Humans

14

To be public information director (PID) for a nuclear power plant less than a hundred miles from a major population center like New York City is not, at the best of times, an easy job, but Joshua Hardwick cheerfully soldiered on, almost never losing heart. Thirty-three years old, pudgy and open-faced, a relentless optimist and a refugee from the advertising business in the city, Hardwick could sing the pro-nuclear song with the best of them, downplaying the downside and painting a picture of an energy-rich and peaceful and happy and secure future dominated by the image of a little girl in a pink crinoline dress playing ball on an expanse of lush green lawn. Like Hans Brinker himself, he could skate with aplomb over the occasional patch of thin ice, such as plant safety or disposal of contaminated wastes, awing and distracting the populace with the grace and assurance of his arabesques.

But this was too much. Arriving at Green Meadow III Nuclear Power Plant this morning, after his usual pleasant bucolic twenty-minute drive from his home in Connecticut, Joshua was startled to see demonstrators marching around on the asphalt of the country road out front.

Oh, God. Not since the operating license struggle when the plant first opened had there been demonstrators here. The emptiness of this rural area, its calm and quiet, seemed to deter most dissenters, as though they needed crowds and hard pavements to fully believe their own rhetoric.

This was a very small demonstration: fewer than a dozen protestors, plus, parked a little distance away, one state police car containing a couple of bored troopers. But was it an augury of worse to come? Squinting, leaning forward over his Honda steering wheel to look out the windshield, Joshua tried to read the signs the demonstrators carried:

“No Nukes Is Good Nukes.” Well, yes, we know that one.

“No Experiments With Our Lives!” Hmm; that one’s new, but what does it mean exactly? That’s the trouble with slogans, they can get a little too cryptic for their own good.

“Keep Maniac Philpott Away From Reactors!” Well, that was straightforward enough, if not quite as clear as chicken broth. Maniac Philpott. A person? Who?

Did one of the demonstrators have a halo? Joshua blinked, and peered again, and of course not. Just a trick of the light.

As usual, Joshua showed his face and his clearance badge to the guard at the gate, who looked more grim than customary this morning but who did wave him through in the ordinary way. Joshua waved back, and drove up and over the gentle rise concealing the main structures from the idle gaze — or concentrated gaze, for that matter — of the populace on the public roadway, and as he drove he mulled that last sign.

“Keep Maniac Philpott Away From Reactors!” Wasn’t there a Philpott, a scientist, some kind of big-dome thinking machine, over at Grayling, not far from here? Philpott, Philpott; Joshua couldn’t remember the first name. There was new construction starting, off to the right of the main buildings, but Joshua, deep in thought, barely registered it. Philpott; Philpott. A scientist, an experimenter.

“No Experiments With Our Lives!”

“Oh, no. Here? Here?” Inside his Honda, as he steered toward his reserved parking space, Joshua looked stricken. They wouldn’t.

And yet they would.

“I don’t know how the news leaked so soon,” Gar Chambers said.

“Not through me, obviously, not through the spokesman here,” Joshua said, not bothering to hide his irritation.

They sat together in Gar’s office, he being chief operating officer of the facility and Joshua’s immediate boss, and the reason Joshua didn’t bother to hide his irritation was that they both knew he could walk out of here and into a job at least as good as this one by the end of the working day. As a spokesman, for anything at all, Joshua was one of the naturals.

Four years ago, when Green Meadow III first opened and the spokesman job here became available, Joshua and his wife, Jennifer, had just completed their first year in their weekend country house, had come to the realization that they no longer liked the commute to New York or the work in New York or even the life in New York, and Joshua had upped roots and converted himself from a harried account executive in a thankless enterprise to a country gentleman who did some chatting for the nuclear industry from time to time. Personally, he had no opinion about nuclear power one way or the other, any more than he’d held strong opinions about the cat food, lipstick, or adult diapers he’d once sold. So if the job was going to become unpleasant, with demonstrators outside the gates and secrets held back from him within, he’d be just as happy being spokesperson for the New York State Tourist Council.

All of which Gar knew as well as Joshua. Sounding apologetic, he said, “We were hoping to get the situation in place before any public announcement was made. A fait accompli is much easier to deal with, as you know.”

“So I was kept outside the loop.”

“I’m sorry about that,” Gar said. “I really thought we could keep it quiet.”

“An experimental physicist,” Joshua said, “world-renowned, is going to move over here from Grayling University to conduct experiments in new kinds of energy. And you thought you could keep that secret. Half the secretaries here must know it by now, but I didn’t know it.”

“It’s probably the construction that gave it away,” Gar said.

“Construction. Oh, yes, I saw something on my way in. What’s that all about?”

“A new laboratory for our distinguished guest,” Gar said. “Well away from the reactor, well away from waste storage. Absolutely guaranteed safe, no possible problem to anybody ever.”

“Doesn’t he have a lab over at Grayling?”

“Well, yes,” Gar admitted.

Joshua smelled the reek of old fish. “Then why isn’t he staying there?”

Gar looked depressed, even a little sick. “He blows things up sometimes,” he said. “They seemed to feel, a college campus wasn’t the right place for that.”

“But a nuclear power plant is.”

Gar spread his hands. “Joshua, the decision was made far above thee and me. Far above.”

“Okay,” Joshua said, “so there’s something in it for our masters. What’s in it for us?”

Gar tried to look hopeful. “Prestige? The inside track on new advances in energy research?”

“Those are pretty thin bones,” Joshua said, “but I’ll do my best to make soup of it. For a while, anyway.”

Gar lifted his head, alert and worried, as though he’d just heard a shot down the hall. “For a while?”

“I don’t know, Gar,” Joshua said, “this is kind of discouraging. To have secrets kept from me, things I really need to know.”

“It won’t happen again, I promise.”

“It happened once.”

Gar said, “Joshua, I need you now. It wasn’t my idea to have that goddamn genius move in on us, but he’s here, or he’s going to be here very soon, and we’ve got to sell him to the public. We can’t let Dr. Marlon Philpott become the excuse for a new round of anti-nuclear demonstrations.”

“He already has.”

“I need you,” Gar repeated. “Stay with the team, Joshua.”

“Did the team stay with me?”

“It will, it will. Don’t abandon the ship now, not when we’re in crisis. Get our story out, Joshua. Please.”

Joshua, somewhat mollified, and aware that the Tourist Council would provide only a little bit more money with a much longer commute, got to his feet and said, “Gar, for you. Only for you. I’ll see what I can do.”

Gar also stood. “Thank you, Joshua,” he said.

For the next few weeks, and particularly after Dr. Philpott moved into his new laboratory on-site, the demonstrations outside the main gate of Green Meadow III grew larger and more unruly every day.

15

In warm weather, in the darkness of a new moon, Kwan climbed over the rail in the soft air and swiftly descended the ladder rungs to the kitchen staff’s deck. It was nearly three in the morning, and everyone on this deck was presumably asleep, exhausted by the day’s labors. Li Kwan, after labor of a much more pleasant sort, and a nice nap in the arms of an Italian college girl named Stefania, felt no sleepiness at all, and paused on the lower deck, forearms on the thrumming rail, to look out at their phosphorescent wake, not even minding that hint of engine oil in the salty air.

Tuesdays made it possible. Kwan could survive his exile now, his flight, his forced anonymity, but only because of Tuesday. Rarely would the same woman be aboard two Tuesdays in a row, but if so he was delighted with the opportunity for a reunion. He had learned to stay away from alcohol, and to sleep for a while on Tuesday afternoons in preparation for the night. His life had become, at least one day a week, more than bearable; it was comfortable, even luxurious.

Perhaps too luxurious! It was too easy to forget in these circumstances who he really was. Not merely a kitchen scamp who crept up the equivalent of a drainpipe to bed his betters on the upper floors, he was a part of a massive human movement against tyranny and oppression, a small but inspired element in a drive to free one-quarter of humanity from the slavery of the ancient murderers.

I must not let this luxury soften me, Kwan told himself. I must not let my love of women distract me from my love of freedom.

Faint lights were visible from time to time, far away to starboard. Some city of Africa; they were steaming up the African coast of the Atlantic now, with Barcelona the next stop and then Rotterdam, and then Southampton, and on and on. Eventually, some part of the North American continent would be reached, and when it was, he would have to find a way off the ship.

Some American girl? Could he persuade an American girl to smuggle him off with her? Could he insert himself among the visitors who crowded aboard at every stop to see off their friends?

A way will present itself, Kwan was sure of that. As though he had at his side a guardian angel — in the shape of the Statue of Liberty, perhaps, like the one in Tiananmen Square — he was confident he would not give in to ease, not lose heart, not be defeated. The road would open before him.

Smiling, pleased with his adventure of the night, with his accommodation to this temporary world, with the fact of his own confidence and youth, Kwan gazed out at the glittering wake of Star Voyager, as it disappeared into the utter blackness of the vast ocean. Such a confident wake.

16

What affected Susan most of all was Grigor’s matter-of-factness. He behaved as though his courage were the most natural thing in the world, as though being brave were something like being blue-eyed or left-handed. It wasn’t an English kind of stiff-upper-lip thing, nor an American’s self-conscious imitation of Humphrey Bogart or Indiana Jones. It probably wasn’t even anything generically Russian, but simply Grigor’s own personality: laconic, aware but unafraid, viewing his own history as it passed by with interest but dispassion. He must have been a wonderful fireman, Susan thought, before they killed him.

She was twenty minutes late today, because demonstrators opposed to some sort of esoteric research at the nuclear power plant near the Taconic Parkway exit had blocked the road. Grigor was not in his room, but the nurse called Jane, at her desk in the hall, grinned hello, and said, “He’s faxing.”

“Thanks.”

It no longer struck anyone odd to have a patient in a cancer research hospital in upstate New York — within ten miles of a nuclear power plant, no less — faxing jokes to Moscow. In Russian. Susan had spent days searching New York last spring, and at last had found a typewriter dealer named Tytell who had come up with a Cyrillic-alphabet typewriter, a used one he’d gotten years before from the Soviet U.N. mission. So now Grigor could tap out his gags two-fingered and not subject some long-suffering secretary in Moscow to his truly terrible penmanship.

In truth, Susan didn’t think Grigor’s jokes were particularly runny, but she understood she wasn’t his intended audience. The Russian television people at the other end of the fax machine seemed pleased, and that was what counted.

And also what counted was that Grigor’s spirits were kept reasonably buoyant. Susan could make the drive up from the city only on weekends, and it seemed to her now that every week he’d declined visibly, become thinner, slower, feebler. His eyes were deep-set now, ringed in gray. The gums were steadily receding from his teeth, so that more and more he looked like a skull, particularly when he laughed. Realizing that, he did his laughing with closed lips these days, or covered his mouth with his hand. It broke Susan’s heart to see the embarrassed way he brought that hand up, the haunted eyes looking out at her as he laughed in secret; laughing was so much a part of his life, and to have it hampered and hedged seemed unnecessarily cruel.

The fax machine was in a small windowless room — a big closet, really — stuffed with the machinery of the clerical trade: a large copying machine, a Mr. Coffee, a paper cutter, several staplers, and a tall gray metal cabinet full of stationery supplies. Grigor sat hunched on the room’s one small typist’s chair, back to the doorway, punching out the phone number with his bony forefinger. Shoulder blades protruded sharply against the back of his shirt, like stubby angel wings. She wanted to put her arms around him, but never had.

Sensing movement, Grigor turned, saw Susan, and smiled with his lips held close together, like a prissy man sipping from a straw “A remarkable machine, this,” he said, by way of hello. “I merely touch a few numbers, and in no time at all I can hear a busy signal eleven thousand miles away.”

Smiling back, not showing him anything except the smile, Susan said, “Is that one of the jokes you’re sending?”

“One of the jokes I’m not sending,” he said, and punched the numbers again. “No, the fax isn’t common enough in the Soviet so far. I sent one gag— Ah, the busy signal.” He broke the connection, turned back to Susan. “I did send one: The Moscow/Washington hot line is by fax now. The only trouble is, the KGB made us attach ours to a shredder.’ Boris Boris didn’t like it.” He peered at her shrewdly. “Neither do you.”

“Try again,” she said gently, gesturing at the machine.

He turned to it. “This fax should be attached to a yacht,” he said, tapping out the number. “It would make a fine anchor. Ah, yes, the signal of busyness. The only sign of economic activity in all Moscow, the fax machine at Soviet Television TV Center on Korolyov Street.”

After three more tries, the call did at last go through, and Grigor fed his two pages of jokes, asides, and suggestions into the machine, then carried the originals back to his room, paused to take his medicines, and at last they could leave for their drive in the country.

This was probably the last cycle of the seasons Grigor would ever see. Susan’s cousin Chuck Woodbury, the AIDS research doctor, had soon after Grigor’s arrival in the States passed him on to other doctors, experts in his particular kind of radiation-induced cancer, and while various medicinal combinations they’d tried had put his illness into slight remission for short periods of time, the advance of the disease was still inexorable, and gradually accelerating its pace.

Grigor had arrived in this mountainous terrain, less than a hundred miles north of New York City, in late May, and had so far seen the finish of spring’s green burgeoning and the flowered lushness of summer. Now he was seeing the first of the great autumn foliage display; every day, more leaves on more branches had turned to russet and ruby and gold. He would most likely see this change all the way through to bare black trees against a white sky, standing in great drifts of rusty leaves; he would probably see the first snowfall of winter. But would he experience the end of winter? Unlikely.

The country rolled, rich in reds and yellows, backed by the dark green of pines. Susan drove through little gray-stone towns and newer clapboard or aluminum-sided developments.

Grigor talked about the beautiful vistas of this new land he’d never known he would visit, and sometimes talked about the beautiful vistas of Russia as well; unstated between them was the knowledge that he would never see those Russian vistas again.

The drive was tiring for Grigor eventually. “I hate to go back,” he finally said, “but...”

“There’s tomorrow,” she reminded him. She almost always spent Saturday night at a motel near the hospital, so she and Grigor could have the two weekend days together. He’d never come to the motel with her, nor had either of them raised the suggestion that he might.

That was a taboo area, by mutual consent. Susan wondered sometimes if her feelings for Grigor were merely self-defensive, if she were just protecting herself from a real, adult, dangerous relationship with a man by concentrating so exclusively on someone who simply could not offer a long-term commitment. But her feelings for Grigor seemed so much stronger than that, more profound. She’d even thought at times about the possibility of having his child, helping him to leave some echo or reminder of himself in the world. She’d never mentioned that idea to him, knowing instinctively that, rather than please him, the prospect of fathering a child he would never see, who would never be alive in his lifetime, would appall and sadden him.

Was he even capable of sex? Weakened, all the systems of his body slowing and failing, would it be possible for him any more? Susan shied away from the question, uncomfortable even to find herself thinking about it.

She’d forgotten the anti-nuclear demonstration. Their roundabout aimless drive, drifting through the falling leaves, had taken them to another approach toward the hospital, and all at once, as they topped a low hill, flanked by yellowing birch and beech and elm and dark green pine, there it was laid out before them, as frenzied yet compact as a scene in a movie. Which in a way it was, since almost all demonstrations are actually composed for television news coverage. So it was in the usual manner that the triumvirate of demonstrators and police and television technicians boiled away furiously together down there, enclosed within an invisible pot; one inch outside camera range, pastoral placidity reigned.

“I think I can get past,” Susan said, hands gripping the wheel as she braked, coming slowly down the slope.

The left side of the road here was flanked by tall chain-link fence with razor wire at the top. Behind it, the woods were, if anything, more lush than anywhere else in the neighborhood, since the power company had added extra trees, mostly pine, to hide the plant tucked into the folds of hills. Only the access road, with its electric gate and guardpost and discreet sign, suggested what lay inside.

The demonstration was centered on that plant entrance. It spilled out to cover the entire road, protestors weaving in their ragged oval, waving their signs, shouting their catchphrases, while local police and private guards contained and controlled them, and the television crews moved and shifted around the perimeter like sharks around a shipwreck. Scuffles kept breaking out in the middle of the action, drawing more observers and participants, but then snuffing themselves out; it was to no one’s advantage to let this confrontation get out of hand, move beyond an acceptable predetermined level of hostility. No side wanted to harm its reputation in Washington and Albany and on Wall Street, where the real decisions would be made.

On the right, the land was wilder, scrubbier, with more underbrush and more visible dead branches or the remains of dead trees. The power company owned this land as well, to protect itself, but didn’t bother to manage it. The shoulder on that side, opposite the plant entrance, was broad and weedy, with a shallow ditch. It seemed to Susan she could leave the blacktop and make her way around the demonstration without getting caught up in it. The alternative was a detour of about fifteen miles, and Grigor was already very tired. She’d chance it.

Up close, the sights and sounds were ugly. Passion and righteousness twisted the faces of the demonstrators, while leashed animal rage froze the faces of the police and guards, and the faces of the TV people bore the placid untouched evil beauty of Dorian Gray. Though the car windows were rolled up, Susan could plainly hear the lust for carnage in all those raised voices, like a primitive tribe psyching itself up to attack another village. Blinking, she drove at a slow and steady pace, the car slanting into the ditch on the right, bumping over the uneven ground.

“They’re right,” Grigor said, looking out the windshield. He sounded unlike himself, bitter and angry and defeated.

They were nearly past when another quick outbreak of violence occurred, just beyond them on their left: a sudden release of pressure, boiling over of rage, like bubbles in lava. Police wands swung, wedges of protestors moved and swayed, and a TV cameraman looking for a better angle backed directly into Susan’s path, forcing her to stop.

She was afraid to sound her horn, not wanting to attract the attention of any of the participants, and while she was waiting there, growing more and more frightened, two people came reeling out of the scrum, a man and a woman, supporting one another. Or he supporting her, his arm around her waist, her hand on his shoulder. He looked up, saw the car, and as he raised his free arm in supplication, she thought, Ben! What’s he doing here?

But of course, it wasn’t Ben Margolin, whom she hadn’t seen since college, whom she’d been madly in love with for one semester (and part of a second). Still, that instant of false recognition predisposed her in his favor, so she nodded as she met his eye, and gestured for them to come to the car. The woman, she could see, had a short diagonal cut on her forehead, a line of dark red blood, straight on its upper side, ragged below, like a line in a graffiti signature.

The TV cameraman moved closer to the action, out of Susan’s path, as the man who wasn’t Ben Margolin opened the rear car door, helped the woman in, and piled in after her. Susan immediately accelerated, bearing down hard on the pedal, the car jouncing, rear wheels spinning before catching hold.

Grigor had the box of Kleenex tissues out of the glove compartment, and had twisted around to offer it to the woman, who gave him a baffled look, then shakily smiled and took two tissues. She was about thirty, dark-haired, exotically attractive, not thin.

The man with her didn’t really look much like Ben at all, except that he was tall and blond and big-boned. But he had a very different face, more open and easygoing and friendly than Ben’s. (Ben had been a tortured intellectual.) He said to Susan, “Thanks for getting us out of that. I think it’s gonna turn bad.”

“It already did turn bad,” Susan said. Clearing the last of the demonstration, getting back onto the road, she could look in the rearview mirror at the woman daubing at her cut forehead with the tissues.

“Worse,” the man said. “Much worse. I’ve seen a lot of these things, I know.”

“You demonstrate a lot?” Susan couldn’t keep the frostiness out of her tone. She didn’t care about the rights or wrongs of specific arguments; all she knew for sure was, when people turned ugly and mean and violent they were wrong, no matter how noble their cause.

“I watch demos a lot,” the man said. “I’m a sociologist at Columbia. I was there to observe this thing, and then this lady got hit by one of the demonstrators’ signs—”

“It was an accident,” the woman said. She had an accent, rough but not unpleasant.

The man grinned at her, easy and comfortable. “I know,” he said. “You got hit by your own team. You still got hit, though. It was still time to get out of there.” Grinning now at Susan in the rearview mirror, he said, “Lucky you came along. Lucky for us, I mean.”

“Glad to help,” Susan said. Something about this man attracted her, but something also — maybe the same something? — made her apprehensive.

The man leaned forward, forearm on the seatback behind Susan’s head. “My name’s Andy Harbinger,” he said.

“Susan Carrigan. And this is Grigor Basmyonov.” She’d become quite practiced by now at saying Grigor’s last name.

They exchanged hellos, and then everyone concentrated on the woman, who looked up from dabbing at her forehead to say, “Oh, yes, excuse me. I am Maria Elena Auston.” She sounded weary, even sad.

17

It was no good. Nothing was any good. Nothing worked the way it was supposed to. Maria Elena’s head throbbed where the sign had grazed her. Riding in the backseat of the car with three strangers, alone in a land she would never understand, she felt sick, exhausted, and in despair. She couldn’t even take part in an anti-nuclear demonstration without being hit in the head by one of her own comrades.

She couldn’t do anything, right, could she? She couldn’t even keep her husband.

At first, it had all been so perfect. She and Jack Auston, together. In Brasilia, every day working with him, every night sleeping with him, his sexual interest a surprising delight, unexpected that such a quiet man could be so voracious in bed.

One day the necessary papers were signed at the city clerk’s office and with the American embassy, and then one other day they went down to the public register and were married in a private ceremony and went back to his apartment — she’d moved in some time before — and made love again, sweet love, and that was their honeymoon.

Jack then had two months remaining on his contract with WHO, and that was the most satisfying time of Maria Elena’s life. Her miserable first marriage with Paco was forgotten, her dead children nearly forgotten, her lost singing career no longer painful to think of, her self-loathing buried so deeply beneath this new self-assurance that she seemed to herself to be a thoroughly new person. And she was going to America.

Her happiness was so great in those days that she barely ever even thought about the original reason for wanting to go to America, for wanting to induce — seduce — John Auston into marrying her. Occasionally the memory would come, particularly when they were in the field at some especially horrifying site, but the fantasy had more or less shrunk from a plan or a hope back to the simple childish fancy it had originally been.

The first month or six weeks in America were dazzling and distracting, the town of Stockbridge in Massachusetts as alien to her as a different planet in a different solar system; yes, even the sun seemed like another sun. Learning to shop at those stores, to drive on those roads, to live in that house, had all been so heady and intense, requiring such concentration, that she couldn’t even count that time as happiness; she was too busy then to be happy. And also too busy to notice for some time that she’d lost Jack.

She knew now what it had been. In Brazil, his sexual excitement had blocked out every other facet of his personality, like a radio jammer. But that kind of excitement, based in the alien and exotic, had inevitably faded once they’d returned to his normal mundane world. In Stockbridge, his insatiable craving for her body had drained out of him with the speed and irreversibility of water out of a cracked swimming pool. And when it was gone, there was nothing left.

Jack didn’t care for her, it seemed, had nothing in common with her, neither liked nor disliked her, was absolutely indifferent to her presence. There was no longer any sex at all between them, and her few efforts to rekindle his passion had been such humiliating failures — how gently and kindly he had excused himself from performance — that she’d quickly given that up, but then had no other way to try to reach him. He had returned to a previous research job at a Massachusetts medical laboratory, and the people and events of his work were absolutely all that held any interest for him. He didn’t actively object to Maria Elena’s presence in his house, cooking his meals and doing his laundry, but if she’d left he would have found another maid without a second thought. In fact, it would probably be easier for him to have a maid who wasn’t inexplicably all over his bedroom every night.

In a way, it would have been easier to understand and live with if Jack had found another woman, but he had not, and might never. He was a kind and gentle man, but he just simply wasn’t much of a physical creature. His job absorbed his interest. His on-site chat with co-workers was all the social life he seemed to need, and that was it. His sudden spurts of sexual excitement must be terribly rare, surprising and pleasing while they were going on, but then gone without a memory, without a regret.

That was the worst of it; Jack couldn’t even seem to remember what it was about her that he’d liked. And she knew now that it was only that deep polite indifference at the core of him that had made him agree to marry her, that had permitted her to succeed in her machinations. Oh, how clever she’d been!

If only she could talk to the first wife, that mystery woman three thousand miles away in Portland, Oregon. Had the same thing happened with her? Had Jack suddenly noticed her body, gone into that frenzy, worn it away inside her, and then reverted to his natural phlegmatic self? (Except, of course, that a child had resulted that other time.) And had the wife at last been unable to stand for another instant that bland polite indifference?

How would an American woman react to such an existence? Maria Elena was at a total loss. Nothing in her experience showed her how to handle a passionless man. In her world, passion was a major constituent, for good and for ill. When she and Paco had come together, it had been like storm systems colliding over a jungle, and when they’d parted, the storms had been even more fierce. They’d drawn blood, both emotionally and physically, and if Maria Elena was eventually battered into an acceptance of Paco’s hateful view of her, it was nevertheless the result of a war, not the result of an ice age covering the Earth.

And when she had sung, and the public had responded, that had been passion, too. She had been for a while the latest in a tradition of forceful South American performers, almost a cross between the emotional intensity of an Edith Piaf and the showbiz intensity of a Liza Minnelli, but propelled by a purely Iberian torrent of feeling. How powerfully she had been able to sing about sorrow and loss, then, before she had known them. How far she was from singing now.

She had brought with her from Brazil the memorabilia of that career, the albums, the rolled-up posters, the magazine articles, the photos, all stacked in two cartons stored away in the Stockbridge attic. She thought of them up there sometimes, thought about listening to one of the albums — Live in São Paulo, for instance, with its almost terrifying roar of audience response — but she never did.

Frustrated, shamed, alone, Maria Elena clung at last to the wreckage of the idea that had caused her to be united with John Auston in the first place. Somehow, she had to find the people who owned the factories, the people who were indifferent to or ignorant of the horror they brought into the lives of less powerful human beings in less influential parts of the globe. Somehow, she had to reach them and convince them to change their ways, reverse their policies, stop the slaughter. But who were these people? How could she find them? How could she make contact with them? How could she make her argument compelling to them?

Finally, there had been no route open except to repeat her earlier political phase in Brazil: join the protestors. It gave her a way to fill her days, it gave her a way to use her untapped passion, it gave her, at least at moments, at least the illusion of accomplishment. She wasn’t doing what had to be done, but she was doing something.

But even there, satisfaction was elusive. Her grasp of English, adequate in every other respect, was too clumsy for the slippery nuances of political discourse. Even this demonstration; it apparently wasn’t opposed to the nuclear plant as such, but to some sort of research going on within it. What did Maria Elena know of science? Nothing; only its leavings. Still she persisted, because something is better than nothing, because movement at least distracted from the emptiness of her life, and because maybe she was doing some good. Maybe she was.

But it didn’t really work, it didn’t really distract, and it certainly didn’t fulfill. She picketed in front of the U.N., signed group letters to the New York Times (that usually weren’t published), contributed toward the cost of advertisements on environmental issues, showed up to help swell the ranks of protests, traveled to Washington on buses chartered by action groups; and always she was alone, always just a little to the side of the group, slightly lost, slightly out of sync.

And all of it culminating in this embarrassment today. This was the worst so far, to be bloodied in front of television cameras, to give the bastards of the media exactly the kind of false violent story they preferred, the kind of story they could use to avoid and obscure the real story. Then, still dazed from that inadvertent blow to the head, she’d permitted herself to be taken away from the action, away from where she should be, to sit here in this car full of strangers. “I am Maria Elena Auston,” she said. “And I thank you, but I really shouldn’t leave my friends. They’ll worry about me.” Which wasn’t at all true, a reality she resolutely ignored. “If you could just let me out,” she went on, “I’ll walk back.”

They all argued that: the handsome young man who’d pulled her out of the picket line, the pleasant young woman driving, the very thin man in the passenger seat in front. They said her head was cut, was still bleeding, had to be seen to. “We’re just a couple of miles from the hospital,” the young woman said, and the thin man said, “That’s very true.”

“I don’t want to take you out of your way. Please, I’ll just get out—”

The thin man laughed, then coughed, then turned to smile at her, saying, “It is not out of our way. I am afraid I live at the hospital.”

Now she actually looked at him and listened to him for the first time. He spoke English with an accent, possibly a stronger one than hers, but very different. Polish? And he was so thin, the shape of his skull was absolutely visible through the translucent blue-gray skin of his face. Knowing what the truth must be, she nevertheless said, “Are you a doctor?”

“Much more important,” he said, smiling again. “I am a star patient.”

“I’m sorry,” Maria Elena said, feeling sudden embarrassment.

“Don’t you be sorry,” he told her. “I’ll be sorry for both of us.” It was strange to have such a skeletal figure behave in that elfin fashion. But then his expression became more sober, and he looked past her out the rear window of the car, saying, “If I had the strength, I might march with you.”

She read the connection immediately: “You mean, the nuclear industry is why you’re sick?”

“Nuclear industry,” he echoed, as though the words contained a joke only he understood.

The young woman driving said tonelessly, “Grigor was at Chernobyl.”

Something constricted Maria Elena’s throat. Unable to speak, unsure even what to call the emotion that had suddenly flooded her, she reached out to fold her palm over his bony shoulder. So bony.

He smiled over her hand at her. Gently, to make her feel better, he said, “I’ve had time to get used to it.”

18

Forty-five minutes later, Susan was alone in the car with Andy Harbinger, driving south on the Taconic, heading toward New York. How it had worked out that way she still didn’t quite understand.

Grigor had taken charge of Mrs. Auston at the hospital, which was a research center, not a regular hospital at all, and so without an emergency room. The doctor Grigor finally rounded up for the task of examining Mrs. Auston’s wound and then bandaging it was wildly overqualified for the job, but took it in good spirit. That was no surprise; the entire hospital staff was friendly and supportive and indulgent toward Grigor.

Meantime, one of the other doctors had taken Susan aside and told her that tomorrow’s outing with Grigor would not be possible. “Grigor doesn’t know it yet,” this doctor said, “but we’ll be starting a new therapy in the morning, and generally it’s going to be unpleasant for him for a few days. He should be in better condition by next weekend, but tomorrow he’s going to be quite sick.”

“Oh, poor Grigor.”

“You know this routine by now, Susan,” the doctor said. “We make him very sick from time to time, because the other option is that he dies.”

“You don’t want me to tell him about tomorrow?”

“Why give him a sleepless night?”

So she had lied to him — “See you tomorrow!” “See you tomorrow!” — hating it but knowing it was better than the alternative, and then as she was heading for the exit Andy Harbinger appeared and asked if she was driving back to the city today, and if so, could he hitch a ride, since he felt no need to see any more of today’s demo. It was impossible to say no, and in fact Susan didn’t particularly want to say no. She was feeling glum, and the two-hour drive back to the city could get boring.

Then there was Mrs. Auston. She wanted nothing but to get back with her protest group, so Susan brought her along as well. The three of them left the hospital and drove together as far as the power plant entrance, which was much calmer than before, the TV crews having all left, though the demonstration continued. Mrs. Auston, a strange self-absorbed woman, left the car with only minimal thanks to her rescuers, and then Susan and Andy Harbinger drove on down the road to the Taconic entrance and headed south.

Once they were on the highway, streaming with moderate traffic toward the far-off city, the late afternoon sun reddening ahead and to the right, Andy Harbinger broke into Susan’s fretful thoughts about Grigor by saying, “Susan? Do you mind if I interview you?”

“What?” At first, the words made no sense at all; she frowned at him, ignoring traffic, finding it hard to see his face clearly in the orangey sunlight. “I’m sorry, what?”

He smiled, his manner easy, non-threatening, friendly. “I’m always working,” he apologized. “I can’t help it. And I noticed, when Mrs. Auston and I first got into the car, when you thought I was one of the demonstrators, you disapproved of me.”

Feeling the heat of embarrassment rise into her cheeks, Susan faced the road again, gazing steadfastly through the windshield as she said, “Disapprove? That’s a funny word. I didn’t say anything like that.”

“You didn’t say anything, but it was in your expression and the tone of your voice.” Harbinger grinned at her. “I’m not trying to get you mad, Susan,” he said. “It’s just my professional nature. You’re good friends with that Russian guy. With that illness of his, I’d think you’d be on the side of the demonstrators.”

“Until they get ugly,” Susan said, and then was sorry she’d been prodded into giving any reaction at all.

Because, of course, now he burrowed in a little more, saying, “Ugly? I guess they are, sometimes. But isn’t it because they feel powerless? They’re trying to make themselves heard. It isn’t easy.”

“No, I know it isn’t,” Susan said, uncomfortable at having to defend a position that even to herself sounded prissy, narrow-minded, irrelevant. “And I do agree with them. It’s... it’s when there’s violence, then I can’t stand it. When people are doing violent things, they make themselves wrong, even if they were right to begin with.”

Gently, he said, “And if there’s no other way?”

“There’s always another way,” Susan insisted, even though she wasn’t herself sure that was true. Then she thought of something to bolster her argument and added, “Gandhi always found another way.”

He chuckled that off the field, saying, “Gandhi was a saint.”

“Then we should all be saints.”

This response seemed to capture him in some way she didn’t understand. Looking at her more openly, twisting to put his right shoulder blade against the door so he could face her more fully, he said, “You keep surprising me, Susan. You really do.”

If he’s trying to pick me up, she thought, it’s a very weird method. She shot him a quick glance, trying to read beneath that open friendly face, and when she looked away from his impenetrable smile, out at the road again, he was reminding her of somebody or something. Who? What?

Mikhail. Whatever his name was, Mikhail something, the nice economist at the party in Moscow, where she’d first met Grigor; where all this started.

As though reading her mind, he said, “Your Russian friend — Grigor, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Grigor.”

“Do you think he agrees with you? About the protestors. That they should give it less than their all.”

“That isn’t what I said! Not give their all, what do you mean?” She was really annoyed with him, for twisting her words like that.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and tried to smile the offense away. “I apologize, that was careless phrasing. All I was trying to ask, really, was do you think Grigor would disagree with the protestors if they resorted to violence?”

Reluctantly, but having to be honest, Susan said, “No, I don’t think so. I think he’d agree. Before you got into the car, he even said so. When we were driving down toward the demonstration, he said, ‘They’re right.’” She looked over at him again, seeing concern and sympathy now on his face, and she told that face, “Grigor’s almost never bitter, you know. He’s amazing that way. He has so much to be bitter about.”

“Life is unfair,” he suggested.

Ignoring the coldness in that, “It shouldn’t be,” she said.

He laughed, and shifted to face forward again as he said, “How did you ever meet up with him, anyway? It’s so unlikely.”

“More unlikely than you know.”

“Really?” He was ready to be interested, amused. “How’s that?”

So she told him about the vodka contest, and the trip to Moscow, and the completely unexpected cocktail party thrown there by an organization she still didn’t know anything about, and the strange little waif-man who’d showed up and talked with her; and then the round-half-the-world phone calls to her cousin at NYU Medical Center, and getting Grigor’s passport, and permission for him to leave Russia, and his strange jokesmith occupation since Chernobyl had killed him; and still doing it, still faxing those unfunny topical jokes to the Russian Johnny Carson, even while the disease ate away at his body like a child licking an ice cream cone.

Andy Harbinger asked questions here and there, showing his interest, encouraging her to expand on the-story, and half the trip went by as she talked. But finally there was nothing more to say, not on that subject, and after a little silence he said thoughtfully, “It isn’t just pity, though, is it? What you feel toward him.”

Pity? There were moments when this man seemed very intuitive and sensitive, and yet other times when he was just so bluntly wrong, almost cruel — life is unfair, it isn’t just pity — that it was impossible to know how to react. Didn’t he know how dismissive he sounded, as though life and emotion didn’t matter?

She really didn’t know how to answer him, and the silence stretched between them, she unusually aware of her own breathing, and then he said, much more softly, “I know what it really is, Susan. You’re in love with him. And you wish you weren’t. And you hate that wish.”

So here was the sensitive Andy Harbinger back again. And he’d defined the problem, all right; she knew she shouldn’t feel about Grigor the way she did, she shouldn’t lash herself so securely to a man who would be dead within the year. But the very knowledge made her guilty, as though she couldn’t forgive herself for even that much dispassion, didn’t believe in her own right to see the pit she was falling into. “I can’t talk about it,” she whispered, and it took all her effort to concentrate on the driving, not just to close her eyes and let events take her away.

“Stop the car,” he said.

“What?” She’d clenched the steering wheel so hard her hands ached, but she couldn’t make them let go.

“Pull off the road and stop,” he told her, his voice calm and authoritative, like a doctor in the examining room. “Until you relax a little. Come on, Susan.”

She obeyed, her right leg made of wood as she forced it off the accelerator and onto the brake. The car wobbled, not entirely under her control, but slowed as she steered it off the pavement and onto the rough dirt surface of the shoulder. It stopped and she shifted into park, and then all at once she was trembling all over, but dry-eyed. Staring hopelessly out at the hood, as aware of the traffic whizzing past on her left as she was of the man listening to her on her right, every sense painfully alert, she said, “It’s so awful, and it just keeps going on. I come up every week, and every week he’s worse, and how much worse can it be? He gets thinner and thinner, and he just...” She shook her head and lifted her aching hands from the steering wheel to gesture vaguely her despair.

“He doesn’t die,” Andy Harbinger said.

“Oh, God.” She hadn’t talked about this with anyone before, not even very much with herself; maybe what it needed was a stranger, somebody she wasn’t already connected with in the usual web of history and knowledge and opinions and shared experience. “I don’t want him to die,” she said, her throat aching as though she had a terrible flu. “That’s the truth. If he could live forever, if he could — well, not forever, nobody lives forever, but you know what I mean.”

“A normal life span.”

“Yes. Normal. So I could—” There was no way to even think this last thought, much less express it.

But Andy Harbinger knew, anyway, what she couldn’t describe. “So you could decide for yourself,” he said gently, “whether or not you’d like to spend that normal life with him.”

“Oh, I suppose so.” She signed through her burning throat. “To be able to do it all normally, let it grow in a normal way instead of, instead of this water torture. I hate blaming him, but I do, I can’t help myself, and then I can’t stand myself, and then I don’t even want to come up here any more, go through it all any more. We’re all so trapped. And then I say, ‘Well, it won’t last much longer,’ and I feel satisfaction.”

“The truth is,” he said, “it actually won’t last much longer, no matter what you do or how you feel or whether or not you feel guilty. It all doesn’t matter.”

“Which doesn’t help,” she said stiffly, responding to that cold side of him again. “It doesn’t help because I can’t just shrug and be indifferent, as though I was in one of those cars there, and this was an accident here, and it wasn’t anybody I knew, and I just drove on by.”

“Of course not,” he said. “But you can’t take on yourself the responsibility for things going wrong in other people’s lives. We’d all like life to be milk and mell, but it just isn’t, not all the time, there’s bound to be some—”

She frowned at him, distracted. “What? Milk and what?”

He was confused for just a second, obviously trying to remember what he’d just said. “Milk and honey,” he finally decided. “I said we’d all like life to be nothing but milk and honey, but there’s bound to be acid, too, along the way.”

“Is that what you—?” She frowned, trying to recall his earlier words. “It sounded different.”

“Well, I don’t know what I said,” he told her, beginning to get impatient. “The point was, it’s natural for you to want this trouble you’re going through to be over with, and it doesn’t mean you’re unfaithful or cold to Grigor when you feel that way. You know that, in your head, but your emotions won’t listen.”

She had to smile at that phraseology, and nod, looking at him at last. The tears were starting now, after the attack, but not out of control. She blinked them out of her eyes, saying, “Emotions never listen, that’s the way they are.”

“So we just do our best, okay?” He smiled at her, warm and concerned. “And we try to think about things other than Grigor.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“And we don’t feel guilty when we succeed.”

“That,” she said, “is the hard part.”

“I know.” He shifted in the seat, clearly ready to move on to other things. He said, “Do you have any idea how good Italian food is when you’re an emotional wreck?”

Now she had to laugh. “As a matter of fact, I do,” she said. “It’s a miracle I don’t weigh eight hundred pounds.”

“I know a great place in the Village,” he said. “Let me take you there.”

Doubtful, afraid, she withdrew from him, saying, “Oh, I don’t know, I don’t think so. I haven’t been...”

“Dating?” He grinned at her. “This isn’t a date, this is dinner. Believe me, Susan, I’m not gonna try to compete with a tragic hero.”

Ananayel

Foolish. Foolish. Mell! It isn’t mell now, it hasn’t been mell for hundreds of years. It’s honey now, I know that as well as anybody.

I was distracted by having to deal with my little Judas ewe, that’s all, and for just a second, I forgot the situation, the time, and made that slip. The problem is, I am not living in time in the same way the humans are, so I don’t have the same temporal relationship with their languages. I have in my mind and at my command all of English, from its earliest guttural beginnings in the fifth century, when speakers of Anglo-Frisian first crossed the then-unnamed stormy water from the European continent to the British Islands, and took up residence there, so that their dialect began to alter away from its Dutch, Frisian, and Low German cousins in the Plattdeutsch family, down through its endless changes to this ultimate moment. (I know it into the now-canceled future as well, all the way to its final commingling with pan-Mandarin.)

Mell entered English early on, from the Greek, Mεαλ, and at one time the language was lush with mell-derived words, of which now only a few remain. Mellifluous, originally meaning something sweetened with honey, soon was adapted to mean sweet speech, as in honey-tongued Shakespeare’s line in Twelfth Night, “A mellifluous voice, as I am true knight.” Melianthus is the honeyflower, a mellivorous bird feeds on honey, and molasses is a later corruption of the original melasus. In medicine, meliceris denotes a tumor containing honey-like matter, and in some technical specialties, mellaginous still means anything that is like honey.

But it’s in the now-forgotten words that mell was at its most mouth-watering. A sweet medieval Breughelesque pastorality seems to cling to these words, as of a better world, lost and forgotten, replaced by this intolerable world. Mellation was the special time for collecting honey, meliturgy was the process of making honey, and anything as sweet as honey was said to be melled. Such things include melicrate, a drink of honey and water, and melitism, a mixture of honey and wine. And melrose was a nostrum of honey, alcohol, and powdered rose leaves used by doctors in the eighteenth century.

I only display all this erudition, of course, because of embarrassment over that slip of the tongue. I see that contact with humans is making me more like them.

Well, the slip was a small one, quickly forgotten by Susan, and the main point of the conversation was accomplished. That is, to bring her confused tangle of feelings about Grigor Basmyonov out into the light, where she can begin to study them, accept their pointlessness, and eventually distance herself first from the feelings themselves and then from Grigor. For how is Grigor to be brought to the necessary despair, if he is loved by Susan?

That is the point.

We drove on to the city, I guiding the conversation into shallower and safer waters, knowing she would return to the deeps herself, later, alone. We had dinner in the Italian restaurant I’d recommended, we walked the city streets in a rarely beautiful early autumn evening, and I escorted her at last to her apartment building, where I made no attempt to kiss her good-night but did ask her to come out to the movies with me the next night. She hesitated, but I gave her more assurances that friendship was all I was offering (or asking), and she at last agreed.

Because, in fact, it isn’t enough merely to force her to see how hopeless her love for Grigor Basmyonov is. She craves an emotional involvement, while fearing a physical one (which makes the Grigor relationship ideal at this moment in her life, of course, a truth we’ve already successfully skipped past), so until she’s given an alternate target for her emotions she won’t abandon Grigor no matter how painful the situation becomes. Andy Harbinger is personable, intriguing, companionable, and absolutely non-threatening. Until she’s weaned from Grigor, Andy will have to be an ongoing presence in her life.

Which is not at all the way it was supposed to be. Susan Carrigan is not one of my principals, but merely the proximate method to bring Grigor Basmyonov to the United States. She should be cut loose by now, she should be off living what’s left of her life, no longer my concern. But I’m not as familiar with humans as perhaps I should be; their use of free will is so frenetic it’s hard to make plans involving them at all. That Susan would so fiercely lock herself to the destiny of a doomed foreigner took me, I admit, by surprise. Alienation, foreignness, hopelessness, a growing estrangement from life, all of these were supposed to be working in Grigor now, moving him in the desired direction. Susan’s presence, her love, holds his despair at bay; it must be deflected.

And then there are my other principals. Pami Njoroge is discontentedly performing sex acts on the hard surfaces of the paved-over lots near the Lincoln Tunnel in Manhattan, in the shadow of the Jacob Javits Convention Center, completely unaware who her pimp really is. (Ha ha, no, it’s not me, the joke is much better than that!) Maria Elena Rodriguez Auston is looking at the telephone number Grigor gave her before she left the hospital, wondering if she should call. (Yes!) Frank Hillfen is living alone in a furnished room in East St. Louis, Illinois, committing small burglaries, too afraid of capture to do more than provide himself a basic subsistence — he hasn’t ever even stolen enough money all at once to pay for transportation to New York City, his goal, where in any event I’m not ready for him — and feeding his growing sense of unjust persecution. (Everybody’s on the take; why does Frank get hassled all the time?) Dr. Marlon Philpott, in his new windowless laboratory at Green Meadow III, oblivious of the protestors outside the gate, pursues the elusive possibility of strange matter.

And Li Kwan is arriving in New York; in chains.

19

Kwan did not see the arrival of the Star Voyager into the famous New York Harbor because the room they had locked him into was an interior space on a lower deck, where the vibrations of the engines could be felt on every surface but there was otherwise no sense of movement or progress; only a small metal cube, painted a cream color, furnished with a cot and a toilet and a sink, its recessed fluorescent ceiling light protected by wire mesh. This was the Star Voyager’s brig, or as close as this frivolous vessel could come to having a brig. On most voyages, Father Mackenzie had told him, the brig remained empty except for the occasional overly drunk crewman, but when it became necessary to hold someone to be turned over to the authorities at the next port of call, this was the room.

The authorities. The next port of call. New York City, United States of America. “I’ve heard,” Father Mackenzie had told him yesterday, long-faced, “that Hong Kong has already started extradition proceedings, even before you arrive.”

“They want me in and out before the media can make a fuss,” Kwan had answered.

“Of course. No one need know Li Kwan was ever in America at all.”

“And you won’t help me, Father? You won’t call the New York Times?”

But the priest had smiled his sad smile and shaken his head. “I can’t. It is not my right to endanger my order’s relationship with the company. I’m here as Norse American’s guest. I wouldn’t want to do anything to make them feel justified in removing the spiritual advisers from all of their passenger ships.”

Everyone has his reasons. Kwan was understanding that now, with increasing bitterness. Probably even Dat had his reasons.

Dat had not joined the crew until Rotterdam, three stops ago on the Star Voyager’s endless goalless circumnavigation of the globe; Rotterdam, then Southampton, then Hamilton on Bermuda, and now New York. And it wasn’t until after Bermuda that Dat began to insinuate himself into Kwan’s life.

From the beginning, lives ago in Hong Kong, Kwan had understood that he was not the only member of the below-decks crew whose papers and alleged history could not bear much scrutiny. There were a number of other crewmen who also chose not to go ashore at the many ports of call, who preferred the calm of their quarters to the gauntlet of beady-eyed immigration officials.

Dat, when he arrived, immediately became one of these, and Kwan noticed him, during the layover in Southampton, reading comic books and drinking tea in the kitchen staff’s galley, but they didn’t talk then, Kwan being content with his own company and Dat apparently the same. A short slope-shouldered man of perhaps forty, with a narrow head and a full-lipped mouth and heavy bags under his eyes, Dat’s ancestors were apparently from somewhere in the Indochinese peninsula, Kwan couldn’t be sure where. He spoke Chinese with some kind of muddy accent, appeared to have a smattering of Japanese, seemed to speak no European tongue at all, and at times conversed with other Indochinese crewmen in a language Kwan didn’t know but the music of which was undeniably Asian.

It was in Bermuda, two days ago, that this man made his approach. Kwan was standing at the rail on the kitchen staff’s small oval deck at the stern of the ship, watching the containerized supplies being loaded from dockside, when Dat appeared beside him, gesturing at the outsize shiny aluminum boxes being winched through the bulwark opening below. “That’s the way to get off,” he said, in his poor accent.

Kwan frowned at him. “Get off?”

“The ship,” Dat explained. “I’m getting off this ship in New York.”

“You are?”

“My own way,” Dat said, and nodded at the containers again.

Kwan also hoped to leave the ship in New York, but hadn’t yet found that mythic American girl who would smuggle him ashore. In fact, American girls were the hardest for him to pick up on his Tuesday night excursions above; they seemed to have more tribal consciousness than other people, to be the most determined to stay with their own kind.

Intrigued, wondering if Dat had any useful ideas (but already a little distrustful, if not quite distrustful enough), Kwan said, “Use the containers, you mean? How?”

“Inside one. They come on full,” Dat explained. “Food and drink and all those shop things, T-shirts and all that, and the drugstore things, all inside those containers. And when they’re empty, they go off again. Many of them will go off in New York.”

Kwan looked down at those containers with new interest. But then he said, “Why tell me?”

“Why not?” Dat shrugged, and took a single crumpled cigarette from his T-shirt pocket, didn’t light it, and watched his fingers turn and smooth and straighten the cigarette as he said, “You don’t have any reason to betray me. And a man has to talk sometimes, has to hear his own thoughts, has to know he isn’t crazy.”

Kwan felt immediately sympathetic. It was true, isolation in the middle of hundreds of people was perhaps the worst solitude of all, as he had learned before being rescued by those metal ladder rungs on the wall behind him. Other people cluster into purposeful groups, supporting and explaining and justifying one another, moving through life in these long- or short-term alliances, their own ideas and conclusions constantly being tested in discourse. The loner has only himself to talk to, only himself to listen, only himself to judge if he’s behaving sensibly or not. If Dat were planning a dangerous move, a desperate move, the need to tell his plans to another human being, to get a response of some kind, could be overwhelming.

So Kwan gave him a response, and it was an honest one. “You’re not crazy. It’s a fine idea.”

Dat gave him a quick gratified smile, the expression battling unsuccessfully with his doleful features, those heavy lips and pronounced bags beneath the eyes. “I watched at Southampton, and I been watching here,” he said, “and nobody looks inside the empty ones. Because that whole storage section down there is locked up. Not many people can get in there.”

“That’s right,” Kwan agreed.

“You can,” Dat said, and looked at him sidewise.

Ah, so that’s what it was about. (Or what it seemed to be about at that time.) Kwan, having gained a little seniority, even in the world of kitchen slaveys, had a few weeks ago been “promoted” from the deep sink filled with filthy pots and pans. His work now was in fact somewhat easier, involving nothing more than mopping and scrubbing and carrying, which meant that on the job now he had a key ring hooked to a trouser loop, containing keys to the cleaning-supplies closet, the walk-in freezer, the uniform and linen lockers, and the large echoing storage space in which the supply containers were kept, as they were gradually emptied. At the end of each shift, Kwan had to turn in those keys to his boss, a fussy suspicious Ecuadorian named Julio; no last name ever offered.

In theory, then, Kwan could, on his last shift before New York was reached, unlock the door to the container area and permit Dat to slip through. But why should he? “That would be very dangerous for me,” he said. “If you were caught—”

“Then it would be dangerous for me,” Dat interrupted. “Not you.”

“They’d want to know who let you in there,” Kwan pointed out. “They’d promise to go easier on you if you told, because the person who let you in there would be more worrisome to them than someone just trying to jump ship.”

“I wouldn’t tell,” Dat said.

“Why not?”

Dat frowned, his whole face taking on the aspect of his baggy eyes and drooping mouth. His fingers fidgeted with that battered cigarette, turning it and turning it, until all at once the cigarette slipped from his grasp and fell, almost floating, down toward the slow-sliding shiny aluminum containers, but missing them and landing instead on the dirty asphalt. “Ah, my cigarette,” Dat said, with nearly unemotional fatalism, watching it fall, then gazing dolefully downward, like a basset hound, becoming a comic figure.

“Oh, that’s too bad,” Kwan said, finding Dat more individual and human now, but no more likable.

But then Dat gave him another of those sideways looks, and a little smile, and said, “Of course, I’d rat on you. You’d do the same for me.”

“I might,” Kwan agreed, taken by Dat’s sudden frankness.

“But what,” Dat said, “if we went together? That way, we help each other and rely on each other, and if we’re caught we’re both caught. What I mean,” he said, suddenly more animated, turning to face Kwan, one narrow elbow on the rail beside him, “you can let me in during your shift. Then you turn in your keys, and when everybody’s away you knock on the door and I let you in. Or don’t you want to get off this ship?”

That last was said with such absolute assurance, with such conviction that Dat already knew the answer, that Kwan didn’t even bother denying it. “Of course, I want to get off the ship in New York,” he said. “If I can do it and not get caught. But inside one of those boxes? We don’t know what happens to them after they get taken off.”

“Yes, we do,” Dat said, and pointed far off to the right, where dozens of the containers stood crammed together, glinting in the sunlight. “They get put out of the way,” Dat said, “until they’re gonna get used again. We go out in the box, we feel when it stops moving, then we wait until dark and climb out and we’re in America.”

“It’s that easy?” Kwan asked.

“We’ll never know till we try,” Dat said, and smiled in a lopsided way, and put out his bony-fingered hand. “Li, isn’t it? Do we have a deal?”

Kwan had kept his name; it was common enough to serve as its own alias. “Yes, it’s Li,” he agreed, and after a brief pause he took Dat’s hand. “And it’s a deal.”

The interior of the container was cold, and smelling faintly of old cardboard, and not entirely airtight or lightproof; grayish yellow lines of illumination defined the edges of the front-opening panel Kwan had used to climb inside. He had nothing with him in this box but a small duffel bag containing one change of clothes and his notebook and pencils; he sat on that and waited. He was alone, Dat having explained that the weight of both of them in one container would draw attention when the containers were winched ashore so he had gone off to hide in another one. But Kwan didn’t mind that; in fact, it was better. He had no interest in becoming Dat’s partner or friend, once they left the ship, and presuming they were successfully to get past whatever gates or guards or locks there might be between the dock and the free world.

The Free World.

Kwan had been in the container less than an hour, seated on the small duffel, back against the cold flimsy-seeming side of the aluminum container, becoming both bored and sleepy but nevertheless feeling a kind of slow deep contentment, when noises alerted him. The storage area door had been opened. Feet strode loudly on the metal floor. Then silence. Then a voice:

“Li Kwan!”

Kwan froze inside the box, silent, barely breathing. His heart was a fist in his chest, massively clenching.

“Li Kwan! We know you’re in there! Come on out! Goddamn it, don’t make us search every goddamn container!”

The voice was irritable, weary, but not actively hostile or angry. It was just a ship’s officer faced with an annoying duty. They know we’re here, Kwan though, not yet realizing the significance of the fact that his was the only name called. But there was no point trying to hide any longer. With a sigh, wondering how much trouble he’d made for himself, Kwan stood, picked up his duffel, and opened the front of the container, letting the panel swing out and down on its hinges. “Here I am,” he said, to the three aggravated uniformed Caucasians, who turned to him with identical frowns of exasperation.

Dat had betrayed him, turned him in, there was no question about that. Dat, more than that, had set him up in the first place, suggested the scheme, inveigled him into it, and then betrayed him. Kwan had plenty of time to think about that in the Star Voyager’s small cream-painted brig. What wasn’t clear was why Dat had done it.

Kwan had discussed that with Father Mackenzie, when the man had come in shortly after the arrest, introduced himself, and asked if there was anything he could do. “Talk to me,” Kwan had said, and Father Mackenzie had been happy to do so — he didn’t seem to have much to occupy himself on the ship, except to be on call for providing the last rites to Roman Catholic passengers who succumbed to strokes or heart attacks while at one or another of the nine meals offered every day — and when the conversation had turned to Dat’s betrayal Father Mackenzie had made one tentative suggestion that just might be the truth. “He could be an agent of the Chinese government,” the priest said. “I’m not saying he is, but he could be. Sent to make sure you never get into a position where you can publicly embarrass China.”

“But I still can, Father, if someone would call the New York Times as soon as we arrive. If you—”

But no. Father Mackenzie couldn’t, or wouldn’t. Bravery and action were impossible to him. He was just a small decent man, doing what he could.

Aaaaaaaaahhhhhh, they’re all decent men.

Shortly after Father MacKenzie left, the vibration of the engines stopped. We’re here, Kwan thought bitterly. The free world.

But then nothing happened for another hour. Kwan paced the floor in the small room, increasingly nervous. Was this really going to be the end? The priest had said that Hong Kong was already seeking extradition. Hong Kong, not China. It would be harder for China to take him away from American jurisdiction, but Hong Kong could do it easily. Put together some trumped-up criminal charge — nothing political, not at all — and the Americans would see nothing wrong with sending a petty thief or arsonist or blackmailer home to a fellow democracy for a fair trial.

Sinking deeper into bitterness and gloom, Kwan paced the narrow floor, rubbing his hands together, pushing his fingers through his thick hair, biting his lower lip. Thoughts of his own death crowded in on him, the dog’s death he’d be given, death equally through humiliation and a bullet. After all this.

He stopped when he heard the grating noises of the door being unlocked. He was facing the door when it opened and three uniformed crewmen entered, these Caucasian faces impersonal, showing nothing at all. “Your escort’s here,” one of them said. “Time to go.”

Kwan’s duffel was on the bed. Picking it up, he said to them, “You know, for one moment, we touched the conscience of the world.”

“Is that right?” the man said, uncaring. Looking around the bare little room, he said, “Got all your stuff?”

“But the truth is,” Kwan said, “the world doesn’t have very much conscience.” And he went with them.

Ananayel

What is it about Susan Carrigan? I don’t need her any more, but here I am with her. I’ve studied my actions, my motivations, my reasons for continuing to see Susan after her task was finished, and I’ve come to a conclusion. It seems to me that the quality in her that attracts me is that she does no harm.

I’m mostly aware, of course, of the others, the ones who snarl and bite, the ones whose messy miserable struggles led finally to my present assignment. My awareness of them is so complete that Susan is becoming more and more of an amazement to me. I’ve been seeing for myself why He has grown weary of these creatures, but it wasn’t until I got closer to Susan over time that I began to sense why He had made them in the first place.

This means nothing, of course. His Will be done. It only seems to me that I ought to get a clearer picture of the humans while they still exist, that I should see them both at their worst and at their best. I knew them so little, understood so little, when I started. Susan shows me the parts I hadn’t suspected.

We see each other three or four times a week. We go to movies, or to stage plays, or to dinner. A few times, I have spent an evening in her apartment to watch some special program on television. She is easy enough in her mind about me by now that I could move the relationship onto a sexual plane, but I have not. (I don’t precisely read her mind, but I can make myself aware of levels of her emotions and the general flow of her thoughts, and I’m rather sure an overture from me would not be unacceptable.) My only personal sexual experience was with Pami: nasty and brutish, though not particularly short. With humans, sex is where reality and belief touch, where the physical and the emotional rationalize one another; it might be better for me not to know any more than I already do.

As for Susan, I do enjoy her company. Her reactions to the world she sees, her opinions, are so close to my own that there are moments when I find her uncannily angelic. She isn’t, of course. She is human, so my time with her will be extremely limited. (Even more than under normal circumstances.) I’m glad of the opportunity, though, no matter how brief it must be.

In the meantime, what’s this? Out in Illinois, what is Frank Hillfen up to?

Getting into trouble all on his own, without any help from me.

20

“There’s nothing to worry about,” Joey said.

Frank knew better than that. There was always something to worry about. That’s what life added up to: worry. “Just tell me the scheme,” he said.

Joey was a big heavy slob who always smelled of tomato sauce. He had some kind of teamster job out at Scott Field, the huge air force base just a few miles out of East St. Louis, but what he mainly did was muscle for some of the heavy guys around the area. He wasn’t a mob soldier, not a made guy, just another bulked-up goon they called on sometimes when bones had to be broken or a little demonstration of power had to be made on the street. Between times, Joey got along as a small-time break-and-enter guy, a lot like Frank himself, except not as fastidious about avoiding violence.

Normally, Frank would keep away from a guy like Joey. People who saw violence as just one more tool of the trade always scared Frank a little, because he didn’t believe violence could be contained with absolute control; it tended to slop over, like a drunk’s soup.

But Frank had been stuck here in this nothing town for weeks now, never scoring any more than just enough to keep himself fed and housed, and the time had come to accomplish something. Joey was a guy Frank knew from Mindle’s, the bar a block and a half from the shitty little furnished room he was staying in. A couple of times, Joey had hinted over beers that he might have a score he’d like to count Frank in on, but Frank had always played it stupid, not getting the hints. But enough was enough; he’d been stuck in this town too long. East St. Louis! Jesus!

“Tell me the scheme,” Frank said.

They were at a side booth in Mindle’s, three in the afternoon, Ralph on the stick, a few loners at the bar, traffic going by past the dusty windows out front. Joey had bought a round of beers, that’s how much he wanted to do this thing, whatever it was. And now he leaned forward over the table, holding the beer in both his scarred fat hands, fat lips barely moving, tomato sauce-scented breath floating the words like little ghosts across the black Formica: “It’s a courier.”

Frank couldn’t quite do that ghost-speech trick; he leaned his cheek against his left hand, to hide his mouth and direct his words toward Joey and away from the people at the bar: “What courier?”

Joey’s lips twitched. “Ganolese,” floated the name, into Frank’s ear.

Frank dropped his hand and stared at Joey. “Are you crazy?”

Leo Ganolese was one of the capos around this part of the country, maybe the capo. He’d let everybody else go drive themselves crazy dealing drugs, dealing women, while he stayed with what he knew. Leo Ganolese was in the gambling business, had been in the gambling business for forty years, and would stay in the gambling business forever. Over on the Missouri side, and here in southwestern Illinois, he was the man in charge, in so solid the Federals never even bothered to try to make a case against him.

And nobody ever was stupid or loco enough to try to take Leo Ganolese’s money away from him. “Forget it,” Frank said. “I gotta be outta my own mind to even sit here with you.”

“Wait for it,” Joey advised. He was still doing the silent-voice thing. “I got it figured. Lemme splain.”

Frank was drinking Joey’s beer; until it was gone, he’d let Joey splain. Then he’d walk out and have nothing more to do with this idiot. “Go ahead.”

“The courier’s an old guy,” came the little word-puffs. “It’s like his retirement job. Every morning he goes around in a car, he picks up cash from the action the night before. All by himself. By lunchtime, he’s got it all, he takes it to the Evanston Social Club. It’s usually around eighty grand, every day, sometimes more.”

“No,” Frank said, his hand up to his cheek again. “Doesn’t make sense. One old guy in a car? Eighty grand every day?”

“He’s some kinda cousin of Leo Ganolese,” Joey explained. “Safest courier there is. Everybody knows don’t touch him.”

“Including you and me, Joey,” Frank said.

“You know why that’s a no?” Joey was getting excited, the words stronger, turning almost into solid speech in the air. “That’s a no, because over in St. Louis, right now, they got a big horse show going on.”

“And?”

“And the city’s full of punks from all over the country,” Joey said. “They follow the horses. They don’t have the kinda respect for the local situation that the local guys do. We take down the courier, we don’t let him see our faces, everybody’s got to know it can’t be anyone from around here did it. Leo Ganolese is gonna be sure it has to be some out-of-town punk just came to St. Louis.”

“I just came to St. Louis. East St. Louis.”

“Nah,” Joey said. “You been around a while now, you’re like a native citizen, Frank, believe me.”

Frank believed him. On that much, he believed him. He, Frank Hillfen, was becoming a local. Here. The knowledge of that reality is what made him say, “I’ll look at this guy. I don’t promise anything.”

“Sure, Frank! We’ll follow him around, and—”

“No!” Frank couldn’t believe he was contemplating a partnership with a guy this simple. “Somebody sees us driving around behind your man, they’ll remember it later on. You tell me a couple of his pickup places, that’s what we’ll take a look at.”

“Sure, Frank. Whatever you say.” Joey’s excitement made him bounce around on the bench, fat fingers clutching at the beer glass. “I’ll pick a couple spots, but I won’t follow him around. Okay, Frank?”

He admires me, Frank thought. He looks up to me, this asshole, he respects me. This is what I’m reduced to, getting a score from a dirtbag that shouldn’t even have the right to speak to me. I gotta get out of this town. I gotta get someplace where the scores make sense and the dirtbags don’t know me and I’m not like a native citizen. “We’ll look at it, Joey,” he said, judicious, like an elder statesman.

Of course, it wasn’t as simple as Joey thought; it couldn’t be. The old guy was there, all right, and he made his collections every day, and he drove his car alone around his route, but he wasn’t without security, not at all. There was always another car trailing around behind him, with two bulky guys inside. Different cars on different days, different guys taking the duty, but always there, hanging a block or so back on the road, parking nearby when the old man made his stops.

The old man himself was — what? seventy? eighty? — old, but spry. Skinny old guy, always wearing a gray topcoat and a nicely blocked gray fedora hat, no matter what the weather. He drove at a normal pace, maybe a little cautious, and he always moved in a dignified way, like he was the messenger of the king; which in a way he was. His stops were bowling alleys, delicatessens, bars, private homes; anywhere that one of Leo Ganolese’s books or numbers drops or tables operated. At every stop, the old man would get out of the car (that other car discretely stopped just up or down the street), enter the place with a calm and measured tread, and come out a few minutes later with usually two or three other guys. (More security, that.) One of the guys would carry a package of some kind, a paper bag or a shoe box or something else equally nondescript. The guys would stand looking this way and that while the old man opened the trunk and the package was put in there with all the other packages. Then the old man would shake hands with one or two of the other guys, get into his car, and drive away. The people from the establishment would wait on the sidewalk until he was a couple blocks off and the other car had moved after him.

“Not easy,” Frank said, back at the table in Mindle’s. He was feeling cold in the pit of his stomach. There were things you did, and things you were foolish to do. This was beginning to look foolish.

Joey, of course, didn’t get it. “All we gotta do is take out that backup car,” he said. “Look, Frank, between Belleville and Millstadt there’s a long run, maybe ten minutes, lotsa places where we could get rid of that other car. Then it’s easy.”

“What do you mean, get rid of that other car?”

“Take it out,” Joey said, shrugging the whole problem away. “Listen, I know a guy down in Missouri, down in Branson, we can get hand grenades, no fooling. We drive by, we flip one in the car, we—”

“Goodbye,” Frank said, and got to his feet, and walked out of the bar.

He was half a block toward the furnished room when Joey caught up with him, looking bewildered, maybe even a little put out. “Whad I do? Whad I do?”

Frank kept walking, Joey sweaty beside him. “I don’t ever go near violence,” he said. “Never. You start throwing hand grenades around—”

“So we just shoot the driver,” Joey said, shrugging, making what he must have thought was a decent compromise.

“No.”

Then Joey grabbed Frank’s arm and stopped him on the street. Joey was a fat slob, but he was also a muscleman fat slob; those fingers holding Frank’s arm hurt. And Joey had something else in his voice now, when he said, “Hold it a minute, Frank.” Something meaner, more dangerous.

Frank stopped, because he had to, and looked at Joey’s angry little eyes. “What now, Joey?”

“What now, Mr. Big Man,” Joey said, “is this. I look around this neighborhood, I don’t see a whole lot of people working on being saints and angels, and that includes you. Don’t give me bullshit, Frank. I brought you a job, we looked it over, it could be nice. All of a sudden, you’re too good for me. You don’t do violence.” Joey was still holding Frank’s arm, and now he squeezed a little, bearing down. “Well, I do,” he said. “I’m not afraid of violence, Frank. You wanna be, that’s okay. You get my meaning?”

This scumbag is turning mean, Frank thought. I made a mistake dealing with him in the first place, and now he’s getting resentful, his little piggy mind’s gonna decide I’m his enemy. I got to cut away from this shit. He said, “Joey, you knock over one day of one of Leo Ganolese’s operations, it won’t hurt him that much. He’ll look for the people did it, naturally, because nobody’s supposed to get away with crap like that. But you’re right, he’ll probably figure it’s some punk hanging around over at the horse show.”

“Just like I said,” Joey agreed, and gave Frank’s arm a little shake.

Frank ignored that. “But,” he said, “you start killing his people, you start acting like Leo Ganolese doesn’t deserve any respect, he’s gonna find you. So you can squeeze my arm all you want, I’d still rather face you than Leo Ganolese.”

Joey thought about that. Finally, reluctantly, he let Frank’s arm go, and Frank resisted the impulse to rub it where it ached. Don’t give the slob the satisfaction.

Meantime, Joey was saying, “Okay. We’re partners, we respect each other. You wanna come up with another way, fine by me.”

“So let me think about it,” Frank said, telling himself, maybe I’ll just leave this town tonight, score something along the way, just enough to take me maybe to Indianapolis, someplace like that.

But Joey said, “Frank, the horse show’s now. My way, I can get this hand grenade tomorrow, we can do it.”

There’s no way out, Frank thought. But somewhere, at some point, I’ve got to protect myself. Joey’s a nasty piece of shit. I shouldn’t be here with him at all, but here I am. “We’ll have to drive the route,” he said. “See what looks good.”

“Okay, Frank,” Joey said. “And I’ll get the hand grenade, too. Just in case.”

As it turned out, they did use the hand grenade, but not in the way Joey had in mind. A hand grenade, yes, but nonviolent.

The situation was, out around Smithton and Floraville, another area where the old man had a long empty ride between pickups, at an intersection in farm country, there was a stop sign. That was where they took him over, running out from both sides of the road as he halted, pulling the ski masks down over their faces, Frank pulling open the driver’s door as Joey hurled himself into the car on the passenger side, put his hands on the old man, and yanked him out from behind the wheel. The old man screamed, and Frank got his hands on the wheel, his right foot on the accelerator, and they shot out into the intersection, swinging around hard to the right.

The old man was yelling — what are you doing, are you crazy, do you know whose car this is, all this shit — and Joey cuffed him across the head to shut him up, the three of them wedged together in the front seat. Frank didn’t look in the rearview mirror, not wanting to know how close that other car was; it would be on their asses, he knew that much, coming along at top speed.

The narrow farm road was another right turn. Frank was so keyed up, so nervous about this part of it, that he almost took the turn too hard and rammed them into a tree. But he recovered, the tires digging into the oiled-gravel surface, spraying stones everywhere as they jolted on down the empty road, and when now he did dare look in the mirror that other car, a gray Toyota, was way the hell and gone behind them, a lot farther than he would have thought. Perfect.

The little bridge was a mile down this road, over a fast-running shallow boulder-strewn stream; Frank slammed on the brakes and they shuddered to a stop on the bridge, the terrified old man pressing his palms against the dashboard to keep from going out the windshield. Frank glared past him at Joey, screwing around with the hand grenade: “Drop the fucking thing, Joey!”

“Right! Right!” Joey dropped the grenade out the window, throwing the pin after it. Frank accelerated, and in the mirror he saw the roadway back there suddenly produce a red and yellow bouquet of flame, with black leaves of smoke. The chasing Toyota spun and shuddered and squealed to a stop, short of the explosion. The road gaped open over the stream. Nobody would be driving down this way any more today.

The beat-up old pickup truck Frank had stolen this morning was still there behind the burned-out shell of an old farmhouse. Frank steered in next to it, pulled the key from the ignition, and jumped from the car. He hadn’t taken anything today, not even a beer, but he was all hopped-up, adrenaline pumping through him. He almost felt as though, if he were to speak, his voice would come out all high-pitched and weird, like somebody who’s been sniffing helium. He couldn’t keep still, but had to go over and touch the pickup, then bounce back to the car, where Joey was still backing out, looking in at the old man. “Shit,” Joey said.

Frank paid no attention. The hard fast driving is what had keyed him up like this. If he held a light bulb it would glow, he knew it would. “He can stay in there,” he said, talking over the top of the car at Joey. “He can stay in there till we’re gone.”

“Oh, yeah, he’ll stay in there,” Joey said. “You’re fucking right he will.”

Something in Joey’s voice finally caught Frank’s attention, and he bent to look through the open driver’s door at the old man, who had gone on sitting in there, tilted slightly to the left now, staring out the windshield as though they were still doing eighty-five down the farm road. “Aw, Christ,” Frank said, seeing the old guy stare, seeing how his mouth hung open, how his hands were curled in his lap, how he didn’t move. Straightening, feeling like shit, he again looked across the top of the car at Joey. “We gave him a heart attack or something.”

Joey’s response was to reach up and pull the ski mask off and throw it on the ground, revealing his heavy face covered with gleaming sweat. “One less problem,” he said. “Open the trunk, Frank.”

One less problem. What a scumbag. Get away from this creep, Frank told himself, do it the first chance you get.

Stripping off his own ski mask, he moved to the back of the car and used the key still in his hand to unlock the trunk, now leaving the key chain to dangle from the lock as he lifted the trunk and looked inside.

Bags, boxes. All jumbled in there with an umbrella and a can of STP and some other junk and the spare. Bags, boxes. Money.

“Well, here it is,” Frank said, feeling heavy in his mind because of the old man. He reached in for a shoe box, glancing over at Joey, and Joey had a little shitty .22 in his hand. “Oh, you fuckhead!” Frank cried, and threw the shoe box as Joey fired, and the bullet zzizzed away into the world like a bee.

The cocksucker’s gonna kill me, Frank thought, disgusted and scared and tired of the whole fucking thing, as he bent and ran down the side of the car, knowing Joey was coming around the trunk after him. Me with nothing, and no time, and nowhere to go, and he can’t miss me every time with that fucking gun.

The old man. Frank reached in and gave him a yank and pulled him out of the car, holding him up against himself like a dress he was testing to see if it was the right size, holding the old man’s body with his left arm around the chest, forearm up along the chest, hand around the old man’s wrinkled neck, pressing that body close while his right hand frisked the guy’s pockets and Joey came around the back of the car, the .22 held out in front of himself. He looked angry and pestered when he saw Frank standing there holding the old man up in front of himself. “What the fuck are you doing, Frank? Put the old guy down!”

“Fuck you, Joey.”

Frank backed slowly away, afraid of tripping over something, patting and patting the old guy’s clothes, feeling something in the right side coat pocket. Let it not be a roll of quarters, okay, God?

Joey tried a shot at Frank’s head, but couldn’t see enough of it. Frustrated and angry, moving forward after Frank, he pumped two shots into the old man’s body, but a .22 doesn’t deliver much of a wallop. He should have brought a .45; that would go through the old man and Frank and the tree behind him. But the .22 just made the old man’s body bump against Frank, as though he had the hiccups.

And Frank’s hand was in that pocket, as Joey trotted toward him now, wanting to be close enough to bring him down regardless of the old man. Frank’s hand was in the pocket, and closing on it, and bringing it out, and it was a Smith & Wesson Chiefs Special .38 revolver. He stuck his right arm out, pointing at Joey’s astonished face as though to say, The joke’s on you, Joey! And scrambled his brains with two shots into that fat skull.

Switch license plates, pickup and the old man’s car. Throw all the boxes and bags into the pickup cab, on the floor and passenger seat. Drive like hell, don’t slow down, don’t even think, until outside Terre Haute, Indiana. Swipe a Honda off the street there, moving all the goddamn boxes and bags into its backseat, head for Indianapolis. Along the way, suddenly get the shakes, terrible shakes. Pull the car off the road, go behind some bushes, throw up, have diarrhea, cold sweats, uncontrollable trembling, blinding headache. Clean up a little, crawl back to the Honda, sit in there as weak as a kitten, finally get it moving again, go on to Indianapolis, around to Weir Cook Airport there. Go into the long-term parking, get the ticket on the way in, drive around, find a nice Chevy Celebrity with no dust on the windshield — so it hasn’t been here long, in the long-term lot — pull in next to it, switch the goods to the Chevy’s backseat, drive on out of there (little joke with the tolltaker about being in the wrong lot), head on into Indianapolis and buy a big cheap suitcase there. Then push the Chevy across Indiana and into the night, keep the foot hard on the accelerator until Welcome to Ohio. Three hundred twenty miles and two states away. Find a motel northwest of Dayton, put all the bags and boxes into the big new suitcase and schlep it into the room. Take a long shower. Stand there in the running hot water, thinking about childhood; haven’t thought about that shit for years. Think and think, remembering all different kinds of stuff, everything lost and gone. Cry a little in the shower, face all snotty. Tap the forehead against the tiles a little. But what’s the use? Nothing to be done, right? You’re where you are, and that’s where you are.

Frank turned off the water and stepped out of the shower. Life goes on.

Frank’s underwear hung on the radiator, his socks were draped over a lampshade to dry in the heat from the bulb, and his shirt hung from the swag chain next to the hanging lamp over the round fake-wood veneer table. Wearing a motel towel, he called a couple of places that in the local phone book claimed they’d deliver food twenty-four hours a day. Three didn’t answer, one said the motel was too far away, and then a pizza place said they’d do it, but he’d have to pay a ten-dollar delivery fee, and it would take a minimum of forty-five minutes. “Sure,” Frank said. “Room 129.”

He wasn’t even sure he could eat. His stomach hurt, all right, but not like normal hunger, though he hadn’t eaten anything now for maybe fourteen hours. But sooner or later this reaction to the incident with Joey and the old man would have to wear off, and then he’d be hungry.

Meantime, he opened the boxes and bags, stacking the money on the round table, adding it up, and it came to $57,820. Less than the eighty grand he’d been promised, but more than the half that would have been his share if Joey hadn’t been such a total unrelieved piece of shit.

He kept out a couple hundred for use, and when he stuffed it in his wallet he noticed that card in there from the lady lawyer in Nebraska. Mary Ann Kelleny. Well, she wouldn’t be much help in Ohio — or in Illinois, either, come to that — but still he hung on to the card. She’d been okay, Mary Ann Kelleny. The only decent thing that had happened to him since he’d got out this last time.

He remembered her advice: don’t do the little jobs, do one great big job. Okay, Mary Ann, I did one great big job, and it wasn’t all that great, okay? Granted, it wasn’t five million, but I can retire for a while anyway, on fifty-seven grand. Is that what you had in mind, Mary Ann?

Grinning at the idea of how the lady lawyer would react if she’d known how literally he was taking her advice, Frank put the rest of the money back into the suitcase, stacking it in rows. It took about half the space now as when it had been in all the different kinds of packages.

The old guy probably had grandchildren. He probably had candy in some of his other pockets.

Sure. At least he’d had a gun, there was that to say for him. No longer smiling, Frank put the gun in the suitcase with the money, and closed the suitcase, and put it on the floor in the doorless closet.

He wasn’t sure why he was keeping the gun. He still didn’t believe in violence, in fact more than ever he didn’t believe in it, but now he’d been in violence, and somehow everything was changed. Of course, he’d been around violence all his life, in the pen and on the streets, but never in that personal horrible way. It had been around him, but he’d never been in the middle of it, doing it and receiving it, feeling the bullets thud into a dead man’s body, using a dead man’s body like that. A simple burglar, slides in, slides out, like a raccoon in the attic; that’s what he was, that’s all he’d ever hoped to be. But now it was different. It was changed. He was in an altered landscape now, one he didn’t know about yet, and the gun was his talisman.

The motel had cable, and cable had a semi-dirty movie about a kid comes home from college to his house in Beverly Hills and there’s nobody there but the new Swedish maid. Sure. “I’ll give you fifty-seven thousand dollars,” Frank told the set, “for every time that happened in real life.”

Somewhere in through there he fell asleep, and when the knock came at the motel door, waking him, there was a black-and-white war movie on instead. He switched it off, readjusted the towel around his middle, and let in a black kid carrying the pizza in a box and wearing a cap with the pizza store’s name on it. He gave the kid a whole lot of money for one lousy pizza, and then when he opened it the smell was too strong. He shut the box and went back to bed and lay there awake, thinking.

The pattern had changed. That was what had happened today, he’d gone through the looking glass like Alice, he was on the other side now, and the pattern was completely different.

The lawyer lady had talked about the pattern, had talked about the rubber band attached to his back with the other end still in his cell, and all along he’d known she was right. He’d known it would happen again. He’d be out for a while and then he’d fuck up and then he’d be back in, the same old pattern, over and over, world without end, amen.

No more. World with end. The law would surely find some way to tie him to the robbery of the old man and the shooting of fat slob Joey. He didn’t know exactly what it would be, fingerprints or saliva or threads from his coat or some damn thing, but something would lash him tight to that robbery-and-murder.

Frank had an almost religious respect for the forensic scientists who worked with the authorities. He believed they were omniscient and omnipotent and damn near omnipresent. And that meant, if the law ever got its hands on Frank Hillfen again, they would drape that robbery-and-murder around his neck, and he’d be gone.

I can’t go back, he thought. Not this time. That’s the change, that’s what’s different now. Now I can’t go back.

I need Mary Ann Kelleny’s five-mil job. The big one.

Hardly dunking about it, Frank got up and ate half the pizza, washing it down with cold water from the sink. The five-mil job. What would it look like?

Ananayel

Fantastic! He did all that on his own! I didn’t influence the proceedings in any way, I haven’t even had contact with Frank Hillfen since Mary Ann Kelleny gave him the ride to Omaha. (Isn’t it touching how he saves that business card? There’s something really very sweet and vulnerable about Frank. Hopelessly self-destructive, of course — of course! — but endearing, like a flea-ridden dog.)

And he surely remembered what Mary Ann Kelleny had to say to him, didn’t he? And he made a mess of things absolutely on his own and without my help. He made himself ready so fast I don’t even have the others in position yet.

Susan is still seeing Grigor Basmyonov sometimes, though less often than before. But she still phones him during the week when Andy Harbinger has monopolized her weekend. I’m afraid a vegetable love isn’t enough to distract Susan completely from Grigor. I’m afraid we’re going to have to become more deeply involved with one another.

But why should this affect me so strongly? When adrift, of course, when in my usual self, I still am my usual self, calm and obedient, but when in Andy’s body I find myself increasingly nervous, expectant, apprehensive. As though there were things to be learned. Things to be learned? From Susan Carrigan?

21

There was a special on PBS that night about efforts being made to preserve the artistic heritage of civilization, the struggle against everything from acid rain to mindless looting, and a little puff piece in the paper mentioned that the International Society for Cultural Preservation would be prominently featured on the program. From the bank, that morning, Susan called Andy up at Columbia — he taught sociology up there — and left a message with the faculty secretary, as she had done before. He called back half an hour later, and she invited him to come watch the program with her. “The organization it’s about is the one where I met Grigor, in Moscow. Remember the cocktail party I told you about?”

“Sure. What time’s it on?”

“Nine o’clock. I’ll make dinner, we can eat before.”

“White or red?”

Meaning the color of the wine he should bring. “You decide,” she said. “I’ll make chicken.”

Buying the chicken and the new potatoes and the baby green beans and the three kinds of lettuce on her way home from the bank, Susan found herself betting Andy would bring white wine, given that choice. Because it was bloodless.

Immediately she rejected that thought, angry at herself. She knew she shouldn’t feel that way, so denigrating, knew she should be grateful she’d found a man happy to give her companionship without making demands, but then sometimes she couldn’t help wondering why it was supposed to be such a big deal to be around a person who never made demands. Maybe she wanted demands. Maybe she should demand demands.

She grinned at herself over the lettuce bins, and a guy smirked at her and said, “You’re beautiful when you smile,” and she turned her back on him, heading for the cashier.

When Andy arrived, just after seven-thirty, he was carrying a brown paper bag up against his left side, and used his right arm to bring her close and kiss her cheek. How pretty he is, she thought yet again. He always surprised her with how good-looking he was, as though his appearance faded slightly every time they were apart.

“A treat tonight,” he said, and reached into the bag, and brought out a bottle of French red wine; good stuff, from the look of it. “For dinner,” he told her, as she took it.

So she’d been wrong. “Great,” she said, looking at the label.

“And,” he said, full of repressed excitement, “this is for now!” And out of the bag came a bottle of champagne.

“Why, Andy!” she said. “You surprise me!”

His smile bubbled over with delight. “I hope to,” he said.

There’s something about knowing you’re going to, but you haven’t yet, nobody’s even made a move or a suggestion or a hint yet, and yet you both know it’s going to happen, this time it’s going to happen; there’s something delicious in those last moments before you fall into one another’s arms.

Susan couldn’t remember when it was exactly that she’d known, whether it was when he’d brought out the red wine, or not until he’d shown her the champagne, but somewhere in there she’d understood that he’d made a decision. And that she agreed with it.

How will he do it? she wondered. He always seems so confident, but we’ve really known one another a while now with no moves at all, so what does that mean?

And how will I do? Will I be a klutz? One or two incidents in her life when she’d been a klutz came into her mind, keeping her edgy, but over the edginess was the knowledge that it was going to happen.

And tonight he didn’t at all do that sort of fading-out thing that happened with him sometimes when they were watching a movie or TV. He would be there with her, and then a kind of glaze would come over him, his eyes became dull, his face less expressive. It was as though he were taking a nap, asleep with his eyes open, but somehow it was more than that. Once, in a movie theater, she’d touched the back of his hand when he was like that, and it was so cold it frightened her. But then he’d responded immediately to her touch — he always responded immediately from the fading-out thing, if his attention was called on — and when he’d used the same hand a minute later to pat the back of her hand it was no longer cold. Had she imagined the coldness? She didn’t believe it, but she’d been reluctant to find out for sure. Since then, if she saw him fading out, she’d speak to him but not touch.

But tonight he didn’t fade once. He was with her the whole time, admiring the dinner she’d thrown together (she was sorry now she hadn’t paid it more attention) and even showing interest in her retelling of the story about the Moscow cocktail party, this time emphasizing the International Society for Cultural Preservation rather than the meeting with Grigor.

They sat on the sofa together to watch the program, and it seemed perfectly natural for him to put his arm around her and for her to nestle in against him, feeling the steady beat of his heart. They watched the program in silence for about twenty minutes, and then, during a boring bit — helicopters over imperiled green rain forest, portentous offscreen narration — he lifted her chin and kissed her lips. A great languor flowed into her from his mouth, a spreading softness and a heightened sense of her own physical self. His hand very gently stroked her body, and he whispered against her lips, “You are so amazing to me.”

He filled her as though his body were all molten, soft and flowing, as though she were a small mountain lake, hidden and unknown, and his presence turned her to nectar. She moved in slow motion, her arms boneless ribbons around him as he nuzzled within her, her body holding and releasing in long easy swells of a great warm tide, physical sensations and yearning emotions all braided together, coiling around her, a close compelling spiral of flesh and she an electric dot in the very center. It all made her so sad she thought she must be dying, she thought this must be the great sad fulfillment of death, but she didn’t care. She embraced the sadness, the salt of tears and birth and death, time contracting into that electric dot that was herself, everything contracting to that one infinitesimal point in the whole world, and she it, and then that point imploded and left nothing at all.

They smiled solemnly at one another, stretched out together on her bed, the warmth rising from their bodies. And he said two astonishing things. No, not astonishing things, but said in an astonishing way:

“I don’t want to lose you.”

And, “I didn’t know about this.”

Ananayel

I didn’t know about this.

I like being Andy Harbinger. I have made him healthy and attractive and reasonably strong. (I’ve tried a number of human types by now, and prefer comfort.) And he is human. I constructed him, from molecules of myself, so he is both me and human, and I am learning from him all the time, but I didn’t know about this.

The experience of being with Susan was unlike anything I could have imagined. Not like that business with Pami at all, that brutal calisthenics. This was...this was like the best of the empyrean, distilled. How can humans spend their time doing anything else?

Of course, it was even more powerful for me, since I was in some general contact with Susan’s feelings and reactions as well. Andy’s and Susan’s emotions, sensations, all mixing together in my semi-human brain; what an explosive cocktail!

I’m so happy I’ve had this chance to get to know and learn about humans, before the end.

22

Three-thirty in the morning. Pami’d only made two hundred twenty-five dollars tonight, but there wasn’t any action left on the street at this hour. Most of the other whores were already gone. Three-thirty on a Tuesday morning, traffic up Eleventh Avenue for the Lincoln Tunnel was down to a couple tired dishwashers and accordion players; not customers.

Pami had to make a decision now: go home, or hope for just one more twenty-five-dollar hit. It was a tricky balancing act she had to do here. Rush didn’t like her to come home much after three on weeknights — because he had to hear all about everything she did before they could go to sleep — but he could turn mean if she came home with less than four hundred dollars.

Well, it wasn’t going to happen, not tonight. No more tricks tonight. So Pami Njoroge, the little twenty-five-dollar whore, left her Eleventh Avenue stroll and walked to 34th Street and Eighth Avenue to take the subway uptown. To wait for the subway uptown; sometimes you had to wait a long time at this hour in the morning.

And right there on the subway platform was one more trick for the night: a half-drunk Spanish man that first thought he’d just hassle her, but then grinned and got happy when she said, with her clipped, mechanical-sounding Kenyan accent, “You gimme twenty-five bucks, I give you blowjob. Else you go away.”

Down at the far end of the platform was a five-foot-high orange metal box to put trash in. They went down to the other side of that, even though they were the only ones on the platform, and there she exchanged her service for his cash, and at the end of it she saw he was thinking about knocking her on the head and robbing her — Rush would really beat the shit out of her, that ever happen — so she showed him the little spring knife in her tiny shoulder bag, and said, “You want that was your last blowjob in the world?”

All of a sudden, he couldn’t speak anything but Spanish. Backing away from her, brown eyes very round, he jabbered away about his innocence and how she was misunderstanding him, all in his New World Spanish — which she couldn’t understand anyway, and didn’t give a damn about — and then he hurried away to the middle of the platform, where he knew he could be seen by the person in the tollbooth.

About ten minutes later a bunch of drunk black teenage boys came in, loud and full of energy, and Pami tensed up, but they didn’t pay her any attention and soon after that the train roared in. She boarded an almost empty car and sat there with her thoughts on the long ride uptown.

The apartment belonged to Rush, on 121st Street near Morningside Park. The big old building with its gray-stone facade didn’t belong to anybody — maybe the city — and half the apartments were empty, all torn up, the sinks and toilets and wiring and wood molding all ripped out. Sometimes you’d see old mezuzahs on the floor — they looked like water beetles, only they didn’t move — the parchment inside them gone, shredded to dust. The people who stripped the apartments were simple and superstitious, and they knew the mezuzahs were strong religious fetishes of the tribe who once lived here, so they pried the little metal containers off the doorposts with screwdrivers before carrying the wood away. They didn’t want bad luck to follow them out of the building.

Nobody who lived in the building now knew the language or even the alphabet on the parchment papers folded into the mezuzahs. Nobody knew that the word Shaddai on the outside was one of the many names of God, or that the tiny writing on the inside was from the Hebrew Bible (also called, by others, the Old Testament), from Deuteronomy 6 and 11:

And:

The people who’d tapped the little nails into the soft chestnut and oak and pine wood, holding the words in place at the doorposts of their houses as they’d been commanded, were long gone. The latter owners of the building, who also knew the law and the language but who had for the most part ignored or forgotten it, were also gone. There was no one in the building now to worry about the coming of the rains or the gathering of the corn, and it had been long since the grass here was for cattle. Nor was there anyone, in any language, to ponder the warning on those long-disintegrated scraps of paper: the kindling of wrath, the shutting of heaven, the quickness of the perishing.

Pami left the train at 125th Street and walked down through dark streets where people slept on the ground; but they were healthier than the people who slept on the ground in Nairobi. Sometimes more dangerous, too; Pami knew to keep walking quickly, keep the little spring knife in her hand, look only straight ahead. Her heels made nervous sharp sounds on the old cracked sidewalk.

The building where she lived with Brother Rush — he liked to call himself Brother sometimes, when he was trying to pull one of his political or religious scams — was in the middle of the block, with smaller brick tenements on one side and brick-strewn rubble where tenements had once stood on the other. The doorway was always open, the door itself long since gone. The still-occupied apartments were mostly in two vertical lines in the rear corners of the building, where the old chimneys and flues still existed and the water pipes hadn’t frozen because of the heated occupied building on the next block which abutted this one at the back. There was water in the building — nobody was sure why — but of course, no heat, so in winter the residents burned whatever they could find in the old shallow fireplaces originally meant for coal.

Pami and Rush used two rooms at the rear of a second-floor apartment, one with a mattress for sleeping and some cardboard cartons for storage and kerosene lamps for light and warmth, and the other with a table and some chairs and plastic milk boxes to sit on and actual electricity from an extension cord (a series of extensions cords, heavy-weight ones) snaking up an airshaft from another building, where a guy Rush knew had tapped into the incoming electric service, Rush paying him two bags for the service (both heavily cut).

It was in the room with the table and chairs that Rush mostly lived. He wasn’t much of a dealer, but what little goods passed through his hands he sold at that table. All his schemes and scams with his druggie friends were talked out at that table (and came to nothing). He ate and drank at that table, and counted Pami’s earnings there every night. And they sat there together for her to tell him everything that had happened since they’d seen each other last.

Pami didn’t understand what that part was all about. She’d known men who got off by listening to their women talk about fucking other men, but this didn’t seem to be like that. (Rush mostly didn’t care about fucking anyway, which was a nice relief.) It was like he was listening for something, some special particular event, his narrow dark head cocked, his red-rimmed eyes brooding, his hands half-clenched on the scarred wood of the table. He never reacted to what she told him, never gave back anything more than a grunt when she was finished; and then they could go to bed.

He was waiting for her as usual tonight, seated at the table, alone in the room, illuminated by the light from one dirty-shaded table lamp on the floor over by the hot plate, an empty Kentucky Fried Chicken carton on the floor at his feet. He was waiting for her as usual, but he wasn’t as usual, and she picked up on that right away. (She was always very aware of her environment, sharply aware of anything around her that might be a threat.)

“You late, baby,” he said, that gruff hoarse voice as always sounding as though it was about to conk out completely, but there wasn’t exactly the same menace in it as usual; something, whatever it was, had him distracted, kept him from turning the entire weight of his mean attention on her.

Still, she played her normal part: “Slow night, Rush,” she said. “Very slow night. All I got’s two-fifty, but there’s nobody on the street an I didn’t wanna come home too late.”

She couldn’t quite keep the wheedle out of the last part of that — when Rush was mean, he was very mean — but tonight he seemed hardly to notice at all. “Sit down,” he said. “Tell me about it.”

“Okay, Rush.”

She sat across the table from him, putting her little shoulder bag on the wood in front of herself, and as she took out the wads of money and replaced the spring knife in the bag he sat and listened, his full lips moving sometimes, in and out, as though he was tasting some old meal. She told him about the Johns, about the other hookers, about the people on the street, every encounter of the night, the Spanish man and the drunken teenagers and nobody much at all on the subway and nobody except sleeping people on the streets of the neighborhood.

He listened, smoothing out the money, counting it, stacking it, finally putting it away in his pants pocket. She finished her recital and sat up, ready for him to nod his permission for her to get up and go into the other room and get ready for bed, which was the way it always went, but tonight was different. Tonight, Rush fixed her with those dark eyes of his with the redness all around them, and sat there in silence for a long minute while she got increasingly nervous and scared, wondering what she’d done wrong. And then he said, “I’m gonna say a name to you. You tell me what that name means when you hear it.”

Pami had no idea what this might be about. “Okay, Rush,” she said.

Rush nodded. He seemed almost to go to sleep. Then he said, very slowly, enunciating much more carefully than he usually did, “Susan Carrigan.”

Pami blinked slowly, thinking. Susan Carrigan.

Rush’s horny fingers tapped on the table. “Well? Pami? Susan Carrigan. Well?”

“I don’t know, Rush,” she said. “It don’t mean anything to me.”

“It damn well better mean something to you,” Rush said, “I’m asking you what it means.”

Pami’s fear and helplessness made her jittery at the table. Dark masses of shadow moved in the room, echoing every movement made by either of them. “I don’t know, Rush. That’s no kinda name I know. What is that? Some social worker? Somebody like that?” Then, thinking maybe she saw some corner of what this problem might be, she said, “Rush? Somebody say I talking against you to social workers? It’s a lie. I don’t talk to nobody but you, you know that.”

Rush sat there, unmoved and unmoving. “There’s gotta be a link,” he said thoughtfully, as though to himself. “He’s usin you. He’s usin her. But what’s he up to? If you don’t know about each other...”

“Rush? Who? Nobody usin me, Rush. I just with you, man.”

Rush paid no attention. He was deep in his own thoughts. “What if,” he said, and then just sat there, brooding, rapping those fingertips on the table. He glanced at Pami as though he didn’t recognize her, didn’t know what she was doing there, wasn’t even thinking about her. Then he roused himself, sat up straighter, took a deep breath, and frowned hard at her, as though he’d just had a thought and didn’t like it. “What if,” he said, “you aren’t anythin at all? What if he finessed me with you, put me all over you while he’s getting it together with other people?”

“Rush? I don’t know what you’re talkin about.”

“And that’s good for you, too,” he told her. “It means you can go on livin.”

“Rush?”

“A while, anyway. How’s the sores?”

“About the same,” she said, truculent, and looked down at the table. She didn’t like it that he even mentioned those sores; she tried not to think about them herself.

The sores had started in the last few weeks, around her waist and in back under her shoulder blades; small but wet. She put drugstore greases on them, to keep them from showing through her clothes, but otherwise ignored them, or tried to. Hooking on Eleventh Avenue, she never had to take any clothes off anyway, so the Johns didn’t know.

“All right, baby,” Rush said, sounding weary and, for him, almost kindly. “Go on to bed.”

“Okay, Rush,” she said, hiding her relief, keeping a cool surface. She got to her feet and went into the other room, and pulled off her clothing, being very careful where the material stuck to the sores.

Off this room was a small bathroom without fixtures. The cold water still ran, and they had a basin and a Scotch bottle to catch it in. The hole where the toilet had been removed smelled so bad they kept an old piece of Sheetrock over it, but they still used it, and Pami did now, holding her breath when she moved the Sheetrock out of the way, squatting over the hole, wiping herself with paper napkins from the Kentucky Fried Chicken, sliding the Sheetrock back into place when she was finished, and expelling the long-held breath with a whoosh. But the smell stayed in the air for ten or fifteen minutes; nothing to be done.

Pami was filling the Scotch bottle with water and pouring it into the basin when Rush came into the room, made a disgusted face, and said, “Shit. I got to steal some Clorox, pour it down in there.”

“That’s a good idea, Rush.”

The basin full, Pami washed her face first, then her underarms, then squatted over it. Rush frowned at her sores. “You ain’t gonna be workin much longer, girl,” he said.

“I got time,” Pami told him, trying not to know how scared she was. “I got plenty of time, Rush.”

He ignored that. “I’m goin out for a while. Don’t leave that light on, I don’t know when I’ll be back.”

“Where you going, Rush?”

He gave her a look, as though to say she was lucky she didn’t get a broken arm for a question like that, and left.

Pami heard the apartment door squeak. It never closed one hundred percent, but why would anybody break in here? Then a minute later she heard the door squeak again, so maybe Rush changed his mind.

She always used to sleep naked, but because of the sores, she now wore an outsize T-shirt, which she had to wash in the basin every morning. It was still slightly damp now when she put it on, but it would warm quickly against her body. She went out to the other room to turn off the light and there was a man there, standing beside the table.

Cop. It stood out all over him. Big and beefy and soreheaded, in a gray topcoat and dark suit and tie. He looked at her with disgust and said, “You want to go back to Africa with that T-shirt on?”

She stared at him in horror. Go back? It had never occurred to her — it had all been so easy, getting here, staying here. That a twenty-shilling whore in Nairobi did about as well as a twenty-five-dollar whore in New York only meant she wasn’t doing worse, and in some ways life here was much easier. If she was arrested now, deported now, they’d be sure to find the sores, examine her, find out the truth. Lock her away somewhere, leave her to die. Trembling, afraid to speak because she would sound like a foreigner — I’m American! Black skin American! — she touched her shaking hands to the T-shirt, feeling her tight scared belly.

His look of disgust increased. “Go get dressed,” he said. “And tell Rush to come out here.”

He knew everything, this cop. But now she had to speak. Form the words with great care, she told herself, form the words the way they do in this neighborhood. “Sir, he isn’t here.”

“Oh, don’t waste my time,” he said. “He can’t get out the back way, there’s no place for him to go. Just send him out and get dressed.”

“Sir—” Would an American even say “sir”? Oh, I’m destroyed, she thought, despair cold against her throat. “Sir, it’s true. He isn’t here.”

The cop frowned at her, frowned at the doorway, lifted his head as though he was smelling for Rush. Like a dog. He seemed a little confused. He gestured for Pami to precede him, and they both went through the doorway into the dark second room, where there was just enough light-spill from the room they’d left behind to let Pami find her way around the cartons and mattress. But Pami knew the place.

The cop pointed. “What’s that?”

“Kerosene lamp, sir.”

“Light it.”

Pami’s fingers were awkward with fear. She struggled with the lamp, squatting beside it, small face furrowed all over with concentration. The light flared up at last, and she turned down the wick and lowered the glass chimney. The messy room came to amber life.

“Pick it up,” the cop said, and Pami did, the shadows all moving together, like an orchestra. Again the cop pointed. “That the John?”

“Yes, sir.”

There was no door to the bathroom, of course. The cop gestured for Pami to bring the lamp over and carry it into the little ruined room. He followed, standing in the doorway, wrinkling his nose. “How do you live like this?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Come back outside.”

Still carrying the kerosene lamp, Pami followed the cop to the outer room, where he sat at the table — in her chair, not Rush’s — and sprawled there, legs wide, thumbs hooked in belt. “Where’d Brother Rush go?”

“I truly don’t know, sir.” Pami had given up trying to sound like an American; whatever was going to happen would happen.

“You stupid little bitch,” the cop said, but without any heat, just weariness. “Don’t you know I can help you, if I want?”

Pami’s twisted jaw worked. He was offering her salvation — short-term salvation, it’s true, but that’s all she could hope for — he was showing her an open doorway, and she couldn’t step through it. “I don’t know!” she wailed. “I don’t know where Rush is! I gotta go back to Africa because that? Rush don’t tell me — nobody ever told me nothing my whole life! Why anybody like you be so stupid come ask me questions? I don’t know nothing!”

The cop was unimpressed. With a jaundiced look, he said, “I bet you know what’s gonna happen if you raise your voice to me again.”

She blinked. The glass chimney rattled as she held the lamp. She kept quiet.

The cop nodded. “Put the lamp down on this table,” he said. “Before you catch yourself on fire.”

“Yes, sir.” Putting the lamp down, growing calmer because of the calm in his voice, she began to think at last, and said, “Maybe... maybe he went to see that woman.”

The cop raised an eyebrow. “Woman? You mean he got himself another whore?”

“No, sir. I don’t know, sir. Not a name like that, sir.”

“Not a name like that?” The cop glared at her, angry because she was confusing him. “What do you mean, not a name like that? What name?”

Panic leaped up in her again. She couldn’t remember the name! Shaking both closed fists in front of herself, she tried desperately to think. “Oh! It’s — it’s — oh, please, oh, wait, it’s — Susan!”

The cop’s thumbs leaped out of his belt. He sat forward, meaty palms slapping on the table. “Susan? Susan what?”

“I don’t know! He just said it, and then he went, and I don’t know these names here!”

“All right, all right,” the cop said, with less agitation, and raised a hand to make her stop. He stared at her very intently. “The last name. Was it Carrigan?”

That was it! “Yes, sir!” she cried, in great relief. “You know it, then! You know everything!”

“Do I?” The cop sat back. One hand flopped down limply into his lap, the other lifted to rub his chin. He was thinking it over. “Okay, Pami,” he said at last. “Go in and get dressed.”

She stared at him. “Why?”

“Because I’m taking you downtown, what else you think?”

“I helped you!”

“Not a lot, Pami.” He shrugged. “Don’t make it tough on yourself. Come on, get dressed.”

She knew what she was going to do before she knew she was going to do it. She pointed at the lamp. “Can I take that in with me?”

“Sure.”

He was sprawled again, across the table from her. She stepped forward, picked up the kerosene lamp, flung it in his face. His hands jolted up, but too late. Glass shattered, liquid fire splashed across the front of him, and Pami ran to the door and out.

Leaping down the stairs, in her mind’s eye she saw him sitting there, not even moving, the kerosene burning all over his face and chest. Almost as though he knew she was going to do it. Knew it when she did. Knew it and didn’t know it when she knew it and didn’t know it.

Barefoot, dressed in the T-shirt, without her clothes and her shoulder bag and her money and her spring knife, Pami fled down 121st Street, as the fire spread behind her.

Ananayel

Susan!

As the fire burns this body, this table, this floor, I continue to sit here, trying to decide what this means. I’ve been spending so much of my time near Susan, one of that creature’s fellow demons must have found me and reported. And now he’s gone to see what he can learn about my plans from Susan.

What will he do? He didn’t hurt Pami, just stayed close to her, waiting for me to find her useful. Will he do the same with Susan? Or will he decide it’s time to take action?

I must remind myself of the situation here. Susan is nothing to do with the plan. Susan was the bait only, to bring Grigor Basmyonov into play. If the bait is useful twice, how much better, of course. Of course. If Susan will now draw that devil off, distract him while I get on with my work, how much better. Of course.

I must remind myself of the situation here. At the best of circumstances, Susan Carrigan will survive no longer than one long inhalation of my life; and these, for Susan are not the best of circumstances. Her life expectancy is now that of the planet; weeks, at most. What does it matter if her life is even briefer than that? What does it matter, between brevities?

I must remind myself of the situation here, as the fire burns through this floor and the living creatures in this fiery shell flee for their fleeting lives and this body falls with this chair and this table through the rotted smoldering boards through two levels of smoky heated air and the fire department sirens are heard in the night.

I must remind myself of the situation here.

X

She sleeps. I sit on her chest, almost weightless, scratching my upraised knees with my claws, and I smell the smells of her breath and her body She has had sex, she is comfortable in her body and her bed and her mind. I touch her dreams with my thoughts, and she whimpers. She feels my touch, she feels my feather weight on her chest, and she is afraid.

This is no Pami. I’ll tear this one into narrow strips and it will tell me everything in its mind. Everything. And that god-dung creature will never use it again.

I knead her chest with my toes. She opens her eyes. She sees me. She screams.

23

I should have stayed in New Jersey, Frank thought. The police car was still there in his rearview mirror, pacing him, not doing anything yet, just pacing him.

I shouldn’t have driven into the city at five in the morning, Frank told himself. I should have waited and come in at rush hour, disappear in the crowd.

The damn thing of it was, he’d decided to avoid the rush hour. Here he was, still in the Chevy from Weir Cook Airport in Indianapolis, driving across New Jersey in the middle of the night, and he’d figured the hell with it, get the trip over with, drive on into New York and ditch the car tonight and get a hotel room and start fresh tomorrow.

So he’d pushed it across New Jersey, and then the tollbooth guy at the George Washington Bridge looked at him funny; he knew it, he felt it at the time. There was just something about Frank or the car or something that alerted the guy, Frank knew it. He’d spent a lifetime knowing things like that.

And then, on the Manhattan side, he was almost alone on the Henry Hudson Parkway as he drove down the west side, and at 158th Street a police car was just pulling up onto the highway. He slowed down to maybe three miles over the limit, and the blue and white police car tucked in at the same speed about six car lengths back, and here they both were.

The tollbooth guy turned me up, Frank thought. He knew there was something wrong, and he got the word to the NYPD, and right now those guys behind me are running this license plate through the computer at Motor Vehicle. Has it been reported stolen yet? Has the Indianapolan returned from his flight and taken the courtesy bus to the spot where his car used to be?

Even if not, even if not, if the cops back there decide anyway to just check out this guy in the Chevy on general principles and because it’s a slow night tonight, Frank is without papers; not on himself and most especially not on the car. “Who is this car registered to?” “John Doe, Officer.”

125th Street; the next exit. Driving smoothly, without fuss, even managing to look casual though no one in the world would be able to see his face at this moment, Frank steered for the exit, flowed smoothly down and around the curve, and the police car followed!

Damn! Damn damn damn! The first traffic light Frank came to was green and he went straight and the cops came right along in his wake, half a block back. The second light was just turning yellow; he pressed the accelerator and zipped through, then eased off again. Now would tell; either the police car stops, or its red and white flashers come on and start revolving and the cops come straight on through the intersection and right up Frank’s tailpipe.

I’ll have to try to outrun them, Frank thought, knowing how hopeless that would be but knowing also that he had no other choice. Take turns, cut back and forth in all these streets, try to lose them. He kept staring at the rearview mirror, not breathing, mouth open in fear, and back there the police car... stopped.

Green light ahead. Frank took the right turn, then the next left, then another right. Bobbing and weaving, losing them any way he could. He kept going, switching back and switching back, all on empty streets in that darkest time of night just before the dawn, no traffic, no pedestrians. Stay off the highway, that was the thing, find the direction to go downtown, get undercover some—

Sirens, off a ways. Looking for me!

A skinny little black girl in a huge bloodred T-shirt ran out of nowhere into the glare of his headlights, waving her arms at him, showing him her tear-streaked terrified face. She was barefoot, and at first he thought she was ten years old, some little kid, attacked, gang-raped, something, and he instinctively hit the brakes, but without completely stopping.

She grabbed the passenger door handle as it went by her at about five miles an hour, snatched it open, leaped headfirst into the car with the door banging against her legs, and Frank, startled, tromped the accelerator again. She pulled herself in and up, knees on the floor, arms on the seat, her pleading wide-eyed broken-jawed face staring up at him, the door imperfectly closed and rattling as he accelerated, fleetingly afraid of an ambush situation, and he saw she wasn’t what he’d thought. She’s a grown-up woman, he realized, staring down at her, ugliest thing I ever seen in my life.

“Mister, take me away from here!” she cried, with some kind of click-clack accent in her words; not like a spade at all; those mushmouth brothers on the inside. “I’ll do anything you want,” she begged, “but take me away from here!”

24

Susan woke from a nightmare to a worse nightmare, sitting on her chest, its claws puncturing her breasts, its red eyes gleaming at her as she screamed. It opened that hooked mustardy beak, and its breath was so foul that even in her terror she had to consciously try not to be sick.

“Susan,” it said, in a husky croak, like a dog that had learned how to talk, and its narrow tongue, forked at the tip, flashed out and back, as though already tasting her blood.

I’m dreaming! But she knew she wasn’t.

A forepaw reached out, one gray-green talon touched her nose as though in play, and fire seared through her body from the touch. She shrieked, her own breath as hot as sulphur in her lungs.

“Suuuu-san,” it crooned, and increased its weight, suddenly and terribly; then was almost weightless again. “Who have you met recently, Suuuuu-san?” it asked, the red eyes sparkling as though it hoped she would refuse to answer. Would refuse at first to answer. Would refuse for as long as possible to answer. “Who have you met? What are you doing together?”

Andy! she thought, but didn’t say, and thought again, it’s a dream, and the thing suddenly looked up, as though startled, and bolts of white light shot out of its eyes.

No; into its eyes. From everywhere, from nowhere, the white light made two long thin cones, stilettos, two narrow blades plunging into the demon through its open eyes, filling it like milk, the white glow inside pulsing through the scales and fur of its body, swelling it, the demon’s mouth yawping wide, dislocating its own jaw, the forked tongue frantically flapping as though caught in a springe and trying to escape desperately from that mouth, that body.

The white light seared the body of the demon from the center, burning and charring, and the monster writhed in furious pain, pressing down on Susan’s body and then leaping into the air. Great huge gray-black wings sprang from it, filling the room, beating wildly, stripping the walls of pictures and mirror — the mirror showing nothing — the demon curling in on itself in the midst of its thumping wings, trying to bite through itself to that tormenting light that slashed and destroyed deep within.

Count Dracula sat quietly in the wooden chair beside the window, right leg crossed over left, hands crossed calmly in lap as he watched the battle proceed in the middle of the room. Susan, battered by terror and pain, roused herself half upward, blood seeping from the long claw-tears on her breasts, and stared at this new horror.

Dracula turned his head, faint sparks of static electricity springing from him as he moved, and smiled at Susan, showing her his blood-smeared fangs. “So you are that important to him,” he said amiably, in no particular accent. “You are the very linchpin of his plan.”

The words made no sense, it was as though they were a part of the torture. Susan stared at her tormentor in this new guise, and he turned his attention back to the madness in the air, where the fury of the wings had slowed, the struggle had been decided. The demon sagged from its wings, which fitfully shook, creaking like old leather.

No, not the demon; the husk of the demon. Susan understood that all at once; the demon itself had fled from that battlefield and now sat calmly watching from the sidelines, amusing itself.

But so did the opponent understand, whoever or whatever that might be. Abruptly, the chest of that ghoul-gryphon tore open and light poured into the room, blinding Susan, who, as she flung her hands to her face, saw the Count Dracula apparition cease to be. Gone.

In the semi-darkness behind her hands, eyes squeezed shut but nevertheless seeing through her lids and her hands, seeing the bones in her hands from the intensity of that light, Susan felt it all change. A great billowing tenderness enfolded her. The light lost its terrifying incandescence, became soft, soothed her, settled and calmed her in the bed, removed all pain and fear, caressed her brain, and she slept, dreamless and full.

The alarm sounded. Her eyes snapped open. What a horrible dream! But it was so real!

She sat up, unable to believe anything, neither that it had been real nor a dream. There were no wounds on her breasts. The pictures and mirror were in place on the walls. A faint scent, like burning tires, hung in the air.

25

Jurisdiction was the word they used. They talked over Li Kwan’s head, or past his ears, as though he didn’t speak English, or it didn’t matter if he did. They used the word jurisdiction, and they smiled and smacked their lips and raised their jaws at one another, as though he were a juicy steak that only one of them could enjoy.

For four days they moved him around, from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. The Star Voyager’s crew had turned him over to uniformed men from the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service, who took him in a car across New York — so familiar, from all the photos, all the films, but so desperately foreign — to an office building and upstairs to a large room with a mesh cage in it. They put him in the cage, and fed him one meal, and then New York City policemen came and took him away to a recognizable prison and put him in an isolation cell, and there he spent the night. Next morning the Federal Bureau of Investigation had a turn at him — and another cell, in another location — and then the Secret Service, and then the New York City police again. And back to Immigration. And occasional brief incomprehensible appearances before various judges, who muttered at the officials and paid him no attention at all. And so on.

For the first two days, Kwan kept trying to make his case, make it with somebody, anybody, but no one would listen, no one cared, not the judges, not the people in uniform who led him from place to place, not anybody. Men in shabby suits, carrying highly polished attaché cases, would occasionally appear and claim to be attorneys and say they had been assigned to “represent” him, and he tried to tell his story to them, but none of them was interested. That was the point, finally, if there was one: no one in the world was even interested.

One attorney, the most honest of them — the only one honest of them — said it straight out: “Never mind that, Kwan. You aren’t political, so forget all that. You aren’t political because it would be too goddamn awkward if you were political, so you’re not. You’re, let’s see, you’re” — studying the papers he’d taken from the gleaming attaché case — “you’re a stowaway, an illegal immigrant, an accused thief—”

“Thief! Who says I’m a thief?”

“You’ll have your day in court, Kwan. That’s the name, right? Li Kwan? Your last name’s Kwan?”

“My family name is Li,” Kwan answered. “My given name is Kwan.”

“Oh.” The man frowned some more at the papers. “They got it backward here.”

“Li Kwan. That’s correct.”

The man smiled in sudden understanding. “I get it! You do it backward! Is that a Chinese thing, or is it just you?”

“It is Chinese.”

“So you’re Mr. Li, is that it?”

“Yes.”

“Like the guy does my shirts,” the man said, and grinned in a sloppy friendly way and said, “I’m here to do what I can for you, Mr. Kwan. Mr. Li. I’ll get it. And I’ll do what I can.” Kwan never saw him again.

But the worst was the women. Several of the functionaries who passed Kwan through their hands like worry beads were women, and Kwan simply didn’t matter to them. They were in uniform or otherwise severely dressed, and their eyes were cold or indifferent or distracted. Most of them had muscle bunches beneath their mean mouths. They met Kwan in small bare rooms with hard metal furniture, they carried their attaché cases or manila folders, they clicked their ballpoint pens, they met him alone or they were accompanied by others, and at no time did he matter.

At first, he tried to attract their attention in the usual way, being a pleasant and interesting and unthreatening but sexually intriguing young male, and not once did they respond in any way at all.

It was not that he hoped for or expected a sex act atop one of these metal desks, but that he simply wanted interpersonal contact in a way he understood, an acknowledgment of their shared humanity, of the world of possibility outside and beyond the airless chambers in which they met. By not noticing him, they made him something less noticeable. By their refusal to have a gender, they refused him one as well; in desexing themselves, they desexed Kwan.

He didn’t understand that specifically, only knew that to his natural outraged frustration at being silenced and stifled by these unemotional automatons, there was added a steadily deepening depression, a loss of self-assurance, a lessening belief that he could ever prevail. The governments robbed him of his high moral ground, the bureaucrats filched his rights and remedies, but the women emptied him of his natural self.

For eleven days they played him, as a cat plays with a mouse. No one listened, and no one ever would. He was simply the shuttlecock in their badminton game. He could not become a participant, so there was no way to win the game.

After eleven days, he decided to stop being nothing by becoming nothing. He took the full tube of toothpaste with which this most recent holding cell was furnished, removed the top, inserted the tube as deeply into his throat as he could, and squeezed as much of the toothpaste into his body as his trembling hands could press from the tube before the lights swirled around him, pain opened through his body, and he passed out.

If he hadn’t made a clatter when falling, he might have died.

It was a black moment when he regained consciousness in the hospital. For the first day and night he took no interest in his surroundings, tried to pretend he’d died anyway. He couldn’t speak, in any event, could in fact barely move. Tubes went into his nose and into a new hole in his throat. Needles pumped fluid into his arms. His wrists and legs were strapped down. White-clothed men and women passed through, ignoring his brain, caring only for his body; he ignored them as much as they ignored him. A bright window to his left showed the changing sky; he didn’t care.

The second afternoon, a rumpled man in tweeds and a bow tie pulled a chair over next to the bed on the side away from the window and said, “I thought you Orientals were supposed to be patient.”

This was so outrageous that it yanked Kwan immediately out of his lethargy, and he turned his head to glare at the man. Round face, round eyes behind round horn-rimmed spectacles, false-looking thick brown moustache. Stupid bow tie, dark blue with white snowflakes; what a stupid thing to wear. If only he could say that.

The man smiled at him. “You aren’t particularly inscrutable either, Kwan,” he said. “May I call you Kwan? Mr. Li seems so formal. If you could talk, you could call me Bob. As you’ve no doubt guessed, I’m a psychiatrist.”

Kwan closed his eyes and turned his head away. Shame, disgust, boredom, rage. Bob: stupid name, like a sound a yeti might make.

Bob laughed and said, to Kwan’s closed eyes, closed face, closed mind, “That’s the true fate worse than death, isn’t it? The trouble with suicide. If you fail, you have to talk to a psychiatrist.”

Kwan deliberately opened his eyes and stared at the man, trying to make himself as cold and dead as possible. He knew what this psychiatrist was up to; he was so obvious, it was insulting. He wanted to become pals, become chums, force Kwan to accept this Bob as a caring fellow human being. If he were only to accept Bob’s humanity, it would imply that Bob — and therefore mankind generally — accepted Kwan in the same way. Which was a lie.

Bob said, “Okay, Kwan, at the moment you just want the facts. Fine. You did a pretty good job on your insides, made enough of a mess that they had to bring you over here to NYU Medical Center, where they’ve got specialists and specialized equipment that can maybe put you back together again. So you aren’t in any kind of jail any more, but there is a cop outside that door, twenty-four hours a day. They wanted to put him in here, sitting in the corner there, but several of us talked them out of that.”

Smiling at the look of inquiry that crossed Kwan’s face despite his best efforts to remain impassive, Bob said, “We felt a world full of cops is what drove you to this condition. We’d like you to know it doesn’t have to be that way. Believe me, Kwan, if you’d waited just a little longer, all those faceless people processing you would have faded away and there would have been somebody to listen.” He smiled, a coach full of positive reinforcement. “Well, fortunately, it isn’t too late. In a week or two you’ll have your voice back, and we can start figuring out what’s best for you. And we will. Kwan?” The cheerful open face above the stupid bow tie loomed toward him. “Will you at least give me the benefit of the doubt?”

No. And I don’t want my voice back. I don’t want anything back.

He’s Sam Mortimer, Kwan thought. He reminds me of Sam Mortimer, the reporter in Hong Kong who betrayed me. All heartiness and fellow feeling and honest concern; and nothing underneath. Professional warmth. He gazed at the professional and willed nothing to appear on his face.

Bob waited, then leaned back and shrugged. “We have time,” he said, apparently unaware how chilling that statement was. “You know, Kwan,” he said, “you don’t have to be strapped down like this. The only reason was to keep you from hurting yourself, pulling the tubes out or whatever. I mean, you know, you really and truly can’t kill yourself in this room, but you could probably do yourself some damage, and nobody wants that. Now, if I guarantee the doctors and that cop out there that you won’t do anything self-destructive, I’m pretty sure I can get those straps taken off, and then you could even sit up and look at the river outside that window. Or I could get you something to read. Chinese or English? Would you like some reading matter?”

Kwan closed his eyes. The tears on his cheeks felt like acid. There was no way to win. They were legion, and they had soldiers for every campaign. And here he lay, helpless. Alone, helpless, hopeless, betrayed, despairing but not even permitted to stop.

“Magazines? Chinese?”

Kwan, behind his closed eyes, nodded; another defeat.

Sitting up, his view to the left was of the East River and some industrial part of Queens on the far side of the wide water. River traffic was sparse and almost all commercial: barges, tugs, the occasional small cargo boat. Every once in a while, a small seaplane took off or landed. This side of the river, just barely visible at the bottom of the window, was the rushing busy traffic on the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Drive; all that barely glimpsed bustle on the roadway made the river seem even emptier, without at all suggesting that it might be serene. Looking out that way, watching the shifting shades of gray on the river, Kwan was reminded of his rowboat crossing from mainland China to Hong Kong. What a different person he had been then. With what hope he had pulled on the oars, and seen the lights of the city come closer.

His view to the right was of the door, through which the doctors and nurses and Bob from time to time came. Every time the door was opened, Kwan could look out and see a uniformed policeman, every shift a different one, seated on a metal-armed office chair against the opposite wall, usually reading a newspaper, sometimes just seated with arms folded and feet planted wide as he gazed away down the wide corridor, probably admiring some nurse’s behind. Once it was a policewoman out there; she read a magazine.

So did Kwan. On the white metal table beside his bed were the magazines Bob had brought him, plus a pencil and notepad in case he wanted to ask for anything or make any kind of comment. He had nothing to say, no reason to use the pencil and notepad, but he did read the magazines, in Chinese and in English, and despite his efforts to keep it out, the world did crowd in on him, in its hopelessness and its faithlessness.

Other times, he slept. He took his medicines, submitted to the tests, underwent the physical therapies. Because of the damage he’d done to his throat and esophagus, he couldn’t eat, or drink any liquids, or talk, but the intravenous-feeding needle fixed into the fleshy part of his left forearm dealt with the first two of those problems, and he had no need to deal with the last.

Because he slept so lightly, once they no longer needed to give him painkillers, he was aware of the door when it opened, and had turned to look that way while it was still swinging wide, so that the person coming into his dark room — Venetian blinds closed over the night view of the river — was silhouetted against the lit corridor. Then the person swung the door shut and shuffled softly forward, and in Kwan’s mind the afterimage showed the corridor, and the empty chair against the opposite wall.

The policeman? Coming in here for some reason?

No. The quick impression of that silhouette, the backlit border of it, had suggested the kind of long white coat worn by the doctors, not a policeman’s uniform at all. But when medical staff came into the room at night, they always kicked down the little rubber-tipped metal foot attached to the door, to hold it open, so they would have the light from the corridor to help them see — plus their own little flashlights — and wouldn’t have to disturb him by putting on the main lights.

Kwan, because he’d already been in here in the dark, could see faintly, could at least make out shapes. The other person in the room, who’d been in the brightly lighted corridor, was obviously having trouble finding his way across the blackness toward the bed; Kwan heard chair legs scrape when the person bumped into it.

And suddenly he knew. Trying to sit up, hampered by the board attached to his left arm that kept it rigid for the intravenous needle, and by the tubes still inserted in his nose and the new hole in his throat, Kwan gargled out hoarse ragged frightened noises, the first sounds he’d made since waking up in the hospital. These noises caused him extreme pain, but also caused that shuffling dark presence over there to stop, to become very still for a moment, and then to whisper, in smooth educated Cantonese, “So you’re awake, are you, Li? I am here to help you.” And he sidled forward again.

Kwan knew what sort of help this smooth bastard was here to provide. He had tried to kill himself, for his own reasons, to gain his own goals, but of course, his desires had meshed wonderfully with theirs. How convenient of him to want to get himself out of their hair, eliminate all potential future embarrassment. But he had failed — as he had failed in everything, he now saw — and so they had decided to help him along the way, had sent this undersecretary or chauffeur or military attaché from their embassy or U.N. mission, to see to it that he didn’t fail a second time.

Not this way! Kwan thought, instinctively resisting, clawing to retain life as automatically as he’d tried to throw it away. He made that hoarse croaking sound again, regardless of the pain, but it wasn’t at all loud enough to be heard through that closed door.

And where was the policeman? The easy pleasant whisper answered him: “Relax, Li, no one will disturb us. We paid for one tiny mix-up in assignments — they believe, simple souls, they’ve gotten out of the way of a photographer from the New York Post — and so we’re all alone. You want to sleep, Li, I know you do, and I am here to assure you of sleep. A long and dreamless sleep.”

The figure was at the bed. Kwan, still struggling to rise, felt the man reach past him for one of the pillows. He dropped back, pressing his palm flat against the man’s chest, pushing as hard as he could, but he was too weak, and the chest he pushed at rippled with hard muscles.

The pillow came down tight onto his face, wrenching the one tube from the hole in his throat, crushing the other inside his nose. The damage he’d already done to his throat was made worse, much worse. Kwan fought not for life but to make this pain go away. He flailed uselessly with his one good hand as the man bore down, his weight keeping the terrible pain inside.

Kwan’s hand slid off the solid shoulder and upper arm of the man, waved out and back, flung wide, rapped his knuckles hard against the white metal table, scrabbled like a spider on that surface, found an object, stabbed upward with it.

“nn”

Good; a reaction. Kwan, planets and fiery satellites spinning against his eyelids, head and chest swelling with the need for air, stabbed again, and a third time, and a fourth, and the thing in his hand that he was stabbing with broke just as the weight on the pillow abruptly eased. Kwan pushed it away, gasping, to see that he held tightly gripped in his fist half of the pencil that had been placed with the notepad on the table, for which he had had no use.

And the figure was reeling backward, both hands clutched to his face. Kwan half leaped and half fell from the bed, the pain when the intravenous needle ripped from his arm almost unnoticeable in all the other pains clamoring at his body. He staggered across the room, good arm out, reaching for the door, finding the knob, pulling it open, so weak the door seemed to come toward him through water.

With a quick look back, he saw the man, Oriental, tall and sinewy, dressed like a doctor, wide-eyed with horror and rage, open-mouthed, gripping with one palsied hand the pencil that jutted from his cheek, afraid to pull it out. He saw Kwan in the doorway, about to escape. He stared, then gave a little cry, and yanked the pencil free, flinging it across the room. Blood spurted from the attacker’s cheeks, and Kwan fled.

Ananayel

They keep moving earlier than I anticipate. First Frank, and now Kwan.

I hadn’t realized that some overreaching bureaucrat within the sprawling Chinese government would decide to order Kwan’s execution. A close thing, that. Kwan saved himself, fortunately, or I would have had to begin all over again, abandoning this entire first group to work out their shortened destinies on their own.

I did arrive to help Kwan, though belatedly. When he let that room door close behind him and ran down the corridor on his tottering legs, his guardian angel was once more at his side. I permitted the assassin, back in the room, once again in the dark and going into shock, to fall over the chair I’d placed in his way, giving Kwan extra seconds to get to the double doors, and through, and find the stairwell.

Kwan’s weakness would have ruined him, but I gave him of my own strength, enough to get him down the stairwell to the ground floor and through a door that was locked until one second before he touched it and locked again one second after he passed through. Various pedestrians — three nurses and one doctor — were shunted slightly from their original routes so that Kwan could pass by unseen. A closet he opened now contained — though it had not previously contained — a tattered topcoat that would fit him reasonably well and cover most of his hospital-issue pajamas. On their sides on the floor lay a pair of shin-high black rubber boots, only a bit too large for Kwan’s feet. He tucked the pajama legs inside the boots and moved on.

A uniformed private security guard would have been at the side exit, except that he’d just been called away to a telephone call, only to find that his party had hung up. (More graceless and clumsy work on my part, but what was I to do with no time for preparation?)

Kwan emerged into a chilly and cloudless night. It was just after five in the morning. First Avenue was to his left, with very little traffic apart from the occasional cruising taxicab. FDR Drive was to his right, scattered with fast-moving cars, and the river lay beyond.

Kwan went to the right, found an on-ramp to the Drive, avoided it, followed a narrow street that ran between the Drive and the rear of various buildings in the hospital complex, found a group of three bundled-up people asleep on a warm-air grate against a high brick wall, and joined them. Lying down, immediately unconscious, the wounds in his neck and left forearm beginning to scab over, he became at once invisible, merely another of New York City’s many thousand street sleepers.

I left him there, and went briefly back to Susan, only to assure myself the demon hadn’t attacked her again — he had not, he was still off somewhere licking his wounds — and turned my attention to my other primary actors.

They’re doing it on their own now. I don’t have to do a thing. Particularly Maria Elena, and also Grigor. I started those tops spinning, but now it’s all happening without any extra push from me. I don’t even appear.

And they’re moving so fast. It’s as though they know, and are in a hurry to reach their end.

26

At ten-thirty the dryer buzzed, and Maria Elena carried the sheets upstairs. She looked out the bedroom window, and of course, the gray Plymouth was still there, across Wilton Road, in front of the house two doors to the right. Yesterday it had been one house farther away, and the day before it had been on this side, down two houses to the left. Always facing in this direction.

Did they think she was a fool? Or were they showing themselves deliberately, trying to intimidate her? That would be ironic, wouldn’t it? Having already given up her connection with the dissenters, to now be pressured by the government — the FBI, the state police, whoever that was out there — to do what she’d already despairingly done.

There were so few cars ever parked on the street along this curving suburban road at the edge of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, that a strange vehicle would of necessity draw attention. Did they think, because the lone observer in the car was a woman — a chain-smoking woman — that Maria Elena wouldn’t understand what was going on? The nondescript gray car, the vaguely progressive (but inoffensive) bumper stickers — I ♥ EARTH; SAVE THE WHALES — were hardly disguise enough, not in a neighborhood like this.

Making the beds — she and Jack slept in different rooms now — Maria Elena engaged in angry silent conversations with the woman in the car. But these fantasy speeches had lost their power to tranquilize. Her make-believe diatribes at the rich and powerful and greedy and cruel did nothing to solve actual problems, had never done anything but soothe her own brittle nervous melancholy. And now they didn’t even do that much.

The worst of it all was, probably she was the one now who should go to the authorities, the one with the specific grievance, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Although she was pretty sure by now that Andras had stolen her past.

Andras Herrmuil, the so-called record producer, the man who made all the promises, and who now, apparently, had disappeared. With her records, her posters, her photos, her clippings.

Not quite two months ago he’d phoned, this enthusiastic baritone voice on the telephone, saying, “Maria Elena? Is this the Maria Elena?”

Even here? she’d wondered, amazed, but even though the thought pleased her she automatically said, “No, I’m sorry, I don’t know what you mean.”

“You are! I can hear your voice!” And he dropped into natural native Brazilian Portuguese: “When you were singing I was still at home, I was young, I was one of your most rabid fans, I went everywhere you appeared.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, unconsciously answering him in Portuguese, “you’re mistaking me for—”

“But I’m not. Do you know how many times you played Belem?”

A small city in the far north of Brazil. Maria Elena said, “What? No, I—”

“Three!” he announced triumphantly. “And I went to every one of them, even though I lived then in São Paulo. Maria Elena, do you remember the Live in São Paulo album? I’m on it! Screaming my head off!”

“Please, no, you’ve—”

“Forgive me,” said that insistent voice, “I get so carried away. My name is Andras Herrmuil, I’m an ‘A and R’ man now with Hemispheric Records, and this is, believe it or not, a professional business telephone call.”

“A and R” had been said in English; it caught at Maria Elena’s attention. She said, “A what? A and R? I’m sorry, I don’t know what that means.”

Again in English, he said, “Artists and Repertory.” Then, back to Portuguese, he said, “It means, I help select which records we put out. I don’t know if you know Hemispheric—”

“No, I don’t.”

“We release in the United States,” he said, “music from other parts of the Americas. Canadian, Mexican, Central and South American. To have Maria Elena on our list would be such a—”

“No, no, please, I—”

“You should not be forgotten! When you were singing, you were the best! You were the only one in a class with Elis Regina!”

One of the major superstars of Brazil, before she killed herself. “Oh, no,” Maria Elena protested, feeling herself blush, “I was never, I could never have been—”

“Ah, you admit who you are! Maria Elena, may I come see you?”

How could she refuse? And so he’d come to see her, a darkly handsome man in his mid-thirties, who had flirted with her (but had not overstepped the bounds) and painted glowing pictures of her career reborn in this cold dry northern world. He had given her his card, and she had given him the two cartons that made up all that was left of her career.

Promising to phone soon, and to forward a contract, Andras had gone away, and for the next few weeks Maria Elena had moved in a happy daze, fantasizing her new career. Could it happen? Could she actually sing again? She was sorry she hadn’t kept just one album, so she could hear afresh what she used to sound like. Could she do it now? Would the cold North Americans accept her?

But Andras didn’t phone, and no contract came in the mail. Maria Elena fretted, she grew sleepless. She shouldn’t call him, she should wait, businesses had delays.

But finally, yesterday, she had taken out his business card and called the number on it, in New York, and a recorded voice had told her that number was not in service. New York City information then told her there was no business in the city known as Hemispheric Records.

Oh, Andras. What have you done, and why? Were you just a fan, a cruel fan? Was that all you wanted, to steal my souvenirs for yourself?

One can get used to living without hope. But to have hope suddenly offered, to be tantalized with hope till one begins to believe in that bright specter once more, and then to have hope snatched away, that is unbearable. Maria Elena ground her teeth that night, alone and awake in her bed, thinking the darkest thoughts of her life.

And this morning, to hammer it home, there was the stakeout, the woman in the gray car.

Not yet eleven in the morning, and there was nothing more to do in this house, no other way to distract herself from her thoughts. This hateful place took care of itself with all of its “labor-saving devices.” There was still labor, of course, it was actually time that was saved, but time for what?

Going downstairs, Maria Elena firmly turned her back on the living room and its television set. The daytime soap operas were too seductive, with their open-ended stories, in which great passion and great absurdity were at every instant inextricably mingled. The characters cared deeply, vitally, as Maria Elena had once cared and had always wanted to care and could no longer care, but what the characters in those daily stories cared so vividly about was invariably trash. Nothing that could possibly really matter to anybody ever arose in their invented lives, and that was why they were so seductive; become a regular watcher, a daily observer of these brightly colored puppets, let them experience your passion for you. All gain, no pain. A legal drug, as efficient as the illegal ones.

Maria Elena’s pride would not let her give in to the release of drugs. Of any kind.

Turning her back on the living room, Maria Elena drifted purposelessly into the dining room. This elaborate neat house contained a separate dining room, perfectly waxed and preserved, never used for anything at all. When she and Jack took dinner together, which wasn’t often, they ate at the breakfast table in the kitchen.

Maria Elena stopped in the dining room, not knowing where to go or what to do with herself. Her fingertips brushed the polished surface of the mahogany table. Seats twelve. What would she do with the rest of her day?

She thought of Grigor Basmyonov, but she’d been to see him again only the day before yesterday. And she’d told him — with such hope! — about Andras Herrmuil and Hemispheric Records and the sudden new career opening up before her. He’d been so happy and encouraging for her; how could she go to him with today’s news?

But there was another reason to stay away. She was afraid of using Grigor, of turning him into a kind of flesh-and-blood soap opera of her very own, over whose dramatic problems she could wail without risk to herself, releasing her emotions in a safely ineffectual way.

But on the days when she didn’t drive across western Massachusetts and into New York State to see Grigor, what was there to do? What purpose in life? She looked toward the plate-glass dining room window, with its view of Wilton Road, and saw the first slanted lines of rain sweep diagonally down it, as though God had shaken out his just-washed beard. Rain. So driving would be more difficult, staying at home even more claustrophobic.

Maria Elena stepped forward to look at the sky, to find out just how much of a storm this was going to be, and was astonished to see that gray Plymouth turning into the driveway of this house. Pulling up beside the house. Stopping.

Arrest! thought Maria Elena, and couldn’t hide from herself the thrilled feeling, the sense that something of interest, something worthwhile, might at last be about to happen. Light-footed, suddenly lighthearted, she turned toward the front door.

The bell didn’t ring for a long time, while Maria Elena stood in the front hall, one pace from the door, trying not to look eager, trying not to know just how eager she was. What was the woman in the Plymouth doing? What was the delay?

Ding-dong. Very loud, because the bell was set to be heard everywhere in this large house, and Maria Elena was standing directly beneath it. She started, even though she’d expected the sound, then stepped forward and opened the door. She would be calm, dignified, rigid, and silent.

At first she thought it was rain on the woman’s face, but the rain was only a sprinkle, and the woman’s cheeks were very wet, her makeup running, her expression twisted with emotion. Tears! Expecting arrest, Maria Elena was completely lost. Did the woman so hate her work for the government that it made her weep?

“Mrs. Auston?”

“Yes?”

“I’m Kate Monroe, I have to talk to you.”

“About what?”

“About John.”

The name meant nothing to her. Someone in the anti-nuclear group? “John?”

“Your husband!” the woman cried. “Don’t you even remember you have a husband?”

“Oh, my God,” Maria Elena said, and stepped back. “Come in, come in.”

They sat in the living room, Maria Elena on the soft sofa, Kate Monroe on the uncomfortable wooden-armed decorative chair; her choice. She was about thirty, somewhat overweight, dressed in a distracted manner in bright colors in several layers of cloth, as though she were a fairy in a hippie production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Her hair was ash blond, cut fairly short, at the moment tangled and unkempt. Her round face would be pretty if it weren’t puffy red from emotion. Tears periodically poured down those round cheeks.

Kate Monroe, while they talked, used and shredded any number of tissues from the box Maria Elena had given her. “I love him, and he loves me! You can’t hold a man who doesn’t love you!”

“I know that.”

“You have to let him go!”

Maria Elena spread her hands, at a loss. “Yes, if he wants. That is the American law.”

“It’s a mockery,” Kate Monroe went on in her shrill voice, obviously not listening to a word Maria Elena said, “to hold on to him if he doesn’t love you any more! We deserve our chance at happiness!”

Maria Elena lifted her head at that, suddenly incensed at this slobby ignorant person in her house. “Deserve? Why do you deserve happiness? What did you do that you deserve happiness?”

“You must let him go!”

But Maria Elena would not be sidetracked. “You said that you deserve happiness. But why? Why do you deserve anything? Why you?”

This time Kate Monroe heard the question. It made her blink, and look briefly evasive. “I said a chance,” she decided, and became self-assured again, crying, “You had your chance!”

“Yes, I did,” Maria Elena agreed.

Kate Monroe misunderstood: “If you lost what you—”

“Oh, not Jack,” Maria Elena told her. “No. My chance at happiness was long before that.”

Kate Monroe couldn’t follow the conversation, and it was making her angry. She’d come into this house with a clear simple burning truth to express, but now it was all turning muddy and difficult. Maria Elena could understand what had happened there, could almost sympathize with the woman; this is the way it is when you try to act out your fantasies in the real world.

Trying to recapture the initiative, Kate Monroe said, loud and angry and vicious, “If that’s the way you feel, if you never cared for John, if all you ever wanted was a ticket to the United States—”

“Yes, that’s true.”

Kate Monroe stared, thunderstruck. “You admit it?”

“Why not?”

“Then why won’t you let him go?”

“Because he hasn’t asked.”

“That’s a lie!”

“I’ve never heard of you, Miss Monroe,” Maria Elena said. “Jack and I don’t talk much. But of course, he can go, if he wants.”

“He did ask you,” Kate Monroe insisted, clutching to the chair arms. “You refused.”

Maria Elena got to her feet. “John will be home in six or seven hours. Why don’t you look around the house, become familiar with it? When he comes home, you can discuss it all with him. You can tell him I will not stand in your way. That you yourself asked me if I would let him go, and I said yes.”

Kate Monroe was getting frightened now. The solid base of her universe was sliding beneath her feet. Staring up at Maria Elena, she said, “Where are you going?”

“I have a friend to visit in the hospital. I will probably be several hours.” Maria Elena pointed at the television set. “You could watch TV while you’re waiting for Jack. There are several interesting dramas on in the daytime. I hope your car isn’t blocking the garage.”

“No, I put it on the— Why? Why won’t you stay and talk with me?”

“Because it has all been said,” Maria Elena told her. Imagining Kate Monroe’s future, she couldn’t hold back the smile. “You’ll have your chance,” she told the wretched woman. “At happiness.”

27

More and more, in these latter days, Grigor couldn’t get out of bed at all. He had a knob of controls handy beside the bed, and could raise himself to a sitting position, and there he’d stay all day, sometimes reading, but more often — when the books were too heavy to hold, even the paperbacks — watching television. There were many channels to watch, and almost always there was something of a news or non-fiction nature somewhere within range. Grigor watched such programs because he still thought of them as grist for the mill, the raw material for more jokes for Boris Boris. But the truth of the matter was, there were now weeks when he didn’t fax even one miserable reject of a joke to the studio in Moscow.

He knew what the problem was, of course. It was obvious, and inevitable, and there was no way to counteract it; like the disease itself. The problem was that he’d been away too long. He no longer knew Russia as naturally as before, as automatically as he knew himself. What changes had taken place there, that Boris Boris should be commenting on? What was the au courant subject in Moscow this week? Grigor didn’t know He would never know.

Almost the only bright spot in his darkening and narrowing world was Maria Elena Auston, that strange lady they’d picked up at the demonstration. She wasn’t exactly a cheerful person, not as enjoyable as for instance Susan, but Susan had her own life to live, had a man of her own now — not some bedridden shell of a man — and very seldom came all the way up from the city to visit. Maria Elena did visit, usually twice a week, and there was something about her very solemnity, that awareness that at all times she carried sorrow somewhere deep within her, that made her a comfortable companion for the person Grigor had become.

We have both been damaged by life, he thought. We understand each other in a way the undamaged can’t know.

What a quality to share; he ought to make a joke about it.

When Maria Elena walked in, it was her third visit that week, a new record, and she was in better spirits than he’d ever seen her. “The plant is on strike!” she announced.

Grigor had just been brooding on how little of the world he recently understood, and here came Maria Elena to prove it. Unable to keep the impatience and irritation out of his voice, he said, “Plant? What plant?”

“Green Meadow! The nuclear plant!”

“Oh, yes. Where we first met. But you said you didn’t go there any more.”

“I drove by it.”

Maria Elena pulled the green Naugahyde chair closer and sat down, her strong face transformed by what appeared to be happiness. She was actually a beautiful woman, in a dark and powerful way.

It’s more than a nuclear plant being on strike, Grigor thought, but he didn’t know enough about her private life to be able to guess at what had changed her. A new lover? Something.

Something to make her drift away from him, like Susan?

Maria Elena was saying, “It’s the quickest route, so I sometimes drive by, and today there were many more pickets, and some had signs saying they were on strike! The workers are, because they know the experiments in there are too dangerous. A school bus was just going inside, with the pickets trying to stop it, so I had to wait, and one of the strikers told me the school bus was full of managers and supervisors!”

“But it’s still operating?”

“Oh, yes. And they’re still experimenting. But you know how they are, they don’t care about the danger, the most important thing to them is that their authority not be questioned.”

Grigor looked at the window. “That’s very close to here.”

“Eight miles.”

“Too close.” With a bitter smile, he asked, “Am I going to be assaulted by two nuclear plants in one lifetime?”

Maria Elena looked startled, then frightened, then disbelieving. “They wouldn’t let that happen!”

“No, of course not.” Grigor nodded. “No more than the officials at Chernobyl would let such an unthinkable thing happen.” Again he brooded at the window, thinking of that structure eight miles away. “I’d like to get inside that place,” he said. “Alone. Just for a little while.”

Sounding breathless, Maria Elena said, “What would you do?”

Grigor turned his head to look at her. When he smiled, his gray gums showed, receding from the roots of his discolored teeth. “I would play a joke,” he said.

X

What is he doing?

I prowl the earth, I tear furrows from the ground in my frustration, I sear the rocks and lash the gravestones. What is that silken slavey up to?

I can’t attack him head-on, that’s the most aggravating part of it. I have to acknowledge that now, after two encounters. He’s too strong for me to meet in direct confrontation.

Well, what of it? Direct confrontation has never been our specialty. He has a back; eventually, I will find it, and I will drive a sword into it.

In the meantime, I watch the woman. Susan Carrigan. Dull as church, predictable as famine. She does nothing to even endanger herself, much less the species, the planet. God’s alabaster moth hangs around her, sometimes in his enriched white-bread guise — Andy Harbinger! that’s his idea of humor! — so I don’t dare to make a move against her, not yet.

But what is his plan? What is this woman supposed to do? The aggravation is unbearable. Oh, the revenge I will take, once it’s safe!

As for the other one, my little Pami, she’s also disappeared. That’s less important.

I dare not fail. I dare not even ask for extra help. I dare not. What would be done to me—

No. We don’t even think about what would be done to me.

28

The doctor took Frank aside while Pami was getting dressed. “Have you had any sexual contact with that young woman?”

“Not me,” Frank said. “I won’t even shake her hand. I’m just here as a friend.”

The doctor was a pleasant enough guy, skinny, balding, about forty. It was hard to tell if he was looking worried about Pami, or if he just looked worried all the time. Being a doctor with a specialty in AIDS, he might as well look worried all the time. He said, “I get the impression she’s an illegal alien.”

Frank gave him a careful look. He said, “The other doctor.”

“Murphy. Who referred you.”

“Yeah, him. He agreed, the deal was, medicine’s the only thing we’re talking about. Cause we don’t want her to spread it, right?”

The doctor smiled thinly, but went on looking worried. “Don’t worry, Mr. Smith, I’m not going to call the Immigration Service. The only point I want to make is that Pami will be needing hospitalization very soon, and I’m not so sure she’ll qualify under any medical plan at all.”

“So what happens? They leave her in the street?”

The doctor shrugged, looking uncomfortable. “They might.”

“Nice people,” Frank said. “How long’s she got?”

“A month or two before she’ll need to be in the hospital. After that... Less than a year, certainly. Less than a week, perhaps.”

“And what can you do for her, between now and then?”

“You’ll have those prescriptions filled,” the doctor said. “The unguent will ease the chafing of the sores. The other things will help her symptomatically, make life a little more pleasant. That’s all that can be done, short of hospitalization.”

Pami came out, dressed again in the clothes Frank had bought her. She didn’t quite know how to wear them yet, so they hung on her as though they didn’t fit, but in fact they did. She smiled her crooked smile at the doctor. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” he said, and smiled back.

The doctor liked her; Frank could tell. The thing about Pami was, when she wasn’t being tough she was like a sweet little kid. Like a pet that could talk. Frank was keeping her around because, as he told himself, she gave him an interest in life, now that he was in semi-retirement with the East St. Louis cash. Anyway, it’s nice to know somebody that’s worse off than you, somebody you can feel sorry for.

The doctor pointed to his receptionist, telling Frank, “You can pay Mrs. Rubinstein.”

“Right.”

Mrs. Rubinstein said, “How will you be paying today, Mr. Smith?”

“Cash,” Frank said, bringing a wad of it out of his pants pocket.

The doctor, about to turn away, looked back and gave Frank a smile as crooked as Pami’s. “You, Mr. Smith,” he said, “are one of those enigmas that will keep me awake at night. I don’t suppose you’d care to satisfy my curiosity just a bit.”

“Nah,” Frank said.

They came walking around to the back of the NYU Medical Center, where they’d left Frank’s most recent car — a blue Toyota, stolen in New Jersey, now sporting altered New York plates — and some bum was lying on the ground against the curbside rear wheel. It looked as though he was drunk or something and fell off the curb, and now he couldn’t get up again. The way the car in front was jammed up against the Toyota, Frank wouldn’t be able to get clear without backing up, and he couldn’t do that with this bum lying draped around the rear wheel, so he poked the guy with his toe, saying, “Come on, pal, rise and shine. Make love to some other tire, okay?”

The bum moved, in some kind of fitful and ineffectual way that did no good at all. Wiped out on cheap port wine, probably. Frank bent and grabbed the guy’s arm through the sleeve of the ratty topcoat, but when he pulled, the guy just flopped over onto his back, the topcoat gaping open, showing striped pajamas underneath. “Jesus,” Frank said, in disgust, “this turkey doesn’t even have any clothes.”

“Oh, look,” Pami said, “look at his neck.”

There was some sort of wound on the guy’s neck, obscured by dried blood. There was more blood around his nose. He was Japanese or Chinese or something like that, and only half-conscious.

“Aw, crap,” Frank said. “I don’t even wanna touch him.” And he thought, him, too. All round me, people I don’t want to touch.

Pami hunkered beside the wounded drunken Jap, looking into his eyes. “He’s from the hospital.”

“You think so? Okay, lemme go get somebody, bring him back.”

But that roused the Jap, who suddenly, fitfully, shook his head back and forth, massive woozy headshakes, as though he had a lobster stuck to his nose.

Frank frowned down at him. “You from the hospital? Why you don’t wanna go back?”

The Jap was lying mostly on his back now on the asphalt, between the parked cars. He held his arms up toward Frank and pressed the insides of his wrists together, looking mutely past them at Frank.

“Handcuffs,” Frank decided. “They’ll arrest you?”

Now the Jap nodded, as vigorously and erratically as before.

Frank gazed upon him without love. “You got anything catching?”

Headshake.

Frank offered a sour grin. “Well, that’ll make a change. Come on,” he told Pami, “we’ll throw him in the backseat and get the hell out of here.”

While they packed he groused. “I don’t see why we gotta keep the guy around at all,” he muttered, putting his new all-cotton shirts in his new all-leather bag. “Some dumb Jap, can’t even talk, probably a loony.”

Pami paid him no attention. She didn’t have a whole lot of clothing to pack, but she took a long time at it because she had to stroke and refold and grin at every damn piece.

“Can’t even stay in one place on account of him,” Frank griped.

The problem was, in New York City there was no hotel room anywhere that you could get to without going past the front desk, and there was no way Frank was going to carry that mute sick Jap in and by the front desk and up to a room, without getting stopped. What they needed was a roadside motel somewhere, that Frank could go into the office of and pay in advance and then drive right on down and park in front of the room. So nobody sees the Jap at all.

“I don’t know how long we can carry him around, though,” Frank said.

Pami said, “Maybe he’ll get better.” She shrugged, and looked more bitter than she had for several days. “Maybe he’ll get better.”

They’d left him in the backseat of the Toyota, lying there like a pile of wash on its way to the laundromat, and when they came back around the corner from the motor hotel they’d been staying in on Tenth Avenue he was still there. Either asleep or dead. He moved slightly, disturbed, when they climbed in, so he wasn’t dead.

Frank made the light at the corner and turned right and they went up Tenth Avenue, north. He was still nervous about highways, after his experience when coming into this city, so he was going to avoid them. Drive city streets, and after that country roads. Just keep heading north, with no place special in mind. Stop where the country looks nice; with a motel.

The eyes that watched him all the time, judged him all the time, liked it that he was hanging out with these people.

29

Pami just couldn’t figure out this guy Frank. He didn’t want to fuck her, he didn’t want to pimp her, he didn’t seem to want to make use of her at all. Takes her to a doctor, gives her food and clothes, drives around with her, and doesn’t want anything back.

Maybe I died, Pami thought sometimes. Maybe I died in that fire with the cop, and this is what it’s like after you die, you have a nice dream to make up for all the bad things that went on before. She didn’t really believe that, though. No dream would have that disgusting Jap in it. And if Pami couldn’t figure out what Frank wanted with her, there wasn’t a hope in hell to figure out what he wanted with the Jap.

But what difference did it make? Being with Frank was a lot better than being with Rush, that’s all that mattered. What did she care if things made sense or not? When had anything ever made any sense?

They drove and drove, up through the middle of Manhattan, spending most of their time stopped at traffic lights, and at one of them the Jap came to and struggled up into a seated position. He looked like hell, unwashed, caked with dried blood, a little scraggly Oriental beard starting to grow. He smiled and bowed, head bobbing in the backseat, thanking them for rescuing him, and Frank told him it was okay, looking in the mirror at him, saying they liked the company, and they were going to drive out of the city for a while. The Jap liked that idea.

Somebody behind them honked that the light was green. Frank jolted them forward and said, “Talk to him, Pami, for Chrissake. Find out if he’s hungry.”

What did she care if the Jap was hungry? But she twisted around and looked at him and said, “You hungry?”

The Jap gave a mournful nod.

Pami nodded back. She said to Frank, “He says yes. He’s hungry.”

“Maybe we’ll stop and get a pizza,” he said. “So we can eat on the way.”

But the Jap was doing all kinds of gestures, pointing at his throat and shaking his head and making disgusted eating faces. Pami watched this for a few seconds and then said, “You got a hurt throat?”

Big nod.

“Can’t eat?”

Sorrowing headshake.

Pami faced front again. “Says he can’t eat,” she said, and went back to looking at the people on the sidewalks. There’s a hooker; that one right there.

“Liquids,” Frank said.

They were way up at the top of Manhattan by then, where it’s all Puerto Rican and Central American, so Frank stopped in front of a bodega and went inside, leaving Pami and the Jap in the car. The bums hanging out in front of the bodega, beer in their bandit moustaches, leered at her but didn’t approach. “Like to give it to you all,” she muttered under her breath.

Frank came back out and got into the car with a plastic bag full of small cans of apple juice, plus rolls and cheese and beer for himself and Pami. “Give him some juice,” he said, “and make us a couple sandwiches.”

So she did, and at the next red light the Jap cautiously took a sip of apple juice and made a horrible face as though it really hurt. But then he managed to swallow some — the rest dribbled down out of the corners of his mouth — and looked grateful.

Pami glanced back at him from time to time, interested to see how he was making out, and as they drove up through the Bronx and into Westchester County the Jap very slowly put away two of the little cans of juice, one agonizing sip at a time. Then he settled back against the seat, eyes glazing over, breathing with a raspy sound, his mouth hanging open.

Driving along behind a very slow pickup truck, waiting for a chance to pass, Frank said, “How is he?”

Pami twisted around to look back. “Better,” she said. “He looks better.” And she faced front again. Greenery up here, big houses. Like some of the hills north of Nairobi, the rich people’s places, only greener.

Frank got around the pickup truck, then looked in the rearview mirror at the Jap. “Better, huh?” he said. “He looks like a dog that fell out of an airplane.” He shook his head. “One halfway decent score in my life,” he commented at the windshield, “and I turn into the welfare department.”

Pami watched the fat men on the little tractors, mowing their lawns.

30

The reason the doctors had said it was all right for Grigor to have an overnight away from the hospital — his first since he’d arrived in the United States — was that nothing mattered any more, and everybody knew it, including Grigor, and including Maria Elena. But even though everything was now hopeless, there was still a great deal of awkward preparation to be made, medicines to carry, the foldaway wheelchair to be put into the trunk of the car, instructions for Maria Elena to write down and carry with her.

Grigor was in favor of the expedition simply because he wanted to go on seeing and experiencing the world for as long as possible, and he knew his time was growing very short. And Maria Elena wanted it because, in some angry uncomplicated way she herself didn’t understand, she wanted Grigor to see her life, to see it, before his own life came to an end. To see what she’d done wrong.

They would drive to Stockbridge, to the house Jack had now vacated — sadly forgiving Maria Elena first for her heartless treatment of poor Kate Monroe, with whom he would not be moving in — and she would cook a dinner, tiptoeing as best she could through the mine field of Grigor’s dietary restrictions. Tonight he would sleep on the living room sofa — the stairs would be impossible for him — and tomorrow they would drive back. Exhausting, futile, and more sorrowful than cheerful, but at least simple.

Until the blowout.

“Now what?” Frank said, seeing the woman wave at him. Just beyond her, a car was pulled off the road, with somebody inside. The right rear of the car sagged down almost to the weedy ground. A few miles back they’d been delayed by some kind of demonstration in front of a nuclear power plant — with everybody in the car shielding their faces from the state troopers standing around — and now this.

“Stupid people,” Pami said.

“By God, I’m gonna get to change another tire,” Frank said, pulling into a stop behind the woman and the car.

Pami said, “Another?”

“It’s just the way my life runs,” Frank told her. Switching off the ignition, opening his door, he said, “Well, maybe this one will have good advice, too.”

Maria Elena was too distraught to notice how odd the trio was in the car that had come to her rescue. She only knew this was a seldom-traveled road, far from the interstates and the Taconic Parkway, where all the traffic sped. She had Grigor as her responsibility, and she had no idea how to change the blown tire.

“I’m sorry to have to ask you,” she said, when the rough-looking man approached her from the Toyota.

“That’s okay,” Frank said. He was feeling surly, because what was he going to get out of this? The hearty thanks of some broad he didn’t know or give a damn about. Good-looking, in a kind of exotic too-strong way, but so what? Already loaded down with Pami and the Jap, he wasn’t going to score on the roadside with some damsel in distress. He was just going to mess up his hands again and get all dirty, that’s all. And Ms. Exotic here didn’t look the practical type; she wasn’t going to have any of those nice wet towelettes. “You wanna open the trunk?” he said.

“Oh, yes.”

Pami got out of the car to stretch her legs. Also, she was curious about the other person in that car. If he was a man, why didn’t he change the tire himself? Why didn’t he even get out of the car? She strolled forward.

Kwan had been napping. Now he sat up, sharply aware again of the nasty sting and burn in his throat. It had been so hard to get the apple juice down. He was very hungry, but how was he going to eat? These people he’d fallen among wouldn’t be able to feed him intravenously. Should he just give up, return to his fate? Or try again to kill himself? He watched Frank open the trunk of the car and take out a wheelchair. Kwan closed his eyes. I don’t think I can go on, he thought.

Frank put the wheelchair to one side and went back into the trunk for the spare, as Pami strolled by. Grigor, seated in the front passenger seat with the window open, watched the thin black girl in the outside mirror as she approached. He readied a small smile, not showing the interior of his ruined mouth, and looked up as she came parallel to him and glanced in. “Hello,” he said.

“Yes, hello,” Pami said, looking him over, understanding why he hadn’t leaped out to change the tire. Merely curious, she said, “You got slim?”

“What?”

“No, that’s not it,” Pami corrected herself. “Here it’s AIDS.”

Grigor smiled again, remembering to keep his lips closed. “No, not me,” he said. Then he looked at her more closely, the bone structure visible in her face, the darkness beneath her eyes, the boniness of her shoulders. “But that’s what’s got you, is it?”

“Oh, yeah,” Pami said, with a shrug. “Anybody can see it now. No more work for me.”

Grigor peered in the outside mirror again at Frank, just hunkering down by the rear wheel, pushing the jack in underneath. “Is that your doctor?”

Pami laughed. “You bet. Cure us all.”

“Not me,” Grigor said.

“Why? What you got?”

“Chernobyl.”

“What’s that?”

While Grigor explained to Pami what had happened to him, Maria Elena said to Frank, “I was feeling very lost before you came.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“The tire breaking the way it did, it was as though everything I touched had to fail.”

The lug nuts were giving Frank a hard time. He said, “I know the feeling.”

“My husband has left me,” she told him. “My friend in the car is dying. Everything I do has failed. I wanted to make things better, but I didn’t.”

Frank stopped his work to look up at her. A lid seemed to come off some boiling pot in his brain. He said, “I’m an ex-con, habitual loser, I jumped parole, did a million little burglaries. I never hurt anybody, but then I went in with another guy, and an old man died. That’s the money I’m spending. I still dream about that old guy.”

Maria Elena looked toward Kwan, barely visible in the backseat of the Toyota. She glanced back at Pami, talking with Grigor. She said to Frank, “Where are you all going?”

“To hell in a handbasket,” Frank said, and pulled the ruined tire off its rim.

“That work will make your hands very dirty,” Maria Elena said.

“Yeah, I know that.”

“When you are finished,” she said, “come to my house.”

Ananayel

Now! my five triggers are together at last, and now all they have to do is find the path I have cleared for them, and the game is over.

I will miss them, I’m afraid, miss all of it, miss the Earth and the humans and even contesting my will against that fiend. The long doze of my life will be as comfortable in the future as it has always been, I know that, and the joy of doing His service will remain untarnished. But still, when I look back, from eons away, at this augenblick in my existence, this speck of time, this brief instant of vivid color and vivid emotion, I will remember it with fondness.

Susan Carrigan.

Well, yes. I have made a study of this problem, while my players have been ricocheting toward one another, and I have proved to my own satisfaction that Susan Carrigan is nothing special. There are millions of such young women scattered over the globe, unmarried as yet, doing small things with clean neat fingers, whether in banks like Susan, or in clothing mills, or in lawyer’s offices, or in computer assembly plants, and they are all the same.

That’s the point. Such minor differences as occur in the appearance of these young women is as momentous as, to a human, the differences between two collies. Such shadings and gradations of personality as they provide within their basic nature as wholehearted servants are of even less moment. There is nothing to distinguish one from the other.

The human males, of course, devote much of their lives to discovering the minutiae of whatever differences do exist in these young women, and make their lifetime choices on the basis of such highly emotional and transitory distinctions as they profess to find. But I am not a human male, though I have enjoyed playing at the part.

Susan Carrigan was the first of them I met, that’s all. Nothing more.

I may drop in to see her again, once or twice, while the plotters work out the planet’s destruction in the house in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, but that will mostly be because I enjoy being Andy. Oh, well, I’ll miss it all, and her, too. I’ve said as much.

Regardless, it won’t be long now.