyn Slotnik stared at him. All this took only a second. There was a sound of the newspaper from back in the dining room.

“Good morning Evelyn,” Fieldbinder said cheerily.

“Monroe,” said Evelyn.

When some more seconds passed during which Fieldbinder still stood outside, smelling the inside of the Slotniks’ home, he smiled again and repeated, louder, “Good morning, Evelyn. Hope I’m not…”

“Well come in,” Evelyn said, ailittle loud. She opened the door wider and stepped back. Fieldbinder wiped off the last of the dewy lawn clippings onto Donald Slotnik’s joke of a welcome mat, that read GO AWAY, and came in.

“Come on in, Monroe,” Evelyn was babbling, even louder. Her puffy eyes were wide and confused on Fieldbinder’s. “He’s home,” she mouthed.

Fieldbinder smiled and nodded at Evelyn. “By any chance is Donald home,” he said loudly. “I’m sorry to intrude. I need to speak to you and Donald.”

From farther in, there was a chair-sound. Donald Slotnik came into the living room, where Evelyn and Fieldbinder stood, looking past each other. Evelyn manipulated the belt of her robe. Donald Slotnik wore some sort of shiny oriental wrap over his pajamas. He had leather slippers, and the sports page, and a cowlick. From the dining room came the rustle of funnies, to which Scott Slotnik was applying Silly Putty.

“Monroe,” said Slotnik.

“Hello Donald,” said Fieldbinder.

“Well hello,” Slotnik said. He looked at Evelyn, then back at Fieldbinder, then at the easy chair Fieldbinder stood next to. “Please, have a seat, I suppose. You’ll have to excuse us, as you can see we weren’t really expecting anyone.”

Fieldbinder shook his head and raised a stop-palm at Slotnik. “Not at all. I’m the one who should apologize. Here I am, barging on a Sunday morning. I apologize.”

“Not at all,” Slotnik said, looking at Evelyn, who had her hands in the pockets of her robe.

“I’m here only because I really felt I should talk to you,” Fieldbinder said. “I felt a need to talk to you both. Now.” One of Evelyn’s hands was now at her collar.

“Well all right then, sure,” said Slotnik. “Let’s all have a seat. Honey, maybe Monroe would like some coffee.”

“No thanks, no coffee for me,” said Fieldbinder, taking off his coat, which Slotnik didn’t offer to hang up for him, and folding it onto the arm of his chair.

“Well I’d like some more,” Slotnik said to Evelyn. She went into the dining room. Fieldbinder heard Scott say something to her.

Slotnik sat on the love seat across from the living room window and Fieldbinder’s chair and crossed his legs, so that one leather slipper threatened to fall off. Fieldbinder refused to believe he saw tiny ducks on Slotnik’s pajamas.

“So,” Slotnik said. “How are Estates?”

“Estates are fine. How are Taxes?”

“Taxes are one hell of a lot better than they were two months ago. Returns are all in, the worst of the post-deadline bitching is petering out… thanks, honey.” Slotnik took a sip from a mug of coffee and put it on the coffee table in front of him. Evelyn sank into the little gap next to Slotnik on the love seat, opposite Fieldbinder. “You remember how seasonal Taxes tends to be,” Slotnik continued, smacking his lips a little over the coffee in his mouth. Slotnik had always struck Fieldbinder as the sort of man who enjoyed the taste of his own saliva.

“I remember all too well.” Fieldbinder smiled at Slotnik. “Fred’s not riding you too hard over there, is he?”

“Not at all. Not at all. Fred and I get along well. We played tennis just yesterday. Fred’s a fine man.”

“Fred rode us hard.”

“Maybe he’s mellowing.”

“Could be.”

The silence that followed was broken only by the sound of Scott doing something to a dish in the kitchen sink.

“So,” said Fieldbinder. “The reason I’m here. I was just next door, at Mr. Costigan’s. Been there since early this morning. Trying to do some inventory work, following through, item-reference, et cetera.” He looked at Slotnik. “You did know Costigan was a client.”

“Sure, poor guy,” Slotnik said, reaching for his coffee. “We helped him set up a little municipal bond shelter just last year. A good, tight little shelter. The man needed protection. Poor guy’ll never get to enjoy any of the advantages, now.”

“Right,” said Fieldbinder. “Well, Alan put me on his estate.”

“Really. Well we wondered who’d be doing it. We’ve had a look across, over the fence, to see if we saw anybody. Fred didn’t know who Estates was going to put on it.”

“Well, you’re looking at him.” Fieldbinder looked at Evelyn Slotnik and smiled. She smiled back.

Then her smile turned upside down and her hand went back to her collar. “Such an awful thing to happen to somebody,” she said. “We were so upset. We were stunned, really, is what we were. So scary that something in a person’s head can just… pop, like a balloon, at any minute, and you’re gone. Veronica Frick two houses over told me he’d never had any sort of health problem before, at all, ever. It’s just so scary.” She snuggled in farther under Slotnik’s arm.

“He was an old man, honey,” Slotnik said, trying to keep Evelyn’s snuggling from spilling the mug of coffee in his hand. “These things happen. How old was he, Monroe?”

“He was fifty-eight,” Fieldbinder said.

“Oh.”

“Neither of us could get over to the service,” Evelyn said. “Donald was swamped at the office, and Scott was home sick with a sore throat. We sent flowers, though.”

“Nice of you.”

“Not at all,” Slotnik said. “He was a good neighbor. Quiet, took care of his place, let the kids play ball in his yard. Sometimes when we were going out of town he’d offer to come over, take in the mail, water the plants. We liked him.”

“Sounds like a nice man.”

“He was,” said Evelyn.

There was a moment of silence. Slotnik cleared his throat. “So then how’s his estate?” he asked.

“Relatively trouble-free, although I’m just starting.” Fieldbinder smiled and shook his head. “Not a problem at all, really. I’m only working on it today because I’m so behind in general, what with the house thing last week, and insurance people to deal with, fire department, red tape, et cetera.”

“Hey, listen, damn sorry to hear about that, Monroe,” Slotnik said. “That must have been a wrench. We didn’t want to bring it up unless you did, right honey? We thought you’d be upset, tired of talking about it.”

“It was just a house,” Fieldbinder said. “All my important papers were at the office. And lawyers tend to be insured to the hilt, as you doubtless know.” They all laughed. Fieldbinder looked at Evelyn. “I am sorry about my bird, though.”

“You had a bird?” Slotnik said.

“Yes. A lovely one. I could feed her off my finger.”

“Too bad,” Slotnik said, scratching his neck.

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

There was more silence. Slotnik sipped coffee around Evelyn. Evelyn seemed to be looking at everything in the living room except Fieldbinder. The ducks on Slotnik’s pajamas looked to be mallards.

“How are the kids?” Fieldbinder asked.

Evelyn cleared her throat. “The kids are fine. Steven has final exams right now, along with baseball, so he’s busy. Scott’s had a cold, but he’s better now.”

“They around?”

“Scott was up for breakfast, believe it or not,” Slotnik said. “Scott?” he called. There was no answer. “He must have gone out back.”

“Steve’s still asleep,” Evelyn said. “He’s pitching this afternoon, Donald says.”

“Damn right,” Slotnik said. “When your dad’s the coach, and you’ve got an arm like that kid’s got on him, you get to pitch sometimes.”

“Well, good,” Fieldbinder said.

“Right.”

“Right.”

Slotnik put down his mug. “So you said you wanted to talk to us.”

“Yes,” Fieldbinder said. Evelyn was staring out the big living room window at the bright green front lawn.

Slotnik looked as if he would have glanced at his watch, had he been wearing one. “So?” he said.

“So you didn’t know Mr. Costigan all that well, then, is the sense I get.”

“We were neighbors. We knew him fairly well for a neighbor. We spoke over the fence. You know how it is.”

“Sure,” Fieldbinder said. He looked at his hands, in his lap. “How about the kids. Kids know him well?”

Slotnik’s forehead became a puzzled forehead.

Evelyn cleared her throat again. “No,” she said. “Well, not any better than we did. They played in his yard, sometimes, when things overflowed from ours. We agreed to make the fence only between the houses, not the yards. He was nice about that. He obviously liked children. The kids liked him, I know, because he gave really good Halloween treats. Giant Hershey bars, that they couldn’t even eat all at once. He was nice, but he kept to himself.”

“As a good neighbor should,” Slotnik said.

“I don’t think the kids knew him any better than we did.”

“Especially Steve, I’m wondering about,” Fieldbinder said.

Slotnik’s forehead got worse. “Well, no, Monroe. What exactly seems to be the problem?”

Fieldbinder sniffed and reached down and popped his briefcase latches. He brought out a large photograph and handed it over the coffee table to Evelyn, all the time looking at Slotnik.

The photo was a color shot of a boy walking up the Slotniks’ brick walk, toward the front door, with a backpack over his shoulder. The boy was about thirteen, healthy, rather big and strong for the age of his face. He had short, dull-blond hair. The photo looked to have been taken from a distance. There were some maple trees in the way of the shot, partly. Fieldbinder himself could make out maple-leaf shapes.

“Now as I recall that’s Steve,” he said. “Right?”

The Slotniks looked up from the photo. “Yes.”

“What happened was I got it out of a room in Mr. Costigan’s house,” Fieldbinder said. He folded his hands in his lap. “Pretty clearly taken from over there, too, up high, with the maples out over the fence in the way.” He gestured through a side window above Evelyn’s head at some maple trees leaning over the fence, their new leaves looking extra green in the morning light. “Taken with a hell of a strong lens, too, as you can see. See the detail on Steve? Costigan had some really nice equipment.”

“Okay,” Slotnik said slowly. He made no move to give the photo back to Fieldbinder. “But I’m not sure I understand. We didn’t know Costigan was a photographer, but so what? It’s a good picture, you can see.”

“Yes. It is,” Fieldbinder said. He did something to a pant-leg. “So are the literally hundreds of other pictures of Steve I found in this particular room in the guy’s house.”

The Slotniks looked at Fieldbinder.

“Which pictures themselves were not all that hard to find,” Fieldbinder continued, “seeing as how this particular room in the house was wall-papered with them.”

Slotnik put down his mug again.

“And I mean floor to ceiling, Don.” Fieldbinder looked at Slotnik. Slotnik looked at Evelyn.

“Also in this room”—Fieldbinder cleared his throat—“this room on the second floor, with a window directly out of which I could see across the fence into a window in your home, a window with a ‘Go Phillies!’ pennant hanging in it, a window I’m going to assume, unless you tell me differently, is Steve’s…” He looked at Slotnik, who said nothing. Fieldbinder sniffed. “Also in this room were”—he ticked off with his fingers—“who knows how many sketches, in charcoal and pencil, and some oils, really quite good, of someone who looks like… no, quite obviously is Steve. Some equally quite good pieces of sculpture, in varied media, I couldn’t really tell, but again with just Steve as the subject, as far as I could see. Also some sort of video recorder set-up that’s rigged rather ingeniously to play a continuing loop of a certain tape, a tape of some games of football in your yard, in Costigan’s yard, of Steve raking some leaves, of Steve mowing the lawn, of Steve and Scott making a snowman, using what looked to me like a frozen sock for the thing’s nose. Sound familiar?” Fieldbinder looked up at the Slotniks. “Also some… items, in a sort of very solid and expensive wooden box, that looks to me like a jewelry box, and is at any rate listed on Costigan’s personal-assets sheet as an antique.”

“Just what sort of items?”

“Now you said Costigan would take care of your house when you were away.”

“Only sometimes,” Evelyn said. “Usually Mrs. Frick…”

Slotnik ignored her. “What sort of items, Monroe?”

Fieldbinder made a bland face. “A few baseball cards. Some strands of hair, light hair, glued to an index card. A Popsicle stick, from an orange Popsicle. A couple of… Kleenex.” He looked at Evelyn. “There was a tee-shirt, a white tee-shirt, Fruit of the Loom. Very neatly pressed, folded, but not laundered. An unclean tee-shirt. And tagged, with a date, sometime in August of last year.”

Evelyn twisted toward Slotnik. “When we were at the Cape.”

“Can you remember Steve maybe ever losing some clothes?” Fieldbinder said.

“Oh, he’s always losing things — they both are. You know how children are.” Evelyn almost started to smile.

“No,” Fieldbinder leaned forward in his chair, “the thing is, I really don’t.”

“What do you mean did Steve ever lose some clothes,” Slotnik said.

“Well Don the thing is that the tee-shirt wasn’t the only… Fruit of the Loom item in Costigan’s box.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Basically it means size twenty-eight briefs, Don.” Fieldbinder looked at Evelyn, whose eyes were no longer quite focused. He took a tiny wrinkle out of the crease in his slacks with a thumbnail and refolded his hands in his lap. He looked back at Slotnik.

Slotnik stared into the air in front of him for a moment, trying to smooth his cowlick, which sprang right back up again. “I’m going to call the police,” he said quietly.

Fieldbinder made a wry smile. “Well, now, Don, and have them do what?”

Slotnik looked at Fieldbinder.

“Maybe what we should do first, if you want my opinion,” said Fieldbinder, “is have you two try to remember if there might have been any occasions when anything could have possibly happened.” He looked at the Slotniks. “Anything even remotely bad.”

Slotnik looked at the coffee table.

“Is Steve ever here alone? Without one of you around?”

“Neither of them, no, never without a sitter,” Slotnik said firmly. “And if they’re out, they’re either with us, or at school, or with friends, or we know exactly where they are.”

“That’s what I figured.” Fieldbinder bent over for a moment to reclose his briefcase. “Now but can either of you ever remember Costigan maybe doing or saying anything strange, having to do with Steve, when you were around? Did he ever say anything to him? Did he ever do anything out of the ordinary? Did he ever maybe touch Steve, at all?”

“Never,” Slotnik said.

There was silence.

“No, he did, once,” Evelyn said quietly, looking out at the lawn. “Just once.”

Slotnik turned uncomfortably to look at his wife under his arm. Fieldbinder looked at them blandly.

“It was so tiny I never thought to say anything to you, honey,” Evelyn said. “I never thought to even think about it. It wasn’t really anything.”

“I think I’d better be the judge of that,” Slotnik said.

Evelyn worked at closing the collar of her robe over her throat. She sniffed out at the lawn. “What happened was Steve and Scott and I were going out to the car. This was a long time ago, Scott was tiny, Steve was ten, I think. I think I was taking Steve somewhere, for something. The car was in the driveway, and Mr. Costigan was in his lawn on the other side of the drive. He’d been getting dandelions out of his lawn, I remember. He had a little wheelbarrow full of dandelions. Anyway, he was there.” Evelyn took a deep breath, and her robe fell back open. “And we stopped, and I said hello, and we made some small talk. He was saying how hard it was to get the whole dandelions out, roots and all, how stubborn they were. I don’t remember what else. And what he did…” Evelyn’s eyes narrowed; she squinted at a memory. “What happened was that in the middle of the talking, for no reason, he just reached out a finger, very slowly, and touched Steve. With just one finger. He touched the front of Steve’s shirt. On his chest. Very carefully.”

“What do you mean, carefully? He touched our child carefully?” Slotnik looked down at Evelyn.

“It was like…” Evelyn looked at Fieldbinder. “It was like, sometimes when you’re standing in front of a clean window, a very clean window, looking out, and the window is so clean it looks like it’s not there. You know? And to make sure it’s there, even though you know it’s there, really, you’ll reach out and just… touch the window, ever so slightly. Just barely touch it. That’s what it was like. And Steve didn’t do anything, I don’t think he even noticed. I think he thought Mr. Costigan was just getting something off his shirt. But he wasn‘t, I know. It was strange, but it was so… tiny. I forgot all about it. I don’t think I ever even put it in words to myself.” She looked at Fieldbinder. “That was the.only thing, just that one time, and it was so long ago.”

“I see,” said Fieldbinder.

The Slotniks didn’t say anything.

“So you can maybe understand why I thought it was worth barging,” Fieldbinder said. “I just thought you ought to know, at some point, and I figured now was as… well, better than some point.” He made a small smile.

“Good of you,” Slotnik said quietly.

“Listen,” Fieldbinder said, “if you care to hear my advice, from having been next door, I think all you need to do is have a talk with Steve. Not to make a big fuss about anything, but simply to make sure nothing has ever happened, that might have upset him.” He looked at Evelyn. “Which I’m sure hasn’t. It just doesn’t sound like that sort of thing. But of course naturally you’ll want to just… talk to him.”

“I’ll go wake him up right now,” Slotnik said. He rose. Fieldbinder and Evelyn rose. Fieldbinder picked up his raincoat and unfolded it, smoothing the wrinkles out.

“Probably a good idea, Don,” he said. “Probably a good idea just to have a little talk. I personally think that’s all you need to do. And Don, if you want to come over and have a look at… everything, I should be next door for about another hour.”

“Not a chance in this world,” Slotnik said. “We’d appreciate it if you’d have your crew just dispose of it. I don’t want to see any of it.” He attacked his cowlick. “If he’s laid one hand on that child, I’ll kill him.”

A moment passed.

“Anyhow,” Fieldbinder said, “I’m off. I hope I did the right thing, coming over. And I’m sorry if this upset you. I just thought you ought to know the story.”

“Monroe,” Slotnik said, “you’re a good friend. We appreciate it. You did the right thing. We appreciate it more than we can say.” He extended a sticky hand, which Fieldbinder shook, smelling syrup. Slotnik whirled on his slippers and headed for the stairs.

Evelyn showed Fieldbinder to the door. She didn’t say anything.

At the door Fieldbinder turned to her. “Listen,” he said. He looked up the staircase. “I’ll understand if this isn’t the right time.” He smiled warmly. “But I’d like to see you, and I’ll just tell you that I’ll actually be next door all day. I’ve got to get it all finished today, I’m so behind. But all day, is the thing. Although the crew’s coming at three. So I’m just telling you. Do what you want, of course. But if you get a chance, feel like it, while they’re at baseball…”

Evelyn didn’t say anything. She had opened the front door for Fieldbinder. She was seeing something past him, in the lawn. Fieldbinder turned to look.

“Well there’s Scott!” he said. “Hello, Scott! Remember me?”

Scott Slotnik was bouncing a tennis ball on the bricks of the front walk, out by the street. The ball made a dull sound as it bounced off the lawn clippings that lay on the walk. At Fieldbinder’s call, Scott looked up.

There was a silence, except for the chatter of a hedge trimmer across the street. Evelyn stared at Scott, past Scott. Then she seemed to give a start. “Scott!” she called sharply. “Please come in here right now!”

Fieldbinder turned back to look at Evelyn. He smiled and put a soft hand on the arm of her robe. “Hey,” he said gently. “Come on.”

Evelyn looked at Fieldbinder’s hand, there on her arm, for a moment. Scott had begun coming toward the door. She looked back out at him. “It’s all right, sweetie,” she called. She made a smile. “Stay and play, if you want.”

Scott looked at Fieldbinder and his mother and then at the ball in his hand.

“Anyhow, the point is just know I’m here, is all; I’m there, all day, till three,” Fieldbinder was saying.

“Yes,” Evelyn said. She went back in from the door, leaving it open.

Fieldbinder moved down the rough brick walk toward Scott Slotnik.

Through the living room window, Evelyn watched Fieldbinder stop and smile and kneel down to say a few words to Scott Slotnik. Something he said made Scott smile shyly and nod. Fieldbinder laughed. Evelyn tried to smooth her morning hair back over her ears. Her sticky thumbs pulled at her hair.

16. 1990

/a/

9 September

A dream so completely frightening, disorienting, and ominous that Fieldbinder awoke streaming.

“Dr. J__ is in significant personal danger, ” he thought wryly,

Lang and I are in my office, in our respective chairs, the translation between us. We are both mysteriously and troublingly nude. It is noon; the shadow is moving. I look down and cover myself with a tea bag, but there is Lang in all his horror. Lang is drawing a picture of Lenore on the back of the final page of “Love.” It is a stunning, lifelike drawing of an unclothed Lenore. I begin to have an erection behind my tea bag. Lang’s pen is in the shape of a beer bottle; Lang sucks at the pen, periodically. Lenore is there on the page, on her back, a Vargas girl, a V. Lang puts his initials in the side of Lenore’s long, curving leg: a deep, wicked W.D.L.

As the initials go down, hands and hair begin to protrude from the page; breasts swell, a tummy heaves, knees rise and part, feet stroke demurely at the edges of the page. Lang works his pen. Lenore emerges from the page and circles the room.

Fingernails click on the window. Outside the window is a young Mindy Metalman, very young, perhaps thirteen, with bright lipstick on her tiny bruised mouth. She holds hedge trimmers, points at the tea bag. I am sucked back into the shadow as it spreads like ink across the white wall. When I look away from the window, Lenore is kneeling, with the beer-bottle pen, signing Lang’s rear end, signing her name with long slow curves, in violet ink, while her other hand finds what purchase it can on Lang’s heroic front.

I scream an airless scream and begin explosively to urinate. The stream is upward, a fan of uncountably many lines, which lines are razor-thin and so hot that I am burned when I try to cross them. I am trapped behind my fan. Hot currents swirl on the office carpet, climbing to lap hollow white at Lenore’s breasts as they tremble with her efforts. The tea bag bleeds into the hot spray. Tea is being made. “Tea symptosis,” says Lang, laughing.

Lenore is drowning; Lang holds her head beneath the surface of the ocean of burnt-yellow tea with his rear end. She continues to sign. Mice boil in the hot currents, their tails wriggling. I am suffocating. It is Salada tea. On the tea bag is written a pithy “It takes a big man to laugh at himself, but it takes an even bigger man to laugh at that man.”

Lang looks down at himself and begins ponderously to stir. I surrender myself to the horror. My diploma is washed from the wall and borne away in a rush of foam.

Fieldbinder awoke streaming, to find that he had actually wet the bed, but fortunately that the stained area was no bigger than a spot of ink, which he rubbed away with his handkerchief.

The thing is that they are at the Tissaws‘, and I am here. There is an unimaginable thickness about Cleveland after one has had a bad night, alone. One I am powerless even to hope to begin to describe. Really.

/b/

PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT OF RAP SESSION IN THE OFFICE OF DR. CURTIS JAY, PH.D., THURSDAY, 9 SEPTEMBER 1990.

PARTICIPANTS: DR. CURTIS JAY AND MS. LENORE BEADSMAN, AGE 24, FILE NUMBER 770-01-4266.

DR. JAY: And so how does that make you feel?

MS. LENORE BEADSMAN: How does what make me feel?

JAY: The state of affairs we were just trying to articulate, in which your grandmother’s separation from and silence toward you paradoxically evokes in you a feeling of greater closeness to and communication with the rest of your family.

LENORE: Well, except there’s the John thing, in Chicago or wherever. JAY: Let’s leave him out of the picture, for the nonce.

LENORE: For the what?

JAY: Go, go with your thoughts.

LENORE: What thoughts?

JAY: The thoughts we just characterized together.

LENORE: Well, I think in a certain way it’s true. Clarice was clueless, she really doesn’t click with the whole Lenore thing, she never has, but still I felt like when I went over there to tell her this troubling family stuff, and then watched her and her own family go through that whole little skit that in a way had to do with exactly what I needed to talk to her about — I felt good, somehow. It felt secure. Is it dumb to say it felt secure?

JAY: You felt connected.

LENORE: Connected and non-connected, too.

JAY: But all in the appropriate ways.

LENORE: Boy, you’re really hot, today.

JAY: There’s a ticklish, stimulating hint of breakthrough-odor. LENORE: And then there’s my other brother… that’s the first time I’ve actually talked to LaVache about anything important in a really long time. He might have been flapped, but still. I just felt somehow like we were really…

JAY: Communicating?

LENORE: I guess so.

JAY: And how long had it been since you two had had a meaningful dialogue? Communicated?

LENORE: Oh, gee, quite a while.

JAY: I see. And how long, just to play a bit of a scent-hunch, here, had your great-grandmother been ensconced in the Shaker Heights Home?

LENORE: Umm, quite a while.

JAY: Would this make you uncomfortable?

LENORE: What is that? Is that a gas mask?

JAY: (muffled) Purely precautionary.

LENORE: Why do I pay money to somebody to make me less flakey when that person is flakier than I am?

JAY: Than I.

LENORE: Good thing I’m strapped in again.

JAY: And then of course you’ve implied that your brother had insights on the whole grandmother-disappearance problem.

LENORE: Not really what you’d call insights. He’d gotten a drawing, too, a different one, of some guy on a dune in the Desert, and he played some flap-games with it, and ended up telling me never to think about myself. It wasn’t super helpful. And also it was pretty depressing to see that he’s still got this schizophrenic thing about his leg, and that he probably personally accounts for about half the drug consumption in New England.

JAY: It’s you I’m interested in, though.

LENORE: Well, sorry, but I tend to be concerned about my brother. Part of the me you’re so interested in is brother-concern.

JAY: The Desert?

LENORE: Pardon?

JAY: You mentioned Desert, in the context of the drawing in question. Do you mean the Desert?

LENORE: Well, the sand was black, and LaVache mentioned sinisterness.

JAY: So the G.O.D., then.

LENORE: Who knows.

JAY: But there’s at least a possibility that the Great Ohio Desert bears on the whereabouts of the nursing home people.

LENORE: What’s going on here?

JAY: Where?

LENORE: Don’t look around, in your stupid mask. Are you trying to put words in my mouth?

JAY: This guy? Me?

LENORE: Why do I get the feeling people are trying to push me out into the Desert? Which for me has all these really far less than pleasant memories of when I was a kid, and Gramma would take me out wandering, and I’d have to hear her go on and on about Auden and Wittgenstein, who she thinks are like jointly God, and we’d fish at the Desert’s edge, and look into the blackness…

JAY: A conspicuous hmmm, here.

LENORE: In your ear. And how come you’re all trying to get me back out there? You, my brother, Rick’s mentioned Desert, Vlad quotes Auden to me, that Gramma used to read in the sand…

JAY: A morsel for thought, if I may be so—

LENORE: And Mr. el creepo Bloemker was acting like some sort of Desert salesman with me before his girlfriend lost her dress and sprung a leak…

JAY: Excuse me?

LENORE: And then also out of the unwelcome blue comes this guy, who I unfortunately met, when I was a kid, and is married to my sister’s old roommate, and it turns out his father more or less built the G.O. D., apparently. His father owns Industrial Desert Design. Dad was unbelievably interested in that. A lot more interested than in any stick-figure drawings, that’s for—

JAY: What guy?

LENORE: Andrew Sealander Lang, who’s doing obscure translation stuff at Frequent and Vigorous, whom Rick met in a bar in Amherst.

JAY: And you’d met him personally before.

LENORE: Why do you ask?

JAY: Why that face?

LENORE: What face?

JAY: You just got a dreamy, faraway expression on your face. LENORE: I did not.

JAY: You’re attracted to this man?

LENORE: Are you out of your mind? What’s with you today? Is air getting through the air-hole in that thing?

JAY: I know an attraction-face when I see one. Psychologists’ senses are keened to pick up on nonverbal signals.

LENORE: Keened?

JAY: Your pupils have dilated to the size of manhole covers.

LENORE: How lovely.

JAY: Does Rick know about this?

LENORE: About what?

JAY: Your infatuation with this Desert-and-translation person. LENORE: You’re really pissing me off.

JAY: It’s written all over your face.

LENORE: Face must be getting pretty crowded. Manhole covers, dreamy expressions, writing…

JAY: Formal ejection warning.

LENORE: Boy, I’d think the one place where I could avoid getting pushed into places and having people pushed into me would be the place where I spend almost all my money for help with those very feelings of pushed-ness.

JAY: This guilt ploy is getting far less effective as time goes by. LENORE: Maybe I ought to just skeedaddle, then.

JAY: A hugely important and also redolent question, Lenore. Why, when you feel valid human inclinations and attractions, purely understandable inclinations to pay a visit to a place that may or may not bear on the whereabouts of a loved one, attractions to someone your own age, who can perhaps—

LENORE: How do you know his age?

JAY: It’s extractable from the context, you ninny. Cut the guano. Relax and let’s try to make a stride or two.

LENORE: Maybe just a quick dash to the ladies’ room, and then I could dash right on back—

JAY: Hush. If you feel a desire to go to the Desert, why don’t you just go? What are you afraid of?

LENORE: You’re blowing this way out of proportion, assuming there’s anything to blow. Which come to think of it there isn‘t, because I’m not afraid of anything. I’m just not dying to go out there, is all. And it would be pointless. There’s just no way twenty-six people, most of them incredibly old, and with walkers, and at least one needing things to be ninety-eight point six degrees all the time, are wandering around in the Desert in September. But what gets me is that it seems like everybody for some reason wants to get me out there. What I resent is just having no say in where I go or what I ostensibly want or—

JAY: I have one word for you.

LENORE: Goodbye?

JAY: Membrane. I say to you “membrane,” Lenore.

LENORE: I think I’d prefer goodbye.

JAY: Think of our work together, Lenore. Our strides. Our progress. Don’t you see that perceiving your own natural desires and inclinations and attractions as somehow being directed at and forced on you from outside, from Outside, is a truly classic instance of a malfunction in a hygiene-identity network? That it’s exhaustively reducible to and explainable in terms of membrane-theory? That a flabby membrane is unhealthily permeable, lets the Self out to soil the Other-set and the Other-set in to soil the Self?

LENORE: I’m afraid I’m really uncomfortably in need of a shower. JAY: And why, pray? I’ll simply tell you straight out that in my perception it’s because you are perceiving the above revelations, the above, yes, let’s take a great stride forward and say the above exhaustive and deadly-accurate characterization and explanation of your whole trouble-set, as coming from outside you, as somehow forced upon you. When it’s really coming from inside you, Lenore. It all is. Don’t you feel it? Direct your attention to your Inside. Feel how clean it is. Forget I’m here altogether. Pretend I’m you.

LENORE: It’s just impossible to take you seriously in that gas mask. JAY: Were I to remove this now, my naïve young client and friend, the stench of breakthrough would blast me into unconsciousness. You would be truly and utterly alone.

LENORE: And what do you mean, pretend you’re me? I thought the whole problem was supposed to be that that flabby old membrane wasn’t keeping you on your side and me on my side. If I pretend you’re me, what does that do to the membrane?

JAY: But don’t you see, the pretending will come from inside you. A true pretending can only come off in the context of an intimate awareness of the real. For you to pretend I’m you, you must know I’m not; the membrane must be a strong, clean membrane. The strong, clean membrane chooses what to suck inside itself and lets all the rest bounce dirtily off. Only the secure can truly pretend, Lenore. The secure have membranes like strong, clean ova. Like ovums. These membranes withstand the onslaught of the countless Other-set, ceaselessly battering, the Others, their heads coated with filth, their underarms clotted with fungus, they batter, and the secure membrane/ovum waits patiently, strong, aloof, secure, and, yes, occasionally will let an Other in, will suck it in, on the membrane’s terms, will suck it in like a sperm, will take it inside itself to renew, to create itself anew. Only a strong membrane can suck in a sperm, Lenore. Here, I know, pretend I’m a sperm.

LENORE: I don’t care for the way this session is going one bit.

JAY: No, really. Be secure. Pretend I’m a sperm cell. Here. I take the string out of the… hood of my sweatshirt, affix it to my behind for a tail, like so…

LENORE: What in God’s name are you doing?

JAY: Pretend, Lenore. Be an ovum. Be strong. Let me hypothetically batter at you. Batter batter. Surrender to the unreal of the real interior.

LENORE: Are you supposed to be a sperm, wriggling your sweatshirt-string like that?

JAY: I can feel the strength of your membrane, Lenore.

LENORE: A sperm in a gas mask?

JAY: Batter batter.

LENORE: I demand that you set my chair in motion.

JAY: Admit that your inclinations and attractions come from inside you.

LENORE: Look, quit wriggling that string all over the place.

JAY: Admit you’re attracted to this young man. This translator. This blond Adonis who can offer you realms of Self-Other interaction you’ve never even dreamed of.

LENORE: How do you know he’s blond?

JAY: The context is the fluid of the uterus. I’m swimming, to batter at you. Batter batter. Let someone inside your membrane.

LENORE: Is this a pass? Are you making a pass?

JAY: Don’t misdirect so pathetically transparently. I speak… speak of this man who spreads your pupils from the inside, like the soft petals of some helpless flower. Who can show you perhaps how the strong membrane is permeated. Who can batter! Batter batter.

LENORE: What are you saying?

JAY: We’re making gargantuan strides. The room is swirling with breakthrough-gases, in which, paradoxically, everything becomes strangely clear. Can’t you feel it?

LENORE: I think you’ve flipped. I never signed up for sperm-therapy, buster, I’m telling you right—

JAY: Admit that your attraction to this Other comes from inside your Self. Strengthen the membrane. Let it be permeated as you desire it so!

LENORE: And how might I ask is Rick supposed to fit into all this? What about Rick?

JAY: Rick knows he must forever remain an Other to you. Rick knows the meaning of membrane. Rick is like a sperm without a tail. An immobilized sperm in the uterus of life. Why do you think Rick is so desperately unhappy? What do you think he means by the Screen Door of Union?

Lenore Beadsman pauses.

JAY: He means membrane! Rick is trapped behind his own membrane. He hasn’t the equipment to get out.

LENORE: Hey, you’re not supposed to talk about your other patients. JAY: Why do you think he’s so possessive? He wants you in him. He wants to trap you behind the membrane with him. He knows he can never validly permeate the membrane of an Other, so he desires to bring that Other into him, for all time. He’s a sick man.

LENORE: Look, stop trying to swim around. You’ve made your point. JAY: No, you’ve made your point. All distinctions are shattered. I am not here. I am the sperm inside you. Remember that you are half sperm, Lenore.

LENORE: Pardon?

JAY: Your father’s sperm. It’s part of you. Inseparable.

LENORE: What does my father have to do with all this?

JAY: Admit.

LENORE: Admit what?

JAY: That you want someone truly inside you. That your membrane is crying out.

LENORE: Jesus.

JAY: Listen…. Hear that? The faint cry of a membrane, isn’t it? “Let me be an ovum, let—”

LENORE: He loves me.

JAY: He does? The Adonis? The valid Other?

LENORE: Rick, you dingwad. Rick loves me. He’s said so.

JAY: Rick cannot give us what we need. Admit it.

LENORE: He loves me.

JAY: It’s a sucking love, Lenore. An inherently unclean love. It’s the love of a flabby, unclean membrane, sucking at an Other, to dirty. Dirt is on this membrane’s mind. It wants to do you dirt.

Lenore Beadsman pauses.

JAY: Do you love him back? Does he batter validly at the membrane? LENORE: Please, a shower.

JAY: Admit the source of your dispositions.

LENORE: Leave me alone. Start my chair.

JAY: Batter batter. We are helpless and inefficacious as parts of a system until we recognize the existence of the system. Batter batter. Hear the syrupy squelch of your membrane.

LENORE: Look, let me leave right now or I’ll stop coming. I’m not kidding.

JAY: First admit it. Say it out loud. Bring it out. Your pupils don’t lie. Make it real. Bring it into the network. Batter back. Take an Other inside.

LENORE: Shower. Please, a shower.

JAY: Admit everything. Do you want a gas mask too? Is that it? No problem at all. A permeated membrane is not a pretty smell. LENORE: God.

JAY: What do we suppose Lenore would have to say to all this? LENORE: Who?

/c/

“Are you all right?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“You look awfully pale.”

“….”

“Would you like some of my oyster stew?”

“You know I hate oyster stew. They look like little mouths, floating in there.”

“Surely you want more than just that tiny salad.”

“Please don’t tell me what I want, Rick. I’ve had more than enough of that already today.”

“What does that mean?”

“…”

“Is. that a Jay-reference?”

“….”

“Was it not a good appointment?”

“Don’t want to talk about it.”

“But if it’s harmed you in some emotional way…”

“We made a deal that we wouldn’t talk about Jay-appointments, remember?”

“You’re so pale you’re practically transparent.”

“Well, you can touch my chest if you want, like in that stupid story. ”

“Pardon me?”

“That one story, the first one you had me read? Where the old man touches the little boy to make sure he’s not a window?”

“You didn’t care for that story? What was it called…?”

“ ‘Love.’ ”

“Yes, that’s the one.”

“I liked that other one, though. That ‘Metamorphosis for the Eighties.’ I thought it was a killer. The part when the people threw coins at the rock star on stage and they stuck in him and he died was maybe a little hokey, but overall it was deadly. I put a big asterisk on it for you.”

“…. ”

“You don’t want your stew anymore? I didn’t mean it about the mouths. Eat up.”

“But you didn’t much care for the other one, then.”

“Maybe I’m wrong, but I thought it sucked canal-water, big time.”

“…. ”

“Oh no, did you really like it? Am I ignorantly stomping on a good thing, that you liked?”

“My tastes are for the moment on the back burner. I’d simply be interested to hear why you disliked it.”

“I’m really not sure. It just seemed… it was like you said about all the other troubled collegiate stuff. It just seemed artificial. Like the kid who wrote it was trying too hard.”

“I see.”

“All that stuff about, ‘And then context came in, and Fieldbaum looked bland.’ ”

“Fieldbinder. ”

“What?”

“Wasn’t the protagonist’s name Fieldbinder? In the story?”

“Right, Fieldbinder. But that stuff about context, though. Shouldn’t a story make the context that makes people do certain things and have the things be appropriate or not appropriate? A story shouldn’t just mention the exact context it’s supposed to try really to create, right?”

“….”

“And the writing was just so… This one line I remember: ‘He grinned wryly.’ Grinned wryly? Who grins wryly? Nobody grins wryly, at all, except in stories. It wasn’t real at all. It was like a story about a story. I put it on Mavis’s desk with the ones about the proctologist and the snowblower.”

“…”

“But I’ll take it right back off if you liked it. You did like it, didn’t you? This means my tastes aren’t keened to the right pitch, doesn’t it?”

“Not… not necessarily. I’m trying to remember where I got the thing. Must have been some kid, somewhere. Troubled. Trying to remember his cover letter…”

“Although it was well typed, I noticed.”

“…. ”

“Let me just try one little smidgeon of your stew, here.”

“Think he said it was almost like a story about a story. The narrative center being the wife’s description of the occasion on which Costigan touched the son…. Almost a story about the way a story waits and waits but never dies, can always come back, even after ostensible characters have long since departed the real scene.”

“Really not all that bad.”

“What?”

“The broth is pretty good. Creamy. I guess it’s just the oysters I don’t like.”

“I seem to remember he said he conceived it as a story of neighborhood obsession. About how sometimes neighbors can become obsessed with other neighbors, even children, and perhaps even peer into their bedrooms across the fence from their dens… but how it’s usually impossible for the respective neighbors to know about such things, because each neighbor is shut away inside his own property, his house, surrounded by a fence. Locked away. Everything meaningful both good-meaningful and bad-meaningful, kept private.”

“…. ”

“Except that ocasionally the Private leaked out, every once in a while, and became Incident. And that perceived Incident became Story. And that Story endured, in Mind, even behind and within the isolating membrane of house and property and fence that surrounded and isolated each individual suburb-resident.”

“Membrane?”

“Sorry. Poor choice of word. I’m sure I’ll hear it often enough this afternoon.”

“You see Jay this afternoon?”

“I told you that yesterday. We discussed it yesterday.”

“….”

“Is there some reason why you’d like me not to see him today?”

“….”

“And that, as I recall, some of the references in the story, the bird business, the burning house, the grinning-wryly business, had to do with a context created by a larger narrative system of which this piece was a part.”

“Well you can imagine I found the bird stuff upsetting. Especially about its being dead. Which Vlad the Impaler now in effect is, at least as far as I’m concerned, at least for a while.”

“He was on television last night, I’m told. Apparently Sykes’s show airs every single evening.”

“I know. Candy watched him last night. I guess he was really good. She said Sykes looked like he was in ecstasies.”

“You didn’t watch it?”

“Candy watched it at Mr. Allied’s. He’s got cable. We don’t get cable, at the Tissaws‘. Their house isn’t hooked up. Mrs. Tissaw usually just watches Oral Roberts on a regular channel. Actually the whole East Corinth-cable story is pretty unhappy, because the cable company and Dad are still—”

“Where were you?”

“What?”

“Where were you last night?”

“Oh, God, what all did I do. I went for a walk for a while. Watched some of a softball game at the park. They were pitching fast. I like it when they pitch fast. I talked to Dad on the phone about the LaVache thing for what turned out to be a long time. And then I went to sleep early. I did read some more of the stories, though. I read—”

“Where was Lang, then, I wonder.”

“….”

“You’re awfully pale.”

“Why do you think I’d know where Lang was?”

“I was just thinking out loud.”

“I heard a definite tone.”

“You heard nothing but your own imagination.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“What is wrong with you, Lenore? Darling I swear I meant nothing at all.”

“….”

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

“….”

“Was the Fieldbinder piece that awful? Is that it?”

“A story can’t make you pale, or sick, Rick. That thing wasn’t even good enough in my opinion to have any effect on me, good or bad, at all.”

“Then what is it, Lenore?”

“….”

“Shall we just go? Norman has been tending to come in here, a lot; for lunches, at about this time, so perhaps—”

“And now what’s that supposed to mean?”

“My God, it meant nothing! I just thought you’d want to avoid seeing him, is all.”

“How does he even get in here anymore?”

“Apparently he simply establishes himself on the sidewalk. Newspapers are laid down. Things are brought to him in huge industrial containers. It’s not a pretty sight.”

“I guess we should go, then. I don’t want to have to try to get past him.”

“The Bombardini Company vice presidents are deeply worried. They claim in all seriousness that Norman is trying to eat himself to death.”

“Or everybody else to death.”

“Surely you don’t take those pathetic plans he was spinning seriously.”

“Don’t presume to tell me what I take seriously and don’t take seriously, Rick.”

“Good Lord, what is the matter with you?”

“…. ”

“Listen…. Listen to that.”

“….”

“Hear it?”

“I do hear something. It’s not thunder, is it?”

“Can’t be. Sun’s shining out past the shadow, see? I’m afraid I sense impending Norman.”

“We better go. You better finish your mouths.”

“Are you absolutely sure you’re all right?”

“….”

/d/

At work, Candy Mandible was smoking and sipping a Tab and enjoying Judith Prietht’s lunch break. Judith had been entering the too-much range. Today she had brought baggies full of sugar cookies in the shapes of cats and birds for Lenore and Candy. Judith was getting to be a real pain in the ass.

The console began beeping. Candy Started In and amused herself for a minute with a hoarse man wanting to know whether she preferred rough banisters to smooth banisters. Then she handled the next call.

“Frequent and Vigorous,” she said.

“Who?” said a voice.

“Frequent and Vigorous Publishing, Inc., may I help you,” Candy said, rolling her eyes.

“Christ, I thought I’d never get through,” the voice said. “Miss, did you know your phones are all fouled up?”

“There’ve been rumors to that effect, ma‘am. Can I help you with something?” Candy took some Tab, around the mouthpiece. She tried to place the voice on the phone. The voice sounded vaguely familiar.

“To whom am I speaking, please,” said the voice.

“This is Ms. Mandible, a Frequent and Vigorous operator,” said Candy Mandible.

“Ms. Mandible, I’m calling to see first whether you have a co-worker there, a Ms. Lenore Beadsman,” said the voice.

“Yes, we do,” said Candy. “Can I take a message for you.” She reached for the Legitimate Call Log.

“And second to see whether you also have a new employee there, a Mr. Lang,” said the voice. “I think he’s in the babyfood department, whatever that means.”

“Ma‘am whom shall I say is calling?” Candy said, opening the Log.

“This is Mrs. Andrew Sealander Lang, of New York,” said the voice.

Candy looked at the console, the circuit buttons in their gelatins of light.

“Hello?” the voice said.

“Yes, hello,” said Candy.

“Is my husband there, is what I need to know.”

“I believe he is with the firm at the present time, ma‘am, yes,” said Candy. “Shall I transfer you to his temporary office?”

“Does he have a direct number there?”

“All individual transfers are done through me at the switchboard, ma‘am. Please hold on.” Candy looked at the switchboard directory, got the number, Started In again, and transferred the call, just as Judith Prietht slouched wearily back into the cubicle.

“What’s happening, Candy?” Judith made a smile and changed her shoes for the slippers beneath her counter.

“Just fine,” Candy said, still staring at the lights in the console, reaching again for her Tab.

/e/

PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT OF RAP-SESSION IN THE OFFICE OF DR. CURTIS JAY, PH.D., THURSDAY, 9 SEPTEMBER 1990. PARTICIPANTS: DR. CURTIS JAY AND MR. RICK VIGOROUS, AGE 42, FILE NUMBER 744-25-4291.

DR. JAY: So as I see it we have three major and not unrelated themes for discussion. Dream. You. Lenore.

MR. RICK VIGOROUS: Preferably the latter. What did you do to her in here, today? She looked simply awful at lunch.

DR. JAY: No pain, no gain. Enormous, enormous strides, today. Breakthrough positively looming on the emotional horizon. And of course there is the Lang issue.

RICK: The Lang issue?

JAY: The young man from your dream?

RICK: Why is he an issue outside the confines of the dream?

JAY: Who said he was?

RICK: You did.

JAY: Did I? I don’t really recall explicitly saying that.

RICK: What an ass-pain you are.

Dr. Jay pauses.

RICK: I officially demand to know how and why Lang is an issue. JAY: You said the Lang dream made you wake up screaming.

RICK, Streaming.

JAY: Watch me exercise self-control.

Rick Vigorous pauses.

JAY: Penis problems, still. Am I right?

RICK: Listen to this. I’m amazed. Last time I was here you said “penis shmenis.”

JAY: But I sense intuitively that Lang has become for you the Other, no? The Other in reference to whom you choose to understand Self, in all its perceived inadequacy?

RICK: I don’t know. What, did Lenore mention Lang to you?

JAY: Why did you bring this person back to Cleveland with you, if he upsets you so?

RICK: I really do not know. We met in our old fraternity bar. Things were strange. Affinities seemed to be jutting out everywhere. He simply seemed to fit in. To click.

JAY: So you brought him within your network.

RICK: I hate to sound like a mutual acquaintance of ours, but somehow

I felt I had little choice. It was as though a context was created in which it would have been inappropriate not to bring him inside.

JAY: Inside?

RICK: Into the nexus of my professional and emotional life.

JAY: I see. And what about Lenore? Is Lenore “inside,” to continue your use of a term positively dripping with Blentnerian connotations? RICK: I hope that she will be someday.

JAY: A conspicuous hmmm. And you, Rick. Are you “inside,” in the context of Lenore’s network?

RICK: Don’t be sadistic. You know I can never be that.

JAY: The Screen Door of Union, et cetera.

RICK: Make my ears stop rumbling.

Dr. Jay pauses.

Rick Vigorous pauses.

JAY: Rick, friend, has it never occurred to you that you might actually represent the genetic cutting edge?

RICK: The what?

JAY: I invite you to think about it. We as a species used to have tails, no? A full coat of thick body-hair? Prehensile toes? Far keener senses of taste, small, hearing, et cetera than we possess today? We eventually lost all these features.Tossed them aside. Why was this?

RICK: What are you trying to say?

JAY: Rick, we didn’t need them. The context in which they had an appropriate function dissolved. They had no use.

RICK: What are you trying to say?

JAY: I suppose I am trying to bring into the focus of our emotional attention the following features of the contemporary society we both enjoy. Genetic engineering. Artificial insemination. Quantum leaps in the technology of sexual aids and implements and prostheses. Perhaps what most of us perceive as the centers of ourselves are simply no longer needed. And we both know that the absence of function, in nature, means death. There is nothing superfluous in nature. Perhaps you are the next wave, Rick. Have you ever thought of that, in the quiet times? Perhaps you are to this Lang what the first upright man was to the crouched, hunched, drooling simian. A sort of god. A prototype, seated on nature’s right hand, for the nonce. A man for the future.

RICK: I think I’d prefer to be the drooling simian, thank you very much. JAY: And why is that?

RICK: I’ll bet you can puzzle it out.

JAY: It has to do with Lenore.

Rick Vigorous pauses.

JAY: Rick, I put a vital question to you in the gentlest and most diplomatic terms possible. Do you think you are truly what Lenore Beadsman wants? What she really needs?

RICK: We love each other.

JAY: You didn’t answer my question. We both know that Lenore is a wonderful but not insignificantly troubled girl. Are you helping her? Are you concerned with her needs? Are you engaged in the sort of discriminating, mature love that focuses primary attention on the needs and interests of the beloved?

RICK: I definitely don’t think Lang is what she needs.

JAY: Who said Lang is what Lenore needs? It’s you we’re discussing, here.

RICK: I think I’d rather discuss Lenore.

JAY: And the issues are separate, aren’t they? And recognized as such. Discussing Lenore is different from discussing you.

RICK: There’s something wrong with that?

JAY: I didn’t say that, Rick. I was simply making an observation. You and Lenore are distinct. Your networks may overlap, but they are distinct. They are neither identical nor coextensive. They are distinct. RICK: What about my dream? Now I’m both afraid to go to the bathroom and afraid to go to sleep. There’s not too much left.

JAY: I personally think the dream is far too complicated to tackle in the short time remaining to us today. For what it’s worth to you, I believe it represents a gigantic foot in the door of breakthrough. I might make a few off-the-cuff observations, if you wish. Shall I?

RICK: (uninteUigible).

JAY: The dream strikes me as being simply chock full of networks. Inside-Outside relations. Inside is the office, outside is the shadow and the little girl, both threatening to enter, to suck you in. Lenore is inside the page, inside the drawing Lang creates with his bottle, but she transcends her context and comes quickly to emblazon her context on his outside. You are trapped behind, inside, the fan of urine, but the tea bag you use to try to cover your difference from the Other “bleeds out” into the hot liquid and stains, discolors, soils the already unclean out-of-contro! extension of Self that imprisons you. A tea bag in hot liquid strikes this psychologist as a perfect archetypal image for the disorienting and disrupting influence of a weak-membraned hygiene-identity network on the associations of distinct networks in relation to which it does, must, understand itself. So on and so on. Airless scream: air cannot get inside your lungs. Lenore “drowning”: clean air in lungs displaced by the exponentially soiled element of soiling tea in soiling Self-extending liquid. Lang holds Lenore under the stained surface with his anus, the absolute archetypal locus of the unclean. There are of course the seemingly ever-present mice, in the putrid currents. Mice we’ve discussed at length already…

RICK: OK, that’s enough. I might have known that—

JAY: But, see, it’s not at all surprisingly Lenore who really fascinates me, in the context of the dream. Your unconscious conceiving of Lenore as somehow “rising off a page.” The Lang drawing serving to place Lenore initially in the network he constructs, making her two-dimensional, non-real, existing and defined wholly within the border of a page, a page on the reverse of which is a story, a network very definitely of your construction, so that—

RICK: A story Lenore went out of her way to scoff at, at lunch, by the way.

JAY: I’m not equipped to discuss that; that’s not my area. My area is the fact that Lang constructs a Lenore, constructs her the way we each of course construct, impose our frameworks of perception and understanding on, the persons who inhabit our individual networks. Yes, Lang constructs a Lenore, and initially she is trapped and two-dimensional and unreal…. Ah, but then he puts marks, initials, his initials, on her, in her. Penetrates her carefully constructed network with his Self, his self, of which the initials are an elegantly transparent symbol and flag. So Lang in the dream is able to bring himself within the very Lenore-membrane he has constructed. He puts himself in her. And what happens, Rick?

RICK: Jesus.

JAY: What happens, my friend?

Rick Vigorous pauses.

JAY: Oh, she becomes real, Rick. She becomes free. She bursts out from behind the membrane of two-dimensionality the page represents and becomes real. Hair, hands, breasts, feet tumesce and burst up and out from the flattening, constricting network of membrane. She rises and circles the room. Was this circling a walking circling, Rick, or a floating circling?

RICK: It wasn’t clear.

JAY: Well, no matter. She escapes, Rick. She is free, real. That is to say, she is no longer merely inside a network, she is a network. Reality and identity rear their Siamese heads at the junction of Network. And what is the newly three-dimensional Lenore doing? She is signing the Other, putting herself on, in, the Other who set her free through membrane-permeation. She puts herself inside a network.

RICK: Lang’s network.

JAY: The network that set her free, Rick. The network that made her real. Only as real is she able to bring herself truly inside an Other. A clean thing is necessarily a reciprocal thing, Rick. Lenore kneels, with overtones perhaps not so much sexual as they are religious, I think, and puts herself on, in. She is valid, Rick. You are watching Lang and Lenore give birth to validity.

RICK: But where am I in all this? Am I chopped liver in the validity-scheme?

JAY: You are watching, Rick. You are the watcher, the observer, looking on from a spatial-dash-emotional elsewhere. You are intrinsically Outside, here. You cannot enter the networks. Why not?

RICK: Jesus.

JAY: And what is the last recourse of an inefficacious hygiene network unable validly to interact with the networks of the Other-set? You soil, Rick. You soil. You enter the networks by dirtying. The childish loss of bladder control, the fan, the swirling currents. The uncleanness made all the more unclean by the introduction of the contents of the tea bag, the shield and symbol within the dream of the locus of your difference and inability validly to enter, its introduction into the hot unclean liquid that represents your only interaction-vehicle. From Outside, you can influence only by soiling, dirtying, disrupting the hygiene networks of those who are valid.

RICK: You’re being cruel, Jay. Go back to blatant bullshit. I vastly prefer blatant bullshit to overt cruelty.

JAY: You know, Olaf Blentner once said to me, over tea, that when reality is unpleasant, realists tend to be unpopular. Rick, as a last resort you try to soil. You try to drown and negate the valid Lenore by dirtying. But it does not work. It cannot. Even from below the currents of your filth and difference, Lenore’s hand, with the violet pen, emerges to carry on the valid membrane-interaction. You are truly Outside, here, Rick. You cannot meaningfully influence. The only recourse of the defective hygiene network is the unclean, and it is impotent in the face of the real, the true.

RICK: Lenore has spoken to you of Lang, hasn’t she?

JAY: Rick, you and your dreaming unconscious have spoken to me of Lang far more eloquently than poor Lenore ever did, or even could. You have, I think, truly perceived a valid need in an Other. You are. striding, in my opinion.

Rick Vigorous pauses.

JAY: And why are you and Lang naked in the dream, Rick? Why is the validating pen in the shape of a beer bottle, with all of that image’s attendant phallic and urological overtones?

RICK: And then why, in this context, does Lenore grasp Lang’s member as she signs? Is the member supposed to be the symbol of membrane-penetration?

JAY: The symbol, Rick? The symbol?

RICK: More than the symbol?

JAY: I am being knocked backward by the force of breakthrough-smell.

RICK: Sit back up, you ass. This is my life you’re fucking with.

JAY: What an interesting choice of verb.

RICK’ So when I’d come to you with these clearly profoundly sexual dreams and you’d say that they were just hygiene-dreams, you weren‘t, under your analysis, really disagreeing with me, were you? The hygiene-fixated is the sexually fixated.

Dr. Jay pauses,

RICK: Don’t just smile at me, damn you. And the hygiene-identity membrane is you’re implying the what? What is it?

JAY: What might the membrane be, here, Rick? Let’s think together. What membrane might Lenore have needed to have permeated in order to feel real, connected? Valid? Transcending in and for her reality the mere reference and emotional attention of the Other, of you? What membrane does the thinking student and friend of the center of your existence conclude that Lenore needed to have penetrated for her?

RICK: What do you mean needed to have penetrated? What does that mean? What has she told you?

JAY: Was Lenore a virgin when she became part of your intrinsically inefficacious network, Rick?

RICK: My God.

JAY: No symbol is merely a symbol, Rick. A symbol is valid and appropriate because its reference is real. You should know that, being a man of letters yourself.

RICK: Lang has had her.

JAY: Would that make you uncomfortable in this context?

RICK: Oh my ears! God!

JAY: Would you like to try some gum?

RICK: I’ll kill him. I’ll kill her.

JAY: That’s right, Rick. Perform the ultimate soiling. Blacken, erase, discipline and negate the valid network that of necessity finds its validity-reference outside your own system.

RICK: My life is over. It’s all over.

JAY: Please see that I have here said nothing to you about Lenore Beadsman’s private affairs. That is not my place. Whatever interactions she might choose to engage in with a virile blond bestower of validity, close to her own age and socio-economic background, are no matter for my tale-telling relationship with you. Let your dreams speak, Rick. That’s what they’re for.

RICK: How do you know his age? That he’s blond and virile, with a socio-economic background?

JAY: I’m simply going to have to put this gas mask on. Also please note that our time is nearly up.

RICK: Wear whatever you want. But I’m not leaving until I’m good and ready.

JAY: (muffled) What a task lies before us, my old friend. What a horrible, wonderful opportunity for the exercise of strength. The vital question: Are we mature? Do we love truly? Do we love an as yet two-dimensional membrane enough to afford that membrane entry into validity, reality, three-dimensionality, to afford it an escape from the very flattening context exclusively within which the original love can be exercised and pseudo-reciprocated? Do we, recognizing our inability to enter and fertilize and permeate and validate a membrane, an Other, let that Other out, back outside, to a clean, odor-free place where she can find fullness, fulfillment, realness?

RICK: I suddenly take it all back. This is utter tripe. I reject everything you’ve said. Your supposed to be helping me, you shit. Your function here is to help me. All this Blentnerian crapola boils down to the fact that you want me to sit idly by and watch the object of my adoration and the complete reference and telos of every action of my whole life go off and get balled until she bleeds by some horny, silky-smooth, lecherous yuppie, one who just happens to have a large organ where I do not.

JAY: But precisely my point has just been borne out, Rick. Listen to what you just said. The object of your so-and-so. The reference of your so-and-so. An object and reference are intrinsically and eternally Other, Rick. See? And so she must remain for you. The question: have we the wherewithal to allow that Other to be a Self?

RICK: Shall I simply eat her? That’s what Norman Bombardini apparently proposes to do. Shall I consume her? Then the Other will certainly become Self.

Dr. Jay pauses.

RICK: Lang wears a type of shoe toward which Lenore feels a rabid hatred.

JAY: Lenore Beadsman’s foot- and shoe-fixations occur and exist within a disordered hygiene-network thoroughly infected with membrane ambiguity. Surely you can see that.

RICK: This is shit. I cannot believe I’m listening to this.

Dr. Jay pauses.

RICK: Where is this Olaf Blentner? I’ll talk to him directly. Spit in his eye. How’ll he like those apples?

JAY: Olaf Blentner is no more. Professor Blentner has returned to the soil.

RICK: How appropriately ironic. Hopefully interred in a cow pasture, laced with bullshit. Dust to dust.

JAY: Anger is absolutely appropriate and natural, here, Rick. Shall I get out the Nerf clubs, and we’ll go a few rounds? I’m here to help as best I can, within the limits imposed by the reality of the situation we find ourselves in.

RICK: Shut up. Where are these so-called Heidelberg Hygiene Lectures? Let me read them. I’ll write and publish a review of them so scathing your eyes will bleed.

JAY: I’m afraid they’re on loan to another client and friend.

RICK: Not Lenore.

JAY: Rick, I’m afraid our time looks to be truly up. I have other longtime clients and friends waiting. Shall I start your chair?

RICK: You bastard.

JAY: Come see me again just as soon as possible. Tell Mrs. Schorr you’re to be given the very next available appointment.

RICK: Jay, convince Lenore that I am what she needs. Help me bring her into me. Then nothing will matter. I’ll pay absolutely anything. JAY: You insult my integrity. You also cast doubt on the very emotion you profess to believe motivates all your actions. I’ll dismiss this as coming from the understandable emotional strain of the moment. RICK: Oh, God.

JAY: Goodbye, Rick. Think over what we’ve seen together today. Call me anytime. I am truly here for you. Here goes the chair. Goodbye.

Rick Vigorous pauses.

JAY: Goodbye.

RICK: (unintelligible).

DOOR: Click.

JAY: (unmuffled) Wow.

/f/

9 September. 9 September.

Lenore Beadsman is fucking Andrew Sealander (“Wang-Dang”) Lang. It is. In a matter of moments this boy, with a grin, perhaps a brief nail-polishing brush of his hand against his shirt, has taken something I can never have. My object and reference sits outside, punctured and validated by the extension of another. And

9 September

Idea for Fieldbinder Collection

Fieldbinder ruminates in presence of pathetic and sadistic psychologist Dr.J___ on the comparative merits of the word “fuck. ”

“We beg your pardon?” said Dr. J___, curling his harelip in incre dulity.

Fieldbinder smiled coolly. “The word ‘fuck,’ Dr. J__. Has it never occurred to you that the word, far from being harsh or ugly, is in truth a strangely lovely word? An appropriate word? I’ll not say onomatopoetic, \ but rather lovely and appropriate. Perhaps even musical. ”

Dr. J__ wriggled his hideous body in his chair. Fieldbinder smiled coolly, continuing, “The word chosen to designate the act — the supreme act of a distinctively human life, the act in reference to the pleasure and meaning of which I naturally understand myself, being as you once remarked an almost exclusively sexual enn‘ty — the word chosen to designate the act must also be extremely important, no?”

“God, what a man he is, ” whispered the doctor, barely audibly, rolling his walleyes until the action hurt the styes which crusted his eyelids.

“No, really, ” smiled Fieldbinder. “Think of the sound, ‘fuck. ’ ‘Fuck’ A good sound. A solid sound. The sound of a heavy coin rattling in a thick porcelain cup. The sound of a drop of clear cold water falling into a still pond from a great height. Roll the word on your tongue for a while, Dr. J___.”

There was a silence while the doctor rolled the word silently on his cold gray tongue. Across the ambiguously lit room, Fieldbinder obliterated a tiny wrinkle from his impeccable slacks.

“I can recall being a student in college, ” Fieldbinder ruminated after a time. “I can recall even then a deep dissatisfaction with the words used by my peers to designate the act. In college, women were locutionally reduced to earth, or impediment. ‘Have you blasted her?’ ‘Drill her yet?’ ‘I pounded hell out of her last night.’ None of these are right, Dr. J___, is this not transparently clear? None of these words are adequate to capture not only the reference but the sense of an act in which two distinct selves interpenetrate, not only physically, but also of course emotionally. I simply must say, as crass as we are conditioned by a troubled society to regard the word, I am a firm believer in the comparative merits of the word ‘fuck.’ ” Fieldbinder looked up and smiled coolly. “Have I offended you?”

“No, hissed Dr, J____, playing maniacally with the controls of his mechanical chair, making it bounce up and down suggestively, as drool coated the doctor’s pathetically weak chin.

Fietdbinder smiled coolly and speculatively stroked his own generous jaw, lingering over the deep cleft that somehow through physical processes obscure caught and reflected light in such a way as to blind anyone who tried to look directly into Fieldbinder’s deep green eyes deep blue eyes, the color of cold crystal, with tiny fluffy white diamonds frozen in irises of ice.

Fieldbinder grinned wryly. “The word has a music, in my opinion, is all.”

I just

“And your house?” Dr. J_____ lispingly hissed. “Are we not deeply upset at the destruction of your house, at the death of your phenomenal pet in its iron cage, at the disastrous fire and the plunge into disorientation and chaos which such an event must symbolize and entail?” J_____ played with himself covertly under his note pad.

Fieldbinder smiled coolly. “Doctor, I believe I have progressed to the point where I can honestly say that the event did not significantly ‘upset’ me — with all the ramifications and meanings implicit in your choice of the word. Attachment to things, to places, to other living beings requires in my view expenditures of energy and attention far in excess of the value of the things thus brought into the relation of attachment. Does this seem unreasonable! The attempt to have the order of one’s life depend on things and persons outside that life is a silly thing, a thing perhaps appropriate only for those weaker, less successful, less fortunate, less advanced than I. ”

“We are not sure what you mean, Mooted Dr. J_____, lovingly stroking the controls of his mechanical chair.

“Think of it this way, doctor,” said Fieldbinder patiently, smiling coolly. “Think of the Self as at the node of a fan-shaped network of emotions, dispositions, extensions of that feeling and thinking Self. Each line in the protruding network-fan may of course have an external reference and attachment. A house, a woman, a bird, a woman. But it need not be so. The line that seeks purchase in and attachment to an exterior Other is necessarily buttressed, supported, held; it thus becomes small, weak, flabby, reliant on Other. Were the exterior reference and attachment to disappear, unlikely as that obviously sounds in my own case, the atrophied line would crumble weakly, might also disappear. The Self would be smaller than before. And even a Self as prodigious as myself must look upon diminution with disfavor.” Fiekibinder grinned wryly, removed a molecule of lint from his impeccable slacks. “Better to have the lines of the fan stand on their own: self-sufficient, rigid, hard, jutting out into space. Should someone find herself attracted to one of the lines, she could of course fall upon it with all the ravenousness that would be only natural. But she shall not be the reference. Only the ephemeral night insect, drawn to a light that is intrinsically inaccessible. She may be consumed in the line’s light, but still the line stands, juts out, rigidly, far into the space exterior to the Self. ”

“We are afraid we are inequipped to understand such a thing, ” hissed J_____ “Please allow me to consult and masturbate over the writings of my teacher.”

“No real need for that, doctor. ” Fieldbinder held up a stop-palm and smiled coolly. “I think it is in my power to put the insight in terms you can readily understand. Have you by any chance ever watched an animated television program called ‘The Road Runner’?”

“I watch the cartoon ever week; I am a rabid fan. ” Drool cascaded over _____ ’s chin as he wriggled in his chair, his feet dangling far above the burnt-yellow office carpet.

“I somehow guessed as much, ” smiled Fieldbinder. “So too is my latest mistress, when she is not busy working as an incredibly successful recorder of messages for cash registers in high-quality supermarkets. I have on occasion taken a Saturday morning off and watched the program with her. Has it occurred to you that ‘The Road Runner’ is what might aptly be termed an existential program? That it comments not uninter estingly on the very attitudes that would be implicit in a person’s feeling ’upset’ over a catastrophic fire in his home? I see you are puzzled, ” Fieldbinder said, noticing Dr. J______ frantically scratching his head, a plume of dandruff shooting up into the air of the office only to resettle on the obscene bald spot in the middle of the doctor’s skull-shaped head.

Fieldbinder smiled and continued, “I invite you to realize that this program does nothing other than present us with a protagonist, a coyote, functioning within a system interestingly characterixed as a malevolent Nature, a protagonist who endlessly, tirelessly, disastrously pursues a thing, a telos — the bird in the title role — a thing and goal far, far less valuable than the effort and resources the protagonist puts into its pursuit.” Fieldbinder grinned wryly. “The thing pursued—a skinny meatless bird—is far less valuable than the energy and attention and economic resources expended by the coyote on the process of pursuit. Just as an attachment radiating from the Self outward is worth far less than the price the establishment of such an attachment inevitably exacts. ”

Dr. J___ inflated an anatomically correct doll and began to fondle it as it stared blankly. Fieldbinder smiled patiently.

“A question, doctor, ” he said. “Why doesn’t the coyote take the money he spends on bird costumes and catapaults and radioactive road runner food pellets and explosive missiles and simply go eat Chinese?” He smiled coolly. “Why doesn’t the coyote simply go eat Chinese food? ”Fieidbinder’s face assumed a cool, bland, wry expression as he attended to his impeccable slacks.

Dr. J____ snarkd and

/g/

“Rick? Am I interrupting?”

“….”

“I can come back.”

“What is it.”

“It’s just about this kid-putting-himself-through-prep-school submission. Is the Physicians’ Desk Reference a real book, or is it just a made-up name?”

“The P.D.R. is real.”

“…. ”

“It numbers among its features a cataloguing, chemical breakdown, manufacturer, dosage, and contraindications for almost every known form of prescription medication available in the United States, in a given year.”

“Oh.”

“People seriously interested in drugs and things medical, but particularly drugs, swear by it.”

“Even kids?”

“Especially kids.”

“How come you know all this?”

“I knew a child who swore by his copy of the P.D.R. Who used to keep it hidden in his toychest, under his old football pads and helmet.”

“Your son?”

“…. ”

“It‘s,pretty late, you know. The lake’s all spoiled mayonnaise now, see?”

“….”

“Look, I’m sorry I was testy at lunch. Dr. Jay had just got done being incredibly weird and obnoxious. I’m seriously considering not seeing him anymore. I think we need to talk about it.”

“Do we.”

“Anyway, I’m sorry.”

“Not a problem at all. Not a problem, at all.”

“Are you going to work much more? Is that Norslan stuff?”

“No. Yes.”

“Is Andy still around?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know, Lenore.”

“You should have heard what he said to Candy this afternoon, at Mr. Bombardini’s meeting. You want to hear about it?”

“Not particularly.”

“Are you going to work much more?”

“I haven’t picked up my Plain Dealer yet. I believe I’ll drop down and pick it up and catch up on things, for a bit.”

“You don’t feel like going to dinner, then?”

“…. ”

“Um, maybe I’ll just stay out at Mavis’s desk and do some more submissions, and wait until you maybe want to go.”

“….”

“Are you OK?”

“Come closer. I can’t see you in this light.”

“Look, I’m sorry I said that that Fieldbinder story you obviously liked sucked canal-water. It was one an eminent friend sent you, right? It all became clear to me this afternoon. Let’s consider it one of the things that keened my pitch. I took it off the rejection pile. I asterisked it.”

“Not a problem at all.”

“So should I wait for you, for dinner?”

“Do whatever you feel valid and three-dimensional doing, Lenore.”

“Pardon me?”

“In answer to your question, the Physicians’ Desk Reference is very real. It has transcended its context, one might say.”

“Are you sure you’re OK? Was Jay a total shit to you too?”

“Just feel a bit… tired and small tonight. A little coyote-ish.”

“Coyote-ish?”

“….”

/h/

Nearly six, the sun low and the shadow full and the watery lights lit high overhead in the lobby ceiling, Judith Prietht was closing up shop and getting ready to shut down the console for the night, the Bombardini Company getting more than enough legitimate calls during business hours. Into her shopping bag went the limp-necked sweater she had almost finished knitting; off went her slippers and on went her street shoes; now off when her console (Position Release and Position Busy pushed together shut down a Centrex 28 equipped with a special Shutdown feature, which the Frequent and Vigorous console wasn‘t, and could only be put to rest by removing the console cable itself from its jack in the back with a ratchet wrench, an option exercised on more than one occasion by Vern Raring in the really empty, quiet part of the night); off went her lamp, leaving the Frequent and Vigorous half of the switchboard cubicle in a softer kind of light; on went her hair net; in went a Certs. Out she went, blowing a not-returned kiss to Candy Mandible, home to feed her cat.

Candy sat smoking again, waiting for Vem Raring to come in at six, trying not to look at the little clock over the console while she told the latest Lang story to Walinda Peahen, who sat completing time sheets for submission to Payroll the next morning, Friday. Walinda was not in a good mood, having been kept overtime in her other job at Frequent Leisure Suit today, but Candy Mandible was the kind of woman who tended to ignore moods not caused directly by her; and since Walinda Peahen was the kind of woman whose bad moods tended to be made worse by people around her behaving as if she were in a bad mood, she and Candy actually got on fairly well, and it was Candy who had originally gotten Lenore her job, this fact now being the only really sore point in Candy-Walinda relations.

“Be needin’ to hire somebody else now that the girl finally got promoted by her squeeze,” Walinda had said.

“Only a temporary person, though,” Candy said. “Because she’s only going to be helping Mr. Vigorous temporarily, while he’s incredibly busy with the Stonecipheco account.”

“Huh,” said Walinda. She turned eyes thick with shadow on Candy. “Girl what you mean Stonecipheco? Vigorous told me it was a big new Norslan account they got.”

“Andy Lang told me that’s what Mr. Vigorous is supposed to tell people,” Candy said, turning slightly to avoid blowing smoke in Walinda’s face. “But it’s really not. It’s really Stonecipheco baby food.”

“And that crap be nasty?” said Walinda. “On sale once, and I give it to my child, and he like to die. Lenore be makin’ some foul-ass food, for all her money.”

“Lenore doesn’t make the food, Walinda, you know that.” Candy sighed. “And you know she doesn’t get any money from it. And just please remember to only hire somebody temporary, is all.”

Walinda didn’t say anything, and Candy launched into the Lang story.

“It was a scream,” she said. “I died. I laughed so hard that I died.”

Walinda worked the adding machine and didn’t say anything.

“I know you couldn’t come,” Candy continued, “but you know today Mr. Bombardini was having a meeting for everybody in both firms in the Building? You got the memo about that, right?”

“I got it. And I heard y‘all just had to hear the fat man talk about his Building.”

“Well it was just really bizarre, is all I can say. He was on this platform, with these like eight incredible hunks in loincloths holding him up in the air, and he was going on and on about how we all needed to begin to reconcile ourselves to having less space in the Building, because there was going to be a steadily decreasing amount of space for us, and then he stopped even mentioning the Building at all and. started talking about there like being less space for us in general, like the world was getting small or something, and he had this weird fiendish light in his eyes, and plus it looked like he’d gained about a thousand pounds or so, and he kept looking at Lenore like he wanted to eat her, and kept dropping all these hints about how there could be some space for some of us if we came around and played our cards right. Bombardini’s totally infatuated with Lenore, ever since his wife left him for a yogurt salesman. He sends her flowers almost every day.”

“Maybe she can get us a bigger cubicle in here, then,” Walinda said thoughtfully, adding up hours.

“But anyway the point is that it was supposed to be an incredibly serious meeting, and it was really a tense scene, and deadly quiet, ‘cause everybody’s scared to death of Mr. Bombardini,” Candy said, blowing a ring and putting a red-nailed finger through it. “So it was deadly quiet, and Bombardini was going on and on, and this Andy Lang guy was sitting right in front of Lenore and me, and he all of a sudden starts turning around in his chair, really slowly, and looks all intensely at us, like he’s got something really important to say, and we lean forward, and he leans back to us, and he whispers to us, real loud, ’I have an erection.‘ ” Candy began to laugh, with big breaths, making Walinda laugh too. “And I died, and started laughing, and it was even worse because it was such a deadly quiet and serious situation, and Lenore started laughing too, and we couldn’t stop. And then but Lang turned back around innocent as can be and started listening to Mr. Bombardini again, and there we were dying, laughing like hell. It was… awful.” Candy was laughing so hard that smoking became impossible. She dropped her cigarette in an old can of Tab, where it hissed and fizzed and died.

Walinda chuckled. “Ooh child. What’d Lenore’s little man think of that, I wonder. Was he sittin’ in her lap at the time?”

“Mr. Vigorous wasn’t there,” said Candy. “He apparently had some kind of appointment. I think you two were the only ones not there, of the day people.”

Walinda wet her finger and turned a time sheet. Candy started to get her things together in preparation for Vem’s arrival. Into her purse went her pack of Djarum; on went her shoes…

“Excuse me,” said a voice in front of the switchboard counter. “I’m looking for Mr. Lang.”

Walinda looked up briefly and narrowed her eyes and went back to her adding machine. Candy straightened up from putting on her shoes and looked into the eyes of Mindy Metalman Lang.

“I’m Mrs. Lang,” the woman said coolly. “I’m here looking for Mr. Lang. My husband. I was told by someone on the phone that he works here, even though the number they said was his when they put me through to him didn’t answer after thirty rings.”

Candy didn’t answer right away. She was busy staring at what she, Candice Eunice Mandible, would very probably be, had she not had the ever so slightest bit of an overbite, and had she had perhaps ten more judiciously distributed pounds, and eyes more like wings, and had she been rich per se. She saw perfection; she smelled White Shoulders; she assumed the fur jacket was sable. This was an enormously beautiful woman, here, and Candy stared, and also unconsciously began smoothing the tight old violet cotton dress she had on.

Mindy was staring back, but not really at Candy so much as at Candy’s dress. Her eyes faded a bit, as if she were trying to latch onto an elusive memory. Her eyes were different from Candy‘s, too. Very. Where Candy’s were light brown and almost perfectly round, giving her face almost too much symmetry, making it an almost triangular face when it would have been nicer and more comforting as a rounder, more vague-at-the-edges face, Mindy’s eyes were so dark they were almost black, and they seemed to spread out far more across the upper ridges of her cheeks, and back at the sides, like the wings of a dark sort of fluttery bird: large, delicate, full of a kind of motion even when still. Really nice eyes. A face very much like Candy’s, but vaguer at the edges, and so really better. Candy smoothed at her dress some more.

“Girl what you doin‘, employee addresses in the directory,” Walinda said to Candy, and she pushed the directory across the white counter until it hit Candy’s hand. “Wrote his address down at the back myself,” Walinda said.

Candy didn’t have to look at the directory. “Mr. Lang’s temporarily staying in a building in East Corinth, which is a suburb south of here.” She smiled at Mindy. “Actually the same building, or house is more like it, as mine, which is how come I know, although it’s a rooming house, so still like a building; it’s not like he’s living in my house.” She laughed breathily.

“I see,” Mindy said with a bit of a smile, nodding. “Perhaps then you could just jot down the address for me.”

Candy reached for a pad and pen and jotted.

“There was, too, the office number, which the operator tried before,” said Mindy. “Perhaps you could try him again for me. What… department is he in?” She looked around her at the marble lobby and the soft red chairs for lobby-dwellers and the tiny veins of the last bit of sunset moving together in the blackness of the walls.

“Translation,” Candy told her, not looking up.

“Translation?”

“Baby food,” Walinda Peahen said, flashing hostile green-shadowed eyes at Mindy’s fur jacket and then returning to tax forms.

“Baby food?”

“Nix,” Candy murmured into Walinda’s ear. She stood up and pushed the Tissaws’ address across the counter to Mindy.

“And I’d ring his office for you, but I happen to know he’s not there, Candy smiled. ”He left the office after a Building-wide meeting, about three this afternoon. I know more or less where he’ll be tonight, though.“

“Do you.” it

“He’s going to be in a bar called Gilligan’s Isle with an old friend of his, watching religious television.”

Mindy was putting Lang’s address into a really nice Étienne Aig ner purse. She snapped it closed and looked up. “Religious television? Andy?”

“One of the… The show features a bird who belongs to a friend of mine, and of Mr. Lang‘s,” said Candy. “We’re all going to try to watch the bird tonight.”

“A bird? Andy’s going to watch a bird on religious television?”

“Gilligan’s Isle is just right across Erieview Plaza from here,” Candy said, pointing in the correct direction out through the revolving door of the lobby. “It’s pretty easy to find. Has big colored statues in it.”

Mindy was staring at the violet dress again. She looked up into Candy’s round eyes. “Have we met before?” she said.

“No we haven‘t, I don’t think.” Candy shook her head and then cocked it. “Why?”

“I’m not sure. I don’t mean to be impolite, but I know I’ve seen that dress before.”

“This dress?” Candy looked down at herself. “This is an incredibly ancient dress. It used to belong to a friend of mine, the person who also owns the bird I just mentioned. Do you know Lenore Beadsman?”

The console began to beep. “Wait a minute,” Candy was saying to Mindy. “You mentioned Lenore on the phone when I talked to you.” Mindy just looked at her. Walinda was making no move toward the console. Candy bent to the call. A rapid, in-house flash. “Operator,” she said.

Mindy had suddenly bent over the top of the cubicle counter and was looking down at the equipment. “That’s a Centrex,” she said to Walinda. “Is that a Centrex?”

Walinda looked up and narrowed her eyes again. “Yeah, it is.”

“In school, in Massachusetts, my roommate worked as a student operator, for the college, and sometimes I’d read at the switchboard at night to keep her company. They had a Centrex.”

“Twenty-eight?”

“I really have no idea.”

“Mmmm.”

Candy released and straightened up. “Well that was just Mr. Lang’s supervisor, on the phone, Mrs. Lang. He’s coming down for his newspaper, the supervisor.” Candy gestured over at a well-perused issue of that day’s Plain Dealer that lay on top of the cubicle typewriter’s gray plastic dustcover. “If you’ll wait here a second, he could probably answer your questions a lot better than I could.”

Mindy continued to look down at the console. Then she smiled up at Candy. “I was freshman roommates at Holyoke with Lenore Beadsman’s sister,” she said in a low voice.

Candy’s jaw dropped. “God, is this Clarice’s dress?” she said. “Lenore sure didn’t tell me. And well I had no idea you knew Lenore’s family.” Through the doors came Vem Raring, at 6:05. “Listen, here’s my relief, so to speak,” Candy said. “Let’s just go have a seat out in the lobby, here, and we can—”

“But Lenore and I have met too,” said Mindy, as if she had decided something, smiling for Candy a truly beautiful smile.

“No kidding. Well I had no idea Lenore knew Andy’s wife.” Candy clapped her hands once and smiled back into the wings of Mindy Metalman’s eyes. “Listen,” Candy said. “I really just love your jacket. Can I maybe touch it?”

“I suppose so.”

Candy was stroking Mindy’s sleeve when she looked past Mindy at the elevators in the northeast comer and saw Rick Vigorous and Lenore emerge.

“Well here’s Lenore and Mr. Vigorous both, now,” she said. Vem Raring entered the cubicle and gave Walinda Peahen a big kiss on the cheek, and she pretended to swat him, both of them laughing.

Mindy turned way around, so that her sleeve was all of a sudden out of Candy’s reach. Candy’s hand hit the counter. Mindy looked into the orange and black.

“Mr. Vigorous?”

17. 1990

/a/

10 September“You hurt me, Andy,” says Lenore. “You hurt me inside. ”“Well sugar that’s love,” says W.D.L.

So look, very closely. If one looks, very closely, into the bowl of the toilet, one sees the water inside is in fact not still, but pulses in its thick porcelain cup; rises and falls, ever so slightly, influenced by the ponderous suck and slap of subterranean tides unimagined by any but the devoutest morning pilgrim.

/b/

“ ‘Down the Laughing Brook came Billy Mink. He was feeling very good that morning, was Billy Mink, pleased with the world in general and with himself in particular.’ ”

“Roughage,” said Concamadine Beadsman.

“ ‘When he reached the Smiling Pool he swam out to the Big Rock. Little Joe Otter was already there, and not far away, lazily floating, with his head and back out of the water, was Jerry Muskrat.

“ ‘ ”Hello, Billy Mink!“ cried Little Joe Otter.

“ ‘ ”Hello yourself,“ replied Billy Mink with a grin.’ ”

“And this one is called what again?” asked Mr. Bloemker from across Concamadine’s bed, doing something to his eye with a finger under his glasses.

“It’s called ‘Billy Mink Goes Dinnerless,’ ” Lenore said without looking up from the book. “Can we please just do it, here? I sense Concamadine really liking this one.”

“By all means.”

“Roughage.”

“ ‘ ”Where are you going?“ asked Little Joe Otter.

“ ‘ ”Nowhere in particular,“ replied Billy Mink.

“ ‘ ”Let’s go fishing down to the Big River,“ said Little Joe Otter.

“ ‘ ”Let’s!“ cried Billy Mink, diving from the highest point on the Big Rock.‘ ”

“Her face is healing well in the moisture, don’t you think?” said Mr. Bloemker.

Concamadine actually didn’t look all that good. There were sores, and there were bandages. A translucent white bandage stretched tight from just above Concamadine’s left eye up into her forehead; one of her tiny pale eyebrows was lost in the bandage that seemed to be growing into the skin.

“I think it was a splendid idea, having the humidifier brought in,” Mr. Bloemker said, looking at his thumb. “We’re just beginning to lose the heat and moisture that was in such generous attendance all season, as I’m sure you’re aware. Concamadine had such trouble last year, and if I recall correctly it was at just this time. As do so many of the J-ward residents. In any event, a splendid idea, Ms. Beadsman.”

“Roughage.”

“ ‘So off they started across the Green Meadows towards the Big River. Halfway there, they met Reddy Fox.’ ”

The red sores looked soft and bright in the light of the morning that spilled into Concarnadine’s wall of windows from the central courtyard full of colored water. They looked wet. No running, though. The bandage that Lenore particularly objected to covered a whole big patch like that, right above Concamadine’s eyebrow. Lenore thought of the adhesive sticking to the soft of a sore. She thought of the bandage getting taken off.

“How often do you guys change that bandage?” she said.

“I’m afraid I don’t know, precisely. I would imagine daily.”

“There’s no way you guys—”

“Roughage. ”

“—rip the thing off, right? You always wet it and peel it off carefully?”

“Of that I’m sure. We do not rip here.”

Lenore looked into Concamadine’s eyes. Concamadine smiled.

“ ‘ ”Hello Reddy! Come on with us to the Big River, fishing,“ called Billy Mink.

“ ‘Now Reddy Fox is no fisherman, though he likes fish to eat well enough. He remembered the last time he went fishing and how Billy Mink had laughed at him when he fell into the Smiling Pool. He was just about to say ”No“ when he changed his mind.

“ ‘ ”All right, I’ll go,“ said Reddy Fox.

“ ‘Now Billy Mink and Little Joe Otter are famous fishermen and can swim even faster than the fish themselves. But Reddy Fox is a poor swimmer and must depend upon his wits. When they reached the bank of the Big River they very carefully crawled down to a sandy beach. There, just a little way out from shore, a school of little striped perch were at play. Billy Mink and Little Joe Otter prepared to dive in and each grab a fish, but Reddy Fox knew that he could not swim well enough for that.’ ”

“Roughage roughage roughage roughage.”

Lenore remembered how last fall Mr. Bloemker had shown her a lot of other people in the Home with Concamadine’s particular condition. Mr. Bloemker had called the condition geriatric acne. He had had a theory. He said that both kinds of acne had to do with the skin not doing what it was supposed to do. He had said, “Someone disposed to see it this way might say that the skin is designed to keep what is properly inside the body inside the body and what is outside the body from getting in,” and then that, “whereas in the case of young people we might say that they are so full of interior life and energy and whatnot that said life and bits of its interior may actually protrude from the envelope of the skin, forced outward, in the case of the residents here we might say that the assault here works in the reverse direction, that the residents’ energies and attentions have collapsed on their still centers to such an extent that there is no longer sufficient interior life and energy to keep what is outside from puncturing the envelope and impinging on the steadily receding interior,” and so on. “Not infection rising from within, but injury punched into the tired envelope from without,” “the skin no longer a viable boundary,” and so on. He had not said membrane, to Lenore’s knowledge.

“Except it only happens in the fall, when it gets drier,” Lenore had said. “Next fall we’ll get Concarnadine a humidifier.”

“ ‘But Billy Mink jeered at Reddy Fox.

“ ‘ ”Pooh! You’re no fisherman, Reddy Fox! If I couldn’t catch fish when they are chased right into my hands I’d never go fishing.“

“ ‘Reddy Fox pretended to be indignant.

“ ‘ ”I tell you what, Billy Mink,“ said he, ”if I don’t catch more fish than you do to-day I’ll bring you the plumpest chicken in Farmer Brown’s dooryard, but if I do catch more fish than you do you will give me the biggest one you catch. Do you agree?“

“ ‘Now Billy Mink is very fond of plump chicken—’ ”

“Roughage.”

“ ‘—and here was a chance to get one without danger of meeting Bowser the Hound, who guards Farmer Brown’s chickens. So Billy Mink agreed to give Reddy Fox the biggest fish he caught that day if Reddy could show more fish than he could at the end of the day. All the time he chuckled to himself, for you know Billy Mink is a famous fisherman—’ ”

“Roughage.”

“ ‘—and he knows that Reddy Fox is a poor swimmer and does not like the water.’ ”

Concarnadine Beadsman, Mrs. Stonecipher Beadsman, Jr., had been in residence at the Shaker Heights Nursing Home even before the Home had been bought by Stonecipheco Baby Food Products. Concamadine Beadsman had unfortunately gone senile while still in her fifties. She had giggled in the rain at the funeral of her husband, after the accident involving the Jell-O alternative. She had moaned in the car on the way to the main Beadsman home in Shaker Heights, to which she was moved from her own home in Chagrin Falls after the death of her husband. Then, for a few years in Shaker Heights, her days had been filled with trips to the mailbox: two hours’ walk to the box at the end of the block; the meat of the day spent peering into the black mouth of the box as the slot was held open first with one hand and then the other, the day punctuated neatly by the mailman coming at four and unlocking the bottom of the box and mail heaving out all over — an end-of the-day release with which Concamadine often unfortunately found herself in involuntary empathy — followed by a thirty-second drive back to the house with a family-member who drove low in the seat and wore sunglasses…. Then just rest, relaxation, unlimited Lawrence Welk, a plethora of mail-watching options, function-labels for things. As far as Lenore could tell — and she did try — Concamadine was really happy.

“ ‘By and by they came to another sandy beach like the first one. They could see another school of foolish young fish at play. As before, Reddy Fox remained on shore while the others swam out and drove the fish in. As before, Reddy caught half a dozen, while Billy Mink and Little Joe Otter each caught one this time. Reddy had five and then pretended to be so tickled over catching one, the smallest of the lot, that Billy Mink didn’t suspect a trick.’ ”

Mr. Bloemker sighed to himself and jiggled a shoe.

Lenore looked at him. “You know, you’re really more than welcome to go. I’m sure you must be busy.”

“Roughage.”

“I have been instructed to wait for the owners of the facility, or of course for a representative,” said Mr. Bloemker. “I can just as well wait here. I hope to have a chance for an additional chat, once this delightful piece is through.”

“My father’s coming down here?”

“It is not impossible.”

“I think he’s too busy gearing up for getting all pissed off about Kopek Spasova doing Gerber ads in Erieview tonight.”

“Nevertheless.”

“Roughage.”

“Is it Karl Rummage who’s coming? Do they maybe want to have you look up patients’ ages for them again?”

“For your information, I have been led to understand that the relevant unavailable facility-connected individuals will apparently be back with us very soon.”

“You said the exact same thing a couple days ago, and I called Dad, and nada.”

“But this time I have been led to the above understanding by persons connected with the ownership of the facility.”

“Roughage.”

“Mr. Rummage?”

“A young person in Chemistry, at Stonecipheco Baby Foods.”

“Obstat?”

“That sounds right.”

“Dad swore up and down that he’d call me the minute he had anything about Lenore. He said he’s about ready to call the police if she and everything else missing don’t turn up, or at least drop a line.”

Mr. Bloemker didn’t say anything. He scratched at his beard.

“Anyway,” Lenore said, “the point is that he sure didn’t call this morning. So I don’t believe it.”

Bloemker looked at his shoe and shrugged.

“And Rick and I supposedly have alternate Lenore-finding plans. Largely and weirdly Rick-inspired, but still.”

“As you wish. I will of course pass on any and all relevant information, as per our agreement.”

“You and Brenda are too kind. ”

“Roughage.”

“ ‘For the rest of the day the fishing was poor. Just as Old Mother West Wind started from the Green Meadows to take her children, the Merry Little Breezes, to their home behind the Purple Hills, the three little fishermen started to count up their catch. Then Reddy brought out all the fish that he had hidden. When they saw the pile of fish Reddy Fox had, Billy Mink and Little Joe Otter were so surprised that their eyes popped out and their jaws dropped.’ ”

“Roughage.” Concamadine’s jaw dropped, too. Her legs were straight out before her as she sat up in bed; her feet, in wool socks, pointed in different directions. Her shins, visible between the flaps of her robe, were spotted.

“ ‘Reddy walked over to the big pickerel and, picking it up, carried it over to his pile. ”What are you doing with my fish?“ shouted Billy Mink angrily.

“ ‘ ”It isn’t yours, it’s mine!“ retorted Reddy Fox.’ ”

“Roughage.”

“ ‘Billy Mink fairly danced up and down he was so angry. ”It’s not yours!“ he shrieked. ”It’s mine, for I caught it!“

“ ‘ ”And you agreed that your biggest fish should be mine if I caught more fish than you did. I’ve caught four times as many, so the pickerel is mine,“ retorted Reddy, winking at Little Joe Otter.’ ”

“Roughage roughage roughage roughage,” said Concarnadine Beadsman.

“What’s with this roughage stuff?” Lenore said. “How come she keeps saying ‘roughage’?”

“We have noted that as the autumn begins to cut into the heat that infallibly and understandably drove so many of the J-ward residents into themselves, the residents begin as it were to come around, to begin to rediscover the rewards of communication,” Mr. Bloemker said. “Recall that Concamadine said absolutely nothing all summer. Now we hear words for the sake of words. Explanation? A nurse probably remarked that it would be good for Concarnadine to eat her salad, for the roughage it contained, and Concarnadine fastened on the word, more than likely. Of course you know that here at the Shaker Heights facility we like to encourage regularity through the consumption of fiber, not through harsh chemicals.”

“Roughage.”

“Except she probably doesn’t have any idea what the word stands for,” Lenore said.

“Doubtless. Although Lenore did have ‘roughage’ in the J-ward lexicons. Shall I hunt around for one?”

“And why that word to get fixated on?” Lenore said. “Concarnadine never used to care what she ate. She even ate Stonecipheco stuff, a lot of the time, when it was around the house. She was a weird eater. One time I was little, and we went over for Christmas, and Gramma C. and Grandaddy had had a fight, and Gramma C. didn’t eat all day; she just stayed in the basement, throwing darts at a poster of Jayne Mansfield.”

Concamadine Beadsman smiled.

Mr. Bloemker leaned over the bed toward Lenore. His eyes had a way of attracting sunlight and turning weird colors behind his glasses.

“Ms. Beadsman, may I bounce a theory off you, bearing on matters we’ve previously discussed?”

“Let me finish this story. You can tell by her smile she likes it.”

“Roughage.”

“Merely this. Has it not occurred to you that a sense of shall we say social history is strongest among the young, not the old?”

“ ‘Then Billy Mink did a very foolish thing; he lost his temper completely. He called Reddy Fox bad names. But he did not dare try to take the big pickerel away from Reddy, for Reddy is much bigger than he. Finally he worked himself into such a rage that he ran off, leaving his pile of fish behind.’ ”

“That as people age, accumulate more and more private experience, their sense of history tightens, narrows, becomes more personal? So that to the extent that they remember events of social importance, they remember only for example ‘where they were’ when such-and-such occurred. Et cetera et cetera. Objective events and data become naturally more and more subjectively colored. Does this account seem reasonable?”

“ ‘Reddy Fox and Little Joe Otter took care not to touch Billy Mink’s fish, but Reddy divided his big pile with Little Joe Otter. Then they, too, started for home, Reddy carrying the big pickerel.’ ”

“Roughage.”

“Any thoughts on this? I am of course extrapolating on some of the issues we tackled when last we met face to face. Of course I feel the insight holds particularly true of Midwestemers, who stand in such an ambiguous geographical and cultural relation to certain other less occluded parts of the country that the very objective events and states of affairs that are proper objects of a social awareness must pass in transit to the awarenesses of the residents here through the filters both of subjectively colored memory and geographical ambivalence. Hence perhaps the extreme complication we can see all around us at the Shaker Heights facility.”

Behind Concamadine’s lovely red lip and the bottom row of her even teeth Lenore could see a clear lake of saliva accumulating, growing, lapping with each breath at the backs of the teeth and beginning to shine at the corners of Concamadine’s mouth as her jaw still hung low.

“ ‘Late that night, when he had recovered his temper, Billy Mink began to grow hungry. The more he thought of his fish, the hungrier he grew.’ ”

“Any thoughts at all, then?”

“Not really.”

“Roughagegegege.”

“Oh, dear.”

“She just got too much saliva in her mouth, is all.” Lenore reached for some Kleenex from the bedside table. “Just a little too much saliva.”

“Happens to the best of us.”

“Mr. Blumker?” At the doorway was Neil Obstat, Jr., knocking faintly at the thin pretend-wood paneling, staring at Lenore, who was bent over a smiling beautiful gray-haired figure in a cotton bathrobe and wool socks, with a handful of sopped Kleenex. “Hello,” he said. “Hi, Lenore.”

“Hi.”

“How are you today?”

“Roughage,” said Concarnadine, wiggling her toes.

“You can swallow, you know, Gramma C. You can just swallow your saliva, you know.”

“How’s your Mom, there?” said Obstat.

“Perhaps we’ll just step outside and let you finish reading to Concamadine,” Mr. Bloemker said, his finger tracing the outline of his beard.

Lenore put the wet Kleenex in Mr. Bloemker’s outstretched hand and bent to the book again. She heard the tissues drop into Concamadine’s metal wastebasket with a heavy sound as Mr. Bloemker went for the door where Obstat was standing.

“Mr. Blumker I’m Neil Obstat, Jr., of Stonecipheco Baby Food Products,” Lenore heard Obstat say. She could tell he was still looking at her from the back.

“Bloemker, actually…,” Lenore heard. “Just step out a bit… hall.” There were sounds.

“ ‘Finally he could stand it no longer and started for the Big River to see what had become of his fish.’ ”

Lenore could remember that at Shaker School one time Neil Obstat had been given a wedgie in the boys’ locker room by Ed Creamer and Jesus Geralamo and the whole sinister crew, and had been left by Creamer hanging by his underwear from a coat-hook in the hall outside the locker rooms, in full view of Lenore and Karen Daughenbaugh and Karen Baum and all the rest of the girls in seventh-hour P.E. who were on the way to the bus, and that a janitor had had to lift Obstat down, and that Karen Baum had said she’d been able to see just about Neil Obstat’s whole butt.

“ ‘He reached the strip of beach where he had so foolishly left them just in time to see the last striped perch disappear down the long throat of Mr. Night Heron.’ ”

“Roughage.” Concamadine was foraging for something in her mouth with a finger. Lenore looked back down at the book.

“Membrane, Concamadine,” Lenore said, trying to make her voice deep. “I say to you ‘membrane.’ ”

“Roughage.”

LaVache Beadsman had said, years ago, that Lenore hated Concamadine because Concarnadine looked like her. True, Concarnadine’s hair was long and full and curled down all over the shoulders of her pink bathrobe, where Lenore’s was of course shorter and brown and hung in two large curls to meet in points below her chin. But Concamadine’s actual face was Lenore’s face, too, more or less, the less being a dust of wrinkles at the comers of Concamadine’s eyes and two deep smile-furrows from the corners of her mouth down into her jaw.

“Lenore hates Concamadine because Concarnadine looks like her,” LaVache had said to John, in the east wing, while Lenore read by the window and listened. “Lenore identifies with her in some deep and scary way.”

“Then are we invited to extend the same reasoning to your relationship with Dad?” John had said with a laugh. “Since we all know that you’re basically just Dad’s image in a tiny little mirror.”

LaVache had moved in, brandishing the leg. And Lenore had watched Miss Malig, current in her fingers, iodine in her eyes, descend, restore order.

“Oh, Lenore.”

Lenore looked up from the book. “Pardon?”

“Roughage roughage.” The bathrobe was now up over her knees, knees that looked to be covered with the kind of gray skin usually found at the backs of elbows.

Obstat’s voice was in the hall. Lenore could hear the wet sound of Mr. Bloemker doing something to his own face. Protruding from the edge of the frame of the door, she could see, was the bottom of Mr. Bloemker’s brown sportcoat. The floor of the doorway looked dusted with a faint black that trailed out into the hall. Lenore wished Concamadine’s room were cleaner.

“ ‘And this is how it happened that Billy Mink went dinnerless to bed. But he had learned three things, had Billy, and he never forgot them — that wit is often better than skill; that it is not only mean but is very foolish to sneer at another; and that to lose one’s temper is the most foolish thing in the world.’ ”

Lenore watched steam chug out of Concamadine’s humidifier and turn pale yellow in the light of the glass wall. The steam made her think of another room.

“What should we do, Gramma C.?”

Concamadine smiled beautifully and plucked at the papery skin on the backs of her hands. Lenore watched her roll her head back and forth at the ceiling, for joy.

/c/

10 September

Shall we begin, then. Calves. Posture. Scent. Sounds amid fields of light.

One. Calves. Shall we discuss the persistent habit the light of the sun had of reflecting off Mindy Metalman’s calves. Thus then the calves themselves. An erotic surface being neither dull nor hard. A dull surface equalling no reflection; a hard surface equalling a vulgar, glinting spangle.

But a reflection from soft, smooth — perfectly shaved smooth — perfectly clean suburban skin. Light off the shins of her calves as said calves projected their curves from chairs, or scissored the air above clogs that made solid sounds in the sidewalk… or yes go ahead hung over the edge of the country club pool, pressing, so that the flesh of the calf behind swelled out and made the reflection two ovals of light.

I pull a new red-eyed Vance Vigorous from the pool, and as we enter into com-dog negotiations there is Mindy Metalman, in a deck chair, sipping something cold through a straw, and there is the light of the Scarsdale sun, reflecting from her smooth shins, and I am elsewhere as Vance shrinks on the deck.

Heavy of necktie, I rise from the plume over baby Vance’s crib to see Mindy Metalman, and yes perhaps two or three incidental neighborhood children around her, for decoration, doing her Circe dance around Rex Metalman’s sprinkler. And yes there is the light, reflected from her legs through the water, and the light comes out and breaks the mist of the sprinkler into color, and the mist and the light settle into the wet grass and the light remains and affects the air around it; I see it even much later as I sip something from my den window and watch Rex on his knees in the trampled, sprinkled, misted lawn, straightening each precious bent blade with tweezers. And in the breeze of late afternoon my own chaotic blades vibrate in sympathy.

From my den window, here, is to be seen Mindy Metalman, at her own window, seated on her desk, legs up and calves demurely thrust curving over the sill of the open pane, shaving in the sun. She sees me across the fence and laughs. Fresh air does absolutely everything good, doesn’t it? And here the blade moves down, too slowly by far to be taken seriously by me, for whom the whole process is a rite entirely other, but at any rate each furrow of foam in the curving field is replaced by an expanse of soft shaved gold, in the light.

Calves, light, legs, light, everything will be all right.

Two. Posture. Am invited by Rex Metalman to a cotillion for his daughter, Melinda Susan Metalman. (Was it a real cotillion? Why can’t I remember?) Am invited by Rex Metalman to some Puberty-Rite function for his daughter.

Said function consisting of row after row, group after group, whole nations of tired, nervous, bad-postured girls in immoderate pink gowns. Thin, heads thrust out, hands resting on one another’s shoulders, lips moving just inside one another’s ears. I squint a bit over my third or fourth something and am in a tinkling, frosted swamp, a cold pond of candy flamingos, flowers of snow, slowly hardening under a varied crystal sun. Then the girls change and become for a while vaguely reptilian, heads out like turtles, vaguely amphibian, seeming ever to scan for threat or reward — pimples to be seen at some of the comers of some of the mouths.

Yes and of course the key here is except for Mindy Metalman, who was in a white gown, with a carnation of pink sugar, and her hair pulled up in a tight bun, but with a burst of a black curl here, and there, and here, hinting at the dark nova the hair could become at any time, should someone outside my influence wish it.

And Melinda Metalman standing straight, with a straight spine, but for the swan’s curve of her neck and the bit of the hip-shot pelvis with which she pummeled the unwary, a solid, straight, juicy girl, her gown just low enough to afford the thinking man imaginative access to the systems that must have lain just within, revolving broad and silent about their still red point. And, and this posture — what was it about a head, with its dark, spreading, fluttery eyes, about a head placed so easily atop a simple vertical line? Perhaps just the contrast with the rest of the wildlife in that cold frosted marsh, perhaps merely the fact that the head was easy and content to let things come, that it did not jut out to snap at them. Sounds of snapping were all around me, and I loathed them, and I loathed too and still do loathe any and all heads which jut.

But dancing was of course out of the question, and this girl in the throes of Rite of course either danced or installed herself in a social orbit around the hors d‘oeuvre bar, and I will never ever again approach a female at an hors d’oeuvre bar.

And yes too following me about the perimeter of the room as I circled, joined at the soft parts of our bones, was as always the deeply chilling presence of Veronica Vigorous, and so yes anything at all was rendered impossible, assuming that it wouldn’t have been, which it would have, and so here I was tiny and icy and tired. But I can remember in the cold bath of the chandelier that vertical line, and the hair, and the eyes that were wings in a head to which jutting was clearly a thing unfamiliar, to be laughed at with the toss of a tiny star-burst curl.

She said Mr. Vigorous what a terribly wonderful surprise seeing you here of all places after all these years, do you remember who I am, and there with her was Mandible, and there in the cubicle the northern regions of the dark planet of Walinda Peahen’s hair, and there was Raring, setting up his magnetic chessboard, he plays chess with himself all night, and there was Lenore, she had wanted to bolt back into the elevator when we stepped into the lobby, she had seen, I could feel, and Mandible was petting the arm of Mindy’s coat as if it were an Airedale, and there she was, and the day had been such that when she said Mr. Vigorous what a terribly wonderful surprise to see you I felt deep beneath all our feet a heavy liquid clicking, as if the gears and cogs of some ponderous subterranean device had all moved into positions of affinity within their baths of lubricant, and she was saying Lenore do you remember me, I certainly remember you, I will bet you remember my husband, at whom you threw a shoe, how is Clarice, and as I rode the rhythm of the device I heard from above talk of parlors and tanning accidents, and uncountably many words from her about husbands, and lawns, and schools, and some dress or other, and careers, and marriage therapy, and Lenore was monosyllabic throughout, and then the tangent involving the type of switchboard equipment we used, and temporary things, and the whole Peahen planet dawned over the cubicle horizon, and cogs bit into one another, and eyes were rolled, and there was talk of Lenore’s bird, our bird, all in the context of the husband being in some bar with a self-flagellating bartender, and the Desert was mentioned, suddenly, and Lenore’s nostrils abruptly flared as she pulled away, and a long look passed that did something to the air between them, and over it all and muffling it all was the sound of hoofs on the marble lobby floor, the Scarsdale Express, bearing down, cold sparks at the wheels, pulled by the marvelous set of horses that whip themselves: Calves, Posture, Scent and Sounds, and all the suns went down.

Three. A scent came off her. Turn just right and it would go through me and leave a tiny hole in which the wind whistled, when I turned just right.

I was behind her in the car, on occasion, when Rex would drive into the city and she to school and me to work. When I rode in the back she would be in front, on the passenger side. She would not wear a seatbelt, and Rex would say You are riding in the Death Seat Melinda, the seat you are in is called the Death Seat you know, and I would be directly behind her, in the Rear Death Seat, with my feet not touching the floor except at the hump in the middle.

And now in the passenger window beside her were reflected at an angle the images of the oncoming cars and trucks, and there was her image, there, too, waiting; and the cars and trucks bore down in the window and emptied head-on into her reflection, were swallowed and exploded, and out the back of her reflection into my sleepy puffy face came fragments of light, the street made pale, and a wash of scent.

Yes the scent really came off her head, not off images exploding into light in glass; I am not a complete shitty fool. It was just a scent: clean, rich, vaguely fleshy. Imagine something blown dry on a line in a soft wind. Much should not be made of what is only a horse with cold hoofs.

Or once finding myself behind her and a friend on a city street. I was eating a pretzel for lunch, big and soft as my own face, a monstrously salty pretzel, and soon the pretzel man’s partner some blocks down would cheerfully sell me a Pepsi, but here were the solid, very solid sounds of her boots on the pavement, like a pump in the roots of a deep well, and here was the dark, thick hair, hanging almost all the way down her back, and having things done to it by the wind, and of course hair equals scent, and I was riddled, and salt poured from me like sand, and Mrs. Lot stood stock still in her beret in the middle of gridlock, transfixed by a red light.

Too much cannot be made of a scent.

Four. Sounds and a Lonely Little Thing.

Veronica and Vance were somewhere, away. For Veronica and me it had been a matter of years, so you can imagine. And it was August, and had my usual Rex-Metalman-world-of-pollen Scarsdale allergies, and was into my second week of being wired on antihistamines, salivaless and bumping into walls…

And it was nighttime, and I was in my den, and because it was nighttime the light was on, and over across the fence Mindy Metalman’s light was on, in her room, and her window was open, but the shades were drawn. Antihistamines make me dream. My light was on, and, it being August, insects wanted in. I established for my purposes levels of insects, levels of entry, each corresponding to a field of light. The lit den made the insects tap and bounce on the windowscreen, wanting in. And a few would get in, that was OK, but then I would hear tiny dry sounds of impact and I would look up and there would be the insects, bouncing off the frosted glass shell around the light fixture: let us in let us in. And unscrew the shell, and then there you would be as before, but with the insects now bouncing off the hot thin skin of the lightbulb itself, let us in, banging with blunt heads and burnt wings, let us in. All right, but where did they want to go? Because break the lightbulb open with, say, the tiny screwdriver you use to fix the keys of your typewriter, break open the skin of the bulb to let them in, and either the light they want is killed and the game is over, or else they simply orbit the unenterable filament until they are fried dry and fall away.

So I stood on tiptoe on my desk, with my screwdriver, and bits of glass in my hair, and a dry mouth, in the dark, wishing for a Flit gun, or else to know where the appropriate place to want in was, then; and I heard sounds, from across the fence.

And they came from Mindy Metalman’s room. Behind the white shade there were shadows. And, too, there were the sounds… like the scent, tiny but penetrating… of a passion, not a person, being yielded to. And I got down on fours on the desk amid papers and glass and allergy capsules and looked out and saw in the Metalmans’ driveway a strange, deep-red Mustang with big rear tires, and the shade with its shadow dance, and behind and above the car and the house the slow, liquid pulse of a distant aerial tower’s red light that matched the spasms of my own drugged heart and so became my falling star. And there were the sounds of Mindy Metalman, in another world, the world of the liquid pulse; and the thought of someone unknown to me sharing the world with her, the thought that some actual person with big rear tires was with her, now, all this sent me off the desk and into the bathroom to climb atop the laundry hamper and brush away hot insects and listen at the lightbulb. For my dry dull head full of pollen thought that if we could just catch something the same, here, the insects and I could all kick off our shoes and have a beer.

I have said to her, no I will not be going to any gymnastic babyfood spectaculars with you.

And when she says why not I say ask Lang.

I say by all means, take the morning off. Go roll about. Be three-dimensional. Sign bottoms.

And she says I am going to go read to my grandmother.

And I say go, ask valid young Lang whom to take to Erieview, he’s in the next room.

And she stands there in her sneakers and says don’t push at me. Darling darling darling, tell me about the reversal I say.

How something or other to have her down below, in my network, all over again. In the cubicle. The lobby will resound, glow. I have bought breath mints.

Lenore what does it mean to feel that you must either kill or die. Does that make us an insect, in a field of light that can be only desired, or else extinguished?

Between yesterday and me lies a whole field of it.

The mints make it cold when I suck at the air. A suck at the air equals a sigh. Dinner, with Mindy Metalman? Oh yes oh no.

The burnt house stands delicate and everything is still arranged but now everything is black and hollow and featherlight and near dust and squeaks in the wind. The toilet is untouched, and pulses quietly as the wind blows through hollow ribs, all around it.

One, Two, Three, Four: that’s utter tripe, says his Lenore.

/d/

“I know what I know, is all.”

“What does that mean, ‘I know what I know’?”

“I know the whole story.”

“Well if I don’t know the story I obviously don’t know if you know the story.”

“The Andy story.”

“What, like his historical story, the story of his life, or what he’s been doing here, or what?”

“You are so funny.”

“Why am I funny?”

“This isn’t the same material, you know.”

“It’s close. It’s the same color.”

“But it’s not the same texture. I want that thin cotton texture, that fadedness and thinness, that it-could-give-way-at-any-second quality.”

“Well maybe you should know that this particular dress is like ten years old, is why it’s so thin. I don’t know why you’re so fixated on this dress.”

“I’d buy it from you, but if it barely fits you like that there is simply no way it could fit me.”

“Who says I’d sell it?”

“So what we need is this color in a lighter, more cottony material.”

“Anyway, it’s Lenore’s. I couldn’t sell Lenore’s dress. I’d have to buy it from her, which I’ll probably do anyway given the Nick thing, but then I wouldn’t want to sell it. See?”

“Relax. It wouldn’t fit me anyway.”

“….”

“I am having lunch in the cafeteria of something called Moora dian’s Department Store, Cleveland, Ohio. Alan and Muffin would just die.”

“This is a really good store. Don’t underrate this store.”

“Not mad about its fabric selection one bit.”

“I’ll give you the names of some other stores, but I can’t go with you, I don’t think. Walinda embolisms if I go over an hour for lunch.”

“She is not my very favorite person.”

“She’s just hard to get to know. You get to know her, everything’s OK. She just didn’t like your jacket, probably. She tends not to like people who have a lot of money. Which you pretty obviously do.”

“….”

“Have money, I mean.”

“….”

“Which if you’ll excuse me makes me sort of wonder why you’re even considering working even as a temporary at the Frequent and Vigorous board. Which don’t get me wrong is not a horrible job or anything, I’m not talking down my job, but it just isn’t too exciting, and right now it’s especially hectic and a pain because of line trouble, and you might or might not know it only pays four an hour, which is a pretty un-princely sum.”

“Money isn’t even an issue. I’m on vacation. I have unlimited vacation time, nearly, in my career. Retail food prices aren’t expected to change in the next few weeks.”

“What a job. I couldn’t believe it. I can’t believe you do that.”

“….”

“Hey, do it again.”

“Not here, Candy.”

“Come on. It’s noisy, no one’ll hear. Please.”

“Honestly.”

“Please.”

“Total: seventeen-fifty. Cash: twenty dollars. Change due: two-fifty.”

“That’s just too super.”

“It gets less super as time goes on, believe me.”

“But so you’d only work at F and V to be near Andy.”

“Maybe in a way.”

“What way is that, if you don’t mind my asking? And why do you want another version of this dress? I don’t get it.”

“You are an inquisitive little thing.”

“You and I look enough alike as it is. Why do you want my dress?”

“That was the point, a minute ago. As you pointed out, it’s Lenore’s dress, not your dress.”

“All right, this is technically Lenore’s dress, if you want to get technical. And this is the dress she wore the time you met her.”

And the time Andy met her.“

“Right.”

“Right.”

“So what?”

“I know what I know.”

“How about letting me know a little of what you know, then?”

“Look, I know all about Andy and Lenore Beadsman. I know you’re her friend, and you can go ahead and tell her I know all about it.”

“What do you know?”

“Everything.”

“I mean what is there to know?”

“Listen, I know you two are friends, but if I’m going to be honest with you you can at least not insult my intelligence.”

“I’m not insulting anything, Mindy.”

“See, I can not only see what’s going on, but I have the advantage that I can also see why it’s going on.”

“Hey, Lenore doesn’t even like Andy very much, to tell the truth.”

“Frankly Lenore does not interest me. My husband, he interests me. And I can see why he’s doing what he’s doing.”

“What’s he doing?”

“Don’t you see why? Yes we’ve had a bad period, but you know all relationships go through bad periods. There are bad times in all relationships. But yes this was a bad period. And now Andy sees your little friend Lenore, in the middle of this admittedly bad period, and suddenly he feels he’s able to go back to a branch in the tree of his life, the branch nine years ago, when he met me and fell in love with me and started a relationship with me, but also, see, the exact same branch he met Lenore at, sitting in her little violet dress and being antisocial and throwing shoes at people, and so suddenly Andy feels as if maybe he can go back and just take a different path from the same branch, to—”

“She threw shoes?”

“Andy sees in this Lenore person a chance to change the past. Andy is always trying to change what he can’t change. He’s a silly. And remember there are two sides to every coin.”

“….”

“Always lots of branches in the same relationship-tree.”

“I don’t think this branch stuff is right, Mindy.”

“You’ve made that perfectly clear.”

“Lenore is pretty heavily involved with Mr. Vigorous, is the thing.”

“Ah, Mr. Vigorous.”

“Who was really your neighbor, in New York City, when he was married?”

“In Scarsdale he was, yes.”

“This whole thing is making me feel a little eerie.”

“Branches and trees, darling.”

“But they’re involved, Mindy. They have been for like a year and a half. Really involved.”

“Andy sometimes likes to hurt, too, when he’s not himself.”

“But I mean they’re really close. Lenore more or less lives over there with him a lot of the time. Mr. Vigorous is incredibly jealous.”

“Poor thing.”

“He even bought the bird for Lenore that’s on ‘The Partners With God Club’ right now.”

“ ‘The Partners With God Club’? On the evangelist network?”

“Didn’t you even see it when you went over to Gilligan’s Isle to see Andy?”

“I only saw him. I was only there to say hello, it turned out. I was only there a moment or two.”

“What did he say?”

“He said, I remember this, he said, ‘Guess how much shit I want out of you right now, Melinda-Sue.’ He says that sometimes.”

“Sheesh.”

“He calls me Melinda Sue.”

“….”

“But you say her bird is on the show?”

“Her bird more or less is the show right now. The bird, Vlad the Impaler, except on the show he’s got some weird Italian name that Reverend Sykes said Vlad the Impaler chose in a moment of ecstasy…”

“Hart Lee Sykes?”

“Yes. Vlad the Impaler is a cockatiel who can sort of talk, or at least repeat things so convincingly it’s apt to seem.like he’s talking, and the Reverend gets him to ask people in pathetic-Christian-TV- viewer-land to send money, and they do. Our landlady is with him in Atlanta, and our landlord says she says the money is supposedly tidal-waving in, right now.”

“I’ll have to watch this.”

“It’s on every night on cable at eight, on I think like channel ninety, one of those cable channels.”

“Hmmm.”

“Except now Rick’s being all spastic and weird about the bird, Lenore says. He has the receipt from Fuss ‘n’ Feathers pet shop, which if you do any time at the F and V board you’ll get to know really well, because our lines are like super fouled up and we get a lot of their calls, but anyway he has the receipt, and he says because Lenore didn’t give him this certain gift at Christmas, Vlad the Impaler is legally and emotionally his. That’s what Lenore says he says.”

“….”

“And maybe he’s really trying to get ahold of the royalties, because Vlad is apparently raking in a lot of royalties, from the tidal wave of money, but that just wouldn’t be like Rick. Rick is intensely weird, but he’s not weird about money. Money just isn’t very important to him.”

“But he legally owns the bird because Lenore didn’t give him something?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“I really shouldn’t say.”

“I’ll pay for lunch. Including dessert.”

“A spanking. Rick supposedly wanted a spanking.”

“A spanking?”

“That’s really all I should say.”

“And he owns the bird, on the show.”

“Kind of hard to take a man seriously who wants a spanking for Christmas.”

“That doesn’t match my memory. My memory is of a nice man in a beret who spent a lot of time at his den window and helped get Daddy out of the lawn, sometimes. I guess we’ll see.”

“Your Daddy was in the lawn?”

“….”

“I think you’ve misjudged Lenore.”

“So I gather.”

“I think you’ve misjudged Andy, too, if you excuse my saying so. I don’t think you can expect to get him back by pretending to be a different violet branch of the same tree.”

“Shall we go?”

“Here’s the check, thanks a lot, Mooradian’s tends to get a little expensive.”

“God, you’re not kidding. This bill is obscene.”

“I think you and Andy just need to sit down and rap. You should try to go out of your way to see him tonight, straighten things out.”

“Tonight Andrew S. Lang is taking Lenore Beadsman to some gymnastics show.”

“No.”

“The symbolism of which doesn’t escape me, rest assured.”

“I think there’s been some kind of mistake. I think you maybe misheard him.”

“We’ll see.”

/e/

“This is suck!” said a small oriental man ahead of Lenore in the line.

He turned to her and said it again. “This is suck!”

With him was another man and two women, all in leatherish jackets. They were all nodding, agreeing that it was suck. Lenore thought they were maybe Vietnamese. She knew Vietnamese people tend to have really high cheekbones. Lenore’s junior roommate at Oberlin had been a Vietnamese woman.

“Pardon me?” Lenore said to the man.

The man took his hands out of his jacket pockets. “This is suck, that we must wait like this. We have been this line for a long time.”

“Pretty decent little old crowd, all right,” said Wang-Dang Lang. He jingled his car keys.

Lenore turned from the man and looked behind her in line. There she could see two girls, from maybe about high school, with short hair Lenore could tell was a very strange color, even between the lights of the Building and the marquee. They both had on big winter coats that looked like some shiny quilts sewn together. Whatever they were talking about they couldn’t believe.

“I just could not believe it,” said one of the girls, who, Lenore saw, had paper clips hanging from her ears.

“What an asshole,” said the other girl.

“No, I mean I could not believe it. When he said it to me, I just totally freaked out. I totally freaked. I was like:” the girl gestured.

“What a gleet.”

It was cold for September, tonight. Lenore had on her gray cloth coat. Lang had on a sheepskin jacket with some false wool fluff around the collar. They were now near the ticket window, after about half an hour.

“Very nice of you to take me, Andy,” Lenore said. “On such short notice, what with Mindy in town, work, et cetera.”

Lang smiled down at her and played with his keys.

“Rick just pretty clearly didn’t feel like going,” Lenore went on, “and he more or less told me to ask you to go.”

“Well shoot, that makes it a bit like an order, then.”

“Candy has to work tonight over at Allied, is the thing.”

“I don’t look at it like a job, Lenore,” Lang said. “I’m looking forward to it.”

“Kopek Spasova’s really supposed to be great.”

“And your Daddy told you to go?”

“Dad doesn’t tell me to do anything. He said he’d appreciate it, is all. If I didn’t want to go, I wouldn’t go.”

Lang grinned. “You sure about that, now.”

“Of course I’m sure. If I thought this was going to be suck, to coin a phrase, I wouldn’t do it.”

“My own personal Daddy tells me to do something, I as a rule do it.”

Lenore looked at him. Her breath went up toward him a little before it disappeared. “Except he told you not to marry Mindy Metalman, you said in the car.”

Lang laughed. “OK, usually I do what he says.” He looked serious. “Sometimes me and Daddy just take a while to see eye to eye.”

Erieview Plaza was all lit up. A marquee had been set up in front of the Erieview Tower lobby, by the ticket window. On the marquee a little electric girl was pulsing around a bar, connected to it by her feet. Beside her throbbed the bright-white perimeter of a baby, with a spoon in its hand. Yellow light from the windows of the Bombardini Building across the Plaza illuminated the rear of the line for the tower lobby.

“So let me get this totally straight, for the record and all,” said Lang, watching his own breath. “You’re just here ‘cause you want to be. In toto. ”

“I like gymnastics. I was totally glued to the TV for the World Championships, last month.”

“But what I understand, this little girl’s helping these Gerbers launch a kind of a Tet Offensive against your Daddy’s company. That’s what Neil said.”

“That’s beside the point. I’m not Dad, or Dad’s company.”

“So what’re we doing here, then? I can think of a thousand funner places for us to be.”

“You’re no joke, brother,” the Vietnamese man in front of them said as his group got to the ticket window. He and one of the women began to talk very fast at the man behind the window.

“Good God, that’s Mr. Beeberling, selling tickets,” said Lenore.

Lang looked briefly at the ticket window before returning to scanning the line.

“He’s really Bob Gerber’s right hand man,” Lenore said. “He’s the one who supposedly came up with this ingredient in Gerber baby food that’s supposed to help babies chew.”

“Instead of singing like birds?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

There was definitely some sort of controversy at the window. The Vietnamese man was jabbing his finger toward the doors to the Erieview lobby. Mr. Beeberling was being told that he was suck.

“Look here,” Lang said, leaning way over to make himself heard in Lenore’s ear above the din around the window. The side of his jaw was smooth and smelled sweet, even in the cold air.

“Look here,” he said. “If we just go on back right now, ‘Dallas’ is on. We can watch ’Dallas.‘ It’s a show that kicks ass. I just got a new TV, a big sucker. I got wine. We’ll have more fun than a whole barrel full of prehensile-toed little tumblers.” He stopped and looked at Lenore. “Of course I guess that’s assuming you’re only doing what you want to do, not what your Daddy or anybody else tells you to do.”

“Hey, look…,” Lenore was saying up to Lang when they were pushed by the force of the line behind them into the glass of the ticket window. Lang lost his cowboy hat. Lenore dropped her purse, and lottery tickets spilled out and went everywhere. She bent and started picking them up. Some blew away.

“Hold your horses God damn it!” Lang shouted back at the line. The two girls, orange and pink hair in the light of the marquee, gestured.

“Hi Mr. Beeberling,” Lenore said, stuffing the last of the bright tickets into her purse. “Two, I guess, please.”

“Lenore,” said Mr. Beeberling. “Lenore Beadsman.”

“Andrew Sealander Lang, here,” Lang said absently, looking around for his hat.

“Two coming up,” smiled Mr. Beeberling. He opened a drawer and began to rummage. He was wearing a porkpie hat that said GERBER’S across the brim. “Just missed Foamwhistle and your Jars guy, Goggins, you know,” he said. “Just came through.”

“Blanchard, or Sigurd?” said Lang.

Lenore turned and stared at Lang.

“Well now here we go,” said Mr. Beeberling. He pushed back his hat and smiled. “That’ll be four hundred dollars, please.”

“Pardon?”

“Special Stonecipheco rate,” Mr. Beeberling said. “If you’re going to scout us out, you can at least help to defray costs.”

“But except I’m not here for Stonecipheco,” Lenore said as Lang fought off another surge of the line behind them. “I’m just here because I really like Kopek Spasova.”

“Well certainly,” said Mr. Beeberling. “So you can be thoroughly entertained, and help defray, all at once.” He gestured back at the long line and the circle of pale breath that wove into itself and vanished above it. “You see what the fray is like. Surely you want to help defray.”

“There’s just no way you can tell me two tickets can cost four hundred dollars,” Lenore said.

“Well, these’re really big tickets, as you can see for yourself,” Mr. Beeberling said, holding up two large black tickets behind the window and sizing them up suggestively with a thumb and forefinger.

“You dung beetle,” Lang said to Beeberling, who smiled and made a little bow.

“I don’t have near that much on me,” said Lenore.

“What an arse!” the two girls were yelling in unison at Lang’s back.

“Lenore, let’s just git. Who needs this, if we’re just doin’ what we want?”

“Mr. Beeberling I’m not here for Stonecipheco.”

Mr. Beeberling grinned and scratched his head under his hat. The electronic image of Kopek Spasova kept lightening and darkening sections of the street.

“This is suck, isn’t it,” said Lenore.

“You can’t get pushed around like this, Lenore. Screw him. Let’s git.” Lang twirled his car keys on a bandaged finger.

“Shit on a twig.”

lfl

“I think you should. I hope you shall.”

“Should I, Rick? Oops, may I call you Rick?”

“Of course. We’re both adults, now. Call me anything.”

“Should I, Rick?”

“As I see it, you would be doing everyone a favor. We need the help. We’re marginally frantic right now, though of course not unpleasantly so. It would be an enjoyable, brief taste of college memories for you, apparently. And I-thank you, waiter.”

“Sure thing.”

“We need some more vino.”

“More wine, please.”

“Right away sir.”

“I should like to be able to see you around, every day, working. It would be nice. And you would of course have the opportunity to spend time around… those Frequent and Vigorous personnel whom you wished to be near.”

“Whoever I wanted to be near?”

“What does that mean?”

“Hey, this is yummy.”

“The eclairs are good here, I’ve found. Lenore and I sampled the eclairs here, not too far back, with Norman Bombardini, our Building-mate, and—”

“It’s really good.”

“I think you should. I so hope you will, Mindy. May I call you Mindy?”

“You silly.”

“Mindy, it would simply be fun. That’s all I’m saying. And how long could it be?”

“Good question.”

“What?”

“Can I have some more of that vino?”

“….”

“And then but what will Lenore think?”

“….”

“Rick, what about Lenore?”

“What about Lenore?”

“How will she feel about me taking her place at the switchboard, however temporarily? I saw that she still has a lot of her personal items scattered around in there. How will she feel about me being in the middle of her personal items?”

“Her items can be moved with minimal trouble.”

“That’s not exactly what I mean, Rick.”

“Perhaps if you were a bit more explicit, then.”

“Let’s just say it has to do with my husband and your fiancée.”

“Lenore is not quite exactly my fiancée.”

“And Andy might not be my husband much longer.”

“What?”

“Did you know he was taking Lenore to see gymnastics tonight? The symbolism of which doesn’t escape me, rest assured.”

“Here the answer is that I told Lenore to ask Lang to go to this function with her, I’m afraid. We had a tiff this morning and I told her to. I was being juvenile.”

“But Andy told me last night he was taking her. He told me he didn’t want any… any flak from me about it. That was last night, not this morning.”

“More wine?”

“Rick, can I ask do you really own that fabulous bird who’s lighting up religious television?”

“If you’re referring to Vlad the Impaler, he is Lenore’s cockatiel.”

“That’s not what I heard, emotionally speaking.”

“What did Lenore say to you?”

“Rick, should I be straight with you?”

“You can certainly be straight about anything Lenore told you.”

“I find you very attractive. I’m sorry if that offends you, but I always have, really, in a way, ever since I was little, and you and Daddy would walk around the lawn in tennis clothes, looking for weeds and drinking things that I’d get to drink the last bits of out in the kitchen.”

“….”

“I remember how wet the glasses got in the summer, the water ran down the sides. I remember that. And you were out there in tennis clothes. It was like a childhood crush.”

“… restroom, very briefly, if you’ll perhaps excuse me for just a second, I’ll be…”

“And all it would take is one word from Lenore, or you, to CBN, to get me in the door as a voice on ‘The Partners With God Club.’ Rick, you could be an absolutely tremendous help to me.”

“What about Andy? What would he think?”

“What about Andy? What about Lenore?”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand what’s going on.”

“Look. I’m a professional voice. I’m the best young corporate voice on the market today. Listen to this. This is CBN. This is ‘The Partners With God Club,’ with your host, Father Hart Lee Sykes, and his bird Vlad. Stay tuned, please.”

“That really is awfully good.”

“Damn right it’s awfully good. I’m a professional.”

“But the bird’s stage name is Ugolino, not Vlad.”

“Ugolino?”

“Yes. Sykes claims Vlad the Impaler revealed his own stage name on the plane to Atlanta, amid a divinely induced aura of glazed blue light. Sykes claims Ugolino is some Biblical character or other. He’s still trying to pin down the reference.”

“And his bird, Ugolino. Please stay tuned.”

“No argument about quality from this end, Mindy.”

“You could call the Christian people tomorrow.”

“Lenore and I have an uncancellable appointment during the day tomorrow.”

“An appointment?”

“You might say we are going to the dentist.”

“You’re going to the Ohio Desert, mister. I know all about it. Andy told me all about it. He’s going, too.”

“No he isn’t. That is not possible. Just Lenore and I are going. That’s a fact.”

“Relax. So maybe he’s going on his own. Maybe he’s going with that creepy guy from the baby food company who helped him with the Desert a long time ago. All I know is he said he was going to wander and commune.”

“Just Lenore and I are going with each other, though.”

“Whatever you say.”

“….”

“So OK. I’ll fill in for a while.”

“Good. Good. Fine.”

“It’ll be fun, and like you said I’ll be able to be around whoever I want to be near.”

“Yes.”

“Except there’s still the matter of training.”

“Not a problem at all.”

“I’ll need to be trained. Although I think you’ll find I can remember whatever you want me to remember. I have a great memory.”

“Well certainly. Ms. Peahen… gave me some introductory material for you, which I as a matter of fact have right here… somewhere. Walinda is willing to install you temporarily at my say-so.”

“Train me.”

“Just listen to this: ‘A Phase III Centrex 28 console with a number 5 Crossbar has features which greatly aid the console operator in the efficient performance of his or her duties.’ ”

“That isn’t what I meant, Rick.”

“Excuse me?”

“I have an idea. Let’s go discuss training. I’m staying right over at the Marriott.”

“….”

“It’ll be fun and instructive. Trust me. Check please!”

“Not entirely sure I even…”

“And but what are those reflections in the street, Rick? Look there, by the comer. The street lights up, and then it doesn’t. What’s going on?”

“Neon. Gymnastic neon, I think.”

“Neon. Isn’t that pretty. Off, on. One, two.”

“You don’t find it a bit troubling?”

“Not one tiny bit.”

/g/

“I don’t know,” Lang said. “I just don’t know what’s with these freakin’ locks.”

“You have to jiggle the key sometimes. Sometimes Candy and I have to jiggle it.”

“You’re telling me,” Lang muttered. He got the door open.

Misty Schwartz’s second-floor apartment looked a lot like Lenore’s room, except it was a bit smaller, and had only one west window, and was definitely much tidier. Lenore looked around, then up at the ceiling that was her floor upstairs.

“You must be very neat,” she said.

Lang was hanging up their coats. “I was a boy, and I’d make my bed, and here’d come my Daddy with a Kennedy half-dollar, and he’d flip it onto the bed, and if the thing didn’t just bounce right back up onto my Daddy’s thumb with the Kennedy head back on top I had to make the sucker up all over again.”

“Geez.”

“Look, you maybe want a can of wine?” Lang said, making motions toward the door of the apartment. “I got some wine downstairs, in the Fridgidaire. It’s next to your soda water, you might have seen.”

“A can of wine?”

“They were on sale.”

“Think I’ll pass,” Lenore said. She smoothed out her dress from the hairy ride on the Inner Belt in Lang’s new Trans Am. A plane came in very low now, and for a moment everything seemed to slow way down, in the noise. Lang stood by the door, looking at her. Lenore could see the way the bright light from Misty’s overhead fixture hit off Lang’s eyes, hitting and breaking up like there were chips of mint in his eyes. Lenore felt the back of her neck with her hand.

As Lang smiled and turned to go she said, “Look, why not. I’ll try a can, or some of your can, whatever. Why not try some wine,” she said.

“Well that’s just fine,” said Lang. “You can warm up that old TV, if you want.” He went out and left the door open.

That old TV was a huge white sail of a screen that curved predator-like over a squat mahogany box. Inside the box a projector pointed like a gun at the screen’s breadbasket. Lenore hit a red button on the box, and an enormous head filled the screen, and there was volume. She hastily turned the thing off, and the screen drizzled and was blank again. The head had been someone from “Dallas,” though, Lenore was pretty sure.

When someone has the same general kind of room you do, it’s usually very interesting to see what they’ve done with it. In Misty Schwartz’s case it wasn’t quite as interesting as it might have been. Lenore didn’t know Misty very well; there had been some unpleasantness over a phone bill, on the Tissaws’ central kitchen phone, a few months ago, and Lenore had since been down to Misty’s place only once or twice, when she had to borrow necessities. Candy Mandible, who had borne the brunt of the phone bill unpleasantness, had said that the only reason Misty Schwartz wasn’t a lesbian was that she had never seen her own face in the mirror. Lenore thought that made no sense at all.

Which didn’t keep her from really not caring too much for Misty’s apartment, though: a room in which lines of steel and a certain kind of grainy white burlap fabric predominated. There was a chair made of white burlap cushions collected and given shape in a frame of polished metal bars. A clear glass table with the same kind of metal frame. At right angles a small couch of the same material as the chair. On the wall a painting of a plain pale orange square against a white background; also a picture of Misty Schwartz and some man on a black statue of a sperm whale, the kind of whale with those jaws. The man was down lying in the jaws, with his arm back over his forehead like Pauline in Peril, and Misty was riding on the thing’s back, pretending to give it the whip, her mouth and eyes open wide. The photo was right flush up next to the painting. That was it for the walls, except for the television screen, which was pretty clearly a Lang addition.

Lenore looked for evidence of Lang. By the bed — a bed tightly made; Lenore thought about trying the thing with the half-dollar and decided against it — was a duffel bag, stuffed full and with some of its contents vomited out onto the floor around it, which fact was partially hidden by a carefully folded blanket Lang had placed over most of the scene, as if he had been in a hurry. On the bed were some new shirts and white socks, all still in their store plastic. But that was all. On the whole it just didn’t seem like a Lang sort of room, to Lenore, at all.

“This just doesn’t seem like your kind of room,” Lenore said to Lang when he came back with his hands full of cans and glasses. She watched him put everything down carefully on the glass table.

“Well it’s a inexpensive room, and no bugs, and the neighbors are tough to beat.” Lang grinned.

“I just mean decor-wise. I just can’t picture you really living in a room with Swedish furniture and paintings of squares.”

Lang hunkered down on the couch and looked for a second over at the blank white television screen. “And so what kind of decor do you picture me in the middle of?” He closed his eyes and popped the top off a can of wine.

Lenore ran her hand along the mantle of Misty’s cold fireplace. “Oh, I don’t know.” She smiled to herself. “Smoky leather. Leather chairs. A leopardy rug, with maybe a snarling bear’s head on it. Lascivious calendars and posters…” She turned. “Maybe some expensive stereo stuff with its control-knobs all gleamy in an overhead light whose brightness you can adjust by turning a dial…”

Lang laughed and hit his knee with his fist. “Undamncanny. You just largely described my old college room.”

“Did I.”

“Forgot the animal heads on the walls, though.” Lang manipulated his eyebrows at her.

Lenore laughed. “The animal heads,” she said. “How could I.”

“And the mirrors on the ceiling…” Lang looked down and came back up holding a big glass. “A little vino?”

Lenore came over to the couch.

“Couldn’t find any damn wine glasses, so I used these. I hope it’s OK to just take glasses, if we wash them out after.” They were Road Runner glasses that Candy Mandible had gotten in some sort of fast-food restaurant promotion.

Lenore took a glass of wine. “It’s OK. They’re Candy’s. She’s pretty generous with her stuff. As I’m sure you know.” She sat down in the white chair, carefully pulling the back of her dress down so the skin of her legs wasn’t touching the burlap cushion. She crossed her legs.

“I figured they were either hers or yours, or poor old Misty Schwartz‘s,” said Lang. “And I didn’t think that poor girl needs any glasses about now.” He leaned back on the couch. “Sent her a card, by the way, in the hospital, saying who I was, about the room, saying I hoped she got better and all.”

“That was pretty nice of you,” Lenore said, picking the glass up from the table. The wine was yellow and sweet and so cold it hurt Lenore’s teeth. She put her glass back on the table and got a bit of a tooth-shiver from the sound of glass on glass, on top of the cold of the wine.

“Nah,” said Lang, crossing his leg over so his ankle was on his knee and holding onto the ankle with one big hand. Lenore looked at his shoe and his hairy ankle.

“Nah,” said Lang. “Just polite, is all. Melinda Sue had a similar thing happen to her, except I guess not as bad. Woman was still slathered to hell in Noxzema for a week.”

“Sounds horrible.”

“Should tell your sister to watch out, not get burnt.”

“Will do.”

“You like the wine?” Lang held his glass up toward the light fixture and tried to look at the wine around a cartoon of the coyote, who was wincing and holding a tiny umbrella over his head, apparently about to get clobbered by a boulder.

“It sure is cold,” Lenore said.

“Uh-huh,” said Lang. He looked over at the white screen again. “Should I just assume you don’t want to watch ‘Dallas,’ then?”

“I turned it on for a second,” Lenore said. “It’s really not my show, which doesn’t mean it’s a bad show or anything. If you want to watch it, go ahead; I’ll watch just about anything, at least for a while.”

“Nah,” said Lang. He took off his sportcoat and got up and hung it up. Lenore touched the sides of her hair. She could feel lines of heat going into her arms and legs, from the wine. She held her glass up to the light. On her glass the Road Runner was running, his legs were just a blur, and the curving road behind him looked used and limp and rubbery against the brown hills of some desert. There were cacti.

“Can I maybe ask where all those lottery tickets come from, that are in your purse?” Lang said, sitting down again, now on the edge of the couch closest to Lenore’s chair, so they could see each other in the glass of the table when they looked down. He looked down at her. “Who’s the lottery-playing demon around here?”

Lenore laughed. “Candy and I play a lot. I mean a lot.” She smoothed hair out of her eyes, and Lang watched her do it. “We play a lot. We have all these systems, using our birthdays and the letters in our names and stuff. Ohio has a really good lottery.”

Lang drank. “Ever win at all?”

“We will,” Lenore said. She laughed. “We started playing in college, just for fun, and I was a philosophy major, and for a joke we hit on this sort of syllogism, ostensibly proving we’d win—”

“Syllogism?”

“Yeah,” Lenore said. “Like a tiny little argument.” She smiled over at Lang and held up fingers. “One. Obviously somebody has to win the lottery. Two. I am somebody. Three. Therefore obviously I have to win the lottery.”

“Shit on fire.”

Lenore laughed.

“So why does that seem like it works, when it doesn‘t, since you haven’t won?”

“It’s called an E-screech equivocation. My brother disproved it to me that same year when I made him mad about something. It’s sort of a math thing.” Lenore laughed again. “The whole thing’s probably silly, but Candy and I still get a kick out of it.”

Lang played with the hairs on his ankle. “You were a phi-los-ophy major, then.” He drew out the word “philosophy.”

“Philosophy and then Spanish, too,” said Lenore, nodding. “I was a double major in school.”

“I personally majored in ec-o-nomics,” Lang said, doing it again.

Lenore ignored him. “I took an economics class one time,” she said. “Dad wanted me to major in it, for a while.”

“But you said no sir.”

“I just didn’t do it, is all. I didn’t say anything.”

“I admire that,” Lang said, pouring more wine for both of them and crushing the empty can in his hand. He threw it in the wastebasket from clear across the room. “Yes I do,” he said.

“Admire what?”

“Except I have trouble picturing you as a phi-los-opher,” he said. “I remember seeing you in Melinda-Sue’s room that one time, so long ago, and thinking to myself: artist. I remember thinking artist to myself, that time.”

The wine was warmer now. Lenore fought off a cough. “Well I’m sure not an artist, although Clarice has what you could call a sort of artsy talent. And I wasn’t ever a philosopher, I was just a student.” She looked into the table. “But how come you can’t picture it?”

“I dunno,” Lang said, throwing an arm back along the top of the couch, holding its steel bar in his hand and stroking it with his fingers. Lenore’s neck felt even tighter at the back. She felt like she could see Lang from all different angles all of a sudden: his profile next to her, his reflection down in the glass table, his other side in the window out past the couch and the television screen. He was all over, it seemed.

Lang was saying: “Just have this picture from school of all these phi-los-ophy guys in beards and glasses and sandals with socks in them, saying all this wise shit all the time.” He grinned.

“That’s just so wrong, Lenore said, leaning forward in the chair. ”The ones I know are about the least wise-seeming people you could imagine. At least the really good ones don’t act like they think they’re wise or anything. They’re really just like physicists, or math—“

“You care for a peanut?” Lang said suddenly.

“No thank you,” said Lenore. “You go ahead, though.”

“Nah. Little suckers get back in my teeth.”

“Mine too. I hate it when peanuts do that.”

“So go ahead with what you were saying, I’m sorry.”

Lenore smiled and shook her head. “It wasn’t important. I was just going to say that they’re like mathematicians, really, except they play their games with words, instead of numbers, and so things are even harder. At least that’s the way it got to seem to me. By the end of school I didn’t like it much anymore.”

Lang put some wine in his mouth and played with it. There was silence for a bit. Through Misty’s wood floor Lenore could hear faint sounds from the television in the Tissaws’ living room.

Then Lang said, “You’re weird about words, aren’t you.” He looked at Lenore. “Are you weird about words?”

“What do you mean?”

“You just seem weird about them. Or like you think they’re weird.”

“In what way?”

Lang felt his upper lip absently with a finger while he looked into the glass table. “Like you take them awful seriously,” he said. “Like they were a big sharp tool, or like a chainsaw, that could cut you up as easy as some tree. Something like that.” He looked up at her. “Is that from your education, in terms of college and your major and such?”

“I don’t think so,” said Lenore. She shrugged her shoulders. “I think I just tend to be sort of quiet. I don’t think words are like chainsaws, that’s for sure.”

“So was that really all just bullshit, what I said?”

Lenore recrossed her legs and played with the wine in her glass. She looked down into her purse, with the tickets, next to her chair. “I think it’s just that my family tends to be kind of weird, and very… verbal.” She looked into the table and sipped. “And it’s hard sometimes not being an especially verbal person in a family that tends to see life as more or less a verbal phenomenon.”

“Sure enough.” Lang smiled. He looked at Lenore’s legs. “And now can I ask you how come you wear those Converse sneakers all over? Your legs are just way too nice to be doing that all the time. How come you do that?”

Lenore shifted in her chair and looked up at Lang to make him stop looking at her legs. “They’re comfortable, is all, really,” she said. “Everybody likes different kinds of shoes, I guess.”

“Takes all kinds of shoes to make up a world, am I right?” Lang laughed and drank.

Lenore smiled. “My family really is funny about wordy things, though. I think you’re right about that. My great-grandmother especially, and she sort of dominated the family for a while.”

“And your Daddy and your housekeeper-lady, too,” said Lang, nodding.

Lenore looked up sharply. “How come you know about them?”

Lang shrugged and then grinned at her. “Think R.V. mentioned something or other.”

“Rick did?”

“But funny how?” Lang said. “I mean it’s not too unusual just to get people who like to talk. World is full of dedicated and excellent talkers. My mother used to get talking, and my Daddy’d say only way to really get her to hush was to hit her with something blunt.”

“Well but see, it wasn’t just talking a lot,” Lenore said, smoothing her hair. “Although everybody sure did. But it was as you said, the importance they attached to everything they said. They made just a huge deal out of what got said.” Lenore felt the rim of her glass for a second. She smiled. “Like to take an example I was just remembering this morning, my little brother Stoney had this stage of his childhood where he called everything brands of things. He’d say, ‘What brand of dog is that?’ or ‘That’s the brand of sunset where the sun makes the clouds all fiery,’ or ‘That brand of tree has edible leaves,’ et cetera.” She looked over at Lang, who was looking at her in the table. He looked up at her. Lenore cleared her throat. “Which obviously, you know, wasn’t all that big a deal,” she continued, “although it was kind of irritating, but still understandable, because Stoney watched television like all the time, back then.” Lenore recrossed her legs; Lang was still looking at her. “But my family was just having a complete spasm about it, after a while, and one time they even arranged to have Stoney out of the house so we could all supposedly sit down in the living room for like a summit meeting about how to get him to start saying ‘kind’ instead of’brand,‘ or whatever. It was a huge family deal, although my father I remember kept talking on the phone during the meeting, or going to get stuff to eat, or even reading, and not paying attention, because my great-grandmother was running the meeting, and they don’t get along too well. At least they didn’t.”

“Now is this your Amherst brother you’re talking about?” said Lang. “LaVache, the one at Amherst now?”

“Yes. LaVache is Stonecipher’s middle name. Stonecipher’s his real name.”

“Then so how’d they break the little guy of the habit? He didn’t say ‘brand’ at dinner, at all, that one time — at least not to his leg, which was about all he was talking to.”

“I think it just stopped,” Lenore said. “I think it just petered out. Unless Miss Malig started hitting him with blunt things on the sly.” She laughed. “I guess anything’s possible.”

“Miss Malig, your nanny, with legs like churns and all?”

At this, Lenore stayed looking into the table for some time, while Lang watched the side of her face. Finally she said, “Look, how do you know all this stuff, Andy?” She put her glass down in its circle of moisture on the table and looked calmly at Lang. “Are you trying to freak me out? Is that it? I think I need to know what exactly Rick told you.”

Lang shook his head seriously. “Freaking you out never even crossed my mind,” he said. He popped the tab on another can of wine. “This was just on the plane, coming on out here, while you were sleeping your pretty head off. We didn’t have nobody to talk to except us.” He tossed off some wine and smiled. “R. V. I remember was telling me about how he was going to promote you up from the phone board up to reader and weeder, and how you’d really get fulfilled by that.”

“Rick told you then that he was going to do that? That’s like two days before he told me he was going to do that.”

“But are you getting fulfilled? Is it rewarding like he said?”

Lenore looked for sarcasm in Lang’s face. She could never tell whether Lang was being sarcastic or not. Her neck really hurt, now. “It’s at least rewarding to the tune of ten smackers an hour,” she said slowly. “And some of the stories are really good.”

“R.V. says you really get into stories. He says you understand yourself as a literary sensibility.”

“He said that?”

“He did.”

Lenore looked back into the table. “Well I do like stories. And Rick likes them too. I think that’s one reason we seem to get along so well. Except what Rick really likes to do is tell them. Sometimes when we’re together he’ll just tell me stories, the whole time. From what gets submitted to him.”

Lang put his shoe out onto the glass tabletop, twisted it back and forth. “He does like to spin, doesn’t he,” he said absently. He paused and looked over at Lenore. Lenore looked down at her shoe. Lang cleared his throat. “I probably shouldn’t do this, but I’ve been wanting to ask you about this one whopper R.V. told me about your brother, with his leg: how the little sucker lost his leg when your mother fell off the side of your house trying to get away from her bridge coach and break into your nursery. Or some such. Now just how much of that is true, and how much was my own personal leg getting pulled, on that plane?”

A lot of little lines seemed to come out of the lines of heat in Lenore’s body. She stared at Lang’s shoe on the table. She closed her eyes and felt her neck. Lang watched her. “Let me get this straight,” she said finally. “Rick told you personal stuff about my family? On the plane? While I was right there, asleep?”

“Was that a mistake, telling you what he told me? Lenore, hurt me with something hot if I just screwed up in any way. Just forget I said anything.”

Lenore kept looking at the glass table, and Lang’s shoe, and Lang’s shoe’s reflection, and Lang’s reflection. “He told you all that while I was asleep,” she said. In the table it looked as though Lang was looking away from her, because the real Lang was looking at her. When he finally looked down at the table, Lenore stared at him.

“Well he said you were his fiancée,” Lang said, “and how he was just passionately and totally interested in everything about his fiancée. It all seemed real innocent to me. Not to mention just articulate as ell.”

Lenore had looked up. “He told you I was his fiancée? As in soon-to-be-married fiancée?”

“Oh shit.” Lang hit his forehead with the heel of his palm. “Oh shit, did I just do it again? Oh Lord. Just forget what I said. Just forget I said anything.”

“Rick said we were engaged? He just said that to you, unsolicited, out of the blue?”

“He probably just didn’t mean it the way he said it.”

“Shit on a twig.”

“Now Lenore I sure don’t want to come between two people who—”

“What the hell did he say there even was to come between?”

“Jesus H.,” Lang said, massaging his jaw. His reflection in the glass looked away from Lenore. Then it looked down, and seemed actually almost to wink, in the glass, all of a sudden. Lenore looked up, but the real Lang was looking at his hands.

“Jesus H. Christ,” he was saying to himself. He drank some wine. Lenore smoothed her hair back with hot fingers.

“Look,” said Lang. “I’m just real sorry. How about if I just tell you everything, everything that’s been making me feel all terribly guilty around you, and then we can just go ahead and—”

“Why on earth should you feel guilty because of Rick?” Lenore said tiredly, massaging her neck with her eyes closed again. “That he told you stuff is no reason for you to feel bad, Andy. I’m not mad at you about it.”

“Except there’s a few sort of sizable items R.V. doesn’t feel inclined to tell, it looks like,” said Lang. He took a very deep breath and looked at his hands again. “Like I’m not in actual fact translating any herbicide or pesticide crap into idiomatic Greek for you.” He looked at her. “Like I’m really working on a pamphlet for your own personal Daddy’s company, and its wild-ass new food that makes kids supposedly talk, like your bird can do.”

Lenore looked into the table. There was silence. “You’re really working for Stonecipheco,” she said.

Lang didn’t say anything.

“Which means Rick is, too. And Rick didn’t tell me.”

“I’m afraid that’s right. Except like I say I’m sure there was a good reason for his not.”

Lenore slowly reached for the open can and poured some more wine into her Road Runner glass. She hunched forward in the white burlap chair until her face was right over the table. She could see some of Lang in the top of her wine, erratic and shimmery, with mint eyes, in the yellow.

“And for his more or less ordering me not to tell you, either,” Lang was saying. He looked at the side of Lenore’s face. “The thing is, Lenore, he more or less ordered me not to tell you, which is why I didn’t tell you.”

Lenore shook the glass a little, rattled the bottom against the tabletop. The wine in the glass sloshed; Lang was broken into pieces that didn’t fit.

“Which means I’m afraid I need to ask you maybe to promise not to tell R.V. I told you, for fear of my job and all,” he said.

“Just like you yourself apparently promised Rick not to tell.”

Lang took his shoe off the table and leaned forward too, so his head was alongside Lenore‘s, a big curl of her hair hanging in the air between them. Lang looked at the curl. “I guess that promise has to get chalked up to what you might call strategic misrepresentation,” he said, very quietly.

“Strategic misrepresentation.”

“Yes. ‘Cause I made it before I ever got exposed to your good qualities and began to care about you as a person.” Lang set his glass of wine down and slowly took hold of some of Lenore’s curl and twisted it this way and that, all very gently.

“I see.”

“Not entirely sure you do, here, Lenore.”

“Oh, I think I do,” Lenore said, getting up and gently getting her hair out of the reach of Lang’s fingers. She walked over to the window and looked out at the houses across the Tissaws’ dark street. All the houses seemed to have their lights on.

“Well then maybe I should ask what do you think,” Lang said from back at the couch, where Lenore could see in the window he’d recrossed his legs and picked up his wine again. “What do you think about it, then,” he said.

“I don’t know,” Lenore said after a minute, breathing on the cold window. She watched how what she said made it hard to see out. “I don’t know what to think, old Wang-Dang Lang. Tell me what to think, please, and then I’ll think that way about it.”

“Well now that’s no way to talk, Lenore.”

Lenore didn’t say anything.

“And you should call me Andy,” said Lang. “You shouldn’t call me anything but Andy, I don’t think.”

“There, that’s what we need,” Lenore said, nodding, with her eyes closed. “We need it explicit. We need this control thing made explicit. No more games. People tell me what to do and think and say and call them, and I do it. It’ll all be simple. Then everybody can stop whispering when I’m asleep, and hiring each other behind my back, and wearing gas masks. They can just start making sense.” Lenore turned around. “So let’s really do it, OK? How are you supposed to be mixed up with my great-grandmother?”

“Now let’s just hold up here a second, Lenore,” said Lang. He put down his glass and came over to within a few feet of where Lenore was standing, at the window. On one side of them was the television screen; behind Lang was the way to the door. “Whoa there,” Lang was saying. “I don’t know anything about any great-grandmother mix-ups. And all‘I got to do with your family is basically you.” He shook his head. “Far as I know there’s nobody sneaking around about you and me.”

Lenore looked at the floor and put one of her curls behind her ear and crossed her arms. Lang was between her and the door. Her eyes began to get big and hot, and she felt as if there was wood in her voice box. She looked at Lang, who had his thumbs hooked into the pockets of his pants.

“Then how come I feel like the whole universe is playing pimp for me with you?” she said quietly. She thought she felt herself beginning to cry.

Lang looked at her. “Hey now please don’t cry,” he said.

“When I didn’t ask for it at all?” Lenore said. “When I didn’t even like you? I didn’t want you.” She looked past Lang at the door and began to sob, felt her shoulders curl down over her chest.

Then there was Lang, and her face was in Lang’s shirt, and a Kleenex got pressed into her hand from out of nowhere, and the wood in her throat seemed to break apart and go in all different directions, hurting.

Lang was making a soft rhythmic sound with his mouth into Lenore’s hair.

“I hated you,” Lenore said into his shirt, talking to his chest. “You came in that time, and terrorized us, and were drunk, and that guy’s stupid bottom, and Sue Shaw was so scared. ”

“It’s OK,” Lang was saying softly. “It’s OK. We were all just kids. We were just kids. That’s all it was.”

“And I say I don’t want you, that I’m mad, and have a right to be, and everybody just winks, and nudges, and gets a tone, and pushes, pushes, pushes.” Lang’s shirt was getting wet. “I’ve just felt so dirty. So out of control.”

Lang pushed her away a bit and dried her eyes with his sleeve. Lenore looked into his eyes for a second and thought for no reason of mint, lima beans, tired grass. His eyes were totally unbloodshot. “Lenore,” he was saying, “it’s OK. Just believe I don’t want to push you, OK? Just believe it,” he said, “OK? You can believe that, ‘cause it’s true. I wouldn’t do anything to hurt you, one bit.” He rubbed at his perfect eye and Lenore went back to smelling his chest. It was true that even while she was crying she had been able to feel him through his clothes, and her clothes.

“Lenore?” Lang said after he’d let her breathe into his shirt for a while. “Hey, Lenore?” He bent and cupped his hands around her ear and made as if he were talking into a bullhorn. “Lenore Beadsman.”

Lenore laughed a convulsive laugh and brought the Kleenex up to her face. It was hot, and wet, and little bits of it were all over her hand.

“I’ll just say it, Lenore,” Lang said. “I sure don’t want to control you at all. Believe that. But I’ll just go ahead and say that I think the one’s maybe trying to do more controlling than’s good for anybody is old R.V.”

For no reason Lenore looked up past Lang at Misty’s ceiling, her own floor.

“Lenore,” said Lang. He stroked the white sleeve of Lenore’s dress with a big warm hand, and through Lenore’s body from the hand went heat.

“Lenore,” he said quietly, “R.V. sat there in that plane, with his little feet dangling and all, sweating like a freaking pig”—he put his hand through his hair—“and just flat out told me you were his, and said I had to promise not to even try to take you away from him.” He looked down at her. “I just thought you should know that.”

Lenore took Lang’s hand from her sleeve and held it while her eyes dried. She could smell herself.

“Like you were his car, or a TV,” Lang was saying, shaking his head. “He wanted me to promise to like respect his ownership of you, or some such.”

His arm brought Lenore into his chest again. She felt something pressing against her stomach, and didn’t even think what it was until later.

“How does he think something like that’s going to make us feel?” Lang was saying into her hair. “Where’s what’s fair in that?”

/h/

“Just sorry, is all.”

“….”

“If such is appropriate.”

“….”

“Which I rather think it is.”

“Ricky that’s silly, don’t be sorry. There’s no need to be sorry.”

“….”

“The situation, the way it turns out we are, sorry doesn’t enter into it at all.”

“As it were.”

“What?”

“….”

“You’re probably just all tense and worried, Rick. Being tense and worried is world-famous for doing this.”

“Look, even if I weren’t tense and worried, you wouldn’t have been able to tell. Is that not clear?”

“You’re probably just tense and worried about your fiancée being in the arms of my husband right now. God knows I’m not exactly thrilled myself.”

“Not after tomorrow I’m not upset. Tomorrow is the end.”

“End of what?”

“Tomorrow Lenore and I are going to melt into the blackness, united in discipline and negation.”

“Discipline?”

“…..”

“Negation?”

“All so to speak.”

“You’re just going to go out and buy admission tickets to Andy’s desert and look for Lenore’s grandmother climbing some dune. I know all about what you’re supposed to do tomorrow.”

“Why on earth does Lenore tell you things like this?”

“….”

“Lenore never tells me anything, really.”

“Rick, I don’t know how long I’ll be around, I mean I’m pretty sure I’ll have to go to Atlanta at some point in time, if you know what I mean, but while I’m here I think you’ll find I can do all kinds of things she can’t. Or won’t.”

“I think it is always can’t. It now occurs to me that there has probably never been a bona fide won’t.”

“You know Andy’s had your ex-wife, too, don’t you? I’m almost positive. I’ve seen him coming out of your house.”

“She is a good person, it occurs to me.”

“Who?”

“Do you think of yourself as a good person, Mindy? When you think of yourself, do you think of yourself as good?”

“Well of course, silly. Where are you if you don’t think of yourself as good?”

“….”

“Then you can’t even like yourself, and then where are you?” “….”

“This is the Christian Broadcasting Network. Stay tuned for the Reverend Hart Lee Sykes, please.”

“What about my son?”

“What?”

“Vance, my son.”

“I think Andy’s pretty much left Vance alone. I don’t think you have to worry about Vance.”

“I mean have you seen him. Does he come home, ever. Do you see him around the neighborhood.”

“Remember when Vance would be out kicking footballs all day long? Honestly, I never could see how anybody could just kick a ball for hours and hours, over and over. And remember Daddy would spend the whole time looking out the window, making sure the ball never hit our lawn, and if it did he’d run out with a screwdriver and let all the air out of the ball?”

“….”

“I haven’t seen Vance for years, Rick. I don’t think I’ve seen Vance since I got out of school. Where is he now?”

“He’s in the city. He’s at Fordham. At least I certainly pay tuition to Fordham. ”

“I haven’t seen him.”

“Nor have I.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Certainly not your fault.”

“….”

“….”

“Look, you can take it off, you know.”

“Excuse me?”

“Your beret. You can take it off, you know. I like a spot. Daddy has a simply humongous spot, now.”

“Great.”

“Anyway, don’t be sorry, is what I want to say.”

“Thank you, Mindy.”

“But roll over.”

“What?”

“You heard me. I think I can help you out if you’ll roll over.”

“What?”

“Trust me.”

“What are you doing?”

“This is… going to hurt me more than it hurts you. Is that what I should say, Rick?”

“Good Lord. What on earth have you been told?”

“Daddy used to say I knew… everything from the… beginning… of time. A… witch in a tartan skirt, is… what he said.”

“Jesus.”

/i/

“Now this is definitely cuddling,” Lenore said. “Am I right? I think I know cuddling when I see it, and this is it.”

Lang laughed.

Lenore and Wang-Dang Lang were on Lang’s bed, on their sides, facing each other, amid shirts and socks in their plastic wrappers. Lenore had on her bra and panties and socks; Lang had on just his chinos and belt. Lenore’s legs were together, and Lang had one of his legs thrown over her hip. Lang was looking at Lenore’s breasts, in her bra. Being on her side was pressing them together, and they were pushing partway over the bra, which Lang obviously liked. He looked at Lenore, and touched her. He rubbed the back of her neck for her. And from time to time he would trace lines on her body with his finger. He would trace a line down the center of her lips, her chin, her throat, and down the line where her breasts pressed together, and over the bottom of the bra, and onto her stomach, where his hand would spread out and cover her, making Lenore need to blink, every time. He would also shift a bit and trace the line where her legs pressed together, from the bottom of her panties to the tops of her knees. He would press his finger deep into the line between her legs, and Lenore knew her legs felt soft and hot to him, from being pressed together. Lang had an erection in his slacks, Lenore could tell.

As for doing anything much more than they were doing, though, Lenore had said she needed time to think it over carefully, and to think about absolutely everything having to do with Rick, before anything like that could even be possible.

“I couldn’t have intercourse with you without coming to an understanding with Rick first,” she’d said. “Not the way things are now. I have to talk with him. That’s just the way I feel.”

Lang had traced a line. “I don’t think I agree that we owe R.V. anything, but I’ll respect your decision for now.”

“Thank you.”

Lang laughed. “You’re welcome.” He was very smooth: Lenore ran her hand over his arm and part of his back. It was really smooth. His chest had a fine covering of yellow hairs that were hard to see in the bright line of the overhead fixture. There was more hair on his stomach, in a line.

“And you shouldn’t say ‘intercourse.’ You should say something else. ‘Intercourse’ sounds like you saw it in a manual.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Well don’t be sorry,” Lang laughed, touching Lenore’s lip with his lip. “I was just making a point is all. Intercourse is what people have when they’re married, and about maybe sixty, and they’ve been married for years, and have kids and all.”

“What would we be having, then, do you think?”

“Something very much else, believe you me. You just trust me and you’ll see.”

Lenore had been tracing a line of her own, from the point on Lang’s forehead where his eyebrows almost met, down his nose and into the furrow of his upper lip. When she got to his lip she stopped and looked at him and took her hand away.

“Hey,” she said. “What happened to the way you talk all of a sudden? Why aren’t you talking the way you usually do? Why aren’t you saying stuff like, ‘Well strap me to the hind end of a sow and sell me to Oscar Mayer’?”

Lang laughed at Lenore’s imitation of his voice. He ran his hand over the flank of her hip and smiled. “I guess I don’t know,” he said softly. “I guess I just don’t feel like it about now. I guess maybe we all talk differently with different people. The good old boy stuff is what I grew up on, and then at school I was from Texas and so everybody expected this sort of talking, and so it kind of became my thing, at school. At school you more or less got to have a thing.”

“So I hear.”

“Without a thing there, believe me, you’re nothing,” Lang said. His finger was in the hot part of her legs again.

“What about Biff Diggerence?” Lenore said. “What was his thing? No, let me guess: I’ll bet his thing was burping.” She made a face.

Lang took his hand out of her legs to scratch along his jaw. “That’s kind of a tender subject, Lenore,” he said. “Old Biff got screwed up at school. School messed him up. He got weird.”

“What’s he doing now?”

“I do not know. I think he’s back in Pennsylvania or wherever. He got real screwed up, at school.”

“Screwed up how? Did he maybe get tetanus from making people sign his bottom, or what?”

“Now that’s not very kind, Lenore,” Lang said. He sat up and bent to get his glass of warm wine by the bed. Lenore looked at his back while he drank. “He just got real screwed up,” he said. “Basically he just started stayin’ in his room all the time. And I mean all the time. Never seein’ anybody, never talkin’ to anybody. Just locked up in his room, with the door locked.”

“Well that doesn’t sound all that awful,” Lenore said. “Lots of people keep to themselves. Lots of people stay in their rooms a lot. I stayed in my room a lot at school.”

Lang turned around to her and shook his head. “Yeah,” he said. “But when it gets to the point where you’re like pissin’ in empty beer cans so you don’t have to go out of your room to the bathroom just down the damn hall, then that’s gettin’ to be bad news, in my opinion.”

“No argument on this end.”

“He got creepy. He got weird.”

“Maybe he pounded too many walls with his head.”

Lang grinned down at Lenore. “Except what you don’t know is he started a real tradition with that. Everybody started doin’ it. He got to be a sort of legend, by our senior year. I don’t think folks even knew he was the one who stayed up in his room all the time. I think they thought he was somebody else.”

Lenore thought of big Biff Diggerence, all alone in a room. Moving around from time to time. Going to the bathroom in beer cans. She remembered his bottom, and his playing with Sue Shaw’s hair while she cried.

“He didn’t marry Sue Shaw, did he?”

“That girl?” Lang said. “Good Lord no. Least I don’t think so. Unless you know something I don’t.”

Later they had switched. Lang lay where Lenore had been and she moved over into his spot. Lang had shoved his duffel bag under the bed and had put the shirts and socks in a drawer that still had some of Misty Schwartz’s clothes in it. The big television was now on, with the volume low. Out of the comer of her eye, Lenore could see enormous heads on the screen, flashing back and forth, talking about the news. There were shots of gymnastics, but Lenore didn’t really watch.

Lang told Lenore that he had been unhappy. He told her that he had felt trapped and constricted and claustrophobic for quite a while now. That he had been an accountant lately and hated it with a righteous fire. About his wife’s voice being all around him. Lenore told Lang a little bit more about LaVache, and about Clarice and Alvin Spaniard and their troubles, and family theater.

Lang told Lenore that what he really wanted to do, he was pretty sure, was to go back to work for Industrial Desert Design, Dallas. He told her about the Great Ohio Desert, and about Neil Obstat, Jr., and Ed Roy Yancey, Jr., and about the Corfu Desert. He told her what had happened was that his father had said that if Andy married a Jewish lady, he wouldn’t let him into the company. His father had been dumb and stubborn, and so had Lang, and so Lang had been an accountant for the past few years.

“And it wasn’t even like she was really Jewish, even,” Lang said. “She never goes to church. And God knows her Daddy don’t go to any Jewish churches. Her Daddy’s this insane pantheist fucker who worships his lawn.” Lang told Lenore some items of interest concerning Rex Metalman, and his lawn, and Scarsdale, and Rick’s ex-wife, Veronica. Then he kissed her for a long time.

They probably kissed for about five solid minutes. Lang was an unbelievably gentle kisser. Lenore wouldn’t have believed it. Rick’s kisses had always been really intense. Rick had said they mirrored and were informed by the intensity of his passion and commitment toward her.

While Lang traced lines everywhere with his finger, Lenore told him about her brother in Chicago, about a strange dream she’d had last night in which she dreamed that her mother dreamed where her brother was, and the dream made him be in that place, someplace with bright lights and people you could just tell were kind.

Lang said he felt really strongly that everything was going to be all right. He felt John was going to be OK, and he now knew for sure, personally speaking, that he was going to get a divorce from Mindy. Then he told Lenore a story about his own brother, his half-brother, who had been much older than he, his father’s son by his first marriage, and about how this brother had unfortunately been killed in the conflict in Vietnam, in the Marines.

What had happened was that Lang’s brother had been trained, along with all the other Marines at a certain training fort in Virginia, to throw grenades into enemy buildings and then wait just out by the door while the grenade exploded inside and put everybody out of commission, and then to come in and finish people off. And how, in Vietnam, Lang’s brother had been fresh off the plane, and had tried to pull the grenade maneuver on a hut in a small village, apparently an enemy hut of some kind, but anyway that the walls of the hut had, not surprisingly, been made of grass and straw and dried water-buffalo droppings, and so the grenade’s explosion not surprisingly tore right through the soft wall of the hut, and killed Lang’s brother where he stood, waiting to finish people off. Lang said he had hardly known his brother at all. He said that the Marines had revised the fort’s training after a lot of other Marines educated in Virginia had died this way. This was apparently early in the Vietnam conflict.

Lenore told Lang about the situation involving Lenore Beadsman, her great-grandmother. It turned out that Lang knew a lot already, from Neil Obstat, Jr.

“He’s got your picture in his wallet, you know,” Lang said. “Neil does.”

“I’ve always found him a little on the creepy side,” said Lenore. “He used to follow me around in school, when we went to school together, but never say anything.” At this point Lang kissed the part of Lenore’s throat right under her chin, and Lenore held his head there with her hand. “I didn’t like him because I thought his head looked like a skull, I’m afraid. I know that’s really shallow.” She massaged the back of Lang’s head while he kissed her throat. “And one time some bigger kids hung him from a hook by his underpants in P.E., and I saw him there, and I remember I felt like I was seeing somebody dead, because his head was all skully, and his eyes were closed, and we could see pretty much his whole bottom. ”

Lang said that in reality Neil Obstat wasn’t a bad guy at all. He said that he and Neil were thinking about taking the day off tomorrow, seeing how it was Saturday, and going off somewhere. He said Lenore was more than welcome to come along, that he’d keep Obstat from being at all creepy. Lenore laughed. Then she told Lang that she was supposed to go out to the Great Ohio Desert with Rick Vigorous tomorrow, that they had made the plans already, and that the plans were pretty unchangeable. Lang was not too pleased.

“It’s just that about a million people seem to think Lenore’s out there,” Lenore said. “As they keep making incredibly clear.” Here Lang tried gently to lift her knee up with his hand, but stopped when she resisted.

“Also Rick really wants to go for some reason,” Lenore said. “Today he was completely unsubtle about it. He almost yelled. And my brother, my father, Mr. Bloemker at the nursing home… everybody looks to be made weirdly happy if I just go out and look for Lenore on a dune for a day.” She had put her hand on Lang’s cheek. “I’m too tired and pissed off to argue with them anymore,” she said. “And I guess now I need the chance to talk things over with Rick.”

“Please just don’t be too hard on him, Lenore,” Lang said. He ran his thumb all the way along Lenore’s leg, making her blink again.

Lang said he sensed everything was going to be all right with respect to Lenore’s great-grandmother, too. He said he just felt it. But he said he didn’t think Lenore should go to the G.O.D.

“Nobody ever finds anybody in a place like that,” he said. “People don’t go to a place like that to look for other people. That’s the opposite of the whole concept that’s behind the thing.”

“I think I ought to grab the opportunity to talk to Rick in private, though, anyway,” Lenore said.

“Uh-huh,” Lang said.

Faint music was coming from the television screen now. Heads kept replacing one another on the screen. Lang had a finger just under the elastic band of Lenore’s panties, on her hip. Lang said the curve of Lenore’s particular hip drove him right straight wild. He kissed her throat again.

Lang said grandmothers made him awfully sad. He said grandmothers were in his opinion basically sad things, especially the really old ones, who had all kinds of sad troubles. He told Lenore he remembered his father’s mother in a nursing home in Texas in the 1960s. He said his grandfather had died and his father and mother had taken the grandmother in, for a time, but that things just hadn’t worked out, even with a sort of nurse hired to come in during the day to look after the grandmother, and that Lang’s father and grandmother had sat down and had a talk and Lang’s father had told her she was going to get moved to a nursing home.

“She was just real decrepit, I remember,” Lang said. “I remember she didn’t move good at all, and her eyes they got milkier and milkier as time went by. She didn’t kick up at the idea of going to the nursing home. I remember she nodded when my Daddy told her. You could tell she knew things just weren’t working out.

“And the thing was we’d visit her in that nursing home every Saturday,” Lang said. “We made it like a routine. My Daddy tried real hard to be a good son. And the place wasn’t but over in Fort Worth, so we’d all just pile in the car and go see her. Always my Daddy, goddamn near always me. Sometimes my mother and my brother. We’d pile in, and drive over, and we’d come through this gate of the place and have to go up this long, real windy gravel road to the place. This was a real nice place, too. It was real expensive. I can’t say anything against the care she must of got.”

Lenore nodded, and Lang touched her lip.

“So we’d just wind on up that road, and I remember how it always looked all sinister up at the actual home itself, which was at the top of a kind of hill, ‘cause my Daddy always had tinted glass in his cars, so when I’d look up at the place through the windshield I’d see all this shit through tinted glass, and it’d look dark as hell, and like it was going to rain and storm and all. It always looked weird,” Lang said. “And we could always see her, as we were coming up that road, ’cause she was always waiting for us on the porch of the place, every time. Place had a real nice porch, raised up. We’d see her as we drove up, see her from far away, ‘cause she had this bright-white hair you could see for miles, and a wheelchair. But and anyway she’d be out there, and we’d come up and pile out, and up we’d go to visit. She was always real glad to see us. It was good to see her, too, but also of course kind of an obligation, you couldn’t deny the fact. I remember I bitched about it, some Saturdays. Had other shit to do. I was like eight.” Lang took his hand off Lenore’s hip and brushed it softly back and forth over her breasts. “But you know we’d visit and all, and she’d fill us in on what she was doing. Which didn’t take much time, ’cause I remember what she was always doing was just making pot holders, for my mother. She made about one pot holder a month, was all. Her hands always moved like it was real cold.”

Lang cleared his throat. “But then after some time went on like that, on one particular Saturday we didn’t go. We couldn’t go that time. My Daddy had some emergency, I had shit to do, so on. So we didn’t go that Saturday. And the next day I remember we couldn’t go that day either. There was just no two ways about it. But Monday we did go, to make up the visit, like surprise her with a visit, to make it up, which seemed fair and all. We all went ahead and piled in that Monday after I got off school. We went, and as we pull up that long drive up the hill we’re confused, ‘cause we can see her, hair all white and wheelchair shining, there on the porch, with everything looking all dark and nasty around her in the tinted glass. And my Daddy goes ’What the hell?‘ ’cause here it was Monday, not Saturday. And it was cool out, you know. It was like November, and things could get cool. But and so she’s sitting there anyway on the porch, in her chair, in blankets, so on.

“And we get up there and get out of the car and go on up to the porch, and she’s glad as hell to see us, like I said her eyes were milky but the milk seemed like it went out of them when she was real happy. She was clapping her hands real slow and soft, and smiling, and trying to hurry to pull pot holders and shit out of the blankets in her lap to show my mother, and grabbing at us and all, and my Daddy says something like ‘Momma it’s Monday, it’s not Saturday, we couldn’t come Saturday so we come today instead to be fair, now you tell me how’d you know to be out here waiting for us today, we didn’t tell anybody we was coming,’ so on. And she looks at my Daddy I remember like she don’t understand, for a time, and then she smiles, real nice, and shrugs, and looks around at us and says well she waits for us every day. Then she nods. Every day, see. She says it like she thought we knew how she waited for us to maybe visit every goddamned day.”

Lenore watched Lang.

“Turned out she didn’t know Saturday from Adam anymore,” Lang said. “She didn’t know we had this shit down to a routine.” He looked out past Lenore. “Or else maybe she did know, but she waited anyway, thinkin’ maybe she’d get lucky and we’d want to see her even on some day when we didn’t have to. Even when it got real cool out on the porch of the place she’d wait, it turned out. She just kept looking at my Daddy like she didn’t see what the problem was, this was just her life, now, here, didn’t we know it? While all the while we just stood around feeling terrible. I remember I felt like shit after that. I was big-time sad.” Lang rubbed at an eye. “She died after that, too, ‘fore I got much older.”

Lenore watched Lang rub one eye. She thought about his grandmother. Lang stopped rubbing his eye and looked at her. Lenore found her throat aching again. She began to cry, just a little bit.

“Now I didn’t mean to make you sad,” Lang said. He smiled kindly. “That’s my sad, it’s not your sad.”

He began kissing at Lenore’s eyes, to get the tears. He did it so gently that Lenore put her arms around his neck. After a minute Lang rolled her toward him and began with one hand to try to unhook the fastener on her bra. Lenore let him, and kept her arms around his neck. Lang played with Lenore’s breasts while she cried and held onto him and thought of a sky in Texas, in November, through tinted glass.

18. 1990

/a/

“Good morning, Patrice.”

“Good morning. How are you this morning?”

“I’m just fine thank you. The nurse tells me you have something for me. ”

“Yes.”

“Can I ask what it is?” “Three men go camping in the woods. One of the men starts out doing all the cooking, but the three men make an arrangement where, if either of the other two complain about the man’s cooking, the complainer will automatically take over the cooking.”

“I’m not sure I understand, Patrice.”

“The cook cooks and cooks, and the other two campers smile and say it’s very good, and they all continue to camp. And by and by the cook gets tired of cooking, and wishes someone would complain and so have to take over for him, but there are still no complaints. So the cook begins overcooking things on purpose, or burning them, or hardly cooking them and having them be raw. But the other two campers still eat it all and manage to smile. Soon the cook begins putting soap in the coffee, sprinkling dirt on everything he cooks, but still the other two go out of their way not to complain.”

“Is this a joke? This is a joke, Patrice, I can tell.”

“So finally the cook gets angry, he’s so very tired of cooking, and he goes deep into the woods and finds a pile of moose droppings, and he takes them back to camp and roasts them, and serves them for dinner, along with soapy coffee. And the other two campers dig in, and the cook smiles at them expectantly, and they’re eating very slowly, and also looking at each other, with faces. Finally one of them puts down his fork and says to the cook, ‘Hey, Joe, I’m afraid I’ve got to tell you that these things taste like moose droppings. Good, though.’”

“Ha-ha.”

“Ha-ha.”

“Patrice, that was splendid, that joke. Where did you hear that? Did you make that joke up?”

“My son told it to me.”

“Well isn’t that just good, Patrice.”

“Yes.”

“When exactly did he tell that joke to you?”

“I think a joke like that ought to be worth some breathing, don’t you?”

“I certainly do.”

“I sure think so.”

/b/

11 September

The End Is a Night Fire.

It is another May night, because May never ever ends. Here is a street that should be dark. In a gust of light the cement of the street can be seen to be new and rough. Some of the homes do not yet have lawns. All the trees are young and thin and supported by networks of ropes and stakes. They flicker and whip in the wind of light.

The wind is a wind of hot sparks. The sparks rise and whirl and die in the shrouds of light they make. At the end of the street sighs a burning home. The home looks the same as every other home on the street. It is on fire. Fire comes out of every opening in the home and rises. As the fire makes more openings in the home and rises from them, the home sighs and settles. The heat of the fire makes the fence in the lawn glow red, and the fence cooks the lawn around it.

The home begins to fold into its fire. Fire comes out of all the openings. It sounds like paper crinkling. It tightens the skin of your face. The fire cannot be controlled, and the home draws in all the air on the street and with a sigh folds down into itself. It takes farever. Everything falls into itself, slow as feathers.

Out the door of the home flies a bird with its tailfeathers on fire. It rises into the sky in circles. It spirals up and up into the sky until its light melts into a sparkle of stars. Down to the lawn floats a corkscrew pattern of burnt feathers.

Feet run over the lawn, through the flaming feathers. Fieldbinder and Evelyn Slotnik, hand in hand, run into the night, their hair on fire. In the light of their own hair they are wind. They make glowing cuts in the black square blocks of the suburbs as they run the tiny miles to the Slotniks’ pool. Fences blush and fall away. An airplane is flying low overhead. The passengers look down and see it all. They see one shining pond of fire soaking out into the lawns and making shrouds of needled light that float up toward them, disappear when they touch. They see two surprised points of orange fire moving too fast through black backyards and waffled fences, making for a kidney of clean new blue water that lies ahead in a line lit up from below. It is captured forever on quality film.

/c/

One of the oars fell into the water and Neil Obstat, Jr., lunged for it, knocking over his can of beer so that beer fizzed on his pantleg. He struggled to get the heavy oar back in its lock.

“God damn it,” he said.

“Just keep the fucker still, Neil,” said Wang-Dang Lang.

“Shit,” said Obstat. Some people trying to fish over in the next rowboat were mad at the commotion and were giving Obstat the finger.

Lang was in the bow of the boat he and Obstat had rented at the Great Ohio Desert Fish License and Boat Rental Center for what Lang thought was a truly criminal amount of money.

“This whole thing’s just gettin’ too goddamn commercialized,” he’d said to Obstat. Obstat had shrugged and hefted the beer.

Lang had some binoculars through which he was watching Lenore Beadsman and Rick Vigorous wandering along the lake’s edge through one of the really blasted and forbidding parts of the Desert. Despite the weekend crowds, Lenore was easy to see in her bright white dress, and of course there was too the matter of Rick Vigorous’s beret. Lang and Obstat were way out in the lake. Obstat was supposed to be rowing the boat so that they stayed just even with Lenore and Rick.

“What do you see?” Obstat had asked from the oars.

When Rick and Lenore were turned the right way, Lang could see their faces, but he couldn’t yet make out what they were saying. They weren’t talking much. Lenore was moving pretty easily through the deep sand, but Lang could see Rick Vigorous having trouble and sometimes needing to trot to keep up. Lenore kept making him look at his watch, as if time were an issue. It was still only mid-morning, but it was hot for September. Crowds wove in and out around Lenore and Rick. Someone on the rim was hawking black tee-shirts in a voice Lang could hear clear out on the water.

Lang held the binoculars in one hand. His other hand hurt like hell today, from twirling his car keys on his injured finger last night. He thought his bird-bite might be getting infected.

“Fucking bird,” he said.

Obstat was grunting at the oars. He kept clunking them against the sides of the boat. Lang and Obstat were positively mowing over people’s fishing lines, and the people in the other boats were getting really pissed off, but Lang told Obstat not to pay them any mind.

“Just remember I get a gander or two at those unearthly legs, climbing dunes,” Obstat gasped as he pulled.

“They’ll start sayin’ important shit any minute now,” Lang said.

/d/

“I absolutely insist that you invite me to relate a story.”

“My shoes are full of this goddamned sand.”

“Lenore…”

“Hey! Watch where you’re going for Christ’s sake!”

“Dear. Excuse us, please.”

“For crying out loud.”

“Terribly sorry.”

“Hell of a place for a picnic.”

“If you want my opinion, Lenore, they should either obliterate this place or enlarge it. The touristiness of the whole thing is negating whatever marginal attractions this place had to offer.”

“People aren’t smelling too terrific in this sun, either, I notice.”

“Forget smells. You’re here to concentrate on potential grandmother-signs.”

“What kind of signs, Rick? I should look for Lenore neither climbing up nor sliding down a dune, all because of a game my brother made up when he was flapped? This has got to be a waste of time. I don’t understand your obsession with this. With getting me out here today.”

“Apparently Lang and his anus-eyed Sancho Panza are about, too. Lurking, et cetera.”

“How do you know where Andy and Obstat are supposed to be?”

“I know what I know.”

“Look, Rick, speaking of knowing, I think we maybe ought to just talk, right here, at some length.”

“I implore you first to implore me for a story.”

“What’s with this story stuff?”

“….”

“Look, you might have forgotten I have to read the things now. They’re work now. When I’m not working, I’d rather not do a work-related thing.”

“You won’t be called on to evaluate, merely to enjoy. To be caught up, engaged, and entertained. You should find this entertaining and engaging.”

“Rick, the thing is we really need to talk. You’re dealing with an upset person, here. We really need to have a long talk.”

“I’m almost convinced the issues here can be treated and perhaps even resolved in the context of the story I have in mind.”

“I really doubt it.”

“Just keep your eyes peeled for things covertly elderly, and I’ll take it from here.”

“So you’re deciding how the talk I want to have is going to be. That’s just super.”

“This story concerns a man who is presented as the most phenomenally successful theoretical dentist of the twentieth century.”

“Theoretical dentist?”

“A scientist specializing in dental theory and in high-level abstract reasoning from empirical cases involving anything at all dental.”

“Wonderful.”

“Do you recall that sweetener that was positively omnipresent for a while? SupraSweet? The one that was abruptly yanked from the supermarket shelves when they discovered that it made certain women give birth to children with antennae, and fangs like vampires?”

“Do I ever.”

“Here the theoretical dentist in question is presented as the man who cracked the antennae-and-fang problem, working as it were from the dental end and tracing matters back to the ubiquitous and malignant sweetener.”

“Jesus, Rick, look at this crowd. How are we supposed to get through all this?”

“They’re just waiting for the shuttle to the interior wastes. It’ll be here soon — see the dust cloud? Perhaps we might just wait over here, under this statue, in this bit of shade…”

“I remember this statue all right. I can’t stand this statue. It’s like Zusatz was trying to set himself up as god of the Desert or something. Sheesh.”

“So the man in question is a theoretical dentist of consummate skill.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And in his spare time he is also a thoroughly competent and experienced Scoutmaster.

“….”

“For the Boy Scouts of America.”

“Got it.”

“Having been himself in his youth a phenomenal Scout: a Ten derfoot at nine, a First Class Scout at eleven, a Star, Life, then finally an Eagle Scout at the amazing age of fourteen. Amazing for his era, anyhow. We may note for example that before my son, Vance, quit the Scouts he had been a Life Scout, the penultimate kind of Scout, at the age of twelve.”

“How nice for him.”

“But the point is that the theoretical dentist had been an exemplary Scout, and one so committed to Scouting in general that when he exited the Scouts because of his age he turned right around and became a Scoutmaster, while still training in theoretical dentistry. This was twenty years ago, fixing the dentist’s present age somewhere in his forties.”

“….”

“And one summer day the dentist is leading his troop of Scouts through some orientation and compass exercises in the dense and desolate interior regions of the coniferous forests that as you may or may not know cover vast portions of the state of Indiana. The whole story takes place in Indiana.”

“….”

“And the dentist is effortlessly leading the Scouts through the forest, preparing them for woodsman merit-badge tests, and now in the densest and most desolate interior section the dentist and his Scouts come on an exhausted and haggard-looking man, dressed exclusively in flannel, with many days’ growth of beard, and bright-red eyes, and white pine-pitch residue smeared around his mouth, who right away moans and faints in the arms of a Star Scout; and with him is an also haggard-looking but still achingly lovely woman, with her dress in a noticeable state of disarray, who immediately falls weeping on the neck of the theoretical dentist, crying that she has been saved. The woman tells the dentist that she and her unconscious companion, who is also it turns out her psychologist, had been lost in the desolate interior coniferous region for days, that the psychologist’s magnetic clipboard-and-pen set had ruined their compass, and that they had been wandering for days, losing hope steadily, sustaining themselves only by eating the truly nauseating white remains of the pine pitch that crusted the bark of the trees all around. The woman tells the dentist all this as they stare deeply into each other’s eyes, and as all around them the badge-happy Scouts are running here and there, positively radiating Competence In The Wild, raising and striking tents, building elaborate multi-tiered fires, detoxifying water with Halazone pellets, and administering to the still swooned psychologist every form of first aid you could possibly imagine. And now, if I may import a bit of context to save time, it is made clear that the woman and the psychologist have been out in the Indiana forests for ostensibly therapeutic reasons, that the woman suffers from a nearly debilitating neurosis under the rules of which she needs constant and prodigious sexual attention and activity, in order to stave off feelings of raving paranoia and loss of three-dimensionality.”

“Let’s go. Here’s the bus. The crowd’s mostly getting on. Let’s get out of this shadow.”

“Did you get all that?”

“Dentist, Scoutmaster, merit badge, rescue, woman with dimension problems. Check. But I’d really rather be talking, Rick.”

“Listen, Lenore, shall we get on the bus? Just on a lark? What do you say?”

“Are you kidding? Do you know what the crowds’ll be like in the interior? It’s Saturday, you might have forgotten. Let’s just stay along the good old lake, here.”

“Why this fixation on the proximity of the lake?”

“….”

“At any rate, we are informed that the now still unconscious psychologist had in therapy sessions professed to see the achingly lovely woman’s psychological troubles as stemming from the con-, tinual sexual advances and erotic situations that necessarily confront the woman as she goes about her life in the collective societal environment of Indianapolis, where she lives, so that the problem is conceived of as, a, due to the constant erotic battering at the woman’s sexual identity from without by other members of Indianapolis’s society, which societal unit the psychologist clearly loathes, but and b, due to the woman’s own failure to develop a sufficiently strong sense of self and interior worth to allow her to be discriminating about which of the constant stream of advances to respond to and allow to have any bearing whatsoever on said interior self and sense of worth.”

“My nose is going to get sunburned. I can feel the sunburn starting.”

“I suppose you want me to ask about the gymnastics. I read a rather cutting review in the Dealer.”

“Look, if you want to talk, like as in have a conversation, good, because we really need to. Let’s just hunker right down here in the sand and—”

“No, no, wait. Not yet. We’re still dangling.”

“Beg pardon?”

“To return, the context gives us to understand that the psychologist is actually at best warped and at worst simply evil, and that though he had lured the achingly lovely but troubled woman out deep into the coniferous interior Indiana wastes ostensibly to rap, one on one, about her sense of self and the strength thereof, ostensibly away from all the disturbing exterior erotic assaults the woman suffers in collective society, actually the psychologist really just wanted to seduce the poor woman, which seduction is immediately attempted, in a positively oafish way, the minute the two have hiked out of earshot of civilization, and but which seduction, however oafish, the poor insecure ambiguously dimensional woman is in no shape to resist, and thus the better part of two days were spent by the psychologist and the woman rutting like crazed weasels on the bed of soft pine needles that covers the coniferous wastes, and actually it was in the throes of one such rutting-session that the psychologist’s magnetic clipboard came into contact with and potentially disastrously damaged the woman’s compass, which was the hikers’ only means of orientation.”

“….”

“The disaster being only potential, of course, because of the timely intervention, after a tense, pine-pitch-eating week or so, of the theoretical dentist and his troop of Scouts, which intervention and rescue prompts a gush of narrative and explanation and context from the woman, who clearly flips for the dentist at first sight, even though he has a slight hair-loss problem, but anyway the gushing and flipping, not to mention the initial aching loveliness, prompts a reciprocal rush of emotion in the dentist, who is a widower; and so in a dubious but not entirely inappropriate passage we are informed that a certain nascent love-plant sends up a fragile and vulnerable green shoot or two through the desolate coniferous soil between the woman and the dentist, while, all about them and the love-shoot, Scouts mill, and accomplish difficult merit-badge-related tasks, and chart elaborate retum-courses that involve steering by the lights of esoteric nebulae, and propose to drag the very worse-for-wear psychologist back to civilization on a gumey sled of branches and pitch and woven pine needles.”

“Rick, is this supposed to be a sign?”

“Just wait for the climax.”

“No, Rick, here. See? Footprints, but around every print four holes, like from an old person’s walker sinking in the sand. Is this supposed to be somebody walking, with a walker?”

“I think not. I think this person here was simply steering a course through a field of sun umbrellas. This place is after all positively littered with sun umbrellas. These holes don’t work for me as walker tracks. Besides, we’re duneless, here, you might have noticed.”

“I guess you’re right….”

“Anyway, to make something long attractively shorter, the theoretical dentist and the achingly lovely woman get married. They fall madly, uncontrollably in love, and decide to unite forever, and the woman tells the dentist about her whole neurosis-set, and the dentist is incredibly compassionate, and says he doesn’t care, and he goes and has a long talk with the eventually physically recovered psychologist, and forgives him for taking advantage of a completely helpless patient, and purely out of compassion and goodness asks him to be the best man at the impending wedding, the wedding is impending, and the psychologist is understandably relieved at the dentist’s discretion, but he’s also still wildly infatuated with the achingly lovely woman, and so even during the wedding — which is attended by, among others, the dentist’s brother, the woman’s whole huge Indianapolis clan, and by everyone who’s anyone in the field of theoretical dentistry — the psychologist is covertly smirking and chuckling and checking out the woman’s body under her wedding dress.”

“I’m tired.”

“Which checking out is at this point futile, though, because although the woman still has the pathological need for sexual attention and activity in order to stave off violent neurotic upheavals, said need is let’s just say being more than adequately fulfilled by the theoretical dentist, in whom the lovely woman has reawakened a surge of passion and an urge for intimacy the dentist has not felt since his youth, when he was fresh out of the Scouts. And here a long section is devoted to graphic descriptions of the implications of all these reawakened surges and fulfilled needs, some of the most vivid of which involve certain dental apparati being put to uses which — although emotionally innocent, and so of course ultimately OK — are far in excess of the average dentist’s wildest fantasies. If you get my drift.”

“Maybe the drift should be sped up. I really want to talk to you.”

“I sense that, Lenore, believe me. Let’s do it within the context provided.”

“So at least get on with it, then.”

“And so the theoretical dentist and the achingly lovely woman are married, and truly staggering levels of intimacy are being attained, and neither partner rejects anything the other wants to do as undesirable or sick, and the woman is unbelievably happy, because she is wildly in love with this admittedly older but still very impressive theoretical dentist, and because her pathological needs are being satisfied within an emotionally and socially acceptable framework. And the theoretical dentist is unbelievably happy, too, because of his fierce and complete love for the achingly lovely woman, and because satisfying her prodigious needs is not exactly torture for him, either. So things are simply wonderful.”

“….”

“Until, that is, the theoretical dentist is the victim of a hideous auto accident, in which he was not at fault, and is catastrophically injured, being as a result of the accident now deaf, dumb, blind, and nearly completely paralyzed and insensate, again through absolutely no fault of his own.”

“Another one of these real happy stories, I see.”

“And now the theoretical dentist lies in the hospital bed that will be his home for the rest of his life, and the lovely woman is of course frantic with grief and love for her husband, and the dentist is lying there, in complete blackness, numb blackness, paralyzed, almost wholly insensate. But not, and now I repeat not, entirely incommunicado.”

“You can tell my socks are going to be all black and nasty from this rotten sand, Rick. This is that cheap kind of sand. Shit on fire.”

“Yes, not incommunicado, as I’m sure you see would be a very significant and precious thing for someone otherwise plunged completely into numb silent blackness. Not incommunicado because exactly one area of the dentist’s devastated body actually retains some feeling and power of movement, namely the central portion of his upper lip. And also because the dentist, having been as we know a consummate Scout, knew and knows Morse code, inside and out.”

“Morse code? Lips?”

“Communications to the dentist are effected simply by tapping the relevant message out in Morse code on the dentist’s upper lip. Messages from the dentist are possible provided that one is willing patiently to tap each letter of the Morse code alphabet onto the lip and wait for a signal from the dentist — a heart-tweakingly feeble and tiny movement of the upper lip — when the right letter has been reached. Needless to say, communications from the shattered dentist are incredibly slow and difficult to receive.”

“….”

“But see that communications to the dentist are comparatively easy. And now the Midwestern theoretical dentistry community, out of sheer respect for the broken and insensate dentist, and a desire to get his input, however understandably slight, on certain vexing high-level dental problems, seeks to engage someone in the Indianapolis area with a working knowledge of Morse code, to tap some of the current and pertinent developments in the dentist’s professional world onto his lip. Meanwhile the achingly lovely woman has undergone an intensive course in Morse code, so that she can communicate on a personal level with the broken dentist, and she visits him every day, relating items of interest, comforting the dentist in his numb black silence, tapping onto his upper lip how very much she loves him, et cetera, and also reading fiction to him, via Morse code, because the dentist has been a fanatical fiction reader, when sighted and whole. Specifically she begins tapping onto the theoretical dentist’s lip Frank Norris’s stunning novel McTeague, which the dentist had been reading just before his hideous mishap, and which she had picked up and seen on the very first page concerned the adventures of a dentist, and which indeed, you can tell from her husband’s lip movements, he enjoys having Morse-coded onto him. ”

“But and meanwhile the psychologist, having seen the news of the hideous auto accident, and having begun to scan the journals of theoretical dentistry for further news of the brilliant dentist’s physical and professional condition, sees in said journals the appeal for an Indianapolis Morse code tapper with some dental savvy, and he immediately comes forward to volunteer his services, although in reality we’re informed that his sole exposure to Morse code had been when he sent away for a Lone Ranger decoder ring as a boy, which ring turned out to be simply a Morse code key, which the boy was to use to decode disappointingly dull ads for Ralston that were transmitted in a supposedly mysterious code at the end of every episode of ‘The Lone Ranger,’ in Indianapolis.”

“Lone Ranger rings? Ralston?”

“He also passes himself off as having a keen amateur interest in the whole theoretical dentistry scene, et cetera. Of course the psychologist’s true motive is to insinuate himself back into the arms and lap of the achingly lovely, but also as he and we can anticipate given the situation and context increasingly troubled, woman. So the psychologist appears in the dentist’s hospital room with armloads of cutting-edge-theoretical-dentistry literature, and he and the woman reestablish an acquaintance, because the woman is almost always in the room tapping McTeague onto the dentist’s lip when the psychologist arrives.”

“Here’s the curve of the lake. We’re getting near the end of the trail.”

“And the psychologist begins ostensibly tapping important cutting-edge dental theory onto the dentist’s lip, while the woman stands there at the door, her eyes shining with gratitude at the psychologist. But in reality the psychologist is simply tapping random and meaningless taps onto the lip, he doesn’t give a damn what he’s tapping, and the paralyzed, deaf-dumb-and-blind dentist gets enormously confused, there in the numb black, and he begins trying to move his upper lip, to communicate his confusion to his wife, to ask what the problem is, what’s this gobbledygook being tapped onto his lip, but the psychologist is meanwhile engaging the woman in clever conversation, and mild flirtation, and the woman has been without the erotic attention and activity she involuntarily craves so desperately for an ominously long time, now, and so she’s distracted, and beginning to be tom, but at any rate she’s distracted, and since the relevant signal-movement of the theoretical dentist’s lip is such a truly pathetically tiny movement, she doesn’t ever see it, and so the wildly disoriented and frightened paralyzed dentist continues to have gibberish tapped onto his lip for hours each day, until one day the psychologist taps and repeats one particular Morse code message that he went to the trouble especially to learn, the message being to the effect that he was going to ball the paralyzed dentist’s achingly lovely wife until she bled, that he was going to take her away from the dentist and leave the dentist all alone in his numb lonely blackness, and that there was nothing the pathetic, paralyzed, helpless dentist could do about it; he was as inefficacious as he was inadequate.”

“Jesus, Rick, what is this?”

“I promise we’ll be able to relate to it. Let’s just bear with. On receipt of this Morse code message, the dentist in his hospital bed is flung into a state of such depression and despair that he stops moving his lip, however pathetically tinily, to signal his wife, even when she taps ‘I love you’ onto the lip. And the lovely wife perceives this sudden absence of lip movement as a sign of further physical deterioration in the dentist, and so she too is thrown into despair, which despair further aggravates her emotional condition vis à vis the sex-and-dimensionality neurosis, and she begins to offer less and less resistance to the malevolent blond psychologist’s frequent and oafish sexual advances, many of them made right there in the dentist’s hospital room, while the dentist lies right there, helpless and insensate.”

“Blond? A blond psychologist?”

“Affirmative.”

“Why is this story beginning to give me the creeps?”

“It means you’re beginning really to relate. You’re being intuitive about it.”

“What does being intuitive have to do with it?”

“Here’s the end of the trail. Shall we strike off into the interior? I sense that whatever it is we’re looking for is best looked for in the interior. In the heart of the Desert, Lenore. What do you say?”

“Let’s just go back the way we came. My nose hurts. This is clearly a waste of time. At least this way I get to look at the lake.”

“Christ, the lake, again. The lake is just a bunch of people fishing for black fish. Who cares about the lake?”

“Rick, why are you sweating like this? It’s hot, but it’s not that hot. Are you OK?”

“…”

“Rick, are you all right I said.”

“Maybe just the effects of trying to relate a difficult and emotionally intricate story in the face of your complete insensitivity you bitch!”

“What?”

“I’m sorry.”

“What did you say to me?”

“Please, forget I said anything. Let’s just walk back along the lake.”

“We really need to talk, buster, and I mean now.”

“Just trust me.”

“What the hell are we even doing out here? Andy was right.”

“Have I not earned some trust?”

/e/

“I don’t like this at all,” Lang was saying. He squatted on his hams in the bow, resting his elbows on his knees and looking through the binoculars. “Not one little red bit, good buddy.”

Obstat took two Pop Tarts out of their wrapper and tossed the wrapper into the lake. “At least they’ve stopped for a second,” he said with his mouth full. “My arms are fucking numb, Wanger.”

“Something’s up,” said Lang. “The little dung beetle’s up to something.”

“What’s he doing?”

“It’s not so much what he’s doing.” Lang shifted up into a seat. “It’s the way Lenore’s looking, here.”

“How’s that dress doing in all this heat, is what I want to know,” Obstat said eagerly. “She got that little V of sweat at the chest yet? I love that little V.”

“Fuck off,” Lang said.

“Hey now Wanger, you said I could look at the legs, and the V too if there was one!”

“Stop whining goddammit Neil,” Lang said angrily. He looked at Obstat, who was looking at him as he chewed. Lang rolled his eyes. “Here, then. Just take a fast goddamn look if you have to.” He passed the binoculars over to Obstat and rubbed his face.

Obstat scanned with the glasses. Lang could see that he was getting Pop Tart filling on them. “Oh Jesus God I’m in love,” Obstat whispered. “This is it. Mommy.”

“I told you to cut that shit out about Lenore.”

“Who’s talking about Lenore? I’m talking about this totally unbelievable babe under a sun umbrella that Lenore and the little double-chinned guy just went by.”

“Just went by?” Lang sat up. “Where’re they going?”

“They just turned around, looks like. They’re going back the way they came I guess.” Obstat was still aimed at the beautiful woman, in a black swimsuit, under an umbrella.

“Turned around? The fuck. Give me those things.”

Obstat looked up from the glasses, pissed off. “Hey,” he said. “Look here. If my ass gets dragged all the way out here and then gets made to row a stupid boat so you can try to read people’s lips, and if you’re going to get all hinkey about Lenore and not let me express feelings, you can at least let me scope a little bit.”

“You little skull-head,” Lang said. He yanked the binoculars out of Obstat’s hands and scanned the black rim of the Desert. “Holy shit, they are goin’ back,” he said. Obstat munched his Pop Tart in a funk. “I don’t like this at all,” Lang was saying. He reached out and knocked the Pop Tart out of Obstat’s hand into the water.

“Hey!” Obstat said.

“Row!” yelled Lang. People in the other boats looked over. Lang squatted back in the bow. “Turn this fucker around and row back the way we came.” He looked through the binoculars again as Obstat muttered and picked up the heavy oars.

“And also start gettin’ us in closer to shore,‘” Lang said, pausing for just a moment to look back at what was undeniably a really unbelievable woman, in that swimsuit. “I want us a whole lot closer to shore.”

/f/

11 September

“So where do you get off, Fieldbinder?” Slotnik said, crossing and uncrossing his legs on the love seat.

The living room smetled vaguely of burn. Fieldbinder sat in wet clothes, shivering, the black wires of his burnt hair protruding up in a fan from his head, his hands full of stiff black feathers.

“What can I say, Don?” he said.

“An excellent question, Monroe, ” said Slotnik, glancing over at Evelyn, in a new dry robe and nothing else, looking at her reflection in the dark living room window and trying on wigs. Slotnik turned back. “]ust what can you say, my friend, with your wet wrinkled clothes and smelly, kinky head? What can the universe say, when my supposedly good and respectable neighbors worship my children on the sly, and my supposedly good friend and colleague balls my wife, pokes and punctures the object of my every non-professional thought, tries to take my wife away, from me, to whom she rightfully belongs. ” He stared at Fieldbinder. “What is to say, Monroe?”

“Don, you’ve raised a number of interesting points, ” said Fieldbinder. He glanced up at the staircase and saw two sets of pajama-feet, the children‘s, as the Slotnik children stood at the top of the case and listened, and perhaps sucked their thumbs.

“Just where do you get off, is what I want to know, ” said Slotnik, crossing and uncrossing his legs, jangling a pair of open handcuffs. “Because, for your own information and files, you’ve gotten off for the last time. This is the end. This is it. ”

Fieldbinder grinned coolly, then wryly. “Is it, ” he said. He slowly felt at the feathers with his good hand.

“Yes, ” said Slotnik, returning Fieldbinder’s smile with one equally wry. He went to Evelyn, at the window, and in a single motion calmly handcuffed her wrist to his wrist. Evelyn said nothing; she continued to put on wigs, making Slotnik’s arm rise and fall with her own. Slotnik stared past his wife at Fieldbinder’s tiny reflection in the dark window.

“Yes, ” he said again. “This is it. You’ve let yourself in for it, Monroe. ” He turned. “You’ve put your precious, prodigious self in connection with another. And now I’m taking the other back. Evelyn and I are now joined together, forever, in discipline and negatian. ”

“Discipline?” Fieldbinder said, removing some mud and a twig from the crease of his slacks.

“She is now gone, the connection severed, and so you are done, ” said Slotnik, holding up his handcuffed wrist for effect. Evelyn’s arm moved with his.

“I see, said Fieldbinder.

“Yes I’m sure you do, ” Slotnik said coolly. “The connection is severed, you are yourself punctured, you are done. You will bleed out of yourseif and rise like a husk on a dry wind. There will be less and less of you. You will grow smaller and smaller in your stylish clothes, until you disappear altogether. ” Slotnik grinned wryly. “You will return to the night sky with your satanic bird, and every dawn and dusk the horizon will run with your juices. ”

“What an interestingly absurd theory, Don, ” Fieldbinder said coolly.

“I’m afraid he means it, Monroe, ” said Evelyn into the window. “Don has always been a man of his word. ” She turned and cocked her head, modelling a blond wig. “What do you think of this one, before you have to go?”

Fieldbinder moved to look at his watch, but it had already slipped off his wrist onto the carpet without a sound.

/g/

“What’s this? Are we checking out today?”

“….”

“Is that what we’re doing, Mr. Beadsman? Checking out?”

“Yes.”

“Well I have a form for you to sign right here, and then I guess off you go into the blue.”

“… ”

“We usually don’t release on Saturday you know Mr. Beadsman. I had to get this form out of a locked drawer you know.”

“I apologize for any inconvenience.”

“Oh I was just joking with you. That was just a joke. There’s no inconvenience at all.”

“May I please leave, then?”

“That’s a good signature you’ve got there, Mr. Beadsman, isn’t it? Now is somebody meeting you, or what?”

“No.”

“Dr. Nelm told me to expect somebody to meet you, Mr. Beadsman. Are we being naughty?”

“I want to take a taxi to the airport.”

“Are we going home, Mr. Beadsman? Are we going home to see our family?”

“….”

“Well all I can say is you just get your mother to give you something to eat. You just don’t eat enough, is part of your problem, if you want my two cents’ worth. You just eat, you hear?”

“Can you please call me a taxi?”

“And your father’s been notified, Dr. Nelm told me.”

“I’ll notify everyone.”

“Looks like a beautiful day out there. I heard it was going to rain, but I’ll take sunshine bouncing off our lake any old day won’t you?”

“….”

“I wish I was going to the airport on such a beautiful day.”

“I’m afraid the sun will hurt my eyes, I’ve been inside so long.”

“Now don’t you worry. You can just squint until you get used to it. Your old eyes will adjust to the outside lickety-split, mine always do.”

….“

“This is just a bright town we live in Mr. Beadsman.”

/h/

“So this goes on, really for longer than is necessary in order to get the narrative job done, with scene after scene of the wife coming in, tapping some McTeague onto the theoretical dentist’s lip, the psychologist coming in and fondling the achingly lovely wife from behind, even as she taps the McTeague code, the wife finally unable to resist any longer and throwing herself into the arms of the psychologist, and their rutting like crazed weasels on the hospital room floor while the theoretical dentist lies helpless in his bed, drowning in numb blackness and despair, vividly imagining precisely the scene that is taking place on the floor below him.”

“Although I bet it’s at least ninety-eight point six out here right now, don’t you think? I don’t know about at night, but I think the Desert could maybe support Lenore during the day. But maybe I’m just grasping at straws. Do you think I’m just grasping?”

“But see, part of the theoretical dentist’s despair stems from the fact that he really doesn’t and can’t blame his achingly lovely wife for what is happening. He knows all about his wife’s being troubled. He knows that she needs something which he is now, through no fault of his own, unable to give her. So he doesn’t and cannot blame her. But imagine his despair, Lenore. In his numb helpless black isolation he needs the emotional center of his life, the object of his complete adoration, his fiancée, more than ever; and yet he knows that it is precisely his state of helpless, inefficacious isolation — a state he is in through exactly zero fault of his own — that is of necessity driving the lovely woman he adores farther and farther away. So he forgives, Lenore. He forgives. But he bums every minute in a cold flame of unimaginable torment.”

“What’s going on, Rick?”

“He forgives her, Lenore. From the icy depths of his helpless isolation and fierce and complete love, he extends a theoretical hand of forgiveness, like so…”

“Ow!”

“Dear me, excuse us, please.”

“Watch where you’re waving your hands, buddy!”

“Terribly sorry.”

“Freaking crowds. Let’s get, Rick. We’re just playing games. Lenore isn’t around here.”

“So on it goes. Finally the theoretical dentist’s brother, who is an estate attorney in Philadelphia, is able to break away from his incredibly successful practice and personal life to come see the withered husk of the theoretical dentist. Since the brother had gone through the Scouts right alongside the dentist, for him Morse code communication to the dentist is no problem, though communications from the dentist are still cumbersome as hell. Nevertheless we’re subjected to long and difficult coded conversations between the two in the hospital room, while the lovely wife, consumed with understandable self-loathing, and afraid that she would not be able to help making a pass at the devastatingly handsome estate-attorney brother, stays shacked up in the malevolent blond psychologist’s apartment, rutting, and also watching gymnastics on television, the symbolism of which doesn’t escape the reader, rest assured.”

“OK Rick, that’s it. Cut the story charade. We’re having a talk.”

“You bet your lovely bottom we are.”

“So why can’t we just have a talk without you pretending it’s something else, Rick? I find this pretty disturbing.”

“But see finally the wife can no longer stay away, she realizes that whatever physical connection she may crave because of her disastrously weak self-network, she and the dentist are connected in a much deeper and more profound and yes in some sense even more fulfilling and three-dimensional way, namely an emotional way, and so she rushes to the hospital, brushes aside nurses and orderlies, and bursts into the theoretical dentist’s room, only to see to her horror the dentist’s brother, leaning over the prone dentist, beginning to remove the dentist’s upper lip with a Boy Scout knife.”

“Oh, really, come on.”

“As the dentist, it turns out, had requested. Which, given the context, the sensitive reader of course regards as food for thought. But and so the wife screams, and the previously brushed-aside nurses and orderlies rush in, and they restrain the estate-attorney brother, and he is carried off, and the achingly lovely woman positively falls on the dentist’s mangled upper lip, trying to stop the bleeding and save the lip, lashing out at doctors who come near, tapping over and over into the gore that she loves the dentist, that she is sorry, please to forgive her. And through his pain the helpless dentist feels her tap, and his heart almost breaks, and though he knows it will do no good, because her pathetic neurosis will, he knows, soon drive the wife into outside connections again, he does forgive her, he does, and he moves his lip in his pathetically tiny way, to let her know he forgives her, but the heart-tweakingly tiny familiar movement of the lip is here of course obscured by the flow of blood from the attempted lip-removal, and so the wife just cannot see the movement, no matter how frantically the helpless dentist tries to move his lip, and so the wife, getting no visible results, finally reels from the dentist’s room in despair and horror and guilt, and immediately goes shopping.”

“Shopping?”

“….”

“Shopping?”

“Lenore, look out there. What is that flash, out on the water? Is that a sunlight-off-binoculars flash?”

“….”

“Good Lord it is. Lenore, what’s going on?”

“ ”

“It is. It’s Lang, in a boat. They’re rowing this way. They’ve been watching. Lenore, what is Lang shouting? Is that Lang, shouting?”

“Rick, I can explain…”

“No problem at all. Let me just… I have to hurry.”

“What are those?”

“These are our connection, Lenore. I forgive you.”

“Handcuffs? You’re going to forgive me with handcuffs that say ‘Bambi’s Den of Discipline’ on them?”

“The… achingly lovely woman returns that night to the dentist’s hospital room with her copy of McTeague. She comes in the night to the numb dentist and taps to him. She taps the conclusion of McTeague. The book’s climax. Have you ever experienced the climax of McTeague?”

“Rick, you just take it easy.”

“The climax consists of McTeague, the dentist, handcuffed to the corpse of his malevolent foe, Marcus Schouler, in the middle of a desert.”

“Desert? Handcuffs? Corpses? Oh shit. Andy! Andy!”

“Andy? No, Schouler.”

“Rick…”

“And as she taps it, ever so gently, taking care not to hurt him any more than she has already, she looks at the dentist’s motionless face and sees a single tear emerge from one partly sedated eye and course down his cheek until it is silently absorbed by a cotton bandage. She, too, weeps, with no sound…. And she produces a pair of handcuffs, which she had gone to enormous expense and embarrassment to buy… and… joins herself… to the wrist of the theoretical dentist, his inefficacious wrist…”

“What are you doing? Let me go!”

“… with the deep oiled… click of the handcuffs.”

“Jesus, Rick. This is it. You get these off right now. You get me out. I’ve told you I hate this torture and pain stuff, and you just don’t care! You’re a sick man!”

“Torture and pain? Lenore, I forgive you.”

“Forgive what, for Christ’s sake? Help! Andy! Neil!”

“Lenore!”

“God damn it, Rick, this is it. No talking, even. I wanted to talk, I said let’s talk Rick, but no, so now forget it, I’m sorry but that’s it.”

“We are now joined, my center and reference! In negation and discipline! Our bodies are husks!”

“You just better have the key. God, Andy, see if he’s got the key. ”

“What the fuck’s going on here?”

“Can’t you see? He’s locked us together!”

“Look you little wiener, cough up the key to these things or your ass is grass.”

“You are fired, Lang! You are dismissed!”

“Fuck being dismissed. You let this little lady go.”

“Lenore, we will shrink into husks together. We will bleed in the sky. See it?”

“Wanger, is he crying? Is the little sucker crying?”

“Shut up, Neil.”

“Rick, please don’t. Let’s just talk about it. Don’t sit in the sand and cry. Everybody can see. Let’s stand up.”

“We’ll be joined in the light of the sky, Lenore. See the light of the sky? The dawn and sunset will be fed from our veins. We’ll be spread all over. We’ll be everything. We’ll be gigantic.”

“How fucking pathetic.”

“Shut up, Neil.”

“Larger than life.”

“Look here, R.V., let’s just stand on up and talk this over, and unlock all this shit.”

“She is handcuffed. to a corpse, in the Desert. Don’t you see the… irony?”

“Want me to just get a cop, here, Wanger?”

“If she weren’t three-dimensional, she wouldn’t be caught! Don’t you see? A three-dimensional husk!”

“I think old R.V.’s just lost a few cards out of a certain deck, Lenore. ”

“Rick.”

“That’s where we’ll be. We’ll be prodigious enough to feed the whole sky! Don’t you see? And whose fault is it, after all?”

“Aw, Rick, don’t you see? Fault just doesn’t enter into it at all.”

“Exactly. Exactly. It’s no one’s fault. We all agree.”

“Rick…”

“Lenore sugar doll I care about you. I do. I don’t care who knows it. I care about you as a person. R. V. can put all the shit on you he wants. You’re mine now. I don’t care if the whole world knows it. Hey y‘all! I care about this little lady right here!”

“We’re in the sky. We can’t hear you.”

“Fuck off, R. V. Look, Lenore, I’m gonna go ahead and just break the chain on these things. OK? I think I can break ‘em. I’ve broke shit like this before.”

“Go ahead and try, Lang. You just go ahead and try it, and see what happens!”

“Is that OK, Lenore?”

“….”

“You ready?”

19. 1990

The time last night when Lenore Beadsman cried in front of Andrew Sealander Lang was the first time she had ever cried in front of anybody else, at all.

Rick Vigorous has cried in front of lots of people.

20. 1990

Disorder asserted itself in the lobby of the Bombardini Building soon after Lenore Beadsman arrived, in a nearly unprecedented state of piss-off, to clear her personal items out of the Frequent and Vigorous/Bombardini Company switchboard cubicle.

Candy Mandible was at the board, filling in briefly for Mindy Metalman, who’d been installed as a temporary at the say-so of Rick Vigorous, and who was for starters supposed to work the day shift today, Saturday, but who had, this morning, finally been able to get hold of Dr. Martin Tissaw, the oral surgeon, Lenore’s landlord, at home, in East Corinth, and had dashed over at lunchtime to see him, to talk about “birds, miracles, dreams and professionalism, not necessarily in that order,” as she’d said to Candy when Candy came in to relieve her. Mindy’s call had awakened Candy at Nick Allied’s Shaker Heights home, where Candy had spent an unhappy night waiting for Allied, who was supposed to return from a product-evaluation trip with his stenographer around midnight, but never had, and hadn’t even called.

The thing is that even before Lenore and Lang arrived, Candy Mandible was getting a hard time of it from any number of sources. There was, for example, Judith Prietht, who had weekends off because the Bombardini Company switchboard was down from Friday night to Monday morning, but who usually came on into the lobby on Saturday anyway, to knit shapeless sweaters and listen to her radio and watch the Erieview shadow move along the lobby walls, and who had today actually brought in her cat, which, when Judith saw that it was Candy at the console, she was for obvious reasons very anxious to introduce to her. And so Judith was hanging around the outside of the cubicle, hefting the cat, being bothersome and artificially nice, and dropping all sorts of heavy hints about blessings and autographs and partnership. Her new idea was to have the Reverend Hart Lee Sykes deliver a personal blessing to the cat, whose name was apparently Champ, and who was the single most obese cat Candy had ever seen, anywhere, but anyway who was supposed to receive the blessing, personally, while he placed a chubby paw on Judith’s television screen. Judith told Candy that Reverend Sykes made time for a viewer-touching-the-screen moment in every installment of ‘The Partners With God Club,’ believing that theologically and economically important Sykes/viewer communications could be established this way.

There was also the matter of Clint Roxbee-Cox, who had kept calling Candy at Nick’s place last night, and not saying anything, and who was now doing the same thing at the F and V board, although he must have had to call many times just to get through at all, because the Frequent and Vigorous switchboard situation was worse than ever. Mindy was too new to get really pissed off yet, but Candy had just about had it with the switchboard. Not only was she getting illegitimate calls for other places, with Fuss ‘n’ Feathers Pet Shop and Cleveland Towing both enjoying unprecedented volume, but now the board had taken to lighting up and ringing and beeping her console phones for what appeared to be no reason at all, with no one on the other end, at all, just static, which was distinguishable from an illegitimate but still human Roxbee-Cox call by the breathing that was a prominent feature of the latter. The phones simply would not shut up, and Candy couldn’t shut down the console, because she didn’t have a ratchet wrench. With great reluctance she tried calling to complain at Interactive Cable, and was informed that Console Service Technician Peter Abbott should at that very moment have been on his way over to the Bombardini Building, by way of Enrique’s House of Cheese, to relate news of some importance to the appropriate Frequent and Vigorous personnel. Ms. Peahen had already been contacted, and they were trying to reach Mr. Vigorous.

“Super,” Candy said.

Then there was the unlikely pair of Mr. Bloemker and Alvin Spaniard, whom Candy didn’t know from a hole in the ground, and who had been lurking in the lobby for about half an hour, waiting to see Lenore. Mr. Bloemker claimed that they’d called the Tissaws’ boarding house and spoken to a strangely familiar-sounding young woman who had said she knew for a positive fact that Lenore was on her way to the Bombardini Building. Candy had shrugged, at the console. She assumed the woman on the phone had been Mindy Metalman, but had no idea how Mindy was supposed to know where Lenore was. Anyway, the two men had looked at their watches and at each other, and said they’d wait, and their waiting had made for an unpleasant half hour, because Alvin Spaniard kept making what Candy thought might have been eyes at her, and Judith Prietht kept making what Candy knew from her long acquaintance with Judith definitely were eyes at Mr. Bloemker, and Mr. Bloemker was just being unnecessarily creepy — scratching violently at his beard, having bits of random sunlight reflect off his glasses, sometimes acting as if he were whispering to someone under his arm when there was clearly no one there, and asking Judith and Candy how they perceived their own sense of the history of the Midwest. Champ had hissed at him. Now Bloemker and Alvin Spaniard were walking slowly around the huge perimeter of the inside of the lobby, pointing at the floor in various places and speaking in low tones. Candy just could not wait for Mindy Metalman Lang to get back.

But now in through the revolving door came Lenore, and following her was Andy Lang, and out in front was the sound of Neil Obstat peeling out in Lang’s Trans Am, he having been signalled on his Stonecipheco beeper the minute the three of them had gotten far enough north on 77 to be in beeper range. Obstat was supposed to come back for them as soon as he could.

Lenore didn’t even seem to notice her brother-in-law and Mr. Bloemker when she came in. She didn’t seem to notice anything. She was also walking funny, and her dress was dirty, and she had a smear of black dust on her face, plus a brightly sunburned nose, and on her wrist Candy could see what was pretty clearly a handcuff, trailing a short length of broken pretend-silver chain.

“Jesus Lenore,” Candy said when Lenore got inside the cubicle. Judith and Champ were staring from the counter.

“Don’t want to hear it Candy,” Lenore said, without looking up. She opened one of the white switchboard cabinets and began taking some of her books out and sorting them on the counter. Out came a little cloth bag with soap, toothbush, and toothpaste. Lenore wordlessly hunted for other items in the cabinet. She opened the next cabinet door and brought out a stack of old lottery tickets bound with a rubber band.

“Hey there Candy,” Lang nodded tiredly from the switchboard counter, rubbing his face.

Candy folded her arms and looked at the handcuff hanging from Lenore’s wrist. The handcuff kept clanking on the insides of the cabinets. The skin of Lenore’s wrist was all red. On the handcuff itself Candy could see part of a pair of metal lips shaped in a kiss-design; on the lips was embossed “Bambi’s Den Of.”

“ ‘Bambi’s Den Of?’ ” she said. She looked up at Lang. Lenore was sifting through some of her magazines.

“Hi there, Lenore,‘” Judith Prietht was saying in a high, pretend-cat voice, holding Champ and moving the cat’s paw up and down in a hello. She made a move to bring the cat back into the cubicle.

“Please stay out, Judith,” Lenore said quietly.

“Ladies, let’s not give Lenore any more grief than need be, she’s had a bad enough day as it is,” Lang said, leaning his elbows on the counter.

“A bad day?” Candy said.

“Don’t want to talk about it.”

“Bad grandmother-news?”

“Don’t want to talk about it.”

“Grandmothers and Desert bondage?”

“Hush, now, Candy,” said Lang.

It wasn’t clear how long Mr. Bloemker and Alvin Spaniard had been at the edge of the counter, next to the hissing Champ. Now Mr. Bloemker rubbed an eye and cleared his throat.

Lang looked over at him. “We help you, chief?”

Mr. Bloemker gave him a bland look. “We are here to speak to Ms. Beadsman,” he said.

Lenore had meanwhile sat down, in Judith’s Bombardini-switchboard chair, and closed her eyes. Now she looked up at Bloemker and Alvin, as if she didn’t recognize them for a moment.

“Hi,” she said.

“Well hello, Lenore,” Alvin said. He was smiling the way someone smiles when he doesn’t feel very well.

“Hi.”

“We come on unprecedentedly urgent business, Ms. Beadsman,” said Bloemker.

“Do you.”

“Gentlemen, the little lady’s had herself a rough morning,” Lang said, moving over behind Bloemker and Alvin and putting a hand on each man’s shoulder. “What say we all just give her some time to collect, here.”

The phones had of course been ringing and beeping like crazy this whole time. Candy Mandible kept Accessing one trunk after another, and there would just be static, and tones.

“The phones have finally gone totally insane, Lenore,” she said through clenched teeth.

Lenore was looking from Mr. Bloemker to her brother-in-law. “Do you guys even know each other?” she said slowly.

Alvin looked decidedly uncomfortable. He kept doing something to the collar of his shirt. Half of Mr. Bloemker’s face was in the shadow.

Now a new head just barely appeared above the top of the switchboard counter, bouncing up and down a little, in the middle of everyone. Lang looked down in irritation. Lenore stood up to see.

“Dr. Jay?” she said.

“Greetings, Lenore,” said Dr. Jay.

“Well hi,” she said.

“Looking a little dishevelled today, aren’t we?” Jay looked her over.

“Can we help you out with somethin‘, here, bud?” Lang said from between Bloemker and Alvin.

Lenore saw the top of Dr. Jay’s head turn. “I’m a friend of Ms. Beadsman‘s, young sir,” he said. “I’m here to see Ms. Beadsman if I may. ”

“What’re you sniffin’ like that for?” Lang said. “You smell somethin’ out of the ordinary do you?”

Dr. Jay was hauling himself up over the top of the counter as far as he could. He looked down into the cubicle at Lenore, who was back in Judith’s chair. “Lenore, I’m afraid I’ve just gotten off the phone with Norman Bombardini,” he said. He tested the air of the cubicle. “I would be inclined to say that it might be better for you not to be in the Building right now. Norman apparently saw you arrive from some restaurant down the street. I’m afraid he’s in a bit of a bad way, emotionally speaking, at the present time.”

“Mr. Bombardini’s in an emotional bad way?” said Judith.

“How do you even know Mr. Bombardini?” Lenore said. “You never told me you knew Mr. Bombardini.”

Dr. Jay made as if to wipe his nose with a handkerchief. He left the hankie over his nose and mouth. “Ethics, et cetera,” he said through the cloth. “Actually a longtime client and friend.” Lang was giving Dr. Jay a very unfriendly look indeed. “He’s unfortunately very upset,” Dr. Jay continued, pushing himself even higher over the counter with his elbows so that his feet were off the lobby floor. He leaned toward Lenore with his hankie. “I’m afraid he’s talking with some earnestness about… consuming people.”

“Consuming?”

“All metaphorical, I’m firmly convinced. Surely you’re in a position to see that this eating business masks membranous turmoils far too… tumultuous to go into here.” Jay looked around. “Shall we perhaps—?”

“Eating?” Lang said.

“The crux here being that in his present state of emotional turmoil and physical… girth,” Jay said, struggling now to keep himself above the counter, “it appears prudent to err on the side of—”

“Hold it a second,” Lang said, his head cocked. “What in the hell’s that sound supposed to be?” Everyone stopped and listened.

And there was a bit of a distant sound, like a train or thunder, that grew slightly and then was for a moment obscured by the shriek of some phones.

“God damn it,” Candy Mandible said.

“Lenore, as a professional and a friend, I suggest that we quickly and quietly leave,” Jay said, struggling. His elbows finally gave, and he fell back out of view. Lang looked down at him. Jay’s voice came over the counter. “Other issues we need to countenance together, Lenore. I’ve been doing some thinking. A discussion is imperative.”

“I’ve decided we’re finished, Dr. Jay,” Lenore said from her chair. “Our relationship is over.”

“I’ll make it a free session.”

“Relationship?” said Lang.

Mr. Bloemker cleared his throat again and stepped forward under Lang’s hand. “Ms. Beadsman before you go anywhere with anyone I really must ask that we all speak, here, in the lobby, on a matter you and I had agreed I should bring before you, should any—”

“And I thought we said we weren’t gonna be makin’ stressful demands on the lady just now, Gus,” Lang said, pulling Bloemker back to him. Bloemker looked over at Alvin Spaniard.

Candy was watching Wang-Dang Lang from the console, whenever she could look up. The noise of the phones was now constant. All the trunk lights were illuminating.

“Are you here with Mr. Bloemker, or what?” Lenore said, looking at Alvin Spaniard.

Alvin pushed his glasses up. He looked across Lang at Mr. Bloemker. The rumbling sound was getting louder.

Judith Prietht and Champ had turned around; Judith was looking into the shadow. “Hey Mr. V!” she called suddenly. “Whatcha doin’ back there?” Everyone turned and looked. Rick Vigorous was back against the rear wall of the lobby, in the edge of the Erieview shadow, moving gradually with it. He was filthy with black dust, arid melted partway into the dark. It was hard to see him. But Candy could see something gleaming on his wrist when his arm came into the light. It was another handcuff. Candy looked back down at Lenore, Lenore had one of her sneakers off and was holding it upside down, pouring black sand through the day’s wreath of roses on top of the switchboard wastebasket.

“Fucking sand,” she said. Her sock was incredibly dirty.

“Greetings, Rick!” Dr. Jay shouted.

“Can’t believe you got the balls to be here right now, R. V.!” Lang called loudly across the empty lobby to Rick Vigorous. “And how the hell’d you even get here so quick?”

Candy began to have a really bad feeling, and she looked at Lenore, who was emptying out her other shoe.

“You better just git!” Lang was calling.

Rick Vigorous didn’t say anything.

The rhythmic rumbling was now too loud even for the phones to cover. Candy thought she could feel the marble floor of the lobby vibrating slightly. The shadow was bigger than it should have been for one o‘clock.

“What the hell is that?” said Lang. He looked down at Dr. Jay.

Now through the revolving door in big hurries came Neil Obstat, Jr., Sigurd Foamwhistle, and Stonecipher Beadsman III. Right behind them was Peter Abbott, and right behind him was Walinda Peahen. Peter’s big toolbox somehow got jammed in the door, and Walinda yelled at him from her glass compartment until he got the box free and the door spit them both out.

Mr. Beadsman was looking at his watch as he came. “Lenore!” he called.

“Jesus Lenore it’s your Dad, and that cable guy, Abbott,” Candy said.

Lenore stayed where she was, in the Bombardini-switchboard chair, holding her sneakers. Mr. Bloemker and Alvin Spaniard headed over to Obstat and Foamwhistle and Mr. Beadsman, and the five stood in the middle of the lobby floor, conferring. Obstat was looking at a large piece of paper and pointing to a section of the floor in the back of the lobby, over near Rick Vigorous. Meanwhile Walinda had come straight to the cubicle, brushing aside Dr. Jay, who was hurrying back toward the revolving door.

“Girl all I can say is whatever happened it damn well better be important,” Walinda said, coming inside. She stopped and looked around. “Where’s that new girl that’s supposed to be on?”

“I quit, Walinda,” Lenore said.

“Quit?” Candy Mandible twisted around in her chair to look at them both. A phone rang.

“Yes.” Lenore raised her voice to get it all the way to the back of the lobby over the rumbling. “I quit!”

“Quit?”

“Girl answer the phone, ” Walinda said, pinching at Candy’s shoulder.

“There’s nothing on the other end,” Candy said quietly, staring at Lenore. “Just static and tones. Lenore, what do you mean quit?”

“Hi Peter!” called Judith Prietht, manipulating poor Champ’s paw yet again. Peter was doing something over near the section of the lobby floor that Neil Obstat had pointed out.

“The matter Lenore, you and that bitty fella back there have a fight?” Walinda chuckled and reached for the Legitimate Call Log. “Too bad. You need any help gettin’ your stuff together?”

“Hey.Geraldine, why don’t you just jump on back,” Lang said to Walinda. “Little lady’s had herself a rough day.” Walinda slowly turned eyes to Wang-Dang Lang, and they stared at each other. Lang grinned.

“Lenore, sweetie, tell me what I can do,” Candy was whispering into Lenore’s ear, an arm around her shoulder. Phones jangled. The lobby shook faintly. Lenore closed her eyes and shook her head.

Now Peter Abbott appeared at the counter. He was smiling broadly.

“Satisfaction, ladies,” he said, hefting his toolbox and patting it.

“Satisfaction?”

Lang looked down at Peter’s box and toolbelt. “Hey there good bud,” he said. “You want to see what you can do about these crazy-ass phones?”

“Tex, that’s the exact reason I’m here,” Peter Abbott said. “To start clearin’ up and explaining maybe the bizarrest phone-tunnel snafu in Cleveland history. He came around into the cubicle. ”And to start to take steps to give you good folks some of the satisfaction you’ve been waitin’ for, and also to remove this pesky old tunnel-test cable, down here.“ He produced a ratchet wrench with a flourish and with two quick turns shut the F and V console off. Now there was only the outside rumble. Peter turned to Walinda Peahen. ”The tests are officially completed.“ He lowered himself under the counter, humming. Candy shot her chair back.

Lang leaned way over the counter into the cubicle. “Lenore, ” he whispered, smiling and snapping his fingers. “Let’s just git. What do you say? Car’s out front. We can just come on back in a bit, R.V. and all these folks’ll be gone. Let’s git.”

“So are you saying you’re actually fixing our lines?” Candy was saying. “Is that what you’re saying?” She kicked a little at Peter’s jiggling boots. “And also maybe explaining a little bit? For Christ’s sake now they ring and there’s nobody there! What kind of phone rings when there’s nobody there?”

“All I can say for openers is that Interactive Cable’s own Ron Sludgeman is a certifiable genius,” said a muffled Peter Abbott. “This particular tunnel-test was certifiably ingenious. You just hang on up there.”

“Lenore, ” Lang was whispering.

“Lenore, please come here immediately,” Mr. Beadsman called from out in the lobby.

Lenore stayed slumped in the chair, looking at the open cabinets and her pile of books and other items on the counters, and at the handcuff. Candy Mandible looked out at Mr. Beadsman and his group. They all seemed to be gathered around Neil Obstat, Jr., in the comer of the lobby, while Obstat lay on his stomach and did something to that section of the floor Peter had been at. Rick Vigorous watched from nearby, along the back wall. Everything rumbled.

“What’re they trying to do to the floor?” Candy asked, tapping Walinda on the shoulder.

Walinda looked out. “Hey fools!” she called. “Hey!”

“You tell everybody to just hang onto their hats about the tunnel,” Peter Abbott was saying. He emerged with one end of the long test-cable and unhooked it from the side of the Frequent and Vigorous console. He held it up for everyone to admire as light slowly went out of it. “Damned smart, is all I can say,” he said. “Put this particular console technician right back in his place, let me tell you that right now.”

“Lenore!” Mr. Beadsman was calling, looking at his watch again.

“Lenore?” Lang was saying. “You all right?” Lenore was staring into space.

The very top of Dr. Jay’s head reappeared at the counter. “Really have to advise in the very strongest possible terms that we leave,” he said through his handkerchief, lifting himself up again. “Really strongly advise it, Lenore.”

“What’s up?” Candy said. “What’s the noise?”

“I’m afraid it seems to be poor Norman,” Dr. Jay said. “He is in considerable distress, and is… having at the rear wall of the whole Building with his… his stomach. He looked Candy up and down. ”He is demanding, and here I use his words, ‘admission to Ms. Beadsman’s space.’ “

“Space?” Candy said.

“Having at?” Lang said.

Jay turned his head to look up at Lang. “Battering, you might say.”

Lenore looked up at them.

“Heat problems,” Peter Abbott said. “Let me just say temperature-problems, for starters, and then let me apologize for not doing my job as good as I maybe should have on this one, I guess. I’m sorry.” He rubbed his hands on his pants. “Like Mr. Sludgeman said to me he said Peter, if you got line trouble, and it’s affecting targets over more than just one circuit, you start to look around for some kinda temperature problem, is what you do if you’re smart.”

Mr. Beadsman appeared overhead. “Lenore,” he said. “I’ll assume you were unable to hear me calling. Please come. We must talk. This is a family matter.” He threw a bit of a sidelong look at Lang, who stared straight ahead and made as if to tip his hat. “A family matter,” Mr. Beadsman said. “Please come out of there and over here with me immediately.”

“You the chump be makin’ that nasty food my child like to choke on one time?” Walinda Peahen put her hands on her hips and glared at Mr. Beadsman.

“My what a perfectly charming negress,” Mr. Beadsman said.

“Boy, I gonna kill you for that.”

“Lenore, please note that this is professional advice being given here,” Dr. Jay said from under Mr. Beadsman’s arm. “Really think it would be best to come back another time.” He shifted on his elbows and looked at Walinda Peahen, who was giving Mr. Beadsman perhaps the world’s biggest fish-eye. Mr. Beadsman was looking expectantly at Lenore.

. “Just a second, please, Dad,” Lenore said, looking at the shoes in her hand. “I’m in the process of quitting.”

“Family emergency, Lenore.”

“Sir, Miss Lenore and I were hopin’ to be on a plane to Nugget Bluff, Texas, by suppertime,” Lang said.

Candy stared at Lenore. “Nugget Bluff, Texas?”

Mr. Beadsman seemed not to hear. He was looking at Lenore’s wrist. “And what may I ask is on my daughter’s wrist?” he said.

“Chief!” Sigurd Foamwhistle was calling from the rear of the lobby.

“Well sir whyn’t you just ask that little dung beetle right back there?” Lang said, pointing at Rick Vigorous, back in the shadow.

Mr. Beadsman turned. “Mr. Vigorous?” he said. There was a particularly loud rumble, and the marble floor shook a little. Mr. Beadsman looked over at his group. “Foamwhistle!” he yelled. “What’s going on?”

“See,” Peter Abbott was saying to the women in the cubicle, “the thing you got to remember is that the tunnels are incredibly temperature-sensitive. There’s just few things in this world more temperature-sensitive than a phone tunnel.” He bent and took a crowbar out of his toolbox.

“Lenore.”

“ ‘Cause see you got to remember that all the calls in the lines are is just basically lines of heat,” Peter said, hefting the crowbar. “They’re just little lines of a kind of heat going back and forth, is all they really are.” He ran a hand through his bright yellow hair. “So it’s only logical that to get satisfactory service, the tunnels’ve got to be one temperature, and the lines another, and the calls in the lines another.” Peter happened to look over the counter at the Stonecipheco group and Neil Obstat, on his stomach. “Hey buddy!” he yelled. “You wanna just get back from there? What’re you trying to do?” He turned to Walinda. “They’re right over where your tunnel is, ma’am,” he said. “That guy’s trying to get into your tunnel. Who is that guy?”

“Baby food chemist,” Candy Mandible said.

“Hey boy you just get on out of here!” Walinda was yelling.

“Do not yell at my employee,” said Mr. Beadsman.

“Why don’t you just go and sit on somethin’ sharp, chump?”

“Well if he gets in there like it looks like he’s tryin’ to, without some trained personnel on hand, he’s gonna be sorry,” Peter Abbott was saying.

“How come?” Candy asked.

“Lenore, your behavior is now becoming unacceptable,” Mr. Beadsman said.

“I’m afraid I’m forced to agree,” came Dr. Jay’s muffled voice from behind the counter.

Lenore closed her eyes. The lobby thundered.

“Peter for Christ’s sake how come, ” Candy Mandible said.

“ ‘Cause according to our data it’s gonna be bitchin’ hot,” Peter said, turning to Candy and looking briefly down into Lenore’s dress. “ ’Cause what I’ve been trying to explain is that it looks like that’s your whole trouble right there. Hot tunnel.”

“Hot tunnel?”

“Well yeah,” Peter Abbott said. “See there’s supposed to be special temperature levels in each tunnel. Tunnel’s supposed to be sixty, sixty-five degrees, tops.” He looked around. “Otherwise, see, the heat of the tunnel infects the heat of your calls, and you get what we call call-bleeding into the circuit. Which actually it turns out is what you’ve been having, we think. Mr. Sludgeman told me he’s suspected some kind of bleeding all along, really.”

“Infection? Bleeding?”

“Just like a big old cranky nervous system, like I been tellin’ you,” Peter said. He was looking back at Neil Obstat, who along with Alvin Spaniard was trying to pry up a whole section of the lobby floor, which was now revealed not to be real marble at all. “Hey you drips!” Peter yelled. “There’s gonna be trouble!”

Obstat looked up and over at the cubicle in alarm, but Mr. Beadsman motioned to him that it was all right. Mr. Bloemker was cleaning his glasses on his tie.

“So that’s all it was?” Candy Mandible said shrilly. “Hot frigging tunnels? That’s why our job’s been biting the big kielbasa for two weeks? The lines are nerves and the nerves are too frigging hot?” She was really mad. “That’s all it is? Heat? I don’t believe it’s just heat.” She looked at Walinda Peahen.

Peter was still watching the Stonecipheco group. “But see the whole thing’s exactly right for nerves, if they were nerves, is what’s weird,” he said. “Your test cable shows it, too.” He looked critically at the length of dark cable on the counter.

“Shows what?”

The rhythm of the rumbling in the lobby walls and floor increased. The wreath of roses abruptly fell off the switchboard wastebasket. Cigarette ashes and part of Mr. Bombardini’s latest note fell on Lenore’s socks. She didn’t see them.

“Lenore,” said Mr. Beadsman, “I am now officially insisting.”

Lenore’s eyes stayed closed. She looked as if she was asleep. Mr. Beadsman looked at Dr. Jay. Andy Lang worked on a hangnail.

Peter Abbott was grinning and shaking his head at Candy and Walinda. “The upshot here is that your particular line tunnel looks like it’s kind of decided it’s a real freakin’ human being or some. thing,” he said. “You want my opinion, this whole thing could get on television real easily.” He looked around at everyone. They stared at him blankly. “You don’t get it, do you?” Peter said. “Look. Your tunnel’s like I said supposed to be around like sixty-some degrees. And instead our test cable shows it’s a perfect ninety-eight point six. You believe that?”

“Boy what you talkin’ about?” Walinda folded her arms.

Lenore opened her eyes.

“I’m talking about your subpar service is due to your lines are bleeding calls into each other because somehow your tunnel’s ninety-eight point six goddamn degrees,” Peter said. “That’s what I’m talking about.”

Mr. Beadsman looked at Lenore. Dr. Jay’s head popped up. The lobby positively shook. Lenore was looking up at Wang-Dang Lang:

“Hey.”

21. 1990

/a/

PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT OF ‘THE PARTNERS WITH GOD CLUB,’ SATURDAY, 11 SEPTEMBER 1990, 8:00 P.M. EASTERN DAYLIGHT TIME. HOSTS: THE REVEREND HART LEE SYKES, AND HIS VERY WELL KNOWN COCKATIEL UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT, THROUGH WHOM THE LORD HAS BEEN HEARD PERSONALLY TO SPEAK ON SEVERAL TELEVISED OCCASIONS.

THE REVEREND HART LEE SYKES: Friends.

THE PARTNERSHIP SINGERS:. (Personalty directed and accompanied on the xytophone by Mrs. Fanny May Sykes) Friends…

REVEREND SYKES: Dear, dear friends.

UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: God bless everything and everybody! THE PARTNERSHIP SINGERS: Friends…

REVEREND SYKES: Friends, what is a partner?

UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: Friends.

REVEREND SYKES: Friends, I stand before you tonight to say that a partner is a worker. That a partner is an individual who recognizes that individuals working together are stronger in the service of the Lord than individuals going their own separate, individual ways.

THE PARTNERSHIP SINGERS: Oh yes, a partner is a worker… REVEREND SYKES: Friends, a partner takes what is in his hand, and casts it down into the soil, to grow. A partner sows, friends. A partner sows. And friends, who reaps?

THE PARTNERSHIP SINGERS: Oh yes, a partner is a worker who sows…

REVEREND SYKES: We the partners take the seed of faith which is in our hand and sow it in the soil of partnership, and now who reaps?

THE PARTNERSHIP SINGERS: Who reaps, oh, who reaps…? UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: Jesus reaped!

REVEREND SYKES: That’s right friends we can see together tonight that the one who reaps is none other than Jesus.

UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: That’s right friends.

REVEREND SYKES: That’s right: Jesus. And now friends we have this question, to introduce tonight’s food-for-thought segment of our time together tonight. Friends, who is Jesus?

UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: Who?

REVEREND SYKES: That’s right friends who is Jesus?

UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: Who?

REVEREND SYKES: Who is he?

UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: I have to do what’s right for me. REVEREND SYKES: Who?

UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: He is we! We are He!

THE PARTNERSHIP SINGERS: Oh, we are He and He is we… REVEREND SYKES: That’s right friends we are Jesus! In a theologically important sense we are Jesus!

UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: How can this be?

REVEREND SYKES: Shall I tell you how this can be?

THE PARTNERSHIP SINGERS: Tell, oh tell us, how all this can be… REVEREND SYKES: Friends I stand before you tonight to say that it is for no other reason than that we, like Jesus, are partners with God.

The Partnership Singers begin to hum a pleasing harmony.

UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: Hart Lee, we are He.

REVEREND SYKES: You’re so right, little miracle. We are Jesus. We are Jesus because Jesus is a worker. Like us. And a partner. Like us. Can we not see friends that in partnership, and now friends I mean here true partnership, everything comes together?

UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: God bless everything! Make me come together! Like this!

REVEREND SYKES: So friends we come to see together once again tonight that the answer… is partnership.

UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: I don’t know what you mean by that word. Tell me what you mean by that word.

REVEREND SYKES: Friends what I mean is nothing less than a miracle.

THE PARTNERSHIP SINGERS: A miracle…

REVEREND SYKES: Friends, whether you choose to become a partner with God by just picking up your telephone and dialing us here at the Partnership Pledge Center at 1-800-PARTNER, and becoming a Lifetime And Beyond Partner with your contributing subscription of five hundred dollars or more, or whether you choose to dial us here at 1- 800-PARTNER and become a Lifetime Partner With God for two hundred and fifty dollars, or a Star Partner for one hundred, or a Personal Friend Of Ugolino Partner for fifty, or yes friends even an equally important Prayer Partner for just twenty dollars, whatever you choose, something will happen. Friends, what will happen?

UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: Friends, as subscribing members of the Reverend Hart Lee Sykes’s Partners With God Club you can expect the entry of the Almighty Lord Jesus into your own personal life in twenty-four hours or less.

REVEREND SYKES: That’s exactly right the entry of Jesus into your life. The habitation by Jesus of your own heart. The existence of the Lord Himself inside each of you, as He is inside all of us here at the Partnership Pledge Center studio. What a glorious and miraculous thing! Partnership!

THE PARTNERSHIP SINGERS: Miracle, glory, partnership…

UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: Inside out!

REVEREND SYKES: What was that, now?

UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: Let us not forget, friends, that all subscriptions are deductible from love.

REVEREND SYKES: Were you trying to say just now that the entry of Jesus into an individual’s life will in some theological sense turn that individual inside out?

UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: Pardon me?

THE PARTNERSHIP SINGERS: What, oh what, was he trying to say…? REVEREND SYKES: Friends, did the acknowledged tweeter of the Lord’s own sound system mean that when Jesus dwells in us, we dwell in Jesus? Can this be what he meant?

UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: I’m a pretty boy.

THE PARTNERSHIP SINGERS: Oh, is he not a pretty pretty boy…? REVEREND SYKES: But friends this would have the spiritual consequence that all our dreams and wishes and needs and goals and desires of our own lives also become Jesus’s desires. And thus that in true partnership with God, the desires of each individual man, woman and child become the desires of Jesus, in Jesus’s name.

UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: Women have desires, buster. Don’t think they don’t have desires.

REVEREND SYKES: Of course women have desires, friends, everyone has desires in their lives, that’s part of the experience of what it is to be human in God’s world. We all have desires, friends. And now we can see that if all us partners work together, in the Lord’s soil, our desires are automatically spiritually transformed into Jesus’s desires, too. UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: Holy cow!

REVEREND SYKES: A need in us is a need in Jesus. And friends can’t we see together that a need in Jesus is a need automatically, by theological definition, fulfilled and satisfied?

THE PARTNERSHIP SINGERS: We need to know, why this is so… REVEREND SYKES: So that a need in a partner with God, a need that exists simultaneously in our Lord Jesus Christ, is a need instantly, completely, satisfied and met?

UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: You fill me up. You satisfy me like no man did before. I can’t deny it. God.

THE PARTNERSHIP SINGERS: Can’t deny, that you satisfy… REVEREND SYKES: Yes friends I stand before you on national prime-time television talking about the satisfaction of your every need. The fulfillment of your every wish. Friends hear me! What I tell you tonight is that if you are a partner with God you are automatically in Jesus, we know that now. You are inside out! Your needs are now Jesus’s needs, and thus you will not go wanting. You will not go wanting. Why is this so? THE PARTNERSHIP SINGERS: Why…?

REVEREND SYKES: Why is this, I say why is this so?

UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: Because Jesus shall not want!

REVEREND SYKES: Oh say it again!

UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: Who’s got the special-wecial book? REVEREND SYKES: Oh say it again!

UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: Jesus shall not want.

THE PARTNERSHIP SINGERS: Amen, Aman, Amen, Aman… REVEREND SYKES: Amen, and Aman. For here friends is tonight’s “Partners With God Club” food-for-thought spiritual message. It is that Jesus shall not want. Jesus shall not want! There it is.

UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: Has the little turd learned his lines yet?

REVEREND SYKES: Friends let us all pause here and listen together and reflect on the implications of such a revelation. That’s right… THE PARTNERSHIP SINGERS: Hmmmmm…

REVEREND SYKES:… a revelation.

UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: (Accompanied by the pleasing harmonies of the Partnership Singers)

Oh, when I’m feelin’ down, down as I can be;

When there’s a giant shadow, a-fallin’ over me;

My spirit’s still as strong as steel, my hope you cannot daunt;

For I stand firm in my belief… that Jesus shall not want!

/b/

“Do you want to hear what I think?” says Mindy Metalman Lang.

“I am one enormous ear,” says Rick Vigorous.

“I think you’re just tired, and tense, and understandably upset, and that’s why you’re not being fair, and making up these lies.”

“And who may I ask has the temerity to allege that I am making up lies,” says Rick Vigorous softly, looking up and away. His face is running with light.

What is going on is that tonight it is raining, between the moon and the window. It is raining awfully hard. Lines of rainwater run down the window, and the moon shines through the rain and the window and makes the rear wall of the dark bedroom run with reflections. Back against the wall leans Rick Vigorous as he sits up in bed, in his underpants. He looks like he’s running with moonlit rain. So does the bed. The whole room, running with clear white. The colored chalk sketch of Rick and Veronica Vigorous in their Scarsdale yard, the one that’s framed in dark wood and hanging above the bed, seems almost to glow. The television is on, over by the window, but its cold flicker is lost in the moon’s million white trickles.

“Rick,” Mindy says from the window.

“Don’t look out,” says Rick.

Mindy turns and waggles her finger. It runs down all the walls. “Rick.”

“Do you know why I don’t want you to look out?”

“Sweetie pumpkin,” says Mindy, “I’m trying ever so hard to still be pleasant about this whole thing, but it’s wrong of you not to tell. It’s not right, and you know it.”

“My God the window’s drooling,” Rick says. He points. His wrist hangs with light. “Doesn’t it look as though the window is drooling? Salivating at the prospect of absolutely everything there is to impart?”

Mindy starts to turn back.

“But don’t look out,” Rick says.

“So start imparting,” says Mindy.

“Haven’t I already?”

“I want to know where my husband is,” Mindy says softly, looking down into the television. “I don’t care about your ‘context,’ and I’m more than a little upset and worried that you’re sitting there with that thing on your wrist seriously trying to tell me that Lenore Beadsman died in your phone tunnel.”

“You saw the lobby floor.”

“But Andy and Lenore went to the airport tonight, I happen to know. I talked to Dr. Tissaw tonight. ”

“Context is essential,” Rick says.

“But I don’t care about context Rick,” says Mindy. “If you want to know the truth I don’t really care that much about Lenore. And I don’t care about some book, which I have no idea what you’re talking about, which first you say you wrote, then you say is the Bible, then you say is the dictionary, then you say is the Sears Catalogue, so what am I supposed to think? But anyway I don’t care about that.” Mindy crosses her arms over her bra. The moon is white jelly through the top of her hair. “Honestly,” she says.

“But it’s essential to the whole story,” says Rick. He is playing with his stomach, over the band of his underpants.

“Or about alphabets of old people, or children singing like birds, or fat men chewing on buildings, or phone crews fishing in black air, or people eating each other’s membranes — you can just stop whispering about all of it, because I don’t care about it right now.”

“What do you want,” says Rick.

Mindy taps a foot on the floor. “I either want to watch the bird’s show, here, which by the way don’t think I’ve forgotten you practically promised to call, last night…”

“I forbid you to look at it directly.”

“… Or then I want to know where my husband and ditzy little Lenore are, so I can begin to take steps. What branch are they supposed to be at?”

“Lenore Beadsman and W.D.L. are finished,” Rick says. He looks around him, his shadow on the flowing wall. “They’re over.”

“Rick sweetie I’m so trying to be nice but that’s just a lie,” says Mindy. She comes to stand at the bed. “Can’t you tell what’s a lie? I don’t know what happened to you today, and how could I since you won’t tell me, but you’re in bad shape if you sincerely think people are done who are obviously not done, I’ve got to tell you. I’ve got to think you’re either lying for fun, or you’re maybe just not a well man. Daddy always said you weren’t a hundred percent.”

Rick looks up at Mindy.

“Honestly,” Mindy says. She looks back at the television. “I can just watch the news, you know.” Rick keeps looking at her. “I can just watch the news at eleven, if you want to be a little dung beetle about it,” she says. “Why lie if I can just find out the truth in a couple hours?”

“I think you’re confused,” says Rick.

/c/

REVEREND SYKES: And so friends if we are to be in Jesus and so never want, never ever want, what must we do here tonight? UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: Use me. Satisfy me like never before. REVEREND SYKES: Tonight we must attempt to see together that to be satisfied in a spiritual sense is to be used.

THE PARTNERSHIP SINGERS: Oh yes that’s right, to be satisfied is to be used…

REVEREND SYKES: For we’ve seen together that to be satisfied is to be in Jesus, and to be in Jesus is to be a partner. And what is a partner?

UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: Who cares how many partners I’ve had, Clinty?

REVEREND SYKES: Yes friends it makes no difference how many partners work together, what is a partner?

THE PARTNERSHIP SINGERS: Partner, oh what is a partner…? REVEREND SYKES: Is not an individual who is a partner with God simply an individual who recognizes, and finds within his own soul the strength to perform, the function God has assigned to him? We must ask how can we be useful to God.

THE PARTNERSHIP SINGERS: Oh, how might I personally be used…? 1 UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: Sunflower seed, please.

REVEREND SYKES: But friends can’t we see that it’s all just a glorious living circle of faith, because now to be useful to God is merely to be apartner with God!

THE PARTNERSHIP SINGERS: Oh, it’s all a glorious circle… REVEREND SYKES: And to be satisfied is to be used, to be used is to be a partner, to be a partner is to be a worker, to be a worker is to be one of many, locked and nourished, together, in the soil of faith. UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: Sounds pretty healthy!

REVEREND SYKES: Friends, tonight I want us to think together of this humble program as the soil of faith. I want us to think of ourselves… joined here tonight, together, in the electronic soil of faith today. I want us to feel used and satisfied by the Lord together tonight.

UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: Miss Beaksman, hear the mandate! REVEREND SYKES: So friends, laugh if you will, but tonight I have a game for us to play together. A profoundly and vitally important game for us to play together tonight. The stakes’ll be as high as the stars in heaven, friends, I’ll warn you now.

The Partnership Singers begin to hum a harmony even more pleasing than the pleasing harmonies previously hummed

REVEREND SYKES: Friends, I want us all to get up and put our hand on our television screen. Those of you who might be unable to get up with us tonight, why you have a friend or loved one bring your television close to you. Friends I want you to come to me and place your hand on my hand, that I hold out to you tonight. Let us all place our hands together in the electronic soil.

UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: Sow to reap a pretty boy!

REVEREND SYKES: So there is the game, friends, and now here are the stakes tonight.

THE PARTNERSHIP SINGERS: The stakes tonight… (They return to the pleasing harmony.)

REVEREND SYKES: Every player, every one of you who feels something, who feels what I can feel standing right here before you tonight, who can feel the individual imprisoned inside these secular shells of impotent pain and desire flow out of you, flow out into the soil, who feels the sort of union with all and with- the Lord our Savior Jesus Christ that I feel right now, when you touch my hand, each one of you who feels what I know in my heart we shall all feel together tonight… each player who feels it will go straight to his telephone and call us here at the Partnership Pledge Center at 1- 800-PARTNER, to become a partner with us and with God, tonight. So to feel what I feel tonight, friends, is to become a partner. No two ways about it. This game is a challenge, friends. Are you up to it? I stand here challenging you tonight.

UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: Holy holy!

REVEREND SYKES: Use me, friends. Let us play the game together. I promise that no player will feel alone. You see my hand? Here it is. I hold it out for you to touch. Touch it. Lay your hands in the soil and touch me. Here I am for you. Friends I sense we are all ready tonight.

/d

“Well no I’m not angry, you silly,” says Mindy, kneeling in front of the television. Cold light comes out from between her fingers, on the screen.

“I promise to tell,” Rick says, looking down at himself.

“I know you’ll tell,” Mindy says softly into the television. White shimmers melt down her back. Drops of light stop and start. She reaches back with her free hand, tosses her hair out of the way, unhooks herself.

“What are you doing?”

Mindy rises and turns and slides out of everything, moving her hips.

“I said I’d tell,” says Rick.

“I know you will,” says Mindy. “I know you’re upset, but I feel like I just know you will.” She comes to the bed. Her body moves a million ways in the wet white light. Behind her Rick can see a flickering hand, dead and cold. It covers everything.

“I really will,” he whispers.

Mindy touches his leg. Light comes out of his leg, between her fingers.

“Don’t you worry about anything,” she says. “I know you.”

“You can trust me,” R. V. says, watching her hand. “I’m a man of my