Mao II

PART ONE

He walked among the bookstore shelves, hearing Muzak in the air. There were rows of handsome covers, prosperous and assured. He felt a fine excitement, hefting a new book, fitting hand over sleek spine, seeing lines of type jitter past his thumb as he let the pages fall. He was a young man, shrewd in his fervors, who knew there were books he wanted to read and others he absolutely had to own, the ones that gesture in special ways, that have a rareness or daring, a charge of heat that stains the air around them. He made a point of checking authors' photos, browsing at the south wall. He examined books stacked on tables and set in clusters near the cash terminals. He saw stacks on the floor five feet high, arranged in artful fanning patterns. There were books standing on pedestals and bunched in little gothic snuggeries. Bookstores made him slightly sick at times. He looked at the gleaming best-sellers. People drifted through the store, appearing caught in some unhappy dazzlement. There were books on step terraces and Lucite wall-shelves, books in pyramids and theme displays. He went downstairs to the paperbacks, where he stared at the covers of mass-market books, running his fingertips erotically over the raised lettering. Covers were lacquered and gilded. Books lay cradled in nine-unit counterpacks like experimental babies. He could hear them shrieking Buy me. There were posters for book weeks and book fairs. People made their way around shipping cartons, stepping over books scattered on the floor. He went to the section on modern classics and found Bill Gray's two lean novels in their latest trade editions, a matched pair banded in austere umbers and rusts. He liked to check the shelves for Bill.

On his way out of the store he saw a man in a torn jacket come stumbling in, great-maned and filthy, rimed saliva in his beard, old bruises across the forehead gone soft and crumbly. People stood frozen in mid-motion, careful to remain outside the zone of infection. The man looked for someone to address. It was a large bright room full of stilled figures, eyes averted. Traffic pounded in the street. One of the man's trouser legs was mashed into a battered rubber boot; the other dragged on the floor in strips. A security guard approached from the mezzanine and the man lifted thick hands in a gesture of explanation.

"I'm here to sign my books," he said.

Everyone waited as the words traveled across the room, slowly unfolding their meaning.

"Bring me a pen so I can sign my books already."

The guard moved in, not actually looking at the man, who drew back quickly.

"Watch with the hands. There's no right that you should touch my person. Just, that's all, don't put no hands on me."

People saw it was all right to move again. Just another New York moment. The guard followed the man out the revolving door and Scott went out behind them. He was running a little late but wanted to look at the Warhols only a few blocks away. The museum lobby was crowded. He went downstairs, where people moved in nervous searching steps around the paintings. He walked past the electric-chair canvases, the repeated news images of car crashes and movie stars, and he got used to the anxious milling, it seemed entirely right, people eager to be undistracted, ray-gunned by fame and death. Scott had never seen work that was so indifferent to the effect it had on those who came to see it. The walls looked off to heaven in a marvelous flat-eyed gaze. He stood before a silk screen called Crowd. The image was irregular, deep streaks marking the canvas, and it seemed to him that the crowd itself, the vast mesh of people, was being riven by some fleeting media catastrophe. He moved along and stood finally in a room filled with images of Chairman Mao. Photocopy Mao, silk-screen Mao, wallpaper Mao, synthetic-polymer Mao. A series of silk screens was installed over a broader surface of wallpaper serigraphs, the Chairman's face a pansy purple here, floating nearly free of its photographic source. Work that was unwitting of history appealed to Scott. He found it liberating. Had he ever realized the deeper meaning of Mao before he saw these pictures? A subway rumbled past in the stony dark nearby. He stood and looked a while longer, feeling a curious calm even with people moving steadily in and out. The surge of bodies made its own soft roar.

Outside, a woman in a padded jacket followed him down the street. He had the impression she was small, with close-cropped hair, carrying some kind of animal in her coat. He picked up the pace but she kept on him, saying, "You're from out of town so I can talk to you."

He almost turned and looked at her but then thought no.

Saying, "Don't be ascared of me, mister, I only want to talk."

He walked faster, looking straight ahead, and she was still there, at his shoulder, saying, "I picked your face out of the air as this is someone I can trust."

He pointed to a blinking traffic-sign, hoping she'd understand he was pressed for time and this was goodbye and no hard feelings please, but she hurried across the street right behind him and moved alongside as they reached the curbstone. That's when she tried to give him the animal. He didn't turn to see what it was. Something dark and sick was his impression. He was almost running now but she kept up, saying, "Take it, mister, take it." He would listen to her but would not reply and would not let her touch him or give him anything she had touched. He thought of the wrecked man in the bookstore who recoiled when the guard reached for him. Neither side wanted to be touched.

Saying, "Take it outside the city, where it's got a chance to live."

When there is enough out-of-placeness in the world, nothing is out of place. He rode to the eighth-floor lobby of a midtown hotel, an atrium palace in the Broadway ruck, with English ivy hanging off the tiered walkways, with trelliswork and groves of trees, elevators falling softly through the bared interior, a dream that once belonged to freeway cities. He saw her at a table near the bar, an overnight bag and a carrying case on the floor by her chair. She was in her late forties, he figured, with whitish blond hair, thick and rigid, shooting out of a sea-bleached face. Her eyes were light blue, so clear and nearly startling he knew it would take an effort not to stare.

"You have to be Brita Nilsson."

"Why?"

"It's the look. I don't know, professional, accomplished, world traveler, slightly apart. Not to mention the camera case. I'm Scott Martineau."

"My guide to the frontier."

"In fact I got lost several times on my approach to the city and then got rattled by traffic even though it's only weekend traffic and I finally got straightened out and even found a place to park but there were unsettling moments yet to come, psychic intruders, sort of living shadows, and they speak. I haven't been to New York in years and wouldn't mind sitting and chatting a while before we hit the streets. Are you staying here?"

"Don't be crazy. I have a place way downtown but I thought it would be simpler to meet somewhere central. It's very nice to have this opportunity. But you talked about conditions without really specifying. I mean how much time do I get to spend with him? And how long can I expect to be gone because I have a schedule that's really quite firm and I haven't, you know, brought days and days of underwear."

"Wait. Are we moving?"

"It's a revolving bar," she said.

"Jesus. Where am I?"

"Isn't it strange? New York has fallen."

He watched Broadway float into the curved window and felt as if blocks of time and space had come loose and drifted. The misplaced heartland hotel. The signs for Mita, Midori, Kirin, Magno, Suntory-words that were part of some synthetic mass language, the esperanto of jet lag. And the tower under construction across the street, webbed and draped against the weather, figures moving fleetly past gaps in the orange sheeting. He saw them clearly now, three or four kids playing on the girders, making the building seem a ruin, an abandonment.

"I also have to tell you I don't understand the drill. I would prefer to get there on my own."

"Get where? You wouldn't know where you were going."

"You could tell me, couldn't you?" she said.

"Bill insists we do it this way."

"A little melodramatic maybe?"

"Bill insists. Besides, we're very hard to find."

"All right. But for the man's own peace of mind, why not choose a neutral site? That way there's no problem over disclosure. His whereabouts remain secret."

"I don't think you'll have very much to disclose. And Bill knows you won't talk anyway."

"How does he know?"

"We saw the piece about you in Aperture. That's how we decided you were the one. And he couldn't meet you somewhere else because he doesn't go anywhere else, except to hide from the book he's doing."

"I do love his books. They really mattered to me. And he hasn't been photographed in what? We must be speaking in the multi decades. So why don't I just relax?"

"Why don't you just relax?" Scott said.

Above the bar area there was a clock rotating in an openwork tower. From the table he could see through the bare trellis and clock framework to the elevators. He thought he could easily sit all afternoon watching the elevators rise and drop, clear pods ringed with pinpoint lighting. They moved soundlessly, clinging to the surface of a vast central cylinder. Everything was moving, everything was slowly turning, there was music coming from somewhere. He watched the people inside the elevators, deftly falling. High up, on the walkways, an occasional figure looking down, head and upper body. He wondered if the thing the woman tried to give him in the street might be a newborn child. The same musical phrase over and over, coming from somewhere.

"You photograph only writers now."

"Only writers. I frankly have a disease called writers. It took me a long time to find out what I wanted to photograph. I came to this country it's fifteen years. To this city actually. And I roamed the streets first day, taking pictures of city faces, eyes of city people, slashed men, prostitutes, emergency rooms, forget it. I did this for years. Many times I used a wide-angle lens and pressed the shutter release with the camera hanging at my chest from a neck strap so I wouldn't attract the wrong kind of attention, thank you very much. I followed derelicts practically to their graves. And I used to go to night court just to look at faces. I mean New York, please, this is my official state religion. But after years of this I began to think it was somehow, strangely-not valid. No matter what I shot, how much horror, reality, misery, ruined bodies, bloody faces, it was all so fucking pretty in the end. Do you know? And so I had to work out for myself certain complicated things that are probably very simple. You reach a certain age, isn't that the way it works? Then you know what you want to do at last."

She was eating roasted nuts from her loosely clenched fist, popping one at a time and drinking peppered vodka.

"But isn't it restful here?" he said. "I'm mesmerized by the elevators. It might be a new addiction."

"Give me a break," she said, and her slight accent and the worn-out catch phrase and the formal way she offered it, without crunching the first two words together, made him very happy.

"Only writers."

"Only writers," she said.

"And you're making a record, a kind of census in still pictures."

"I will just keep on photographing writers, every one I can reach, novelists, poets, playwrights. I am on the prowl, so to speak. I never stop traveling and taking pictures. This is what I do now. Writers."

"Every face."

"Every man and woman who is out there and who is reachable. If someone's not well known, so much the better. Given a choice, I prefer to search out writers who remain obscure. I get tips all the time, I get names and books from editors and other writers who understand what I'm doing or at least they say they do to make me feel better. A planetary record. For me, it's a form of knowledge and memory. I'm furnishing my own kind of witness. I try to do it systematically, country by country, but there are always problems. Finding some writers is a problem. And there are many writers in prison. This is always a problem. In some cases I've received permission to photograph writers under house arrest. People are starting to know me and this helps sometimes."

"With authorities."

"Yes, and writers. They're willing to see me because they know I'm simply doing a record. A species count, one writer said. I eliminate technique and personal style to the degree that this is possible. Secretly I know I'm doing certain things to get certain effects. But we ignore this, you and I. I'm four years on this project, which by its nature of course there is no end."

"The question is, what happens to Bill's pictures?"

"This is completely up to you. I make some pictures available to publishers or the media but only if the writer gives consent. This is how I support the project, along with several grants. I have a travel grant I absolutely depend on. Magazines would do anything to run a photo essay on Bill Gray. But I don't want to do pictures that make a revelation, that say here he is after all these years. A simple study piece is better. I want to do pictures that are unobtrusive, shy actually. Like a work-in-progress. Not so permanent and finished. Then you look at the contacts and decide what you want me to do with them."

"These are the answers we were hoping to get."

"Good. So life goes on."

"And what happens ultimately to your pictures of writers as a collection?"

"Ultimately I don't know. People say some kind of gallery installation. Conceptual art. Thousands of passport-size photos. But I don't see the point myself. I think this is a basic reference work. It's just for storing. Put the pictures in the basement of some library. If people want to look, they come and ask. I mean what's the importance of a photograph if you know the writer's work? I don't know. But people still want the image, don't they? The writer's face is the surface of the work. It's a clue to the mystery inside. Or is the mystery in the face? Sometimes I think about faces. We all try to read faces. Some faces are better than some books. Or put the pictures in a space capsule, that would be fantastic. Send them into space. Greetings. We are writers of Earth."

The elevators climb and fall, the clock rotates, the bar slowly turns, the signs appear once more, the traffic lights change, the yellow taxis come and go. Magno, Minolta, Kirin, Sony, Sun-tory. What does Bill say? The city is a device for measuring time.

"There are kids up there. See them? Around the twentieth floor. Can you believe it?"

"It's safer than the streets. Leave them alone," she said.

"The streets. I guess I'm ready now."

"Then we'll go."

They found the car and Scott drove north along the Hudson and across the bridge at Beacon into dusk and secondary roads, connecting briefly with the thruway and then dropping into networks of two-lane blacktops, hours into night, the landscape reduced to what appears in headlights, to curves and grades and the signs for these, and there were dirt roads and gravel roads and old logging trails, there were steep hills and the sleet-spray of pebbles firing up at the car, there were pine stands lit by the moon. Two near strangers in night confinement inside the laboring drone of the small car, coming out of long silences to speak abruptly, out of long thoughts and memory chains and waking dreams and every kind of mindlife, the narrative that races just behind the eyes, their words sounding clean and shaped in the empty night.

"I feel as if I'm being taken to see some terrorist chief at his secret retreat in the mountains."

"Tell Bill. He'll love that," Scott said.

The room was dark and the man stood at the window waiting for headlights to appear at the top of the hill and weave across the field, across the tree stumps and bent stalks and rock debris. It was not eager or needful waiting but only a sense that the thing was about to happen and if he stood here a moment longer he would see the car turn into the rutted lane, a wobbly shadow set behind the lights, and come down the hill toward the house, taking on dimension. He resolved to count to ten and if the lights did not appear he would go to the desk and turn on the lamp and do some work, going over what he'd written during the day, the scant drip, the ooze of speckled matter, the blood sneeze, the daily pale secretion, the bits of human tissue sticking to the page. He counted to ten and when no lights showed he began to count to ten once more, slower now, standing in the dark, making an agreement with himself that this time he would really go to the desk and turn on the lamp if the car did not appear at the top of the hill by the time he reached ten, the mud-spattered compact, and settle down to work because it was only children who thought they could make things happen by counting, and he went to ten one more time and then one more time and then just stood watching until the headlights finally showed, splashy white, the car dipping off the rim of the hill and the lights sweeping briefly across the scrub, and strange children at that, the squinters and crappers, the ones who ball up their fists when they cry.

The car moved into the glow of the porch light. Mud stains on its lower flanks, layers of dust settled at the edges of the windshield outside the overlapping arcs of the wipers. When they got out and walked to the porch steps he went to the door of his workroom and listened to them stamp their feet on the mat and come in downstairs, mingled voices, the ruffle of people entering a house, shaking off coats, making all the incidental noises of transition, the sigh of the full body, homeyness and deep relief, the way it seemed a danger and a lie.

He closed the door and stood in the dark room, moving his hand across the desktop to find his cigarettes.

Glad to be indoors after a long journey on a chill night, nowhere. Goulash soup and black bread. Glad to be reminded that kitchens are places for long talks, the late hour, the wood stove and musty wine. Brita had shared a thousand odd dialogues with strangers on planes, intense and shallow, whispery with Existenz. Totally fake really. She could not talk seriously in cars. The car was serial travel, a sprocketed motion that shot her attention span to pieces. Even when the car generated a dull flat landscape she found it hard to unravel herself from the stutter reality of the broken white line and the picture in the window and the Kleenex in the box and break into real talk. She talked in kitchens. She was always following people into kitchens when they cooked meals or got ice for drinks and she talked into their faces or their backs, it didn't matter, making them forget what they were doing. Scott sat across the table, lean and bushy-haired, something of a monochrome, with a beach glow in his pale brows. She thought he was happy to have company, a full-tilt voice from the breathless cities, pieces of experience, and he leaned toward her as if she were whispering, telling him rare and private things. But all she did was push out words, eat and talk, working the human burble. And he gazed, he stared at her, examined with uncalculating interest. If women her age were creatures who went mainly unseen and if she was a slightly weathered Scandian in jeans and sweatshirt who crushes cigarettes in dinner plates, then maybe he wondered what arresting things they might possibly have in common. He was in his absurdly early thirties, faintly unsure.

"I'll tell you the truth. I have no idea where we are. Not a bloody clue. And I suppose when I leave we do it by night so I don't see landmarks."

"There are no landmarks," he said. "But we do it after dark, yes."

"Now that I'm here it's hard to talk for very long about anything but him. I feel there's something at my shoulder and I can't help thinking I should refer to it now and then. Many people have tried to find him, I'm sure."

"Nobody's gotten this far. There have been media forays that we've heard about, intrepid teams with telephoto lenses. And his publisher forwards mail from people who are setting out to find him, who send word of their progress, who think they know where he is, who've heard rumors, who simply want to meet him and tell him what his books have meant to them and ask the usual questions, fairly ordinary people actually who just want to look at his face."

"Where is he?" she said.

"Upstairs hiding. But don't worry. Tomorrow you get your pictures."

"It's an important shoot for me."

"Maybe it will ease the pressure on Bill. Getting some pictures out. He's felt lately that they're moving in, getting closer all the time."

"All those fairly ordinary people."

"Someone sent him a severed finger in the mail. But that was in the sixties."

Scott showed her a room off the kitchen where some of Bill's papers were kept. Seven metal cabinets stood against the walls. He opened a number of drawers and itemized the contents, which included publishing correspondence, contracts and royalty statements, notebooks, old mail from readers-hundreds of sepiaedged envelopes bound in twine. He narrated matter-of-factly. There were old handwritten manuscripts, printer's typescripts, master galleys. There were reviews of Bill's novels, interviews with former colleagues and acquaintances. There were stacks of magazines and journals containing articles about Bill's work and about his disappearance, his concealment, his retirement, his alleged change of identity, his rumored suicide, his return to work, his work-in-progress, his death, his rumored return. Scott read excerpts from some of these pieces. Then they carried their wineglasses out along the hall where there were shelves filled with booklength studies of Bill's work and of work about his work. Scott pointed out special issues of a number of quarterlies, devoted solely to Bill. They went into another small room and here were Bill's two books in every domestic and foreign edition, hardcover and soft, and Brita went along the shelves studying cover designs, looking at texts in obscure languages, moving softly, not inclined to speak. They went to the basement, where Bill's work-in-progress was stored in hard black binders, each marked with a code number and a date for fairly easy retrieval and all set on freestanding shelves against the concrete walls, maybe two hundred thick binders representing drafts, corrected drafts, notes, fragments, recorrections, throwaways, updates, tentative revisions, final revisions. The slit windows high on the walls were shaded with dark material and there were two large dehumidifiers, one at each end of the room. She waited for Scott to call this room the bunker. He never did. And no hint of ironic inflection anywhere in his comments. But she sensed his pride of stewardship easily enough, the satisfaction he took in being part of this epic preservation, the neatly amassed evidence of driven art. This was the holy place, the inner book, long rows of typewriter bond buried in a cellar in the bleak hills.

There was a back stairway from the kitchen to the second-storey hall and they took Brita's jacket and bag and equipment case and went up that way. She glimpsed pantry shelves set into the wall and more of Bill's reader mail, thick boxed files labeled by month and year. She followed Scott through the door and across the hall. This was Brita's room.

In the bedroom downstairs Karen sat up watching TV. Scott came in and began undressing.

"Long day," she said.

"Let me tell you."

"All that driving, you must be really."

He put on pajamas and got into bed and she reached over and turned off the lamp. Then she picked up the remote control and lowered the volume on the TV, touch touch touch, until it was totally off. Scott's head was flat in the pillow and he was already halfway gone. She was watching the world news of the day. On any given day it was mainly the film footage she wanted to see and she didn't mind watching without sound. It was interesting how you could make up the news as you went along by sticking to picture only.

She sees men and boys at first, a swarming maleness, a thickness of pressed-together bodies. Then a crowd, thousands, filling the screen. It looks like slow motion but she knows it isn't. It is real time with bodies pressed and heaving, like bodies rolling in a sea swell, several arms raised above the crowd. They show bodies at odd angles. They show men standing off to the side somewhere, watching sort of half interested. She sees a great straining knot of people pressed to a fence, forced massively forward. They show the metal fence and bodies crushed against it, arms upflung. They show the terrible slow straining and heaving. What is it called, writhing? The camera is just outside the fence shooting straight in through the heavy-gauge steel wire. She sees men far back actually climbing on top of the mass of bodies, two men crawling on all the heads and shoulders. She sees the crowd pushed toward the fence and people at the fence pressed together and terribly twisted. It is an agony of raised and twisted arms and suffering faces. They show men calmly watching. They show men in shorts and jerseys, soccer players wearing those high stockings they wear, standing in the grass. There are bodies packed solid, filling the screen, and people barely moving at the fence, pressed and forced into one twisted position. She sees a boy in a white cap with a red peak and he has an expression on his face of what a nice day or here I am on my way home from school and they are dying all around him, they are writhing and twisted with open mouths and bloated tongues showing. Soccer is called football abroad. She sees the fence up close and they stop the film and it is like a religious painting, the scene could be a fresco in a tourist church, it is composed and balanced and filled with people suffering. She sees the faces of a woman and a girl and the large hand of a man behind them, the woman's wet tresses, her arm twisted against the steel strands of the fence, the girl crushed and buckled under someone's elbow, the boy in the white cap with red peak standing in the midst, in the crush, only now he senses, his eyes are shut, he senses he is trapped, his face is reading desperation. She sees people caught in strangleholds of no intent, arms upflung, faces popping out at her, hands trying to reach the fence but only floating in the air, a man's large hand, a long-haired boy in a denim shirt with his back to the fence, the face of the woman with the tresses hidden behind her own twisted arm, nails painted glossy pink, a girl or woman with eyes closed and tongue showing, dying or dead. In people's faces she sees the hopelessness of knowing. They show men calmly looking on. They show the fence from a distance, bodies piling up behind it, smothered, sometimes only fingers moving, and it is like a fresco in an old dark church, a crowded twisted vision of a rush to death as only a master of the age could paint it.

Brita unpacked the quartz light and screwed it into the top of the portable stand. She was nervous and kept a soft patter going. Bill stood against the wall waiting. He wore work pants and an old sweater, a thick-bodied man with a battered face and smoky hair combed straight back in wide tracks, going faintly yellow at the fringes. She felt the uneasy force, the strangeness of seeing a man who had lived in her mind for years as words alone-the force of a body in a room. She almost could not look at him. She looked indirectly, trying to conceal her glances in flurries of preparation. She thought he might have settled into an oldness, into ways of gesture and appearance that were deeper than his countable years. He watched her handle the equipment, looking past her into another moment somewhere. Already she sensed he was disappearing from the room.

"I'm going to bounce light off this wall and then you can go stand over there and I'll get my camera and stand over here and that's all there is to it."

"Sounds ominous."

There was a typewriter on a desk and sheets of oversized sketch paper taped to the walls and the lower half of one of the windows. These were charts, master plans evidently, the maps of his work-in-progress, and the sheets were covered with scrawled words, boxes, lines connecting words, tiny writing in the boxes. There were circled numbers, crossed-out names, a cluster of stick-figure drawings, a dozen other cryptic markings. She saw notebooks stacked on the radiator cover. There were drifts of paper on the desk, a mound of crumpled butts in the ashtray.

"There's something about writers. I don't know why but I feel I ought to know the person as well as the work and so ordinarily I try to schedule a walk beforehand, just to chat with the person, talk about books, family, anything at all. But I understand you'd rather not go on and on with this, so we'll work quickly."

"We can talk."

"Are you interested in cameras? This is an eighty-five-millimeter lens."

"I used to take pictures. I don't know why I stopped. One day it just ended forever."

"I guess it's true to say that something else is ending forever."

"You mean the writer comes out of hiding."

"Am I right that it's thirty years since your picture has appeared anywhere?"

"Scott would know."

"And together you decided the time has come."

"Well it's a weariness really, to know that people make so much of this. When a writer doesn't show his face, he becomes a local symptom of God's famous reluctance to appear."

"But this is intriguing to many people."

"It's also taken as an awful sort of arrogance."

"But we're all drawn to the idea of remoteness. A hard-to-reach place is necessarily beautiful, I think. Beautiful and a little sacred maybe. And a person who becomes inaccessible has a grace and a wholeness the rest of us envy."

"The image world is corrupt, here is a man who hides his face."

"Yes," she said.

"People may be intrigued by this figure but they also resent him and mock him and want to dirty him up and watch his face distort in shock and fear when the concealed photographer leaps out of the trees. In a mosque, no images. In our world we sleep and eat the image and pray to it and wear it too. The writer who won't show his face is encroaching on holy turf. He's playing God's own trick."

"Maybe he's just shy, Bill."

Through the viewfinder she watched him smile. He looked clearer in the camera. He had an intentness of gaze, an economy, and his face was handsomely lined and worked, embroidered across the forehead and at the corners of the eyes. So often in her work the human shambles was remade by the energy of her seeing, by the pure will that the camera uncovered in her, the will to see deeply.

"Shall I tell you something?"

"Go ahead."

"I'm afraid to talk to writers about their work. It's so easy to say something stupid. Don't drop your chin. Good, that's better, I like that. There's a secret language I haven't learned to speak. I spend a great deal of time with writers. I love writers. But this gift you have, which for me is total delight, makes me feel that I'm an outsider, not able to converse in the private language, the language that will mean something to you."

"The only private language I know is self-exaggeration. I think I've grown a second self in this room. It's the self-important fool that keeps the writer going. I exaggerate the pain of writing, the pain of solitude, the failure, the rage, the confusion, the helplessness, the fear, the humiliation. The narrower the boundaries of my life, the more I exaggerate myself. If the pain is real, why do I inflate it? Maybe this is the only pleasure I'm allowed."

"Raise your chin."

"Raise my chin."

"Frankly I didn't expect such speeches."

"I've been saving it up."

"I expected you to stand here a few minutes and then get restless and walk off."

"One of my failings is that I say things to strangers, women passing by, that I've never said to a wife or child, a close friend."

"You talk candidly to Scott."

"I talk to Scott. But it becomes less necessary all the time. He already knows. He's at my brainstem like a surgeon with a bright knife."

She finished the roll and went to her case for another. Bill stood by the desk shaking a cigarette out of the pack. There was mud crust and bent weed stuck to his shoes. He didn't seem to be putting across his own picture, his idea of what he wanted to look like or who he wanted to be for the next hour or two. It was clear he hadn't bothered to think it out. She liked the feel of the room with him in it. It was his room in a way in which this wasn't his house. She asked him to stand near one of the wall charts and when he didn't object she moved the lamp and adjusted focus and started shooting. He smoked and talked. He thought he was suffering like the rest of them. They all thought they were bungling and desolate and tormented but none of them ever wanted to do anything else but write and each believed that the only person who might possibly be worse off was another writer somewhere and when one of them mixed too many brandies and little violet pills or placed the nozzle of a revolver just behind the ear, the others felt both sorry and acknowledged.

"I'll tell you what I don't exaggerate. The doubt. Every minute of every day. It's what I smell in my bed. Loss of faith. That's what this is all about."

Space was closing in the way it did when a session went well. Time and light were narrowed to automatic choices. Bill stood before the odd notations on his chart and she knew she had everything she might want or need. Here was the old, marked and melancholy head, the lost man of letters, and there was the early alphabet on the wall, the plan of his missing book in the form of lopsided boxes and felt-tipped scrawls and sets of directional signs like arrows scratched out by a child with a pencil in his fist. And he was animated, leaning and jabbing as he talked. His hands were blunt and nicked. There was a doggedness to him, a sense of all the limits he'd needed to exceed, getting on top of work that always came hard. She was trying to place him in context, fit the voice and body to the books. The first thing she'd thought, entering the room, was wait a minute, no, this can't be him. She'd expected someone lean and drawn, with eyes like hex signs on an Amish barn. But Bill was slowly beginning to make sense to her, to look reasonably like his work.

"I'm forced to steal one of your cigarettes," she said. "I've been giving up cigarettes for twenty-five years and I've made a lot of progress in that time. Okay? But then I see the little glisten of the package."

"Tell me about New York," he said. "I don't get there anymore. When I think of cities where I lived, I see great cubist paintings."

"I'll tell you what I see."

"That edginess and density and those old brownish tones and how cities age and stain in the mind like Roman walls."

"Where I live, okay, there's a rooftop chaos, a jumble, four, five, six, seven storeys, and it's water tanks, laundry lines, antennas, belfries, pigeon lofts, chimney pots, everything human about the lower island-little crouched gardens, statuary, painted signs. And I wake up to this and love it and depend on it. But it's all being flattened and hauled away so they can build their towers."

"Eventually the towers will seem human and local and quirky. Give them time."

"I'll go and hit my head against the wall. You tell me when to stop."

"You'll wonder what made you mad."

"I already have the World Trade Center."

"And it's already harmless and ageless. Forgotten-looking. And think how much worse."

"What?" she said.

"If there was only one tower instead of two."

"You mean they interact. There is a play of light."

"Wouldn't a single tower be much worse?"

"No, because my big complaint is only partly size. The size is deadly. But having two of them is like a comment, it's like a dialogue, only I don't know what they're saying."

"They're saying, 'Have a nice day.'

"Someday, go walk those streets," she said. "Sick and dying people with nowhere to live and there are bigger and bigger towers all the time, fantastic buildings with miles of rentable space. All the space is inside. Am I exaggerating?"

"I'm the one who exaggerates."

"This is strange but I feel I know you."

"It is strange, isn't it? We're managing to have a real talk while you bob and weave with a camera and I stand here looking stiff and cloddish."

"I don't usually talk, you see. I ask a question and let the writer talk, let the tension drain out a little."

"Let the fool babble on."

"All right if you put it that way. And I listen only vaguely as a rule because I'm working. I'm detached, I'm working, I'm listening at the edges."

"And you travel all the time. You seek us out."

"You're dropping your chin," she said.

"You cross continents and oceans to take pictures of ordinary faces, to make a record of a thousand faces, ten thousand faces."

"It's crazy. I'm devoting my life to a gesture. Yes, I travel. Which means there is no moment on certain days when I'm not thinking terror. They have us in their power. In boarding areas I never sit near windows in case of flying glass. I carry a Swedish passport so that's okay unless you believe that terrorists killed the prime minister. Then maybe it's not so good. And I use codes in my address book for names and addresses of writers because how can you tell if the name of a certain writer is dangerous to carry, some dissident, some Jew or blasphemer. I'm careful about reading matter. Nothing religious comes with me, no books with religious symbols on the jacket and no pictures of guns or sexy women. That's on the one hand. On the other hand I know in my heart I'm going to die of some dreadful slow disease so you're safe with me on a plane."

She inserted another roll. She was sure she already had what she'd come for but a hundred times in her life she thought she had the cluster of shots she wanted and then found better work deep in the contact sheets. She liked working past the feeling of this is it. Important to keep going, obliterate the sure thing and come upon a moment of stealthy blessing.

"Do you ask your writers how it feels to be painted dummies?"

"What do you mean?"

"You've got me talking, Brita."

"Anything that's animated I love it."

"You don't care what I say."

"Speak Swahili."

"There's a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists. In the West we become famous effigies as our books lose the power to shape and influence. Do you ask your writers how they feel about this? Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated."

"Keep going. I like your anger."

"But you know all this. This is why you travel a million miles photographing writers. Because we're giving way to terror, to news of terror, to tape recorders and cameras, to radios, to bombs stashed in radios. News of disaster is the only narrative people need. The darker the news, the grander the narrative. News is the last addiction before-what? I don't know. But you're smart to trap us in your camera before we disappear."

"I'm the one they're trying to kill. You're sitting in a room making theories."

"Put us in a museum and charge admission."

"Writers will always write. Are you crazy? Writers have long-range influence. You can't talk about these gunmen in the same breath. I have to steal another cigarette. You're no good for me, this is obvious. You have a look on your face, I don't know, like a bad actor doing weariness of the spirit."

"I am a bad actor."

"Not for me or my camera. I see the person, not some idea he wants to make himself into."

"I'm all idea today."

"I definitely don't see it."

"I'm playing the idea of death. Look closely," he said.

She didn't know whether she was supposed to find this funny.

He said, "Something about the occasion makes me think I'm at my own wake. Sitting for a picture is morbid business. A portrait doesn't begin to mean anything until the subject is dead. This is the whole point. We're doing this to create a kind of sentimental past for people in the decades to come. It's their past, their history we're inventing here. And it's not how I look now that matters. It's how I'll look in twenty-five years as clothing and faces change, as photographs change. The deeper I pass into death, the more powerful my picture becomes. Isn't this why picture-taking is so ceremonial? It's like a wake. And I'm the actor made up for the laying-out."

"Close your mouth."

"Remember they used to say, This is the first day of the rest of your life. It struck me just last night these pictures are the announcement of my dying."

"Close your mouth. Good, good, good, good."

She finished the roll, reloaded, reached for her cigarette, took a drag, put it down, then moved toward him and touched a hand to his face, tilting it slightly left.

"Stay now. Don't move. I like that."

"See, anything you want. I do it at once."

"Touching Bill Gray."

"Do you realize what an intimate thing we're doing?"

"It's in my memoirs, guaranteed. And you're not cloddish by the way."

"We're alone in a room involved in this mysterious exchange. What am I giving up to you? And what are you investing me with, or stealing from me? How are you changing me? I can feel the change like some current just under the skin. Are you making me up as you go along? Am I mimicking myself? And when did women start photographing men in the first place?"

"I'll look it up when I get home."

"We're getting on extremely well."

"Now that we've changed the subject."

"I'm losing a morning's work without remorse."

"That's not the only thing you're losing. Don't forget, from the moment your picture appears you'll be expected to look just like it. And if you meet people somewhere, they will absolutely question your right to look different from your picture."

"I've become someone's material. Yours, Brita. There's the life and there's the consumer event. Everything around us tends to channel our lives toward some final reality in print or on film. Two lovers quarrel in the back of a taxi and a question becomes implicit in the event. Who will write the book and who will play the lovers in the movie? Everything seeks its own heightened version. Or put it this way. Nothing happens until it's consumed. Or put it this way. Nature has given way to aura. A man cuts himself shaving and someone is signed up to write the biography of the cut. All the material in every life is channeled into the glow. Here I am in your lens. Already I see myself differently. Twice over or once removed."

"And you may think of yourself differently as well. It's interesting how deep a picture takes you. You may see something you thought you'd kept hidden. Or some aspect of your mother or father or children. There it is. You pick up a snapshot and there's your face in half shadow but it's really your father looking back at you."

"You're preparing the body all right."

"Chemicals and paper, that's all it is."

"Rouging my cheeks. Waxing my hands and lips. But when I'm really dead, they'll think of me as living in your picture."

"I was in Chile last year and I met an editor who'd been sent to prison after his magazine did caricatures of General Pinochet. The charge was assassinating the image of the general."

"Sounds perfectly reasonable."

"Are you losing interest? Because I sometimes don't realize the way a session becomes mine. I get very possessive at a certain point. I'm easy and agreeable on the edges of the operation. But at the heart, in the frame, it's mine."

"I think I need these pictures more than you do. To break down the monolith I've built. I'm afraid to go anywhere, even the seedy diner in the nearest little crossroads town. I'm convinced the serious trackers are moving in with their mobile phones and zoom lenses. Once you choose this life, you understand what it's like to exist in a state of constant religious observance. There are no halfway measures. All the movements we make are ritual movements. Everything we do that isn't directly centered on work revolves around concealment, seclusion, ways of evasion. Scott works out the routes of simple trips I occasionally make, like doctor's visits. There are procedures for people coming to the house. Repairmen, deliverymen. It's an irrational way of life that has a powerful inner logic. The way religion takes over a life. The way disease takes over a life. There's a force that's totally independent of my conscious choices. And it's an angry grudging force. Maybe I don't want to feel the things other people feel. I have my own cosmology of pain.

Leave me alone with it. Don't stare at me, don't ask me to sign copies of my books, don't point me out on the street, don't creep up on me with a tape recorder clipped to your belt. Most of all don't take my picture. I've paid a terrible price for this wretched hiding. And I'm sick of it finally."

He spoke quietly, looking away from her. He gave the impression he was learning these things for the first time, hearing them at last. How strange they sounded. He couldn't understand how any of it had happened, how a young man, inexperienced, wary of the machinery of gloss and distortion, protective of his work and very shy and slightly self-romanticizing, could find himself all these years later trapped in his own massive stillness.

"Are you fading at all?"

"No."

"I forget how weary all this concentrated effort can make a person. I have no conscience when it comes to work. I expect the subject to be as single-minded as I am."

"This isn't work for me."

"We make pictures together after all."

"Work is what I do to feel bad."

"Why should anyone feel good?"

"Exactly. When I was a kid I used to announce ballgames to myself. I sat in a room and made up the games and described the play-by-play out loud. I was the players, the announcer, the crowd, the listening audience and the radio. There hasn't been a moment since those days when I've felt nearly so good."

He had a smoker's laugh, cracked and graveled.

"I remember the names of all those players, the positions they played, their spots in the batting order. I do batting orders in my head all the time. And I've been trying to write toward that kind of innocence ever since. The pure game of making up. You sit there suspended in a perfect clarity of invention. There's no separation between you and the players and the room and the field. Everything is seamless and transparent. And it's completely spontaneous. It's the lost game of self, without doubt or fear."

"I don't know, Bill."

"I don't know, either."

"It sounds like mental illness to me."

He laughed again. She took pictures of him laughing until the roll was finished. Then she loaded the camera and moved him away from the quartz lamp and started shooting again, using window light now.

"Incidentally. I bring a message from Charles Everson."

Bill hitched up his pants. He seemed to look past her, frisking himself for signs of cigarettes.

"I ran into him at a publishing dinner somewhere. He asked how my work was going. I told him I'd probably be seeing you."

"No reason you shouldn't mention it."

"I hope it's all right."

"The pictures will be out one day."

"Actually the only message I bring is that Charles wants to talk to you. He wouldn't tell me what it's all about. I told him to write you a letter. He said you don't read your mail."

"Scott reads my mail."

"He said that what he had to tell you couldn't be seen or heard by anyone else. Far too delicate. He also said he used to be your editor and good, good friend. And he said it was distressing not to be able to get in touch with you directly."

Bill looked for matches now, clearing papers off the desktop.

"How's old Charlie then?"

"The same. Soft, pink and happy."

"Always new writers, you see. They sit in their corner offices and never have to worry about surviving the failed books because there's always a new one coming along, a hot new excitement.

They live, we die. A perfectly balanced state."

"He told me you'd say something like that."

"And you waited to tell me about him. Didn't want to spring it on me prematurely."

"I wanted my pictures first. I didn't know how you'd react to news from out there."

He struck the match and then forgot it.

"Do you know what they like to do best? Run those black-border ads for dead writers. It makes them feel they're part of an august tradition."

"He simply wants you to call him. He says it's a matter of some importance."

He swiveled his head until the cigarette at the corner of his mouth came into contact with the flame.

"The more books they publish, the weaker we become. The secret force that drives the industry is the compulsion to make writers harmless."

"You like being a little bit fanatical. I know the feeling, believe me. But what is more harmless than the pure game of making up? You want to do baseball in your room. Maybe it's just a metaphor, an innocence, but isn't this what makes your books popular? You call it a lost game that you've been trying to recover as a writer. Maybe it's not so lost. What you say you're writing toward, isn't this what people see in your work?"

"I only know what I see. Or what I don't see."

"Tell me what that means."

He dropped the match in an ashtray on the desk.

"Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there. On one level this truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language. I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence. The language of my books has shaped me as a man. There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live. The deeper I become entangled in the process of getting a sentence right in its syllables and rhythms, the more I learn about myself. I've worked the sentences of this book long and hard but not long and hard enough because I no longer see myself in the language. The running picture is gone, the code of being that pushed me on and made me trust the world. This book and these years have worn me down. I've forgotten what it means to write. Forgotten my own first rule. Keep it simple, Bill. I've lacked courage and perseverance. Exhausted. Sick of struggling. I've let good enough be good enough. This is someone else's book. It feels all forced and wrong. I've tricked myself into going on, into believing. Can you understand how that can happen? I'm sitting on a book that's dead."

"Does Scott know you feel this way?"

"Scott. Scott's way ahead of me. Scott doesn't want me to publish."

"But this is completely crazy."

"No, it's not. There's something to be said."

"When will you finish?"

"Finish. I'm finished. The book's been done for two years. But I rewrite pages and then revise in detail. I write to survive now, to keep my heart beating."

"Show someone else."

"Scott is smart and totally honest."

"He's only one opinion."

"Any judgment based strictly on merit is going to sound like his. And how it hurts when you know the verdict is true. And how you try to evade it, twist it, disfigure it. And word could get out. And once that happens."

"You finish, you publish and you take what comes."

"I will publish."

"It's simple, Bill."

"It's just a question of making up my mind and going ahead and doing it."

"And you'll stop redoing pages. The book is finished. I don't want to make a fetish of things are simple. But it's done, so you stop."

She watched him surrender his crisp gaze to a softening, a bright-eyed fear that seemed to tunnel out of childhood. It had the starkness of a last prayer. She worked to get at it. His face was drained and slack, coming into flatness, into black and white, cracked lips and flaring brows, age lines that hinge the chin, old bafflements and regrets. She moved in closer and refocused, she shot and shot, and he stood there looking into the lens, soft eyes shining.

Scott told her a story at lunch about his days of wandering, ten years ago, sick and broke in Athens and trying to cadge yankee dollars from tourists so he could get on one of those amphetamine buses that take you to the Himalayas in about a hundred hours of nonstop terror, through wars and mountain passes, but he was getting nowhere. He walked into the main square and saw some people gathered on the steps of a nice-looking old hotel with a European name he couldn't recall. "Grande Bretagne."

Right. There was a film crew and some men who looked like government officials and fifty or sixty people just passing by and Scott went over there and saw a man on the top step who wore a khaki field jacket and checkered headscarf, a short guy with a scratchy beard, and it was Yasir Arafat and he was waving at the people on the sidewalk. When a hotel guest came out the door, Arafat smiled and nodded and people in the crowd smiled in response. Then Arafat said something to an official and the man laughed and everyone on the sidewalk smiled some more. Scott realized he was smiling broadly. He could feel the smile stretching across his face and he looked at the people around him and they looked back smiling and it was clearly agreed they all felt good together. And Arafat smiled again, talking to officials, overges-turing for the camera, pointing toward the entrance and then moving that way. Everyone applauded now. Someone shook Arafat's hand and there was more applause. He lets a stranger shake his hand. Scott smiled and applauded, he saw the men on the steps applaud. When Arafat went inside, the people on the sidewalk smiled and clapped one last time. They wanted to make him happy.

"Did you get to the Himalayas?"

"I got to Minneapolis. I went back to school for a year but then I dropped out again and fell into another spiral of drugs and nonbeing. There was nothing very special about it, even to me. I was a salesperson for a while in a heavily carpeted shoestore. Somebody gave me Bill's first novel to read and I said, Whoa what's this? That book was about me somehow. I had to read slowly to keep from jumping out of my skin. I saw myself. It was my book. Something about the way I think and feel. He caught the back-and-forthness. The way things fit almost anywhere and nothing gets completely forgotten."

"Yes. Sentences with built-in memories."

"When I read Bill I think of photographs of tract houses at the edge of the desert. There's an incidental menace. That great Winogrand photo of a small child at the head of a driveway and the fallen tricycle and the storm shadow on the bare hills."

"It's a beautiful picture."

"Finish eating. I'll show you the attic."

"Why don't you want him to publish?"

"It's his call. He does what he wants. But he'll tell you himself the book falls short. Woefully short. Bill has been working on and off for twenty-three years on this book. He quits it, then returns. He rewrites it, then puts it aside. He starts something new, then comes back to it. He takes a trip, he returns, he resumes work, goes away, comes back, works every single day for three years, he puts it aside, picks it up, smells it, weighs it, rewrites it, puts it aside, starts something new, goes away, comes back."

"Sounds like total."

"It is. The work has burnt him out. He's burnt out. Bill has always had to struggle for every word. Bill walks five feet from his desk and doubt hits him like a hammer in the back. He has to go back to his desk and find a passage he knows will reassure him. He reads it and he's reassured. An hour later, sitting in the car, he feels it again, the page is wrong, the chapter is wrong, and he can't shake the doubt until he gets back to his desk and finds a passage he knows will reassure him. He reads it and he's reassured. He's been doing this all his life and now he's run out of reassuring passages."

"How long have you been with him?"

"Eight years. The last few have been tough on him. He's gone back to drinking although not so heavily as before. He takes medications for ailments unknown to science. He rarely sleeps past five a. m. Wakes and stares. When the sun comes up, he shuffles to his desk."

"To me, publication is exactly what he needs. You have to show people what you've done. How else do you resolve anything?"

"Bill is at the height of his fame. Ask me why. Because he hasn't published in years and years and years. When his books first came out, and people forget this or never knew it, they made a slight sort of curio impression. I've seen the reviews. Bric-a-brac, like what's this little oddity. It's the years since that made him big. Bill gained celebrity by doing nothing. The world caught up. Reprint after reprint. We make a nice steady income, most of which goes to his two ex-wives and three ex-children. We could make a king's whatever, multimillions, with the new book. But it would be the end of Bill as a myth, a force. Bill gets bigger as his distance from the scene deepens."

"Then why do you want these photographs?"

"I don't want. He wants."

"I see."

"I've said again and again. Craziness. I've harangued the poor man. Don't do it. Madness. Self-destructive."

"I didn't realize from your manner."

"Because I do my job. He makes the decisions, I follow through. If he decides to publish, I'll work with him day and night on the galleys, the page proofs, everything. He knows that. But for Bill, the only thing worse than writing is publishing. When the book comes out. When people buy it and read it. He feels totally and horribly exposed. They are taking the book home and turning the pages. They are reading the actual words."

In the attic there were file cabinets containing research material. Scott recited subject headings and showed her dozens of color-coded folders. His desk and typewriter were here. There were cardboard boxes filled with loose manuscript pages. There was a large photocopy machine and shelves lined with reference books, style manuals and stacks of periodicals. He handed Brita a pale-gray manuscript box, unmarked, and gestured to six identical boxes on the desk and said this was the final version, the typed and corrected and proofread copy of Bill's new novel.

But Bill was still working, making changes. They heard him typing when they went down the stairs.

He had coffee and a sandwich at his desk. Then tapped on the keys, hearing an old watery moan deep in the body. How the day's first words set off physical alarms, a pule and fret, the resistance of living systems to racking work. Calls for a cigarette, don't you think? He heard them come down the stairs and pictured them making an effort not to creak, setting their feet down softly, shoulders hunched. Let's not disturb the family fool in the locked room. He didn't know whether she was leaving right away. He thought it would be awkward to see her again.

There was nothing to say, was there? They'd shared a closeness that felt sorry and cheap the minute she walked out of the room. He couldn't clearly recall what he'd said to her but knew it was all wrong, an effusion, a presumption, all the worse for being mainly true. Who was she anyway? Something strong in her face, the rigor of life choice, of what it takes to make your way, a stripped-down force, a settledness, bare but not unwary. He could easily get up from the desk and go to New York and live with her forever in a terrace apartment overlooking the park or the river or both. Staring past the keys. Used to be that time rushed down on him when he started a book, time fell and pressed, then lifted when he finished. Now it wasn't lifting. But then he wasn't finished. Live in a large bright apartment with gray sheets on the bed, reading perfumed magazines. There is the epic and bendable space-time of the theoretical physicist, time detached from human experience, the pure curve of nature, and there is the haunted time of the novelist, intimate, pressing, stale and sad. His teeth felt soft today. He needed to sneak to the bedroom and mix up some pink-and-yellow fluoride multivitamins and in the meantime let's concentrate on the page, tap a letter, then another. He wanted to fuck her loudly on a hard bed with rain beating on the windows. Please Jesus let me work. Every book is a bug-eyed race, let's face it. Must finish. Can't die yet. He struck enough keys to make a sentence and thought about going down to say goodbye to her but it would only embarrass them both. Got what she came for, didn't she? I'm a picture now, flat as birdshit on a Buick. He saw he'd inverted two letters, which he's been doing a lot of lately, one of many signs there's something growing on his brain, and he elevated the page and whited out the mistake, then had to wait while the liquid dried. How he punished himself for repeated errors at the machine, eternal mis-fingerings, how typing mistakes became despair, meaningless flubs bringing a craze to his eyes, and he stared at the white fluid drying and would not resume work until it faded into the page, which was both the punishment and the escape. Her hand on his face, how surprised he'd been to feel so affected by the gesture, the entireness of simple touch. Want to live like other people, eating tricolor pasta in trattorias near the park. Always whiting out and typing in. He looked at the sentence, six disconsolate words, and saw the entire book as it took occasional shape in his mind, a neutered near-human dragging through the house, humpbacked, hydrocephalic, with puckered lips and soft skin, dribbling brain fluid from its mouth. Took him all these years to realize this book was his hated adversary. Locked together in the forbidden room, had him in a chokehold. He examined the immense complexity of changing the ribbon. So many pros and cons, alters and egos. He felt it coming and then sneezed onto the page, nicely, noting blood-spotted matter but thin and sparse. He would not dignify it by calling it snot. She likes my anger. Live at the center of the cubist city, Sunday papers spread everywhere and glossy bagels on a plate. I'm between novels, he used to say, so I don't mind dying. The problem with his second wife. But never mind. Live near the museums and galleries, stand on movie lines, uncork the wines, redo the rooms, sleep in the gray sheets, loving her, ordering out, let's order out tonight, walk the dogs, speak the words, hear the doormen whistle down the cabs, rain beating on the windows.

Brita was packed and ready anytime. She went downstairs and poured a cup of coffee. She sat at the table and looked around the kitchen. A young woman walked in and softly said Hi. She leaned on the table, using a hand to balance, her left foot raised vaguely off the floor. She had long straight hair, light brown, and a slightly jutting mouth that made her look remorseless. "How many pictures did you take?"

"We talked and worked a while and then I shot some more rolls when we ran out of conversation and then some more after that."

"Would you call this an average day or going into the realm of horrid excess?"

"What's your name?"

"Karen."

"And you live here."

"Scott and I."

"I'll tell you the truth, Karen. I'm not interested in photography. I'm interested in writers."

"Then why don't you stay home and read?"

She reached for a box of muffins on the countertop and put it down near Brita's coffee. Then she curled into a chair and played with a stray spoon. She wore a limp blouse over blue jeans and had the body lines of a teenager, the crooks and skews and smeariness, and a way of merging with furniture, a kind of draped indecision.

Brita said, "I read at home, I read in hotels, I take a book with me on a twenty-minute trip to the dentist. Then I read in the waiting room."

"Did you always know you wanted to be a photographer?"

"I read on planes, I read in laundromats. How old are you?"

"Twenty-four."

"And you help out here."

"Scott does most of it. He manages the expenses, the cash flow, he does taxes, he deals with the utilities, he answers all Bill's mail except the mentals, which we haughtily ignore lest they get encouraged. We share the cooking and shopping except he probably does more than I do. He does all the filing, the organizing of papers. I clean like a little scrub lady, which I don't half mind. I make believe I'm fat and walk with a waddle. We do the typing about fifty-fifty, with Scott doing the last spotless copy, and then we proofread together, which is probably our favorite time."

"And you think it's a mistake, these pictures."

"We love Bill, that's all."

"And you hate me for leaving here with all that film."

"It's just a feeling of there's something wrong. We have a life here that's carefully balanced. There's a lot of planning and thinking behind the way Bill lives and now there's a crack all of a sudden. What's it called, a fissure."

The car pulled up, door opened, then closed. Karen tapped the bowl end of the spoon with her index finger, over and over, making the handle go up and down.

"What do you think of marriage for a professional woman?" she said.

"I'm divorced many years. He lives in Belgium. We don't talk at all."

"Do you have children that are still torn up over the divorce so that everybody's tense around each other and you can see the resentment lurking far back in their eyes even after all this time?"

"Sorry, no."

"I haven't known many people with careers. It sounds so important. Having a career. Do you keep a bottle of vodka handy in your freezer?"

"Yes, I do."

"Do people tell you they like your work? They come up to you at parties in New York and say, 'I just wanted to tell you.' Or, 'You don't know me but I just wanted.' Or, 'I really have to tell you this and I hope you'll forgive the intrusion.' Then you look at them and smile like shyly."

Scott came in with groceries. He poured a cup of coffee and told the story of his journey out of nonbeing. How he started writing letters to Bill care of his publisher. He wrote nine or ten letters, ambitious and self-searching, filled with things a luckless boy wants to say to a writer whose work has moved him. He hadn't known he could summon these deep feelings or express them with reckless style and delight, certain cosmic words typed in caps and others spelled oddly to reveal second and third meanings. The letters released something, maybe a sense that he was not alone, that the world was a place where travelers in language could know the same things. How he finally got one letter back, two lines, handwritten in a hurry, saying there is never time to respond properly but thanks for writing. How Scott took this as encouragement and wrote five more letters, intense and sweeping, the last of them saying that he was setting out to find Bill, that he needed to see and meet and talk to Bill, that the urge to make a journey in search of the man who wrote these books could no longer be contained. How Bill did not reply. And how Scott took this as encouragement because Bill could have written and said, Forget it, stay away, do not even remotely approach. He had the envelope Bill's note had come in, postmarked New York City, but Scott happened to know from reading a magazine piece about Lost Writers that Bill concealed his whereabouts by sending letters to his publisher for remailing.

"And so you hitchhiked."

Yes. He set out thumbing rides at the edges of ripping interstates and the venture was so chancy it made him feel weightless, standing in the wind of rolling diesel rigs. He wore mirrored glasses and carried a timeless Eastern text and he told drivers he was setting out to find a famous writer. Some of them talked about famous people they wished they could meet and it was interesting how very few of these people were alive today. All the famous were either dead or used up. A pickup he was riding in caught fire just west of Fort Wayne and it seemed all right, it seemed appropriate, things were too vivid not to enter deeper states. He was elated, worked to a sensory howl, flying past the low stink of day-to-day. A driver had chest pains outside Toledo and Scott drove him to a hospital, feeling talkative, telling the man the plot of a movie he'd seen last week. The car handled well and he gained in being as he drove, cornering sweetly. I'm glad we had this chance to talk, he said, jogging alongside the gurney as attendants hustled the man into white light. Three days later he had a job in the mailroom at the house that published Bill Gray's books.

How he made friends. How he learned that the letters Bill sent in to be remailed came in a nine-by-twelve manila envelope addressed to the head of the mailroom, a friendly sleepy former IRA man named Joe Doheny, who opened the envelope and processed the letters in the normal way. Scott waited, living at the Y, eating his meals standing up at narrow counters set along streetside windows so he could watch the march of faces and pathologies, people going by in trance states and dancing manias, the crosstown stream of race and shape and ruin, and in these hard streets even the healthy and well-dressed looked afflicted. Because they were sliding deeper into their own lives. Because they knew the future would not take them. Because they refused to give themselves the necessary narrow structure, the secret destiny. After some weeks he spotted a manila envelope addressed to Joe Doheny in Bill's close-woven hand. There was no return address of course but Scott looked at the postmark and then went to the library and lugged an atlas to a table and found that the town in question-he did not reveal its name to Brita-was about two hundred miles outside the gates of the medieval city. He was not necessarily relieved to learn that Bill was only hours from New York. It would be just as easy to go to Chad or Borneo or the Himalayas, with perhaps a greater gain in being.

He took a bus part of the way and then hitchhiked on secondary roads, carrying a sleeping bag and other basics. He walked around town and watched the market and the post office, five weekends of vain surveillance. Not that he minded. He had a life now and that's what mattered. He was in Bill's material mesh, drawing the same air, seeing things Bill saw. He did not ask people if they knew who Bill was or where he lived. He was a backpacker on the amble, determined to go unnoticed. After weekend five he quit his job and lived in campgrounds in the area and saw a man who had to be Bill getting out of a car in front of the hardware store, only eight days after he'd left the city for good.

"Why did it have to be Bill?"

"Had to be. Not the slightest doubt. How can a photographer ask a question like that? Doesn't his work, his life show on his face? Are there other people in that one small rural area who might possibly look as though they'd written those books? No, had to be him. Stocky, running his hand through his hair. Walking toward me. Making his way down the street. Becoming more familiar with every step. Had to be Bill and he was coming right at me and I seemed to need oxygen. Important parts of my body were closing down."

How he stepped up to Bill and told him who he was, the persistent letter-writer, and made an effort to speak slowly and clearly in complete sentences, feeling his mouth dry out and hearing the words come bouncing hollow off his tongue. Hearing the heart noise, a deep staccato in the chest that he'd heard only once before, climbing for hours in mountain country in extreme heat, the sound of blood driving through the aorta and jarring the heart. How he managed to say as Bill's eyes narrowed to rifleman's slits that he wondered if the writer had ever thought an assistant might be helpful, someone to handle the mail (he had experience), a quiet individual who would type and file, even prepare meals if there was no one doing this, a person who would try to ease the writer's beleaguerment (he drew a trace of grim amusement here). And then on instinct simply stopped and let Bill absorb the offer while he stood there looking earnest and dependable. Watching Bill's face begin to change. How the jaw muscles slackened and the eyes grew calm. A great man's face shows the beauty of his work.

Karen was in the bedroom looking at the gift Scott had brought back from the city. It was a reproduction of a pencil drawing called Mao II. She unrolled it on the bed and used objects in reach to hold down the corners. She studied the picture to see what was interesting about it or why Scott thought she might like it. The face of Mao Zedong. She liked that name all right. It was strange how a few lines with a pencil and there he is, some shading in, a scribbled neck and brows. It was by a famous painter whose name she could never remember but he was famous, he was dead, he had a white mask of a face and glowing white hair. Or maybe he was just supposed to be dead. Scott said he didn't seem dead because he never seemed real. Andy. That was it.

Scott was washing coffee cups. Bill came in and said, "What are you doing?"

Scott looked into the basin, running a sponge around the inside of a cup. "We could walk up to the mill. It's a nice enough day."

"You have to work," Scott said. "I've worked."

"It's early yet. Go back and work some more."

"I've put in some good time today."

"Bullshit. You were having your picture taken."

"But I caught up. Come on. We'll get the women and hike to the mill."

"Go back up."

"I don't want to go back up."

"Don't start. I'm not in the mood."

"We'll get the women," Bill said.

"It's early. You ruined your morning with picture-taking. Go back up and do your work." Scott held the sponge under warm water, rinsing out the soap. "We have three hours of light. Ample time to get there and back."

"I'm telling you for your own good. It's your idea to write this book forever. I'm only saying what I'm supposed to say."

"You know what you are?"

"Yeah yeah yeah yeah."

"Yeah yeah," Bill said. "I don't think you did ten good minutes."

"Yeah yeah yeah."

"So go back up and sit down and do your work."

"We're wasting all this light."

"It's really very simple."

"It isn't simple. It's everything in the world that isn't simple wrapped up in one small bundle." Scott was finished at the sink but stayed there looking into the basin. "It's simple all right. It really is. You just go back up and sit down and do your work."

"The women would enjoy it."

"I'm only saying what we both know I'm supposed to say."

"I could go back up and just sit there. How would you know I was working?"

"I wouldn't, Bill."

"I could sit there tearing stamps from a twenty-five-dollar roll of stamps with the fucking flag on every stamp."

"As long as you're in the room. I want you in the room, seated."

"I'll tell you what you are," Bill said.

Scott reached for a towel and dried his hands but didn't turn around. He hung the towel on the plastic hook and waited.

Brita stood outside Bill's workroom, in the open doorway, looking in. After a moment she reached in and knocked softly on the door even though it was clear the room was empty. She stood motionless and waited. Then she took one step in, looking carefully at the ordinary things inside as if compelled to memorize the details of whatever had escaped the camera-the placement of objects and titles of reference works, the number of pencils in the marmalade jar. Gazing for history's sake, for the obsessive record of what is on the desk and who is in the snapshots, the oddments that seem so precious to our understanding of the man.

But all she wanted was a cigarette. She spotted the pack, crossed the room quickly and took one out. There were footsteps on the stairs. She found matches and lit up and when Bill appeared in the doorway she gestured with the cigarette and told him thanks.

"I thought you were probably gone," he said.

"Don't you know the rules? We wait for dark. Then we go on side roads and no roads to avoid route signs that might tell me where we are."

"Scott spent weeks on this."

"It takes twice the time, his way."

"I think you're supposed to appreciate the maze aspects."

"I'll try harder. But right now I'm keeping you from your work so we'll meet at early dinner if this is the plan."

Bill moved some papers from a bench near the window and then seemed to forget that he meant to sit there and stood holding the sheaf chest-high.

"I said things, didn't I?"

"About your work mostly."

"Hard up for sympathy. And I want to say things now but totally fail. I've forgotten how to talk in ordinary ways except to mumble at meals for the salt."

"They shouldn't give it to you."

"I'm sixty-three and it hurts."

"I'll never make it to sixty. I see something coming and I see it complete. Slow, wasting, horrible, deep in the body. It's something I've known for years."

"Fear has its own ego, hasn't it?"

"Do I sound awful?" she said.

"A little boastful maybe."

"What is it you want to say but can't?"

"I want to ask you to come back some time. Or tell me where you live. Or stay and talk."

"I have no trouble talking. But in this house it's not so easy. I think there's an intensity that makes certain subjects a little dangerous. And we don't have the camera between us. This changes everything, doesn't it? Scott said six-thirty."

"Then it must be true."

"He told me how he found you."

"I nearly stove in his head the first thirty seconds. He took over fast. Taught himself many wiles and skills. We talk and argue all the time. He gives me perspectives."

"And Karen."

"Scott says I invented her. But he's the one who snatched her out of the air. She scares me sometimes. She can scare me and delight me in the space of five words. She's smart about people.

Looks right through us. Watches TV and knows what people are going to say next. Not only gets it right but does their voices."

"She came here how long after Scott?"

"Maybe five years after. She does their voices with a trueness that's startling. That's our Karen."

Brita lay nearly flat in the long tub, hearing someone chopping wood just below the window. Steam rose up around her. First the crack of the ax, then the soft topple of split logs. She felt a small dim misery stealing through her and wasn't sure what it meant. If there was any day in her recent working life that might be called special, this was it. Not that she thought any longer of building a career. She had no career, only writers hunched in chairs from here to China. There was little income and only passing public mention of the scheme. Pictures of most of the writers would appear exactly nowhere, others in obscure journals and directories. She was the person who traveled compulsively to photograph the unknown, the untranslated, the inaccessible, the politically suspect, the hunted, the silenced. So it was a form of validation, a rosy endorsement, when a writer like Bill offered to pose for her. Then why this strange off-balance mood? She ran more hot water. She knew it was him down there, breathing hard, chanting with the effort. First the crack, then the soft topple. Keep a distance. He is on some rocking edge. The temperature of the bath was perfect now, almost too hot to bear. She felt sweat break out on her face and she moved more deeply in. Isn't this why picture-taking is so ceremonial? Steam hung in the room. The heat was profound, deep-going and dulling and close to stopping the heart. She knew he was strong, saw it in his hands and girth, that dockworker's density of body. She reached for a towel and wiped her face and after a while she stepped out of the tub and went to the window, using the towel to rub vapor off the glass at face level. How could she keep a distance if she'd already taken his picture? This was the partnership, the little misery. Bill was tossing split logs toward the corded wood set under a sagging canopy at the side of the house. The announcement of my dying. She had to rub away vapor several times, standing by the window looking down.

Bill raised his glass.

"This place feels like home tonight. There's a wholeness, isn't there? A sense of extension and completion. And we all know why. Here's to guests and what they mean to civilization."

He drank and coughed.

He said, "It's interesting how 'guest' and 'host' are words that intertwine. The etymologies are curious. Converging, mixing, reciprocating. Like the human groupings marked by the words. Guests bring ideas from outside."

Scott sat facing Brita and spoke to her even when his remarks were meant for Bill.

"I don't think she considers herself a guest in the true sense. She came to work."

"Damn strange work. Quixotic as hell. But I think I admire her."

"You admire her for doing work that often goes unseen. Work that describes a kind of mission, a dedication. Exactly what I've been urging you to do. Keep this book out of sight. Build on it. Use it to define an idea, a principle. "

"What principle?" Brita said.

"That the withheld work of art is the only eloquence left."

"This lamb is very nice," Bill said.

Karen came back from the kitchen with bread on a cutting board.

Scott looked at Brita.

"Art floats by all the time, part of the common bloat. But if he withholds the book. If he keeps the book in typescript and lets it take on heat and light. This is how he renews his claim to wide attention. Book and writer are now inseparable."

"Excuse me but it stinks," Brita said.

"He knows I'm right. What puts him on edge is not when I argue with him but when I agree with him. When I bring his little wishes dancing to the surface."

Bill kept a bottle of Irish whiskey flush against the right rear leg of his chair and he reached down for it now and refilled his wineglass.

He said, "We want to have a dinner with a theme. We're four of us tonight. Four is the first square. Foursquare. But we also have a roundness, a rounding-out. Three plus one. And it happens that we're halfway through April, or month number four."

"We were almost five," Scott said. "A woman tried to give me a baby yesterday. She took it out of her coat. A little thing only hours old."

He was staring at Brita.

"Why didn't you take it?" Karen said.

"Because I was on my way to meet Brita at a hotel where babies are not allowed. They have baby detectors at every door. They escort babies to the street."

"We could have found a place for it even if we didn't keep it ourselves. You should have taken it. How could you not take it?"

"People have always given away their babies. It's old stuff. I more or less suspect that I was given away. It explains so much," Scott said.

"My mother used to talk about God's compensation," Brita said. "When her heart began to fail, her rheumatism seemed to ease up. This was her idea of some almighty balance. I wonder about God's compensation for babies that are given away in the street or left in the garbage or thrown out the window."

Karen was talking to Scott about a road sign she'd seen on a walk that morning.

"Because I feel someone owes me something every time this happens," Brita said, "but who can it be if there is no God?"

Scott said, "Karen believes. Bill says he believes but we're not convinced."

"Our theme is four," Bill said. "In many ancient languages, God's name has four letters."

Brita poured more wine for herself and Scott.

"I don't like not believing. I'm not at peace with it. I take comfort when others believe."

"Karen thinks God is here. Like walkin' and talkin'."

"I want others to believe, you see. Many believers everywhere. I feel the enormous importance of this. When I was in Catania and saw hundreds of running men pulling a saint on a float through the streets, absolutely running. When I saw people crawl for miles on their knees in Mexico City on the Day of the Virgin, leaving blood on the basilica steps and then joining the crowd inside, the crush, so many people that there was no air. Always blood. The Day of Blood in Teheran. I need these people to believe for me. I cling to believers. Many, everywhere. Without them, the planet goes cold."

Bill spoke into his plate.

"Did I say how much I like this lamb?"

"Then eat it," Scott said.

"You're not eating it," Karen said.

"I thought I was supposed to look at it. You mean actually eat. As in the dictionary definition."

The dining room was small, with unmatched chairs around an oblong table, and there was a fire going in the old brick chimney corner.

"Do you want me to cut it for you?" Karen said.

Scott was still looking at Brita.

"If it's believers you want, Karen is your person. Unconditional belief. The messiah is here on earth."

"Because I feel someone owes me something every time this happens," Brita said, "but who can it be if there is no God?"

Scott said, "Karen believes. Bill says he believes but we're not convinced."

"Our theme is four," Bill said. "In many ancient languages, God's name has four letters."

Brita poured more wine for herself and Scott.

"I don't like not believing. I'm not at peace with it. I take comfort when others believe."

"Karen thinks God is here. Like walkin' and talkin'."

"I want others to believe, you see. Many believers everywhere. I feel the enormous importance of this. When I was in Catania and saw hundreds of running men pulling a saint on a float through the streets, absolutely running. When I saw people crawl for miles on their knees in Mexico City on the Day of the Virgin, leaving blood on the basilica steps and then joining the crowd inside, the crush, so many people that there was no air. Always blood. The Day of Blood in Teheran. I need these people to believe for me. I cling to believers. Many, everywhere. Without them, the planet goes cold."

Bill spoke into his plate.

"Did I say how much I like this lamb?"

"Then eat it," Scott said.

"You're not eating it," Karen said.

"I thought I was supposed to look at it. You mean actually eat. As in the dictionary definition."

The dining room was small, with unmatched chairs around an oblong table, and there was a fire going in the old brick chimney corner.

"Do you want me to cut it for you?" Karen said.

Scott was still looking at Brita.

"If it's believers you want, Karen is your person. Unconditional belief. The messiah is here on earth."

Karen reached across the table and cut Bill's lamb into neat pieces for him.

"I was telling Scott," she said. "What was I saying?"

"They have a security detail trained in babies," Scott said. "A nationwide chain of baby-proof hotels."

"I was saying about this official orange sign of the state."

Brita gave a delayed laugh, scanning the table for cigarettes.

"I believe in the God of the stumblebum," Bill said. "The waitress with a throbbing tooth."

Scott laughed because Brita was laughing.

He cut some bread.

He said, "The book is finished but will remain in typescript. Then Brita's photos appear in a prominent place. Timed just right. We don't need the book. We have the author."

"I am in pain," Brita said. "Pour more wine."

She laughed, turning in her chair to scan the room for cigarettes.

Scott laughed.

Bill looked at his food, seeming to know it was changed somehow.

"Or maybe not a prominent place," Scott said. "Maybe a little journal in the corn belt."

"No, no, no, no," Karen said. "Let's imagine Bill on TV. He is on the sofa talking."

"We have the pictures, let's use them to advantage. The book disappears into the image of the writer."

"No, wait, he is sitting in a chair facing a host in a chair, leaning real close, a bespectacled host with his chin in his fist."

"Did you actually see the baby?" Brita said.

Scott laughed and this made Brita laugh.

Bill said, "Our theme is four. Earth, air, fire and water."

"What's the Day of Blood?" Karen said. "Not that I couldn't easily guess."

Scott didn't take his eyes off Brita.

"Bill has the idea that writers are being consumed by the emergence of news as an apocalyptic force."

"He told me, more or less."

"The novel used to feed our search for meaning. Quoting Bill. It was the great secular transcendence. The Latin mass of language, character, occasional new truth. But our desperation has led us toward something larger and darker. So we turn to the news, which provides an unremitting mood of catastrophe. This is where we find emotional experience not available elsewhere. We don't need the novel. Quoting Bill. We don't even need catastrophes, necessarily. We only need the reports and predictions and warnings."

Karen watched Bill touch his fork to a piece of meat.

He said, "I know the road sign you mean. The one for the deaf child."

"And it's not homemade. It's official orange and black and they put it there for one child who can't hear a car or truck bearing down on her. When I saw that I thought DEAF CHILD. I thought the state that erects a sign for one child can't be so awful and unfeeling."

"Yes, it's a nice sign. It's nice to think about a child with her own sign. But this wholly ridiculous contention I've been hearing. Disappear the book. Define a principle. Do I have the words right? Are those the words?"

He lifted the bottle and held the glass in his lap and poured while talking.

"Keep the book. Hide the book. Make the writer the book. I totally fail."

"Why are you still writing if you know the book is finished and we all know the book is finished and we all know you're still writing? "

"Books are never finished."

"Plays are never finished. Books are finished."

"I'll tell you when a book is finished. When the writer keels over with a great big thump."

Karen said, "I'm enlivened by the road sign every time I see it."

"As many books as a writer has published, those are the books he keeps on writing plus the one in his typewriter. Old books haunt the blood."

Brita poured more wine.

"I'm driving, thank you," Scott said.

He drank.

Bill drank and coughed.

Brita waited for him to take out his cigarettes.

"You can't let the book be seen," Scott said. "It's all over if you do. The book is a grossity. We have to invent words to describe the corpulence, the top-heaviness, the lack of discernment, pace and energy."

"Kid thinks he owns my soul."

"He knows. It's a master collapse. It's a failure so deep it places suspicion on the great early work. People will look at the great early work in a new way, searching for signs of weakness and muddle."

"The book appears. I'm going to do it. Sooner than anyone thinks."

Scott was looking at Brita.

"He knows I'm right. He just hates it when we agree. His words in my mouth. It drives him crazy. But I'm only trying to secure his rightful place."

Bill was looking for something to knock over, a thing, a suitable object he might swat off the table and break into pieces.

"I think we need a pet in this household," Karen said.

Scott wiped bread crumbs off the edge of the table into his hand.

"I'm only saying what he deep down wants me to say."

Karen looked at Brita.

They changed seats and Karen sat close to Bill, pushing her chair against his.

"Now do we want a dog or a cat?" she said in someone else's voice.

Bill went for the butter dish, backhanding it across the table.

The lid hit Scott in the face.

This made Bill angrier and he tried to get up and start smashing in earnest.

"I don't think we want to do this," Karen said.

She kept him in the chair.

Scott held his left hand to his face. He still had bread crumbs in the other hand.

"Pets are famously therapeutic," he said.

"Nobody's hurt, so shut the fuck up."

"For the old, the lonely, the stark and the raving."

"Four out of four. Our theme is four."

Karen put her hand over Bill's eyes to keep him from seeing anything that might get him madder.

Brita said, "I want someone to tell me this is a rare occurrence."

A gesture, a look, almost anything might get Bill going uncontrollably.

Scott wiped his hands and face with a napkin and stood behind Brita's chair, taking her by the arm as she got up and leading her from the room.

Karen took her hands from Bill's eyes.

"People who love each other, it's the old dumb story, Bill, which we all know a thousand times over."

They sat at the table for some minutes.

Then Bill went upstairs to his workroom, where he closed the door and stood by the window in the dark.

Scott wanted Brita to see one last thing before they left. They went out the back door and walked a few yards to a low shed built into an angle of the house. She followed him in, hunched over, and he switched on a light and they stood just inside the door looking at the shelves and compartments Scott had built himself-all filled with photocopies of the final draft, carbons of earlier drafts, carbons of notes and fragments, letters from Bill's friends and acquaintances, more galleys, more reader mail in boxed and labeled files, more cardboard boxes stuffed with manuscripts and papers.

The shed was insulated and waterproofed. Brita stood bent and silent and looked at the thick binders filled with words and she thought of all the words on all the pages stacked and filed in other parts of the house and she wanted to get out of here, run down the dark road away from this killing work and the grimness of the lives behind it.

They went around to the front of the house and she waited near the porch steps while Scott went in to get her things. She expected to feel the bystander's separation from a painful scene, the safety and complacence, but it wasn't working that way. She felt guilty of something, implicated in something, and could not face saying goodbye to Bill.

Scott came out and they walked to the car.

"If you glance back over your left shoulder, you'll see him watching from his window."

She looked without thinking but the window was dark and she turned quickly to the front. The night air had force, damp and spiky. When they were in the car and veering off the hard rutted mud onto packed gravel, she looked back again and thought she saw the faintest trace of silhouette centered in the window, man-shaped and dead still, and she kept on looking until the house slipped into distance, lost in trees and shifting perspective, in the spacious power of night.

Scott peered into the dark and told his third story of the day, working the wipers periodically to part the soft mist. They talk about people driving erratically. He found Karen walking erratically down the main street of a northeastern Kansas town called White Cloud, population maybe two hundred ten, and he trailed her in the car. She stopped outside a red brick building with boarded windows under a low mean sky. He put the car in a slot, parking head-on, and watched her try to thumbnail a candy out of a sticky package. A farm vehicle rolled on past, steered by a bare-chested kid with a knotted hanky on his head. The street was broad and sandy gray with weeds coming out of the curbstone and old tin canopies leaning off the café and the auto-and-bike repair. She stood there and dislodged the candy but then couldn't get it unstuck from the individual wrap. A sign jutted from the front of the general store with a mysterious word on it.

Scott wondered a while what there was about this scene that felt familiar. He was driving back east after seeing his sister, who lived nearby with a doctor husband and a baby flown in from Peru. He was glad to shake free of Bill for two weeks because the man had just remembered whiskey and was doing many mumbling riffs deep in the night.

He got out of the car and leaned on the fender, watching her deal with the candy melt in her hand. It was hard candy in theory and in name but would not separate from the wrap, attaching to it in webby strands as she pulled the paper outward.

Is it the heat wave, you think, or second-rate manufacturing methods that can't compete with the overseas challenge?

She paid no attention.

You think they'd know how to do gumdrops by now.

He took his sunglasses from his breast pocket and worked a fistful of shirtfront out of his pants to clean the glasses with, just to give himself some business in the empty hanging time.

She said, Are you here to deprogram me?

Then he knew what was familiar here. It was like something out of Bill Gray and he should have seen it earlier. The funny girl on the tumbledown street with an undecidable threat in the air, stormlit skies or just some alienating word that opens up a sentence to baleful influence.

If that's why you're here, you better forget it real fast, she said, because they tried it and got nowheres with an s at the end.

Soon they were driving through the top end of Missouri, getting acquainted, and in the same car, headed downstate now, he told Brita how she spoke in streaky lines of recollection about her time as a Moonie, although she didn't use that word herself and wouldn't let anyone else use it in her presence, ever.

In the van all clothing was the same, dumped in a pile and washed together, then given out so many items per person, never mind original owner or previous wearer. This was the truth of the body common. But it sure gives you a strange feeling, wearing someone else's socks and another person's underwear. Gives you the jumps, the cold creeps. Makes you want to walk along a little shriveled inward so you don't touch the clothes you're in.

And she was selling peanuts on the street, which she couldn't help feeling was a personal comedown after flowers. A guilty and dangerous thought. And her peanut team was made up of fairly purposeless sisters, roaming the land without the rooted point of view that their unison prayers affected the lives of every single person on the planet.

And she often thought of her husband, Kim, who was attached to a mission in England, the husband she didn't know. The separation would end in six months but only if each of them brought three new members into the church.

She believed deeply in Master and still thought of herself as a seeker, ready to receive what was vast and true. But she missed simple things, parents' birthdays, a rug underfoot, nights when she didn't have to sleep in a zipped bag. She began to think she was inadequate to the strict plain shapes of churchly faith. Head pains hit her at the end of the day. They came with a shining, an electrochemical sheen, light from out of nowhere, brain-made, the eerie gleam of who you are.

Scott took her to a motel and listened to her talk for much of the night. She peed with the door open and he thought, How fantastic. No sex however just yet. She talked in ten-minute spasms. She could not sleep or was afraid to. He kept going to the machine in the corridor to get her soft drinks and came back expecting to find her gone, a curtain blowing through the open window, except the curtains were too heavy to blow and the windows didn't open anyway.

Then action, bodies moving through the night. Because just as she was beginning to doubt and fear and mind-wander, she stepped out of the van on a cloud-banded evening and three men detached themselves from a playground wall and approached, two strangers and her tank-top cousin Rick, a football player with a clean-shaven head except for one wavy lock right on top, dyed y'know like parrot-green. The other guys wore suits and showed a certain weary expertise. Frankly it's hard to know what to say to people who come off a wall in a nameless town and your own bulging cousin has a look that's unreadable.

They stuffed her in a car and took her to a motel room, where her father sat waiting in a fire-retardant chair, oddly in his stocking feet. There was a lot of emotional talk, tabloid-type reassurances about love and mother and home, and she listened craftily, moved and bored more or less together, and Daddy cried a little and kissed her and put on his shoes and then left with Rick, who'd put his hand in her panties when they were ten, a memory that hung between them like the musky scent of a sniffed finger, and here was Scott in his own motel marveling at the underwear theme that coursed through this young woman's life.

Brita sat with her head back on the padded rest and her eyes closed, hearing his voice go louder when he turned her way.

The two men deprogrammed her eighteen hours a day for eight days. They cited case histories. They repeated key phrases. They played tapes and showed movies on the wall. The shades were drawn all the time and the door stayed locked. No clocks or watches anywhere. They left when she slept or tried to sleep and a local churchwoman arrived and sat in a chair with a headset on, listening to songs of the humpbacked whales.

In these quiet moments of near sleep she sometimes loved her parents and was stirred by the drama of abduction.

You were brainwashed.

You were programmed.

You have the transfixed gaze.

Other times she hated everyone involved and thought it was the logical brutal extension of parent-child, locked in a room and forced to listen to rote harangues. Of course this is what they said the church had been doing to her all along.

Her mother called and they had a normal practical chat about getting enough to eat and we are sending clothes.

The head pains came more often and there were nightmares now. She began to develop a sense that she was only passing through. She couldn't figure out exactly who it was that lived in this body. Her name had broken down to units of sound and it struck her as totally strange. She wanted to get back to her sisters and leaders. Everything outside the church was Satan-made. What does the church teach? Be children again. If you have theories, put them away. If you have knowledge, abandon it for the open heart of the child.

Programmed.

Brainwashed.

Indoctrinated.

When she tried a good-natured escape, sort of ambling dumbly out the door, they slammed her against the wall. Their hands were all over her and she thought they would tear her clothes away just to enjoy the noise of ripped Korean acrylic and so Scott moved closer in the darkened room, showing gentle concern, the tender recompense of the other side of the male equation, but no sympathetic sex just yet, bud.

They rode in silence for a while.

Brita said, "I didn't quite get that business about a husband. If I ever met anyone who didn't seem married."

"Mass-married. Married in a public ceremony involving thousands of others. Bill calls it millennial hysteria. By compressing a million moments of love and touch and courtship into one accelerated mass, you're saying that life must become more anxious, more surreal, more image-bound, more prone to hurrying its own transformation, or what's the point? You take marriage, the faith of the species, the means of continuation, and you turn it into catastrophe, a total implosion of the future. Quoting Bill. But I think he's all wrong."

They drove across Iowa and Illinois and Scott looked at the doubled landscape of his original journey in search of Bill and his return with a character out of Bill's fiction. They saw a horse galloping on the highway, empty-saddled. Karen had her blood pressure taken at a mobile clinic because she liked to feel the puffy tension of the cuff tightening on her arm.

You have the transfixed gaze.

But if being deprogrammed meant getting back home to a quiet room and a bed and regular meals, then maybe for the time being, because her parents loved her and she didn't want to do another winter in the van, she might just let them bend her mind a little.

They brought in Junette, a former sister, carried off by parents, deprogrammed, turned against the church, now used to soften others to the message. She wore the great stain of experience. Karen watched her rush into the room pretending to show deep empathy is the word but actually feeling superior and aloof. They went on with it anyway, falling into their scripted roles of sisterly and intimate, with three weepy embraces. The men waited outside, their shadows mingled on the drawn curtain. Junette tore down Master's teaching. She read letters from disaffected members in the important voice of the dead. Karen saw her teeth needed work, the spaces plugged with yellowish deposits. The famous tartar problem, of tartar and plaque. She was sitting craftily inside her own head, looking out at buttery Junette.

Maybe you know the feeling of being deeply, as they say, conflicted, like you wanna stay but you wanna go, and they bring in a person you'd like to stab in the neck with something jagged.

They stopped at a motel in mid-Ohio and the mood turned uneasy. They were tired and untalkative. Scott knew she was wondering why she was here at all, traveling with a stranger, some suspiciously helpful fellow, who is he anyway, and sitting in a room that was identical to the brown box where they tried to turn her mind inside out like a paper favor at a party. The same room repeats itself in a crosscountry chain and he's going to make me stop at every one.

So he told her about Bill, everything he knew, the man, the work, the murk, his own deep involvement. She didn't say anything but seemed to be trying to listen, to recall another world, the place of language and solitude and wet sedge meadows.

They went out for a real dinner in a restaurant with tasseled menus and a footbridge to the main room. She looked at him for the first time. In other words took him in retroactively, absorbing the accidental wonder of the past day and a half as it registered on his face. They went back to the room. The time was still not right for the sex of compassionate rescue, the sex of self-effacement, and he wondered if he was doing something wrong. She talked and slept and then woke him up to talk some more.

They told her, The trouble with postcult is that you lose your link to the fate of mankind.

They said, We know you're a good person who's just going through a rough adjustment while your parents are waiting and praying and writing a steady stream of checks for your emotional rescue.

They forced her to agree that the church had made a drone of her. She chanted, Made me a drone, made me a drone. That night she got out of bed in a glow of tingling light and tried to say something to the woman with the headset but could not speak and found herself some time later on her hands and knees on the toilet floor, vomiting foods of many nations.

They told her, Okay you are going to a deprogramming center where the lost and wan and wounded of many sects and movements are gathered for humane counseling.

Rick arrived with clothes and spending money and a box of specialty foods packed in impressive crinkly straw and they all drove to the airport. Karen found a cancer coloring book in the door pocket and leafed through. When they got out of the car she saw a policeman and decided to stroll over and tell him she'd been kidnapped. She pointed to the perpetrators, who looked-what is the word that sounds like it means calm and assured but actually means you are baffled? They looked nonplussed. Also guilty, which they were, including the cousin with the slash of green hair. So a multivoice discussion starts on the sidewalk outside the terminal with the normal airport scramble all around. One of the men tried to tell the officer about state conservatorship laws, which entitled them-and Karen was running, gone, through the terminal, down some stairs, feeling light and swift and young, hand-paddling through the crowds, then out a lower-level door and into a taxi, softly saying, Downtown.

She didn't know what city the downtown area belonged to but when she got there she put fifty dollars aside and spent the rest on a Greyhound ticket-ridin' the dog-and got off three hours later in White Cloud, a name in the sky, where Scott found her walking zigzag on a nearly empty street.

Brita said, "I have an Eve Arnold photograph of White Cloud, Kansas. It shows the main street, I'm fairly certain, and a structure that could be the brick building where Karen was standing when you approached her and there is definitely a tractor or combine or some other high-wheeled farm machine in the picture."

"But we're not there, she and I."

"And there's the small sign you mentioned on one of the stores with the funny word on it, the Indian word or whatever, and in a way the whole picture, the wide sky and wide street, everything so lonely and eloquent and commonplace at the same time, it all flows into the strange word on that sign."

"I remember now. Ha-Hush-Kah. A Bill Gray touch. It's a Bill Gray place. It really is."

They drove on these same roads finally, going the other way of course, and she asked questions about Bill. Scott realized this was the first time she'd said more than ten words about anything outside herself. He didn't know whether Bill would let her stay.

It turned out the subject never came up in so many words. They walked in and talked to Bill about the trip and he seemed to take to Karen. His eyes showed a detached amusement that meant there are some things that just have to happen before we know how smart or dumb they are.

After she read Bill's novels she moved from the old sofa into Scott's bed and it felt to him as though she'd been there always.

Bill lay smoking in bed, the ashtray resting on his chest. Every time he did this he thought of old rummies in single-residence brownstones expiring in the slow smoke of mattress fires.

Karen came in wearing her briefs and an oversized T-shirt.

"Feeling any better, Mr. Bill?"

She climbed on the bed, straddling Bill near the midsection, her upper body vertical, hands on her thighs.

Light folding in from the hallway.

"Want to put the cigarette away and smoke some of Scott's marijuana? Might help you sleep if you're still upset."

"I don't think I'm ready to sleep just yet."

"I never took to dope for some strange finicky whatever reason."

"It gives me heart-attack dreams."

"Scott uses it mainly to settle him down when he works late on manuscripts or files."

"The operational direction right now is up, not down."

She bounced a little, making him groan, then sat back on her haunches.

"He says you are familiar with a number of substances that alter the biochemistry."

"These are regulated medications. A doctor writes a prescription. All perfectly statutory."

"I definitely feel a stirring under the covers."

"Did I ever tell you what my first wife?"

"Don't think so. What?"

"She used to say I was all dick. I spent so much time locked up and was so tight-lipped about my work and eventually about everything else that there was nothing left but raw sex. And we didn't talk about that either."

"Just did it."

"She didn't like writers. I realized this, stupidly, way too late."

"If you were stupid, what was she? Marrying a writer."

"She expected us to adapt to each other. Women have faith in the mechanics of adjustment. A woman knows how to want something. She'll take chances to secure the future."

"I never think about the future."

"You come from the future," he said quietly.

She took his cigarette and stubbed it out and then put the ashtray on the floor, sliding it toward the foot of the bed.

"What's a heart-attack dream?"

"Panic. Rapid heartbeat. Then I wake up and I'm not sure if the heartbeat was dreamed or real. Not that dreamed isn't real."

"Everything is real."

She shook easily out of the T-shirt, arms unfolding full-length above her head, and Bill almost turned away. Every time she did this, breasts and hair swinging, he felt the shock of seeing something full-measure, almost lost in the force of it. He advanced the action in time to give it stillness and coherence, make it a memory of shape and grace caught unaware. She wouldn't ever know how deep-reaching that painted moment was when her elbows scissored out and she slipped free of the furled shirt and stretched to a figured yawn, making him forget where he was.

"I know it's bad form to ask."

"But what?" she said.

"Does Scott know you come up here?"

They were working him out of his pajama top, one arm at a time, then had to stop while he had a coughing fit.

"Is there anything in this house Scott doesn't know?"

"That's what I thought," he said.

"The mice are his friends. He knows which window gets the best moonlight on any given night on the lunar calendar."

She changed position to lower the bedcovers and undo the drawstring on his pants.

"And it's okay with him," Bill said.

"I don't see what choice. I mean he hasn't shot us yet."

"No, he hasn't."

"And he wouldn't."

"No, he wouldn't, would he?"

"And anyway and anyway and anyway. Didn't he bring me here for you?"

Bill could find no cheery features in this thought. He wanted to believe she'd just found the words tumbling on her tongue, which was how she hit upon much of what she said. But maybe she thought it was true and maybe it was and how interesting for Bill to imagine that he was betraying Scott all along by the other man's design.

His cock was dancing in her hand.

"I think we ought to have our intercourse now."

"Yes, dear," said Bill.

She went to the chest across the room and took a small package out of the middle drawer. She removed a condom and came back to the bed, straddling Bill's thighs, and began to outfit him with the device.

"Who are you protecting, you or me?"

"It's just the norm today."

He saw how absorbed she was in the task, dainty-fingered and determined to be expert, like a solemn child dressing a doll.

Scott stood looking around the loft apartment. Columns extended the length of the room. There was a broad plastic sheet slung under the leaky skylight. Brita walked around switching on lights. A small kitchen and dining area and a half-hidden recess of files and shelves. He followed along behind her, turning two lights off. A sofa and some chairs in a cluster. Then a darkroom and printing room with black curtains over the doors. Out the south windows the Trade towers stood cut against the night, intensely massed and near. This is the word "loomed" in all its prolonged and impending force.

"I will make tea for the travelers."

"Now I finally feel I've seen New York inside and out, just standing here in this space and looking through the window."

"When it rains out, it also rains in."

"Brita, despite whatever inconvenience."

"It's small as these places go. But I can't afford it anymore. And I have to look at the million-storey towers."

"One has an antenna."

"The male."

"Tea is perfect, thank you."

In the kitchen she took things out of cabinets and drawers, an object at a time, feeling as though she'd been away for a month, six weeks, a sense of home folding over her now. These cups and spoons made her feel intact again, reclaimed her from the jet trails, the physics of being in transit. She was so weary she could hear it, a ringing in the bones, and she had to keep reminding herself she'd been gone for less than two days. Scott stood at a table across the room looking at strewn magazines and commenting more or less uncontrollably.

The elevator clanked through the building, the old green iron gate smashing and rattling in the night.

They drank their tea.

"What makes this city different is that nobody expects to be in one place for ten minutes. Everybody moves all the time. Seven nameless men own everything and move us around on a board. People are swept out into the streets because the owners need the space. Then they are swept off the streets because someone owns the air they breathe. Men buy and sell air in the sky and there are bodies heaped together in boxes on the sidewalk. Then they sweep away the boxes."

"You like to overstate."

"I overstate things to stay alive. This is the point of New York. I completely love and trust this city but I know the moment I stop being angry I'm finished forever."

Scott said, "I used to eat alone. It made me ashamed, having no one to eat with. But not only alone-standing up. This is one of the haunting secrets of our time, that we are willing to eat standing up. I used to stand because it's more anonymous, it suited the way I felt about being in the city. Hundreds of thousands of people eating alone. They eat alone, they walk alone, they talk to themselves in the street in profound and troubled monologues like saints in the depths of temptation."

"I'm getting very sleepy," Brita said.

"I don't want to get back in the car right now."

"You're the driver, Scott."

"I don't think I can drive another fifteen feet."

He got up and turned off another light.

Sirens sounding to the east.

Then he sat near her on the sofa. He leaned toward her and touched the back of his hand to her cheek. She watched a mouse run up the face of a window and disappear. She had a theory the sirens drove them mad.

She said, "In some places where you eat standing up you are forced to look directly into a mirror. This is total control of the person's responses, like a consumer prison. And the mirror is literally inches away so you can hardly put the food in your mouth without hitting into it."

"The mirror is for safety, for protection. You use it to hide. You're totally alone in the foreground but you're also part of the swarm, the shifting jelly of heads looming over your little face. Bill doesn't understand how people need to blend in, lose themselves in something larger. The point of mass marriage is to show that we have to survive as a community instead of individuals trying to master every complex force. Mass interracial marriage. The conversion of the white-skinned by the dark. Every revolutionary idea involves danger and reversal. I know all the drawbacks of the Moon system but in theory it is brave and visionary. Think of the future and see how depressed you get. All the news is bad. We can't survive by needing more, wanting more, standing out, grabbing all we can."

"Speaking of the future."

"You can't send me out there."

"I need to sleep, to stop the noise in my head. I feel I've known all three of you for years and it's goddamn tiring actually."

They were seated far from the one dim light floating over the stove.

"We've gone too far into space to insist on our differences. Like those people you talk about on the Great Wall, a man and woman walking toward each other across China. This isn't a story about seeing the planet new. It's about seeing people new. We see them from space, where gender and features don't matter, where names don't matter. We've learned to see ourselves as if from space, as if from satellite cameras, all the time, all the same. As if from the moon, even. We're all Moonies, or should learn to be."

She heard the elevator gate smash shut again. Her eyes were closed. But Scott was the one who fell asleep. When she realized this, she eased off the sofa and got a blanket for him. Then she went to the other end of the loft, past the kitchen, and climbed the ladder to her bed.

She took off her sneakers and lay face up with her clothes on, suddenly wide awake. The cat appeared at her elbow, watching. She heard shouting in the street, the night voices that called all the time now, kids who pissed on sleeping men, the woman who lived in garbage bags, wearing them, sleeping inside them, who carried a large plastic bag everywhere, filled with other plastic bags. Brita heard her talking now, her voice carried on the river wind, a rasp of static in the night.

Soon the road replayed itself in her mind, the raveled passage down the hours. It was strange to lie still in a small corner and feel the power of movement, the gull-rush of air over the hood. A sense memory pulsing in the skin. The cat moved past her hand, a shrug of lunar muscle and fur. She heard car alarms going off in sequence, the panic data that fed into her life. Everything feeds in, everything is coded, there is everything and its hidden meaning. Which crisis do I trust? She felt she needed her own hidden meanings to get her through the average day. She reached out and snatched the cat, bringing it onto her chest. She thought her body had become defensive, homesick for lost assurances. It wanted to be a refuge against the way things work, against the force of what is out there. To love and touch, the roundness of these moments was crossed with something wistful now. All sex is a form of longing even as it happens. Because it happens against the crush of time. Because the surface of the act is public, a cross-grain of fear and ruin. She wanted her body to remain a secret of the past, untouched by complexity and regret. She was superstitious about talking to doctors in detail. She thought they would take her body over, name all the damaged parts, speak all the awful words. She lay for a long time with her eyes closed, trying to drift into sleep. Then she rubbed the cat's fur and felt her childhood there. It was complete in a touch, everything intact, carried out of old lost houses and fields and summer days into the river of her hand.

She slipped under the quilt, turning on her side and facing the wall to prove she was serious. Slowly now, into that helpless half life of self-commentary, the voice film that runs between light and dark. But the time eventually came when she had to admit she was still awake. She threw off the quilt and lay there on her back. Then she climbed down the ladder and went to a window, seeing steam come heaving out of a vent hole in the street. The telephone rang. Like earthwork art, these vapor columns rising all over the city, white and silent in empty streets. She heard the machine switch on and waited for the caller to speak. A man's voice, sounding completely familiar, sounding enhanced, filling the high room, but she couldn't identify him at first, couldn't quite fix the context of his remarks, and she thought he might be someone she'd known years before, many years and very well, a voice that seemed to wrap itself around her, so strangely and totally near.

"You left without saying goodbye. Although that's not why I'm calling. I'm wide awake and need to talk to someone but that's not why I'm calling either. Do you know how strange it is for me to sit here talking to a machine? I feel like a TV set left on in an empty room. I'm playing to an empty room. This is a new kind of loneliness you're getting me into, Brita. How nice to say your name. The loneliness of knowing I won't be heard for hours or days. I imagine you're always catching up with messages. Accessing your machine from distant sites. There's a lot of violence in that phrase. 'Accessing your machine.' You need a secret code if I'm not mistaken. You enter your code in Brussels and blow up a building in Madrid. This is the dark wish that the accessing industry caters to. I'm sitting in my cane chair looking out the window. The birds are awake and so am I. Another draggy smoked-out dawn with my throat scorched raw but I've had much worse. I stopped drinking when you left last night. And I'm speaking slowly now because there's no sense of a listener, not even the silences a listener creates, a dozen different kinds, dense and expectant and bored and angry, and I feel a little awkward, making a speech to an absent friend. I hope we're friends. But that's not why I'm calling. I keep seeing my book wandering through the halls. There the thing is, creeping feebly, if you can imagine a naked humped creature with filed-down genitals, only worse, because its head bulges at the top and there's a gargoylish tongue jutting at a corner of the mouth and truly terrible feet. It tries to cling to me, to touch and fasten. A cretin, a distort. Water-bloated, slobbering, incontinent. I'm speaking slowly to get it right. It's my book after all, so I'm responsible for getting it right. The loneliness of voices stored on tape. By the time you listen to this, I'll no longer remember what I said. I'll be an old message by then, buried under many new messages. The machine makes everything a message, which narrows the range of discourse and destroys the poetry of nobody home. Home is a failed idea. People are no longer home or not home. They're either picking up or not picking up. The truth is I don't feel awkward. It's probably easier to talk to you this way. But that's not why I'm calling. I'm calling to describe the sunrise. A pale runny light spreading across the hills. There's a partial cloud cover, which makes the light seem to hug the land, quiet light, soft, calm, pale, a landglow more than a light from the sky. I thought you'd want to know these things. I thought this is a woman who wants to know these things more than other things that other people might attempt to tell her. The cloud bank is long and slate-gray and altogether fine. There really isn't any more to say about it. The window is open so I can feel the air. I'm not deeply hung over and so the air does not rebuke me. The air is fine. It's precisely what it is. I'm sitting in my old cane chair with my feet up on a bench and my back to the typewriter. The birds are fine.

I can hear them in the trees nearby and out in the fields, crows in clusters in the fields. The air is sharp and cold and fine and smells altogether as air should smell early on a spring morning when a man is talking to a machine. I thought these are the things this woman wants to hear about. It tries to cling to me, soft-skinned and moist, to fasten its puckery limpet flesh onto mine."

The machine cut him off.

She realized Scott was right behind her. He leaned against her, ardent and sleepy, hands reaching around, hands and thumbs, thumbs sliding into the belt loops of her jeans. She let her head drop back against his shoulder, concentrating, and he pressed in tight. She yawned and then laughed. He put his hands under her sweater, he undid her belt, leaned in to her, put his hands down along her belly, the watchfulness, the startled alert of the body to every touch. He lifted her sweater up onto her shoulders and rubbed the side of his face against her back. She concentrated, she looked like someone listening for sounds in the wall. She felt everything. She was speculative, waiting, her breathing even and careful, and she moved slowly under his hands and felt the sandy buzz of his face on her back.

She knew he would not say a word, not even going up the ladder, not even the faithful little ladder joke, and she welcomed the silence, the tactful boy lean and pale, climbing her body with a groan.

Bill opened the door in the middle of traffic, the thick choked blast of yellow metal, and he walked out into it. Scott called after him to wait, stay, watch out. He moved between stalled cabs where drivers sat slumped in the gloom like inmates watching daytime TV. Scott shouted out a place and a time to meet. Bill threw back a wave and then stood at the edge of the one active lane until there was an opening to the sidewalk.

The rush of things, of shuffled sights, the mixed swagger of the avenue, noisy storefronts, jewelry spread across the sidewalk, the deep stream of reflections, heads floating in windows, towers liquefied on taxi doors, bodies shivery and elongate, all of it interesting to Bill in the way it blocked comment, the way it simply rushed at him, massively, like your first day in Jalalabad, rushed and was. Nothing tells you what you're supposed to think of this. Well, it was his first day in New York in many years and there was no street or building he wanted to see again, no old haunt that might rouse a longing or sweet regret.

He found the number and approached an oval desk in the lobby, where two security officers sat behind a bank of telephones, TV monitors and computer displays. He gave his name and waited for the woman to check a visitors' list on the swivel screen. She asked him some questions and then picked up a phone and in a couple of minutes a uniformed man appeared to escort Bill to the proper floor. The woman at the desk gave the man a visitor's badge, an adhesive piece of paper, which he fastened to Bill's lapel.

There was another checkpoint at the elevator bank and they passed without delay and rode an express to the top of the building and when the door came open there was Charlie Everson in a bright tie, waiting. He squeezed Bill's arms at the biceps and looked squarely into his face. Neither man said a word. Then Charlie nodded to the guard and led Bill through a door opposite the reception room. They walked down a long corridor lined with book jackets and went into a large sunny office filled with plant life and polished surfaces.

"Where's your Bushmills?" Bill said. "A bite of the single-malt will do just fine."

"I'm not drinking these days."

"But you keep something in the cabinet for visiting writers."

"Ballygowan. It's water."

Bill looked at him hard. Then he sat down and undid the laces on his shoes, which were new and tight.

"Bill, it's hard to believe."

"I know. So many years, so fast, so strange."

"You look like a writer. You never used to. Took all these years. Do I recognize the jacket?"

"I think it's yours."

"Is it possible? The night Louise Wiegand got drunk and insulted my jacket."

"And you took it off."

"I threw it right down."

"And I said I need a jacket and I did need a jacket and she said or someone said take this one."

"Wasn't me. I liked that jacket."

"It's a nice old tweed."

"Doesn't fit."

"I've worn it maybe four times."

"She gave you my jacket."

"Louise was damn nice that way."

"She's dead, you know."

"Don't start, Charlie."

"What do you hear from Helen?"

"Speaking of dead? Nothing."

"I always liked Helen."

"You should have married her," Bill said. "Would have saved me a ton of trouble."

"She wasn't the trouble. You were the trouble."

"Either way," Bill said.

Charlie's face was broad, with a healthy flush, the windburn that fills the mirror behind the yacht-club bar. Thin pale hair cut short. The custom suit. The traditional loud tie that preserved a link to collegiate fun, that reminded people he was still Charlie E. and this was still supposed to be the book business, not global war through laser technology.

"Those years seem awfully clear to me. And they keep adding on. New things come back all the time. I find myself recalling scraps of dialogue from 1955."

"Be careful, you'll end up writing this stuff down."

"If I live and live and live, boringly into my middle eighties, I wonder how much I'll be able to add to the pleasure of those memories, the intense conversations, all those endless dinners and drinks and arguments we all had. We used to come out of a bar at three a. m. and talk on a street corner because there was so much we still had to say to each other, there were arguments we'd only scratched the surface of. Writing, painting, women, jazz, politics, history, baseball, every damn thing under the sun. I never wanted to go home, Bill. And when I finally got home I couldn't sleep. The talk kept buzzing in my head."

"Eleanor Baumann."

"God yes. Fantastic woman."

"She was smarter than both of us put together."

"Crazier too, unfortunately."

"Strange-smelling breath," Bill said.

"Fantastic letters. She wrote me a hundred amazing letters."

"What did they smell like?"

"For years. I have years of letters from that woman."

Charlie sat parallel to his desk, legs extended, his hands joined behind his neck.

"I was glad to hear from you," he said. "I talked to Brita Nilsson when she got back and she wouldn't tell me anything except that she passed on my message. Took you a while to call."

"I was working."

"And it's going well?"

"We don't talk about that."

"Took you a month. I've always thought I understood precisely why you went into isolation."

"Is that what we're here to talk about?"

"You have a twisted sense of the writer's place in society. You think the writer belongs at the far margin, doing dangerous things. In Central America, writers carry guns. They have to. And this has always been your idea of the way it ought to be. The state should want to kill all writers. Every government, every group that holds power or aspires to power should feel so threatened by writers that they hunt them down, everywhere."

"I've done no dangerous things."

"No. But you've lived out the vision anyway."

"So my life is a kind of simulation."

"Not exactly. There's nothing false about it. You've actually become a hunted man."

"I see."

"And that's what we're here to talk about. There's a young man held hostage in Beirut. He's Swiss, a UN worker who was doing research on health care in the Palestinian camps. He's also a poet. Published maybe fifteen short poems in French-language journals. We know next to nothing about the group that has him. The hostage is the only proof they exist."

"What's your involvement?"

"I'm chairman of a high-minded committee on free expression. We're mainly academics and publishing people and we're just getting started and this is the crazy part of the whole business. This group takes a hostage simply because he's there, he's available, and he apparently tells them he's a poet and what is the first thing they do? They contact us. They have a fellow in Athens who calls our London office and says, There's a writer chained to a wall in a bare room in Beirut. If you want him back, maybe we can do a deal."

"Buy me lunch, Charlie. I've come all this way."

"Wait, now listen. I've been talking to the chap in Athens whenever I can reach him. On and off for weeks. Sometimes his phone rings, sometimes I hear an oceanic roar, sometimes he's there and sometimes he's not. We've finally agreed on a plan. We want to have a news conference, small and tightly controlled. Day after tomorrow in London. We talk about the captive writer. We talk about the group that has him. And then I announce that the hostage is being freed at that moment on live television in Beirut."

"Sounds pretty fucking fishy to me."

"I know. An element of mutual interest. But listen."

"Your new group gets press, their new group gets press, the young man is sprung from his basement room, the journalists get a story, so what's the harm."

"Right. And with this one success we can open up everybody's thinking. How do you create a shift in rooted attitudes and hardline positions if not through public events that show us how to imagine other possibilities? Besides, it's the only way to get this poor guy out of there. Isn't that enough, all by itself? We're obligated to do everything we can to save him and if we learn something about the people who took him, so much the better."

"Where the hell do I fit in?"

"If I hadn't run into Brita that evening, you wouldn't fit in at all. But when she said she was taking your picture, bells went off in my head. If you're willing to be photographed after all these years, why not take it one step further? Do something that will help us show who we are as an organization and how important it is for writers to take a public stand. Frankly I'm hoping to create a happy sensation. I want you to show up in London and briefly read from the poet's work, a selection of five or six poems. That's all."

"Get a Swiss writer. Won't the Swiss feel left out?"

"I can get any writer I want. But I want Bill Gray. Look, I didn't tell anyone you were coming here today. Not even my secretary. Because if I had there'd be a queue outside that door stretching like a conga line into the distance. There's an excitement that attaches to your name and it will help us put a mark on this event, force people to talk about it and think about it long after the speeches fade. I want one missing writer to read the work of another. I want the famous novelist to address the suffering of the unknown poet. I want the English-language writer to read in French and the older man to speak across the night to his young colleague in letters. Don't you see how beautifully balanced?"

Bill said nothing.

"This is the soul's own business, Bill. I think it's something you need to do. Get out of your room, away from your preoccupations. And I make these promises. There will be no advance announcement of your presence. No interviews after your appearance. Still cameras only. The conference will be kept to fifty or sixty people, all inclusive. I want a ripple effect. Word will spread, follow-up stories will appear, curiosity will build. I want our work to have a future. Your French still passable?"

Bill began searching for a cigarette. There was a silence, a period of thoughtful review. The bright badge at Bill's lapel read Visitor Access Only.

Charlie said softly, "We used to argue on street corners at three in the morning."

"It's true, Charlie."

"There were times you made me furious. All those infamous ideas of yours. I felt so sensible and petty. You were almost always wrong but there was no chance I could ever win an argument in any way that really counted."

"I think I'm supposed to be out of here soon."

"Don't you find yourself remembering? Things come flooding back with a force that's overwhelming. Christ, Bill, I'm happy to see you."

"I remember everything. Almost constantly."

"What do you hear from Sara?"

"Are we doing my former wives in chronological order?"

"What do you hear from her?"

"She's okay. She likes to stay in some kind of touch. It means a lot to her that we still talk once in a while."

"Of course I barely knew her. You had some kind of quarantine in effect."

"She was young, that's all."

"Too young. Not ready for the hopeless task of wifing a writer like you."

"They're all like me."

"Not that I was any readier. I was never sure what I was supposed to be guilty of."

"You were guilty of being my editor. A writer has complaints."

"Well, this is surely true."

"You were guilty of being in the vicinity. No matter what you said or did, I had a way of using it to my bleak advantage."

"For many happy years I've listened to writers and their brilliant kvetching. The most successful writers make the biggest com-plainers. This is so interesting to me. I wonder if the qualities that produce a top writer also account for the ingenuity and size of his complaints. Does writing come out of bitterness and rage or does it produce bitterness and rage?"

"Or both," Bill said.

"Everyone complains about the loneliness. The solitude is killing. The nights are sleepless. The days are taut with worry and pain. Bemoan, bemoan. The novelists are doing interviews. The interviewers are writing novels. The money is never enough. The acclaim is falling short. Come on, Bill, what else?"

"It must be hard for you, dealing with these wretches day after day."

"No, it's easy. I take them to a major eatery. I say, Pooh pooh pooh pooh. I say, Drinky drinky drinky. I tell them their books are doing splendidly in the chains. I tell them readers are flocking to the malls. I say, Coochy coochy coo. I recommend the roast monkfish with savoy cabbage. I tell them the reprint bidders are howling in the commodity pits. There is miniseries interest, there is audiocassette interest, the White House wants a copy for the den. I say, The publicity people are setting up tours. The Italians love the book completely. The Germans are groping for new levels of rapture. Oh my oh my oh my."

"And yourself, Charlie."

"I'm adjusting to the new style."

"How long have you been here?"

"Two years."

"Who owns this company?"

"You don't want to know."

"Give me the whole big story in one quick burst."

"It's all about limousines."

Bill leaned down to lace his shoes.

"All right. Who else is dead that I should know about?"

"Do we really want to do this?"

"Probably not."

"We're next," Charlie said.

"I'm next, you bastard."

"I want the new book, Bill."

"I'm still working."

"Whatever relationship you maintain with the old dusty lovable skinflint house."

"I'm in the final pages."

"Whatever crumbling remnants of a contract, there are ways around it."

"I'm polishing. That's what I'm doing."

"I want this book, you bastard."

They stirred in their chairs. Charlie flexed his right knee, grimacing. They got to their feet at the same time and stretched, working their shoulder muscles. Bill looked out the east window into a sky mural of bridge spans and ship cranes, factory smoke over Queens.

"You're not the hermit, the woodsman-writer, you're not the crank with a native vision. You're the hunted man. You don't write political novels or books steeped in history but you still feel the clamor at your back. This is the conflict, Bill."

"I think I got rooked on these shoes."

"You'll call me about London at home tonight. Here's my number. Or tomorrow at the absolute latest, right here, by noon if possible. I'm taking a night flight. It's something I think you need to do. Remember. One less writer in the hands of killers."

The guard was waiting in the reception area. Bill asked him where the men's room was. The guard had a key and stood by the drying machine as Bill went through his pockets looking for the tin with his mixed medications. He took precut segments of three brands of amphetamine tablets out of the tin. The colors were a blue, a white and a pink. He placed them on his tongue but when he realized the tap would not deliver water unless he kept his hand on the valve he took the pill fragments out of his mouth so he could ask the guard to turn on the cold water for him. The guard was willing to do this. Bill put the pieces back on his tongue, cupped his hands under the spout and brought the water to his mouth and drank, throwing back his head when he swallowed. The guard looked at him as if to ask whether everything had gone as planned. Bill nodded and they went out to the elevator and rode to the lobby together.

Bill stood near the entranceway, about fifty feet from the oval desk and directly in front of the register that listed the building's occupants. He could see Scott waiting just outside, standing at the far end of a shop window that jutted at an angle from the recessed entranceway, forming a border extending to the sidewalk. He carried a small package, books probably, and had his back to the shop window. Bill stepped away from the glass doors and smoked a cigarette. He stood in thought, his arms folded and his head cocked slightly left. His gaze seemed to end at the tip of the cigarette dangling from his right hand. When he peered out again, Scott was nearer the entranceway but had turned to look in the shop window. Bill walked across the front of the lobby past two sets of revolving doors. He exited by the last single door, peeling the visitor's badge from his lapel and moving out onto the sidewalk, where he joined the surge of the noontime crowd.