Desire Provoked

Part Two

I WANT them back.

He wakes with this sentence. He had dreamed of his grandparents, all of whom are dead now. In the dream they were walking, the four of them together, on a rope-and-wooden bridge over a stream in a park heavy with foliage. White feathers rained from the trees and the grandparents were laughing, sharing a bottle of wine with napkins and plastic cups. Adams watched them from a distance, seated at a red cedar table, thinking how much the grandparents could’ve taught him about history, marriage, politics. But when they were alive, he was a small child, not yet ready for their lessons, and he knew in the dream that he couldn’t go to them. He began to regret that for much of his life his timing has been off with people who might’ve proved important. Relations, friends, possible lovers. People he relinquished when circumstances made friendship too difficult.

I’m not done with them. I want them back. Toby and Deidre too.

The unfinished business with his children sends him to the kitchen. There’s only a little apple juice left in the refrigerator, so he pours a cup and stands at the window to toast his family, here and gone.

Pamela’s hair color remains the same (rich auburn), she has gained no weight (one hundred and ten pounds, consistently, since college), but her attitudes are shading into gray, she’s reading more books, and her thoughts are changing her, physically, from the inside out. She looks younger than Adams and talks like someone he has never met. On Saturday she attended a pro-Palestinian rally; she plans to march in protest of American military presence in Honduras.

“Where are your politics these days?” he asks.

“On the left, where my heart is.”

Already he has spent hundreds of dollars on Pamela’s work, and now she’s asked him for a loan. At forty-one thousand a year, with a family of four, he is nearly underwater.

He sits in front of the TV with a bag of Doritos and a pocket calculator. Frank Gifford informs him that Tom Landry is the only coach the Dallas Cowboys have ever had.

In the last three years his social security tax has risen from $2,346 a year to $3,407. Even with the latest tax cut he figures to absorb a net loss this year of over six hundred dollars and will have to spend part of his savings.

The kids’ bills will be about the same — higher dental costs, perhaps — but Pamela is unpredictable. And he never knows when Kenny will have an emergency, like the time he was arrested in Buster Keaton’s old house with three actresses and a bag of coke. One of the women, subletting the house from its current owners, took the rap — “I don’t touch the stuff,” Kenny said — but the incident cost Adams five hundred dollars for bail.

Before she left, Pamela developed a series of holograms based on the work of Dieter Jung, a German photographer and painter. She had attended an exhibition of Jung’s “Spanned Rainbows,” depictions of light in oil. The word Wirklichkeit occurred to her as she viewed the paintings. “Wirklichkeit means everything we know,” she explained to Adams. “It’s inseparable from Werk, to work, and wirken, to effect.”

Pamela cherishes her German ancestry (her father’s mother came from Siegen) and, to Adams, her pride recalls their days at the University of Nebraska. Pamela had been a commercial photographer, active in local publishing though only a sophomore, and Adams had distinguished himself as an outstanding student in the geology department. As his graduate studies progressed, he became increasingly interested in contour charts and even secured a number of grants for surveys. At night, in the lobby of her dorm, Pamela discussed her plans with Adams. “Photography’s an art, but I can’t afford to be fancy. I’ve got to earn some money.”

After graduation Adams went to Alaska for two months on a postdoctoral grant from Conoco, leaving Pamela to finish school. That summer she did freelance work (the AP picked up her shot of lightning striking the state capitol in Lincoln) and took a night course in the history of photography. In August she had a gallery showing with two friends. She had made a series of double exposures — celery superimposed on a farm laborers’ rally — and tinted them, each a different color. Though the response was good, she didn’t take it seriously and concentrated on journalism. Then she got chummy with a few fashion designers for whom she did Sunday-supplement ads.

The day she returned from the Jung exhibit she leaped and sang. Her eyes narrowed, thin as almonds, and she played with the ends of her hair. “If you make the viewer aware of the materials of art — the pigment in the paint, the emulsion on the film,” she said, “you’ve performed a critical as well as an artistic act. It’s what I’ve been looking for in my work.”

Suddenly fashion ads were out. At dinner she lectured him on aesthetics. A grid can be centrifugal or centripetal. When Mondrian paints a vertical and horizontal grid and places it within a diamond-shaped canvas, cutting off the corners of the grid, our view is truncated but we know that the painter’s landscape continues beyond what we can see. On the other hand, grid lines can act as a divider between the world of the canvas and the space that the viewer occupies. The prevalence of the grid in modern art, and its profound ambiguity, reveal the depths to which our century is divided between the sacred and the secular, the inner and outer worlds. The grid is essentially materialistic, of course, despite what Male-vich says about Mind and Spirit or the Greek cross in Ad Reinhardt’s nine-square grids.

Adams didn’t know what she was talking about.

She traced the roots of Wirklichkeit. Originally, she discovered, Werk and wirken meant to wrap with wicker. To medieval Germans, the empirical world was woven from a variety of materials, including earth, air, water, and fire. Each man or woman was a knot or straw.

Next, Pamela tested the limits of her equipment. With nails she scratched patterns on her negatives. On long exposures she alternated light and dark, oscillated color, and formed swirls — like fingerprints or cloth swatches — with different intensities of light.

Within a month she had borrowed holographic equipment from her friend Cyndi. “A hologram looks three-dimensional, but it’s not. It’s formed by curved space and pulsating light,” she explained. “A map of our cognition.”

Her first images were conventional: butterflies, cats, sparkling rocks, each structured like a feather. One chilly night in February, sleet pelting the windows, Pamela called Adams into the garage. “Look,” she said, switching off the light.

In the air, twisting above the vise grip, the word Wirklichkeit. Aquamarine. Wrapped in wicker. Rippling like a wave, or Adams’ breath.

She was making progress. It made him uneasy.

Adams asks Carter’s secretary, whose name is Jill, to dinner. She accepts. He makes reservations for two at the Ivory Rose, which has the best Indian food in town. It turns out that Jill is, like Adams, a world traveler. Over curry and chutney she tells him she once had an Algerian lover. In Algeria there were no working toilets. She had to squat over an open hole, wipe herself with her left hand.

Since returning from Algeria she has attended a number of est seminars. “I was raised a Baptist, but their ideas about women are skewed. I mean, be submissive and all that. Don’t have sex. Shit. Who are they kidding? The Gospel writers — excuse me, this isn’t good dinner conversation, I know — but they didn’t have to walk around with tampons between their legs, know what I mean? The preachers don’t know what it’s like. So I figure, whatever the church says about women’s bodies and sexual behavior and all that, they don’t know the first thing. Those decisions I make for myself, est is hokey in a lot of ways, but they let you make up your own mind, and you can walk away anytime you like.” She sugars her tea. “A lot of people are turned off by est.”

“I don’t know much about it.”

“Be honest. What did you think when I brought it up?”

“I wondered if you were — ”

“A fruitcake, right? Be honest.”

“Yes,” Adams says. “I did.”

“That’s okay. est has that reputation, but it’s an easy target, you see. Anything really personal is easy to laugh at, don’t you think?”

“Sure, because nobody knows what it is.”

“Exactly.” She looks away, suddenly shy. “I’m sorry, Sam, I probably am coming on like a fruitcake. It’s been a long week, you know? I haven’t had a chance to unwind.”

“It’s okay. I’m enjoying it.”

“Me, too.” She smiles. “I just don’t want you to think I’m one of those dizzy secretaries or anything. Actually, I think est is pretty stupid. It gave me something to do when I first got back to the States. What really interests me is the stock market. I watched it for a year, then started investing. Made thirty-two hundred bucks the first five months.”

“You’re kidding.”

“You got to watch these high-tech industries. They’re springing up everywhere and if you hit the right one you’re off and sailing, but lots of them go bust right away. I wish I’d been old enough to get in on air conditioning in the early days. That’s the place to be. What about you?” she says. “What are your values in life?”

The question is troublesome, but not without charm. “I like my work,” he says.

“Yeah, but Carter’s a smoothie, isn’t he? I could see him in the Nixon administration or something. He’ll make a lot of money for the company, but I wouldn’t vouch for his ways and means.”

“I’m glad I’m not the only one who feels that way.”

At home, Adams offers her Drambuie. For the first time he looks carefully at her body. He’d found her attractive at work, but any slender woman with blond hair who is the boss’s secretary achieves a kind of status. He senses that, in sexual matters, she is not a patient woman.

Her left shoe has come off. Discreetly, Adams nudges the shoe away from her foot. “Would you like to go to bed?”

“Yes, I think so.” She places her glass on the coffee table. “We should make a process note first.”

“A what?”

“It’s kind of silly, but sometimes you learn something. We should admit to each other, honestly, how this evening affected us.”

“All right.”

“How do you feel,” she asks.

“Fine.”

“Can you elaborate?”

“I’d like to make love to you.”

She wants to know why. Adams doesn’t say anything. She accepts that.

Chopping vegetables for the children’s dinner, Adams listens tight-lipped to Toby complain about congestion in his chest.

“Mom gets me these pills.”

“What kind of pills?”

“Oxydol, I think.”

“That’s a detergent, Toby. What about an antihistamine?”

“They don’t work.”

His seditious illness. When he was smaller, rather than do what Adams said, he gasped like a sun-bleached fish. I was born wrong, his face seemed to say. “I’ll dream for you a day of air,” Adams promised. “Leaping, running, baseballs falling slowly in the blue, blue sky.” But at night his lungs glowed blue with exertion through the sheets. This was Toby’s way of fighting him. Adams thought of Alan, pink fists flailing in the air, waving good-bye.

Deidre’s body is as strong as a missile. Setting the table, she stretches as if health were as easy to hold as a fork. But Adams anticipates failure. He pictures Deidre a few years older, chipping away at her body piece by piece with PCP and pot, group sex and artificial coloring agents. Driving her home from dance class one evening in late winter, he passed a young boy walking barefoot in the snow, shirt unbuttoned, mouth open to the cold and sleet. Deidre pointed, frightened. “What’s wrong with him, Dad?” Adams pulled up beside him, rolling down his window. “Are you all right?” he said. “Can we help you?” The boy didn’t even know they were there. He plowed through drifts of snow, flapping his arms in the headlights.

“Is he crazy?” Deidre said.

“I think he’s taken some kind of drug.”

They followed him slowly for half a block, then three squad cars surrounded him in the middle of the street, spotlighting him with their flashing lights. He put his arms over his eyes and began to scream; four policemen were needed to subdue him. Deidre started to cry. For a long time after that she refused to take even aspirin, and is still wary of medicines, but Adams, exercising his fatherly right, imagines the worst for her teenage years.

Isohyet, from the Greek: isos, equal; hyetos, rain. A line drawn on a map to indicate equal rainfall along its length.

Twice a year the employees of On-Line Information Systems are required to see the company psychologist, a muttering, bent man named Mayer. He does not submit anyone to rigorous testing, merely asks questions related to work. A week later he types a psychological profile of each employee, listing his/her managerial strengths, social limitations, etc. In rare cases he recommends that someone attend a personal growth seminar, tax-deductible.

Adams is scheduled for Monday morning at eleven. At 10:55 he sits waiting in the foyer. Jordan bolts from Dr. Mayer’s office.

“What’s the matter with him,” Adams asks.

“Nothing, nothing,” the doctor says.

“Bad day?”

“He’s under a bit of a strain right now. As who isn’t?” Mayer says.

“I’ve been worried about him for a long time.” “Oh?”

“Yeah. He seems a little weird to me.”

“You all know I’m here. If he’s having problems, he knows where to come.”

Adams nods. “Maybe I shouldn’t tell you this, but I think he’s been standing in my yard.”

“Really?”

“Well, not lately. But I’m sure it was him. And there’s nothing to see, I mean, I don’t know what he was looking for. It gave me the creeps. I called the police but they wouldn’t do anything.”

“Have you spoken to him about it?”

“He denies it.” Jordan, in fact, had merely laughed in his typical offhand manner.

“Let me know if you see him again.”

The doctor asks Adams a series of questions, such as, “When you are under deadline pressure and fear you won’t make it, do you (a) give up, (b) request an extension, (c) work harder to finish, (d) other.”

The following Monday, Adams receives his profile in the interoffice mail: “A conscientious worker and careful listener. A tendency toward abstraction, even in the most casual conversations. Best production when allowed to proceed at his own pace, though he responds well to pressure. Uncomfortable in groups, prefers to work alone.”

He’s had friends. Fathers like himself who’ve sacrificed exciting careers as anglers, goalies, and entrepreneurs to raise their children. Watching baseball on Saturday afternoon with one such friend, he encountered, face-to-face, the sadness that grips certain fathers. “Right there. That was me. I was up for that part,” his friend said. On the screen a man putted around a toilet bowl in a boat. “Katie was pregnant. Insisted there wasn’t enough security in acting, so I went to work for State Farm.” His friend gazed wistfully at the little boat. “Ah well, what the hell,” he said. “I insure suckers ten times that size.”

Potency is an ugly thing.

Still, thinking back, fathering was perhaps the source of erotic mystery for Adams — a sleeplessness beneath his pleasure with Pamela at night.

There was a park by the house where they lived in the days before Deidre was born. Adams walked there with Toby. In the evenings other fathers joined him. Softballs, footballs. The clink of skate keys against nickels and dimes, money for ice cream, in the fathers’ heavy pockets. He remembers a group of young women and men marching up the street past the park, carrying signs. It was the early seventies. The last legs of the youth movement, they were denouncing Richard Nixon with not much conviction. Their signs read STOP THE BOMBING IN CAMBODIA and ANDY WARHOL FOR PRESIDENT.

“Daddy, who’s Andy Warhol,” asked a neighbor’s daughter.

“No one knows, honey,” her father said.

Now that neighbor’s in Seattle — like other fathers, he hit the road in service of free enterprise. Hundreds of fathers balancing themselves on the white stripes of the highways, wives and children stacked on their shoulders as high as ice cream cones.

Other fathers have died. Adams misses them. He shared many terrifying moments with them, signing release forms in emergency rooms, squirming in metal folding chairs in recital halls. They taught the little girls how to blow their noses without bursting their eardrums, and the little boys how to scratch their balls, if scratch they must, in secret, through their pockets. They were good fathers, all of them, full of love for their wives and gratitude for a cold glass of beer, with failing legs but the courage to dive for any wild pitch that came their way.

He finds an excuse to visit the Records Office. As he’s thumbing through the photo file, he asks Jordan, “Everything all right?” “Yeah.”

“I think those visits with Mayer are a waste of time, don’t you? He says the same thing every time.”

“He’s all right,” Jordan says. “He isn’t a gung-ho company man like everybody else around here. It’s refreshing.”

Adams wonders if he has just been insulted. “Has he ever said anything you could use?”

“What business is that of yours?”

“Nothing. Wasn’t personal. I just don’t find his little profiles very helpful.”

Jordan puts down the stack of 8×10’s he’s been holding. “I don’t know what this thing is that you seem to have about me, Sam, but I wish you’d stop it. I’ve never seen your fucking yard, all right? And I’ll tell you something else, if I need to see Mayer, it’s because you’re driving me crazy.”

He pours himself a beer and opens a bag of chips. He walks to the living room, sits at his drafting table, studies his latest map of the property Carter has recently acquired.

Something is wrong. What is it?

The isohyet. What about it?

The ninety-eighth meridian.

Adams squints, sips his beer.

When someone fouls up, the volume of mail passing back and forth within On-Line increases dramatically. Interoffice memos travel between floors, beginning “Earlier we discussed …” or “In reference to last week’s conference …” Each department goes on record as having been clean.

The company library, containing a number of atlases and journals, is located in a niche off the coffee room. There, on a shelf along one wall, a row of legal books entitled Words and Phrases can be found. These volumes provide legal definitions for every occasion. When a problem arises within the company, the books disappear from the library.

Carter’s got his lawyers, Mallow and Vox, working overtime on the real estate deals. Vox is a tiny man, lost in his clothes. His face is as battered as a drum head, ravaged, it appears, from serious bouts with acne. Adams has never had a direct conversation with him, talks past him in meetings.

Mallow is nervous and pale. Adams hasn’t had occasion to work with him, either, but knows from the newsletter that he has lobbied in Washington with lawyers from corporations in their congressional district. In addition, both Mallow and Vox have formed, at Carter’s request, a Political Action Committee. Company policy states that management-level personnel must contribute to the committee. The rest of the employees are not required to do so, but know that failure to give is interpreted by Carter as refusal to support the company’s goals.

When Mallow comes around, pale hand hanging open, Adams makes a point of giving a little more each time.

The offending left hand: On the freeway Adams waves to the world. He signals waiters and cashiers with his left hand. With his left hand he acknowledges Jordan from across the coffee room. When he speaks to Pamela on the phone, he holds the receiver in his left hand.

“The other night Deidre woke me up and said a bad clown had come out of her coloring book and tried to stick his puffy cap down her throat,” Pamela says. “She couldn’t understand why I didn’t search her room. Then I thought, if she can’t tell the difference between waking life and dreams, and if there’s anything at all to Aristotle’s notion that the pleasure of art is imitation, then Deidre can’t appreciate art. She doesn’t know it’s imitation. So I bought a clown suit — ”

“Pam?” Adams says. “Are you terrorizing our daughter?”

Pamela laughs. “It’s true. There was no pleasure on her face.”

Mosquitoes swarm around his arms. He passes the Polish dance hall and the cemetery that round off one end of his neighborhood (it has never been zoned). Rosa the fortune-teller is standing on her front porch in a print dress, a purple scarf draped around her head. She picks her teeth with a toothpick, gazes at the tombstones across the street.

In the public library, two blocks from his house, Adams finds books on climatology, geography, and federal land grant programs. He carries the books to a wooden table and switches on the green reading lamp.

The ninety-eighth meridian. Of course.

At the turn of the century, American meteorologists drew a thirty-inch isohyet along the ninety-eighth meridian, indicating the westernmost boundary along which the annual rainfall averaged thirty inches. Thirty inches, along with rate of evaporation and seasonal distribution, was, according to the meteorologists, the bare minimum needed to grow crops. Carter’s property lies west of the line.

“You’re making an awful lot of noise about a thirty-inch line,” Carter says.

“That line could be very important to a number of families.”

“The county averages over forty inches of rain a year.”

“Yes, but the rainfall isn’t evenly distributed. In the fall, parts of the county experience droughtlike conditions. The land looks fertile, but those are limestone hills containing only surface soil. Those shrubs are stunted trees.”

“Granted, it won’t be easy to cultivate…”

“It’ll be impossible to cultivate.”

“Damn it, Sam, you’re too smart for your own good,” Carter says, leaning forward in his chair.

“I suggest — ”

“How do you like your computer?”

“I like it very much.”

“We’ve got to pay for it, hmm?”

“Yes.”

“Hmm?”

“Sure.”

“Then move the isohyet a quarter of an inch to the left,” Carter says.

“Excuse me?”

“After all, the county records aren’t all that accurate.” Carter opens the office door. “And while you’re at it, draw up a mental map of the area and an environmental stress chart of the county.”

A foul-up: City council, at the request of its senior member, a former Spenserian scholar, renames one of its residential streets Faerie Queene Boulevard. Tenants in apartments on Faerie Queene Boulevard move out. Owners complain that they cannot rent property in the area.

Several thousand maps have been printed, bearing the name Faerie Queene Boulevard.

Memos fly back and forth — first within city hall, then between city hall and On-Line, finally within On-Line itself. Thousands of tax dollars later, Words and Phrases reappears on the shelves of the company library.

A recipe comes in the mail. Stew with steak. He makes it for Jill.

“Scrumptious,” she says, scooting next to him on the bed. “Your recipe?”

“The power company’s. It came with their bill.” “Bless them,” Jill says.

He pulls her to his chest. She asks about his wife. “She works at the high school,” he tells her, “balancing PA speakers in the rafters of the boys’ gymnasium.”

“Tell me about your kids.”

“I’ve hired them out to the fair. They have to push the Ferris wheel all day long to keep it spinning.”

She laughs. He looks past her through the window. Outside her apartment on a billboard, a whiskey ad: a giant glass, ice tumbling over blocks of ice.

Toby has flunked his science class — inevitable, like the failure of the city’s fiscal plan and the raising of taxes, but disheartening nevertheless. Toby does not seem upset at the prospect of summer school.

“What does your mother say about it?” Adams says.

“She wants to send me to a doctor.”

“What kind of doctor?”

“A shrink.”

“We’ll see about that.”

“Is there any peach ice cream,” Deidre asks.

“Yes, but finish your hot dog first.”

After dinner Adams walks with them past the Polish dance hall and the cemetery. The evening is cool. The kids enjoy poking around the old neighborhood. Deidre still seems to think she’ll be back here any day.

They encounter the Reverend Sister Rosa on the sidewalk in front of her house. Toby assumes a defensive stance, Deidre hides behind Adams.

“Why, hello, I haven’t seen you in a long time,” Rosa says, extending her arm toward Toby.

“Hi,” Toby says, stiffly shaking the woman’s hand.

“And how are you?” Rosa asks, peering around Adams’ legs.

“Fine,” Deidre answers.

“Lovely evening.”

“Yes,” says Adams, edging the kids past her.

“I was just getting ready to sit out here on the porch with a plate of spaghetti. Would you like to join me? I made a big pot. You know how it is with spaghetti.”

“Thanks, we’ve eaten.”

“I see. Taking a little stroll, then?”

“That’s right.”

“It’s a wonderful neighborhood if you can afford to stay. My husband died six years ago, and it’s been a real struggle.” She has managed to pay off the house, though, and guesses she’ll die in it. “When I’m gone, they won’t have far to carry me,” she says, nodding at the cemetery across the street.

“We live here, too,” Deidre says.

“Used to,” Toby corrects her.

“I know what,” Rosa says, looking sadly at the children. “I’ll bet the kids would like to have their fortunes told, am I right?”

“We’ve got to-”

“On me.” She winks at Adams. “It’ll only take a second and it’ll be fun for them. Maybe they’ll get lucky in love.” Before he can think of a reply, she’s headed up her walk, motioning for him to follow.

“Did you know she’s a witch?” Deidre whispers, tugging on Adams’ pants.

“Shhh,” Adams says. “Be friendly.”

Rosa’s front room is small, lighted by a single lamp with a yellow shade. On the television, underneath the rabbit ears, a stack of newspapers and magazines. Paintings of Jesus and photographs of Eugene Debs cover the walls, garlic stalks wilt in blue vases around the room.

“Can I get you a glass of water?”

The kids shake their heads.

Rosa produces a deck of Tarot cards from her dress pocket and flips through them like a picture book.

“You’re first,” she tells Toby. “Shuffle the cards, and think about what you’d like to know.”

The cards fascinate Adams. He doesn’t believe in their ability to foretell the future, but as a symbol system they intrigue him, and he’s taken with the idea of mapping time. Instinctively, he reaches for the Two of Wands. It depicts a young man looking over battlements to the sea. In his right hand he grips a small globe; in his left he clutches a staff.

Rosa tells him, “This is the lord of the manor. The card indicates riches, magnificence, dominance, skill in science.”

Adams smiles. Rosa adds, “When the card appears upside down in a reading, it indicates sadness, suffering, lack of will.”

Adams lays the card aside.

The Nine of Wands — a young man, head wrapped in bandages, leaning on a staff — reminds him of Jordan: the vacant stare, the air of patience and immobility.

“Cunning, hidden strength, opposition,” Rosa says, tapping the card. “This person is an able adversary.”

The Two of Swords: a blindfolded woman balancing a pair of swords on her shoulders. She sits on a bench with her back to the sea, a crescent moon above. “This would be a very desirable card for you in a reading,” Rosa tells him. “It indicates balanced forces, an end to family quarrels. It can also, in rare cases, mean impotence.”

Toby will be a great man, Rosa predicts, like Churchill or Kennedy. Deidre will have many children.

“I want to be a great man, too,” she says.

“You will, of course you will,” Rosa tells her.

The spaghetti is about to boil over on Rosa’s stove, and Adams uses this as an excuse to get away. Politely, and with thanks, he hustles the children out the door.

“Listen, I’m starting a group séance on Thursday nights. Ten percent discount if you contact two or more spirits. Drop by sometime.”

“Thanks, I will,” Adams says.

“She’s a neat lady,” Deidre muses on the way home. “I liked it, what she said about me.”

“I thought you said she was a witch.”

“That was before I was a great man.”

Adams places his watch on the back porch, next to the barbecue pit. Jordan does not appear. The following evening Adams leaves a ring.

Straightening his desk at the end of the day, he discovers in a stack of papers the program notes from last year’s conference on plate tectonics. Over drinks in a hotel lobby a seismologist from UCLA had turned to him. “In an information-based society, what happens to blue-collar workers?” he said. “You and me, information-gatherers, we’re the elite. But we’re not making plans for people who work with their hands.” Adams was tired. He shared a room with Carter, though their schedules overlapped and they didn’t see each other much. Carter’s presentation had been given a prime spot on the bill — Friday evening, closing night. Adams was relegated to Tuesday afternoon, when many of the conferees were playing tennis or enjoying late lunches.

He ordered another gin and tonic, nodded perfunctorily at his colleague, and tried to spin the ashtray. It was glued to the table. “It’s the same lack of foresight that gets us into wars,” the seismologist continued. “In a million years the continents will have cracked so much you won’t be able to tell America from Spain. We fight and sign treaties as if nothing’s going to change, but in a geologically active world, what does territoriality mean?”

“Here’s the information you wanted.”

“Good, good, come in,” says Carter. “What did you find?”

“The Deerbridge Road area is generally perceived as undesirable.”

“We’ve got an ad campaign that’ll change that.”

“Also, I drew an Ignorance Surface Map. People tend to confuse similar shapes when they’re side by side — Arizona and New Mexico are often mistaken for one another. And it occurred to me that Richmond County, which is nothing but scrub oaks, is shaped a little like the northern half of Elgin County. Perhaps people confuse the two, and think your lots are barren.”

“Wonderful. We can use that.”

“Of course, rainfall amounts being what they are — ”

“Right. And the isohyet?”

“Where you wanted it.”

“Very good. Do you know what we’re doing, Sam? We’re educating people’s desires.”

“You mean, telling them what they want?”

“That’s a little hard. Let’s say we’re paving the way for change. Sit tight, hmm? Phase Two in a couple of days.”

Adams tells Carter he will not alter any more maps. Falsifying documents is not what he had in mind when he came to work for On-Line. Besides, prestige does not accompany local projects; overseas fieldwork is the best means of gaining promotion and respect.

“I was hoping for another international assignment,” he says. “Now’s a particularly good time for me to travel.”

“Why’s that?”

“My wife and I separated.”

“Sorry to hear it.”

“Thank you. Anyway, with the kids gone, I have less responsibility at home. I’m a good man in the field, and it’s been over two years.”

“Your skills are needed here, Sam.” He taps the Ixodes on Adams’ lapel. “At least for the time being. We’ll consider an international assignment in a few months, okay?”

Late at night in his office, Adams fiddles with the console. A single fluorescent bulb buzzes over head. Below, the street is quiet.

He calls two light cones up on the screen — a pair of pale blue pyramids, points touching in the center of the graph.

The upper light cone he labels accessible future: that is, the realm of events that can possibly follow the present. The bottom cone’s the accessible past: the realm of events leading up to now. The white space outside the light cones is the inaccessible future and past. He has, in effect, drawn the basis of a map defining the regions of the universe knowable from a given point in space and time.

To make the map more accurate, he must concentrate the surface area of the light cones. When he does so, the shape of the cones fluctuates wildly, indicating that the line between future and past can easily blur, even at short distances.

Next, he calls to the screen a wormhole. On a flat plane, a wormhole is formed by drawing two openings opposite each other and stretching them into a single tube. If, as some astronomers believe, dead suns form wormholes in space, the topology around them is highly unstable.

Further, Adams discovers that if he quantizes all the data on the screen, emptiness acquires a complex topology. It looks like an arterial system, a tightly fused matrix of tubes. To fully understand the shape of space-time, he needs a four-dimensional image.

He switches off the system, gets up, stretches, and walks to the window. Tattered paper flutters in the street, against the curb. A couple strolls down the walk. Tiny caterpillars of motion inhabit the space between him and the street where, tomorrow morning at eight, he will enter the building.

In Ecuador, where Adams once headed an international group, the Quechua Indians, an educated and happy people, believe the future lies behind them. “A man does not have eyes in the back of his head,” said one. “Nor can he see the future. Does it not make sense, then, to place the future behind you?” Similarly, the past, an “open book,” lies ahead.

Adams feels like a Quechua.

At work his supply of ink is low. He hasn’t been to the storeroom. Grease pencils aren’t precise and lead pencils aren’t dark enough. He’ll try it anyway.

1:00 He can’t see the grids he has made. The lines are simply too light, and his eyes begin to ache. He should have used the computer.

2:00 Deerbridge Road.

2:15 Deerbridge Road disappears. County records are uncertain.

4:45 Deerbridge Road reappears.

At home, he tries to call the kids. No answer.

At dusk, Jordan returns. He is standing close to the house and appears to be fiddling with the faucet. For the first time, Adams feels panic more than curiosity or annoyance. Still in his suit he leaps out the door, past the barbecue pit and the tree. The man turns, opens the gate, flies up the walk. Adams, in pursuit, loosens his tie. The man jumps a fence. Adams follows. Shrubs. Thorns. The barking of a dog. Pale blue television light flickers through blinds. The laughter of the neighbors. Loose bricks in the yards. Dog shit, the smell of lilac. Adams can’t keep up — Jordan is much younger than he, and in better shape. “Goddamn you!” Adams calls. The man heaves a plastic garbage can at him. Adams brushes potato skins from his suit, runs up the empty street past the dance hall and Rosa’s house. His shoes hurt. The man has disappeared. Did he have a car waiting?

Adams sits on the curb. The night is humid, tar shines on the streets. He can turn left, make a right, or go straight. He can walk backwards up the street until he reaches a dead end.

An airplane passes overhead.

He’s not sure where he is.

He clambers over a wire mesh fence and finds himself in a garden. Peppers, tomatoes, beets. A pigeon coop.

As Adams speaks, Mayer remains impassive, remote.

“And you’ve positively identified him?”

“Well, I think so. It looked like he was doing something to the house. You’ve treated the man. You must know he’s nuts.”

Mayer shows him nothing.

“I want to know the best course of action. I’ve already called the police. I could try them again, or maybe it would be better if you did it. I need a rational plan; otherwise I’m going to fly off the handle. Enough is enough.”

“It wouldn’t hurt for you to call the police again, ask them to patrol the neighborhood if they will. In the meantime, I’ll speak to Mr. Jordan and we’ll determine what needs to be done.”

“He is nuts, right? He sure looked like it the day he came running out of your office.”

Mayer says only, “I’ll speak to him. There’s been no damage to your property, is that correct?”

“Not that I can tell.”

“All right, Mr. Adams. Thank you for bringing this to my attention. I know how upsetting something like this can be. If you’re having trouble sleeping — ”

Mayer follows him into the hall. Jordan is walking toward them from the far end. Adams starts, but Mayer holds his arm. “Please, Mr. Adams, let me speak to him before you say anything, all right?”

Adams straightens his coat. “You asshole,” he says to Jordan.

Inevitably, the call from Pamela’s family. He’s surprised it didn’t come sooner: perhaps they were hoping for a reconciliation by now. Her father, Jurgen, accuses Adams of neglecting Pamela’s needs. Without irony, Adams asks, “What are her needs?” It seems to him that her needs were ill-defined even at the time of their wedding. Would she be a journalist or an artist? Would she travel with Adams or remain at home? Perhaps she married him because, given her family background, marriage was prudent for her; yet Adams, with his passport and maps, was the most impractical of husbands.

When they met she was taking an Old English course. “Your eyes are Nordic,” she said, winter-cearig” which, roughly translated, meant “winter-sad.” The fact that she found him moody pleased him at the time. He enjoyed being a serious young student.

Jurgen wanted to marry them but Adams refused politely, feeling that to grant him this privilege would be to approve in advance any intervention Jurgen might wish to make in their marriage. Adams hired a Unitarian minister, and throughout the ceremony Pamela’s parents, in the front pew, criticized his performance. “His voice is a little shaky,” Adams heard Jurgen whisper. “Such a monotone,” said Pamela’s mother.

Now, on the phone, Jurgen’s telling him the story of Abraham and Sarah, who survived hardships with unending faith and love and were able to conceive a child even after their bodies were withered and broken.

Whenever Jurgen preaches, he quotes liberally from a variety of sources. Like Pamela, he is proud of his German ancestry, and is particularly fond of Nietzsche and Hegel. He has misconstrued Nietzsche’s Will to Power as “willpower” and erroneously paraphrases him in a Christian context. Hegel pops up in his apocalyptic sermons. “History’s coming to an end,” Jurgen shouts. “The Book of Revelation says so, the great Lutheran thinker Hegel says so.”

Listening to him, Adams loses trust in narrative. In Jurgen’s hands narrative is simply a form of typology, a chain of causality, leaving no room for accident. Adam was the forerunner of Moses who was the forerunner of Christ who became a scapegoat for all mankind… Well, Adams thinks, you see the trouble that’s gotten us into.

He has drawn enough jagged coastlines and isolated islands to be a firm believer in accident.

In sum, he does not get along with Pamela’s father.

The only member of Pamela’s family he enjoys is her uncle Otto. A rounder and a scoundrel, Otto is one of the richest men in Pennsylvania. He quit school in the fifth grade, learned sign-painting, and along with his father designed billboards all over the East Coast. When his father died, he discovered that the old man owned much of the East Coast, though he’d lived like a pauper all his life. Otto inherited so much land that the Army Corps of Engineers had to consult him each time they planned a project in the Delaware basin.

“You can’t really own a piece of land,” he once told Adams. “It’s there for anyone to sleep and piss on. Besides, my inheritance never stopped me from sinking to my proper level in life.” With buckets of silver and buckets of gold he formed images up and down America’s highways, meanwhile accumulating interest on his holdings — money he rarely touched. He didn’t drink much before the age of fourteen, but “did quite a bit,” he said, “after that.” He preferred to live like his father and had no use for the rest of Pamela’s family. “Tight-assed Lutheran Krauts,” he called them.

Adams agreed, but did not want to upset Jurgen any more than the separation already had. He sounded old.

“It’s all for the best, Jurgen. We were going in different directions. Pam’s found a whole new career — ”

“Don’t go blaming Pammy for your oversights.”

“We both made mistakes.”

“Excuses won’t wash with God, Sam. Marriage is a sacred institution.”

“Jurgen, please, I want you to stop worrying about it. Let Pam and me work this out ourselves, all right? In the meantime, you take care of yourself.”

“I’m fit as a fiddle. Don’t change the subject.”

Adams’ family is easier. His mother and father divorced just after Kenny was born. She stays at home with migraines, he runs a miniature golf course on the outskirts of Red Cloud. When she wasn’t in bed with pain, she was arguing with the old man in the clubhouse next to the eighteenth green. The final fairway led to a clown’s face, sad as a frozen dinner, with pointed eyes and a grinning mouth. The tongue was a red slide up which the ball rolled into the hole located just behind the clown’s uvula. Adams remembers sitting on the tongue, watching his parents threaten each other with putters.

Though neither is happy when he calls and tells them his troubles, they listen and forgive.

A note from Mayer: “Re our earlier conversation. Mr. Jordan has been under an intense emotional strain of late, factors having to do mainly with overwork. At my request, Mr. Carter has agreed to allow him some time off. You’ll be happy to know that Mr. Jordan’s problems are not serious. He is not a threat to you, nor has he ever been. I am satisfied you will not be bothered again.”