Strong Motion : A Novel

7

The anglicizing of Howard Chun began when he was nine years old and his family enrolled him at the Queen Victoria Academy in suburban Taipei, an outpost of the Anglican Church where the letters of the English alphabet, each holding the hand of its lowercase daughter, paraded around the third-grade classroom between the chalkboards and the color head shots of Jesus, and instruction in Chinese was elective in the upper forms. By rights Howard ought to have become his class’s Henry, since his given name was Hsing-hai, but there was a rival boy named Ho-kwang whose parents had done a better job than Howard’s mother of pre-programming their son to demand what was due him for the 30,000 Taiwanese dollars that a year in Queen Victoria’s lower school then cost. Ho-kwang grabbed Henry when the English names were being apportioned, and Hsing-hai, blinking back tears as he glared at the hoggish Henry né Ho-kwang, was given the less pleasing and regal Howard, his dispossession ordained and sealed by the Church of England before he’d even grasped what was happening.

Howard’s mother was a screen actress. She’d lived one of those colorful lives engendered by the union of war and money. She had no great acting talent, but as a girl she’d made a medium-sized splash in Beijing’s bourgeois cinema, most notably in the title role in Maple-Tree Girl, an otherwise forgettable film containing one immortal sequence in which Maple-Tree Girl is pursued by a rug merchant with immoral aims through the great Wuhan flood of 1931, eleven stupendous minutes of this chaste beauty staggering through ever deeper and dirtier water and more menacing locales, clutching her rent garment to her throat, her round eyes radiating unmodulated terror and anguish for the entire fifteen thousand frames. In the mid-forties, Miss Chun and a director old enough to be her father lived in fashionable exile in Singapore and ate up the pretty nest egg she’d set aside, making it necessary for her and her three young children to join her relatives in Taipei as soon as the Nationalists were back in the movie business. For a while she was prized by casting directors in need of “the less pretty older sister,” and she subsequently spent many lucrative years playing a wicked stepmother on a soap opera called “Hostages of Love.” At least once in every installment of “Hostages” the camera caught her baring her teeth and rolling her eyes, to remind viewers of her evil, scheming nature. In real life she was vague and good-natured and selfish, and mainly lived for eating sweets. When Howard came home from Queen Victoria on days when she wasn’t filming, he would find her sitting up in bed, chewing in slow motion on some piece of candied fruit, frowning as though the flavor were a message trickling into her head by telegraph, which she had to strain to catch each word of.

Howard was her fifth and youngest child and the only one she’d had by a man of whom nobody in the family, including her, could furnish a satisfactory account. She indicated in a general way that the man was a war hero, “a noble spirit commanding troops in the struggle for freedom,” though by the time Howard heard this, the Nationalists had been out of combat for twenty years. Occasionally he tried to picture his male parent up in the sky someplace, a marshal in the mile-thick tropical clouds above the Yellow Sea, at an altitude where hostilities hadn’t ceased, but the picture was ridiculous and he made himself think about other things.

Howard’s aunts and great-aunts were a philosophical bunch, willing to wink at the lapses in his mother’s personal morality for the sake of the income she provided. They huddled and rustled in hallways, managing income; one was never sure in whose canvas neckbag her savings passbook could be found. Howard much preferred his aunts’ realism to his mother’s reveries, and consequently grew up feeling more like a pampered houseguest than a child. He never really adolesced. After his mother died, he adopted an easy, overfamiliar manner with his elders, hanging around the kitchen with them like a middle-aged man between jobs, the kind of family friend or much-removed relative who dropped in for dinner every day for a year and then was never heard from again. Altogether, though he was the brightest child in the house and no reasonable expense was spared in educating him, he wasted vast amounts of time; and whenever an aunt descanted on the brightness of his future he would leer at her strangely, as if this Hsing-hai of whom she spoke were a pathetic figment who only he, Howard, was privileged to know had no intention of inhabiting the future she foresaw.

One day he announced that he was going to college in America. His eldest half brother was a wing captain in the Nationalist Air Force and could have opened doors for him there, but he saw no reason to donate three years of his life to the military if it could possibly be avoided. He had long legs, and his visions of manned flight focused on nip-sized whiskey bottles, swizzle sticks shaped like propellers, and roomy first-class seats.

As a matter of law, his pacifism required that when he left Taipei, at the age of eighteen, he could not return for at least seventeen years. Any regrets he had about this did not survive his first bus ride in America. One glimpse of girls in cowboy boots, one glance at a billboard-freckled hillside, one eyeful of U.S. 36 north of Denver — the Denny’ses and Arby’ses and Wendy’ses, the tall man’s cars in the big man’s lanes — sufficed to set his mind at rest: This was the place for him. He reclined in his seat to the maximum degree permitted and dozed until the bus arrived in Boulder.

Nobody could have loved life in America more than Howard Chun. Within a month of his arrival he had a MasterCard; within a semester he had a car. Everywhere he went his freshman year the Bee Gees were in the air, and he was among the first to catch the fever and the last to sweat it out. He loved to say “disco.” He loved to dance it. He loved to freeze in a strobe and stretch his arm out with his fist clenched. With regard to dating, he was a fair success; certainly he wasn’t so choosy as to often have to do without a girl. He liked fast food not because it was fast but because it tasted good. Various governments funded his education, and what ever else he needed to keep his charge accounts in trim came his way by serendipity, which often took the form of an export or an import or a trade, since he was always traveling and there were always friends and relatives willing to pay a premium on portable commodities. He regularly took $300 worth of new records and cassette tapes to the post office, wrote "‘records, tapes” on the customs slip, and six weeks later received a cashier’s check for $600 U.S. from an older cousin in Taipei. Nightlifewise, these checks were enabling and sustaining. What he was doing was perhaps not very legal, but he never got caught and so never knew for sure.

All in all he had so much fun in Colorado that it took him five years and constant threats from the financial aid office to get his B.A. But just as his financial debts never stopped him from being a sharer of pizzas and stander-to of beers and offerer of rides, so his stints in the academic doghouse in no way interfered with his role as a selfless helper of younger students (especially blond female students) and as a central cog in the geology department’s social life. In the spring of his fourth year, he had the good fortune to break both his legs on a ski slope. The senior thesis he wrote while he was on his back was fine enough to win him an aid package from Harvard.

At Harvard he decided to protect himself academically by mastering the ins and outs of the departmental computer. This way, the machine could do his work for him and he would only have to drop by the lab once a day, on his way to the squash courts or after a movie in the Square, and pick up the completed work and give the computer fresh instructions. Being a computer expert entitled him to skip the occasional class or seminar and discuss the material with his professors at times that didn’t interfere with his sleep or social schedule. The only professor who objected to this mode of operation was Howard’s adviser, who, in the spring of Howard’s third year in Cambridge, raised his voice to new heights and said he considered it improbable that Howard would pass his orals. He was also tactless enough to wonder aloud how Howard could have accomplished so much less in three years than Renée Seitchek, for example, had accomplished in two. Renée Seitchek had effortlessly passed her own orals and was expanding her second-year project into a dissertation.

Though officially a year behind him, Seitchek was Howard’s age or slightly older. Unlike him, she worked all summer and attended just one convention a year. When scientists from other institutions called the lab, they asked to speak to her even when their questions pertained to Howard’s field. She went to dinners and parties thrown by faculty and other students; she only refused to go to the dinners and parties Howard threw. During her first year, he’d frequently proposed that she play squash or have a meal with him, and she was so polite and smiling in her refusals that it had taken him a whole semester to get the message.

Whenever he stopped by the lab to check on his work (he did this standing up, leaning over a keyboard, without removing his coat or unwinding his scarf), he could see Seitchek working implacably on her projects, her arm muscles losing their youthful tone from month to month, white strands appearing in her hair, her complexion picking up the gray of the fluorescent lighting while he, who played lots of squash and frequently vacationed, remained fit and rosy-cheeked. It was Seitchek who noticed that his programs were consuming too much CPU time and swamping the array processor every morning (while he was sleeping). She raised her voice and took the same Howard-you-have-been-told-and-told-and-told tone with him as his adviser did. When further funding proved unavailable, he had to abandon his work on strong motion, though everyone agreed that his inversions of acceleration records might eventually have shown interesting results if he’d had his own private supercomputer. He was forced to beat the bushes for a new project even as Seitchek homed in on her Ph.D.

Then one summer — it was the summer before the local earthquakes started — everyone stopped liking her. Maybe it was because the last of her older friends had left the department, or maybe because her new thesis adviser, the department chairman, had gone on leave for a year, but in a matter of weeks she managed to alienate practically every student and post-doc who remained. Terry Snall reported that he’d overheard her using an offensive word in reference to his manner; the word was rumored to be “faggy.” One morning computer users found that valuable documents of theirs had been dumped in the trash for no worse sin than being part of the foot-deep drifts of paper engulfing the consoles in the system rooms. There soon followed an ugly scene when various students discovered that Seitchek was lowering the priorities of their jobs so that her programs would run fast while theirs stalled. She made one young woman cry and one immature petrologist so angry that he threw a wastebasket at the telephone and broke a table lamp. When Terry Snall stuck up for the petrologist, she became a pillar of rage. She said that 70 percent of the computer’s funding came from her adviser’s grants. She said that for three years she had personally done more than half the daily maintenance of the system, and if anyone wanted to argue with her they should begin by calling the chairman in California and see whose judgment he trusted, and ask him what he thought, whether he thought she had no right to lower the priorities, whether he thought that the petrologists who contributed nothing to the system or its upkeep had any rights here whatsoever. Howard strolled into the lab to check on his programs just as Seitchek was storming up the hall. He found Snall inciting the petrologist to lower her priority, now that she was out of the room.

His own turn came a few days later, right before he flew to London for a cousin’s wedding and a week’s vacation in Ireland. He’d stopped by the lab to set in motion a few hundred twenty-minute batch jobs to run while he was gone, and to collect his messages. Without really meaning to, he’d gotten involved with a Chinese-American engineer named Sally Go, who seemed to think he’d promised her something and burst into tears whenever he tried to find out what. He was pretty sure she thought he’d promised to marry her the following spring, but since she refused to say so, insisting instead on weeping and repeating, “You know what you promised,” he in turn felt justified in barking, “What? What? What I promise? What?” He had now managed not to see Sally for some three and a half weeks, and the daily notes she left on his desk had begun to treat themes like “cowardice” and “skunkiness” and “disgrace.” He was reading her latest, his nose scrunched up in displeasure, when he heard Seitchek across the hall in the system rooms.

“You’d think,” she said, “that in ten years he might have learned to make an r sound. I’m going to have a stroke if I hear him say ‘compyu pogam’ one more time. Compyu pogam. Compyu pogam.” Her voice was rushed and squeaky with malice. “I’m write me a compyu pogam cacawate weast squares.”

Howard’s eyes filled. He reeled out of his office blinking violently, scowling and jerking his head as if to clear it of an unwelcome hallucination. But it was no hallucination, and he knew it. Ten-plus years in America had done little to correct the crippling his language skills had suffered at the Queen Victoria Academy. The English instructor for the upper forms, Mrs. Hennahant, had taught phonetics on the principle that it was contagious, and she was curiously deaf to the immunity her students displayed. Day after day she repeated sentences like “Hilary plays the clarinet,” and then nodded sagely to the rhythm of the students’ voices as each in turn reproduced this as “Hirry prays crarenet.” After they’d all spoken she would nod and strut and try once again to hammer the hopelessly bent nail into their heads: “Hilary plays the clarinet Hilary plays the clarinet. The alimentary—canal. The alimentary — canal. Henry?”

Back from London ten days later, Howard had just enough time to stop by the lab before flying on to San Francisco, where a different cousin was getting married. He removed several cubic feet of printouts from the line-printer basket and the counter next to it. Science had grown fifty kilos richer while he was touring Dublin and County Cork, and he added another hundred jobs to the batch queue to ensure that his time in California would be similarly productive.

Seitchek was sitting in their office with her feet up on a suitcase. He asked her if there had been any phone calls for him. Her “no” didn’t faze him. Sometimes she answered no and then, when she’d reconciled herself to being interrupted, changed her mind and reeled off several interesting phone messages.

“Edward’s looking for you,” she said at length. “He heard you were back from London.”

Edward was the name of Howard’s ultra-picky adviser.

“Oh yeah,” he said. The uppermost note from Sally on his desktop said FORGET IT!

“He wants to see you on Monday,” Seitchek said. “First thing in the morning. Something new on Alan Grubb, I think.”

He beamed. “Can’t come on Monday. Going to San Francisco.” He nodded at Seitchek’s suitcase. “What about you?”

“L.A.,” she said. “I mean Orange County. I’m going to see my parents and my little. nieces. It’s my every-third-year visit.”

“Oh yeah.” He had an uneasy feeling that this meant she’d finished her thesis while he was in Ireland. “Three years a long time,” he croaked politely.

“Not long enough.”

“You wanna ride to the airport?”

“No thanks,” she said.

“You wanna ride to the Square?”

“You’re very eager to have me ride in your car, aren’t you?”

He shrugged. “I’m double-parked.”

In California, large lesions of greasy orange flame were eating up the ranges from Eureka to the San Gabriels. Even in the city the air smelled like burning houses. For the first time in the longest time, Howard was sorry to be traveling. Neither the wedding on Saturday afternoon nor the banquet the same night in Chinatown measured up to the nuptial festivities in London. For one thing, the median age of the wedding guests was less than twelve. Howard wore a zootish pinstripe suit and Dock-Sides, without socks; he was the tallest person present. Since his more important relatives had already cornered him in London and updated themselves on his brilliant career, he spent many minutes by himself, drinking beer from a can and wearing an expression of dignity and moderate discomfort as he gazed down on the wizened heads of great-great-aunts and the high-fashion hairstyles of the pre-adolescents. He was getting sick of weddings.

On Sunday morning he steered his rented car east towards the hills in which he planned to do some camping and casual inspection of fault scarps. There was a bromine-colored pall above the country he was entering, and soon he began to pass blackened fire fighters who had thrown themselves on the road embankment and were sleeping. Already the fires surrounded him on all sides. Changing his mind, he headed for the coast again, wondering if maybe the time hadn’t come to confront Alan Grubb. Grubb was a student at Scripps Institution in San Diego whose thesis was rumored to be identical in content to Howard’s own and two years closer to completion. Howard been told and told and told, by Edward and Seitchek and other stand-ins for his conscience, that he ought to give Grubb a call or try to see him at a convention, but until now he’d only blinked at their suggestions.

At a supermarket north of Santa Barbara he bought a three-pack of Latin disco tapes, and by midnight he was sleeping in his bucket seat on a side street in central San Diego. At nine the next morning he drove to Scripps. It was dead in the Labor Day sun. A watchman led him to a laboratory where, from a beachfront window, a dour post-doc told him that Alan Grubb would not be back from Italy until September 23. The moral was so plain that it might have been posted in institutional ceramic letters over the entrance to the lab: it pays to phone ahead.

Later in the day, after a productive tanning session, Howard invited himself to visit some friends of his oldest half sister who lived nearby in Linda Vista. He had decent barbecue there. As the afternoon aged, he slouched in his plastic chair and watched the ponderous plate-like migrations of the ice blocks his hosts cooled their pool with, his face almost purple from the martinis he’d been given, his spirits sinking at the thought of spending one more minute in a rented car or entering one more Wendy’s or logging one more frequent-flyer bonus mile. Burnt sesame seeds were falling from the chins of the hosts’ children. His own Mandarin small talk sounded whiny and bitchy to his Americanized ear. Compyu pogam, compyu pogam. He asked to use the telephone, and his hosts led him to it, urging him to stay in Linda Vista for as long as he liked; they hoped (indeed already planned) to take him deep-sea fishing and to Sea World.

Directory assistance had a single Seitchek listed in Newport Beach. As soon as he heard her voice, Howard began to shake his head emphatically. Seitchek, however, sounded happy to hear from him. She asked him how he was.

“Not bad,” he said. “See some friends, got some friends in Los Angeles, rent a car, not bad. It’s a vacation.”

“Are you going to come and see me?”

The invitation in her voice was so warm that he assumed there was a catch somewhere. He lunged at the curtains facing the street and looked out at a car driving by. It was just an ordinary car without any relation to him.

“No, really,” Seitchek said. “Did you call because you wanted to get together or something?”

“Sure, why not,” Howard said, as if it were entirely her idea.

The sky above Newport Beach the next afternoon was a brutal white the mere sight of which, in the single wide window of Seitchek’s, bedroom, negated the effect of the airconditioning and brought into the room the torpor of the young, full-bodied palms outside the window, and the white fire on the terra-cotta roofs beyond them, and the blazing monotony of the beaches in the distance. The walls of the room were bare except for a poster of Magic Johnson slam-dunking and a large acrylic seascape in the muted colors of upholstery. The closet door was open and on either side of it were Hefty trash bags and stacks of cardboard cartons, yellow ones, from Mayflower moving.

From the hallway Howard gave the room a courteous onceover, leaning in as if there were a velvet rope in the doorway. His neck was covered with shaving cuts and areas of abrasion whose cumulative redness gave him a guilty, crabby, immature expression. Before leaving San Diego he’d scraped himself mercilessly, Seitchek’s cordial invitation having led him to expect an introduction to her family and perhaps a sit-down lunch. When he arrived, though, the house was empty, and she did not even offer him a glass of water. She went back up the staircase which from outside the door he’d heard her descending, and let him follow. She appeared not to really recognize any of the things her eyes fell on, including Howard. She was hollow-cheeked and waif-like, as pale as a person with the flu.

“You feeling OK?” he said.

She didn’t answer. On a desk by the window stood a bottle of Nexxus shampoo and a dozen or so Hummel figurines. She pushed on the figurines until they were flush with the wall.

“I was amazed when you called,” she said suddenly, her back to him. “I was amazed because I’d been lying on the floor here,” she nodded at a space between a twin bed and a wall, “for about five hours, and I was wondering what could possibly ever make me stand up again ever in my life, and obviously the answer was, my mother knocking on the door and saying there was somebody on the phone for me. I was amazed when she told me who it was.”

She pushed on the figurines again, making sure they could not be straightened more. She turned to Howard and spoke dully. “Did you get to Scripps? Did you see Alan Grubb?”

“Yeah, no. He wasn’t there. You got a bathroom?”

“A bathroom? Do we have one?” She waited for him to leave.

At the bathroom mirror he tugged on his shirt, trying to get it to hang right, and scraped some of the dried blood off his neck. He looked out the window at the swimming pool. When he returned to the bedroom, Seitchek was kneeling near the closet, tossing paperbacks from a full carton into a less full carton. A bit of gum that had once been bright green was lodged in the tread of her left sneaker. Between the waist of her jeans and the white skin of her lower back was a space wide enough to stick an arm down. “Is it OK I parked my car in your driveway?” Howard asked.

“Sure.” She looked up from her books very briefly. “You can poke your cow anywhere you feel like.”

Poke his cow? Poke his cow? She’d said it so casually, and yet. He sat down on a twin bed and pounded on the mattress until the pounding became stylized and irrelevant. “You want to go out? Get something to eat?”

“No,” she said. “Do you?”

“Maybe. Maybe get some fish and chips. Saw a fish and chips place. You wanna go there?”

Ignoring him, she flipped books into the carton, A Separate Peace, Franny and Zooey, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, The Women’s Room, The Glass Bead Game, The Sot-Weed Factor, a stack of Vonnegut, some Frank Herbert and Robert Heinlein, Watership Down, Fear of Flying, The Sunlight Dialogues, a boxed set of Tolkien, more Salinger, some P. D. James, The Bell Jar, 1984. She straightened her back and reported:

“My mother went out specially to buy cold cuts and hard rolls and Heineken Dark before she went golfing. I told her you were coming by.”

Bending over the boxes again, she riffled the pages of The Bell Jar and then put it back in with the discards. D. T. Suzuki, The World According to Garp and Ragtime followed. She turned to Howard. “You want some books?” With a tremendous shove she slid the box across the carpeting.

He selected two Heinleins. “These OK?”

“Anything you want. Really. It’s all going out. How about some shoes? Do you have any little sisters?” She held up a pair of sandals with four-inch cork platforms, a pair of Earth Shoes, a pair of clogs with daisies tooled on the brown leather, a child-sized pair of white plastic go-go boots. She unfolded a pair of polyester bell-bottoms with giant green-and-white checks. “I’m supposed to go through life feeling good about myself, knowing there was a time I was seen in public in these?” She rooted further in a box. “My Nehru jacket. Any interest in Nehru jackets in Taiwan these days?” She stuffed the jacket into a garbage bag.

“Cold cuts,” Howard hinted.

“Yeah, pork, beef. My favorite foods.”

He made an encouraging noise, but it was clear that she’d only been toying with this lunch idea. She pushed her bangs out of her eyes and opened a new carton. “See my first-grade class?” She handed him a sheet of photos. “Here, you want these? You want about five hundred pictures of me?” She slid the whole box over to him. While he peered into it, lifting the corners of a few photographs, she unearthed further treasures — a felt Peanuts banner stating that happiness is a warm puppy; Walter Carlos albums, Three Dog Night albums, Cat Stevens albums, Janis Ian albums, Moody Blues albums, Paul Simon albums; posters by Peter Max; the Game of Life; collections of Doonesbury strips; a throw pillow upholstered with artificial zebra fur; a lamp made out of a 7UP can. She unrolled a full-length poster of Mark Spitz. “I won this,” she said. “I won this at dancing school. The thing is I actually put it up. I put it on my closet door and he looked at me for an entire year, with his seven gold medals. His eyes would follow me.”

Howard was trying to show an interest in the poster when she let it roll back up and pushed it deep into a trash bag. She released a breath and slumped, generally, staring at the floor. “I had nothing to do with any of these things coming out here. The last time I was here I spent about two days looking at all the pictures and going through my old papers and notebooks. Every single band concert program that had my name in it. All my blue ribbons and acceptance letters and every quiz I ever took and every little paper I ever wrote. Even if I throw it away, it’s like this tremendous weight of implication, which how can I ever, ever, ever escape?”

Her eyes alighted on a pale blue college exam book lying near her on the floor. She stuffed it in the trash bag. “My parents moved out here the year I went to college. They got this nice four-bedroom house, one bedroom for each of us kids and a big one for themselves. Mine’s also the guest room, isn’t it great? The decor? It’s really me. That’s the thing: it really is me. This is what I try to forget.”

Howard looked at the poster of Magic Johnson and the Hummel figurines. He bounced a little on the bed. “What you come here for if you don’t like it?”

“To throw things away.”

An insight made his eyes glitter evilly. “Thought you came to see your nieces.”

“Oh, my nieces, yes.” She aimed a sneer through the open door. “You know I’d never seen them before? Not any of them?”

“Sure.”

“Although the last time I was here I did have the pleasure of seeing a sister-in-law pregnant. You can see we’re not living in poverty. We could have afforded to bring me home. Obviously I chose not to come.”

“I don’t go home,” Howard said.

This interested her. “What, to Taiwan?”

“Can’t go. Don’t wanna go.”

She shook her head, forgetting him again. “I start thinking there’s something here for me. That I can come home, I can drink, I can eat, I can sleep, I can come here and be rich like they are, drive the BMW, see the babies, and just be it, you know, for a week. I actually start looking forward to it. I kill myself trying to finish the thesis and get on the plane, and it’s just so dumb of me to set myself up like that. My whole family’s in the living room when I get here, both my little brothers, both my little sisters-in-law, all my little nieces. I’ve finally come to view the babies. I’m very late. But not too late. The suspense must be unbearable for me. Unthinkable that I could be anything but dying to have my nieces crawling on me. And the simple fact that it’s unthinkable is enough to kill my interest on the spot.”

She smiled, seeing that Howard was flipping through her pictures. “The thing is I can’t just show pleasure and interest in the abstract. I have to talk to these girls. I have to have a relationship with them. With this two-and-a-half-year-old girl and these two babies who don’t speak a word yet. I start to say some clever thing, like I’m talking to a dog or something, but then I hear them all listening, and so I try to think of something sweet to say, and that’s even worse, I mean, it’s just a child, what do you say, what do you say? — ”

She paused, staring at the back wall of the closet, and Howard leaned to look inside it, almost believing there was someone in there listening to what she said.

“All I can hear is the incredible stupidity and lameness of the things I’m saying. And the girls know it. At least, the oldest one definitely knows it. She knows I’m not one of those women who think there’s nothing better in the world than having a child like her, and so of course she doesn’t like me, why should she. And there’s this little scene where she won’t come near me, and I hate her and she hates me, and the reason is that I’m more like her than I’m like any of the four parents, and she knows it.” She nodded positively. “I’m almost thirty years old, and I’m more like her than I am like them. And it’s one thing to be three years old and be a child, but to be me and still be so selfconscious— I could still stand it if they didn’t all so obviously pity me. They give me these pitying looks, and they actually have the gall to tell me that I can’t imagine what a grownup life is like — I can’t imagine how busy you are, and how little time to read the newspaper you have — because I don’t have children myself. As soon as I have children, I’ll understand. And what I want to say is, Let me tell you some of the things you don’t know about life and never will. But these women, it’s like they’ve been waiting all their lives for a chance to ignore a person like me, and now that they have their babies they’re allowed to. They’re allowed to be totally self-absorbed and totally rude to me, because they have children. As soon as you have children you’re allowed to close your mind. And no one can say you’re not grownup. And any kind of life that I might have, any different kind of life, any kind of life that could be envied — it’s obviously not working, because I’m still just this incredibly embarrassing adolescent. I can’t possibly compete with these twenty-four-year-old parents, all their narcissism and basic human decency. There’s just no contest.”

She fell silent, shaking her head and staring into the closet. Howard had begun to bounce on his toes with his hands in his pockets and elbows flapping. He raised a leg for balance and peered into the hall, as if he’d heard a sound. There had been no sound. When he turned back, Seitchek’s eyes were on him.

“And this is what I see,” she said bitterly. “In my free, exciting East Coast life. This is what I look up from the screen and see. This is the great alternative.”

He bounced on his toes. “Think I gotta go now,” he said. “Gotta see some people, think I better go.”

She smiled at him horribly. “What about your core cuts? Don’t you want your core cuts? Don’t you want to go poke your cow in the diveway?” She turned away in disgust. “See, I don’t even care what I say anymore. I don’t even care who’s listening.”

Howard continued to bounce, wandering and tilting like a top in the latter stages of its revolution, his vibrations jarring his hands out of his pockets. He veered close to Seitchek. When she looked up at him, he slapped her so hard that she fell back on her elbows.

They stared at each other. There was an odd, silent moment of discovery. It was as if the time of day had changed. Then Seitchek’s face twisted and she covered it with her hands. “Oh God. Oh God, I am so embarrassed.”

Already Howard was bending down, his hands in the neighborhood of her head. He patted her cheek and touched her ears and then patted her shoulders with both hands, not remorsefully but impatiently, as if he’d bumped a table and was rushing to right the stupid vases that had fallen. “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

She hit him on the jaw with her fingernails. “Get away from me! Get away from me! Go dive your cow, get away from me.” She struck at his eyes, and he had to grab her wrists and pin them cruelly as she fought to break free. She struggled beneath him, gulping air and breaking into what he thought was sobs but turned out to be something more like laughter, because things were not at all the way he’d thought they were. Her fingers were in his hair. She was pressing his face into hers, and he squeezed his eyes shut, the short lashes interlocking like the stitches a rag doll has to see with, because he was not yet ready to look at the person underneath him and believe his luck in obtaining a girl like this, in a house like this, with four large bedrooms and a thirty-foot pool and a wet bar in the living room.

8

Earthquakes aren’t a man’s murder of his pregnant wife. They’re not court-ordered desegregation. They’re not Kennedys. For several weeks after the last network news crew packed up and left Boston, you could feel the city’s disappointment with the earth. Obviously, no one had been eager to be personally crushed by falling timbers or to see their possessions go up in flames, but for a few days in the spring Nature had toyed with the city’s expectations, and people had rapidly developed covert appetites for televised images of bodies under sheets of polyethylene, for the carnival-ride sensation of being tossed around the living room, for a Californian experience, for major numbers. A hundred dead would really have been something. A thousand dead: historic. But the earth had reneged on its promises, mutely refusing to reduce buildings to exciting, photogenic messes; and the death count never made it off the ground. For all the impact the numbers had on local viscera, the thirty-seven earthquake-related injuries could have been caused by boring car accidents, the $100 million of property loss by neglected maintenance, and Rita Kernaghan’s death by a boring heart attack. Journalistic aftershocks dwindled to an article or two per week. Local reporters still scoured Essex County in search of lives ruined by the disaster, but, to their dismay, they couldn’t find a single one. Homeowners were repairing walls and ceilings. Questionable structures were being inspected and reopened. It was all so morally neutral, so sensible.

Fortunately for everyone, the Red Sox began June by sweeping a series with the Yankees at Fenway and carrying a streak of seven wins on a trip to the American League West. No sane person believed the Sox would actually end up winning their division, but at the moment they could hardly be said to be losing ground, and what was one supposed to do? Boo in advance? Later in the summer there would be plenty of opportunities to revive the old hatred and envy — Bostonians’ hearts would pound and their throats would tighten at the very thought of baseball’s winners, their soporifically effective pitching staffs, the arrogant baby-cheeked sluggers whom God unbelievably permitted to hit homer after homer, and the horrible fair-weather fans, cheap euphoria smeared across their faces like the juice of sex and peaches, who thought that this was what baseball was about, that it was about winning and winning handily — but as long as the streak lasted, the city was full of heathen haves blissfully oblivious to the have-nots of the sports world, and in the absence of further tremors, the fear of death and personal injury had retreated to its rightful place, far to the rear of people’s minds.

This wasn’t to say that Essex County had entirely stopped shivering. Portable seismographs installed cooperatively by Boston College, the USGS, and Weston Geophysical were registering as many as twenty shocks per day in the vicinity of Peabody, and the occasional blip near Ipswich. The Richter magnitudes seldom exceeded 3.0, however, and although no two scientists agreed about exactly what was going on, the activity was generally taken to represent aftershocks to the events of April and May. Granted, aftershocks to moderate earthquakes usually tail off quickly, and granted, the aftershocks in Peabody weren’t doing this, but in view of the unusually strong foreshocks to the May 10 events, Larry Axelrod and other seismologists theorized that the rupture of rock beneath Peabody had for some reason been “unclean.” As Axelrod explained it to the Globe, the chicken with its head neatly lopped off convulses for a moment but soon lies still, while the chicken with a mangled neck can go on thrashing for an hour, though ever more feebly.

Almost no one in seismology would absolutely guarantee that Boston had seen the last of strong motion. The sole exception was Mass Geostudy, a private research venture sponsored by the Army Corps of Engineers and the nuclear power industry. Overlooked in news articles, Mass Geostudy wrote a testy letter to the Globe and informed readers that “there is zero probability of greater Boston experiencing an earthquake as severe as the May 10 temblors in the next 85—120 years.” Many other scientists agreed that the stress release on May 10 had indeed diminished the risk of further major earthquakes, but a substantial minority, including the venerable Axelrod, continued to warn that “it ain’t over till it’s over.” They pointed to the unusual aftershock pattern and to evidence of deep, fault-like structures in the dozen miles separating Ipswich and Peabody. While there was no reason to expect a rupture over the entire twelve miles (this would be a major earthquake), a smaller rupture couldn’t be ruled out either.

The phrase of the hour, applied willy-nilly to all things geophysical in the eastern United States, was “not well understood.”

Rather than spend a billion dollars making Massachusetts as catastrophe-resistant as California, the state legislature chose to allocate a million dollars for immediate seismological research. (Even a million seemed like a lot to a state with serious budget troubles.) Much of the money went to Boston College to fund a full-scale seismic mapping of Essex County. Exposed faults were inspected for fresh offsets (none was found), and Vibroseis equipment was put to work. Students drove a truck-mounted machine to selected sites and surrounded it with a grid of listening devices called Geophones. At carefully timed moments, the machine chirped into the earth, and from the underground refractions and reflections and dilations of the chirps, as recorded on the Geophones, buried structures could be mapped in much the same way as a fetus is mapped by ultrasound.

Early results of Vibroseis mapping revealed a tangle of discontinuities crisscrossing Essex County and extending to greater depths than had previously been supposed. Ambiguity escalated as seismologists tried to correlate earthquake hypocenters with mapped structures. The new data lent support to a variety of competing models. It also gave rise to new models that contradicted not only each other but all the earlier models.

On June 7, a BC student planting a Geophone in a wooded lot in Topsfield discovered the naked body of a Danvers teenager who had been missing for a month, and the Red Sox edged Seattle in ten innings.

The rest of the state money was being spent on studies in short-term earthquake prediction, organized by scholars from as far away as California. One group planted sensors in the bedrock to measure changes in its electrical conductivity. Another was monitoring magnetic fields and listening for extremely low-frequency radio waves. Four independent groups were studying less glamorous but equally well established indicators: changes in the depth and clarity of water in wells, release of methane and other gases from deep holes, oddities in animal behavior, and foreshock-like clusters of tremors.

A mini-scandal broke when Channel 4 learned that the state had given a Michigan post-doc $15,000 to import a tank of Japanese catfish and observe them in a darkened motel room outside Salem. Several studies had indicated that this species of catfish became upset on the eve of earthquakes, but the Michigan postdoc was shy and made a poor impression on camera. The Channel 4 reporter, Penny Spanghorn, called the experiment “perhaps the ultimate rip-off.”

By and large, the media and the public assumed that the research groups would issue urgent warnings if a cruncher appeared imminent; that this was what they’d come to Boston for. The groups themselves had no such plans. They were scientists and had come to gather information and advance their understanding of the earth. They knew, in any case, that the governor would never take the economically disruptive step of issuing an all-out warning unless most of the prediction methods agreed that a major shock was due. In the past, the methods had specifically not agreed about the timing, severity, and location of major earthquakes. This was why the methods were still being tested. When the groups said so, however, the public took it as modesty and continued to assume that somehow, should a disaster loom, a warning would be issued.

Aside from the catfish story, press coverage of the prediction efforts was enthusiastic, and the experimental installations became highly sought after by local young people. A report of muddied water in a pair of wells in Beverly was later retracted when a teenager confessed to having dumped dirt and gravel into them “as a prank.” Soon after this, a far-flung earful of Somerville youth was arrested by Salem police while “box-bashing” in a lonely place. The youths had thought it would be fun to confuse a portable seismograph by jumping on the ground and simulating tremors, but it was not much fun, and so they attacked the seismograph with baseball bats.

In the first week of June every household in eastern Massachusetts received a brochure called tremor tips. The brochure, which had been printed in California, was illustrated with palm trees and Mission Style houses and recommended that children crouch under their desks at school, that downed electrical wires be avoided, that gas leaks be reported pronto, and that supplies of canned food and bottled water have been purchased well in advance. Supermarkets and discount stores responded with special Quake Survival displays, and gun dealers throughout the region reported a jump in sales.

Insurance companies had resumed sales of earthquake insurance, although they freely admitted that with rates beginning at $30 per $1,000 of coverage, almost no one was buying. Con artists working door-to-door did brisk business in bogus discount policies, however. The stock of companies and banks with large capital investments in the Boston area remained depressed, as did the market for real estate in Essex County and in low-lying areas farther south, including Back Bay and much of Cambridge. (Buildings on filled marshes and other reclaimed land were particularly susceptible to seismic shaking.) Wealthy municipalities were afraid of sparking an all-out panic by sponsoring earthquake drills; poor communities had other worries; and so no drills were held.

The Reverend Philip Stites quietly observed in a broadcast editorial on WSNE that he didn’t think God was done with the Commonwealth, nor would He be until the last abortion clinic in the state had closed its doors. Stites went on to condemn as un-Christian the recent bombings of facilities in Lowell, saying that it was for God, not man, to mete out punishment. As of June 8, fifty-eight members of Stites’s Church of Action in Christ were sitting in Boston and Cambridge jail cells. They had declined to post bail after their arrest for blocking entrances to various clinics. Cartoonists and columnists portrayed Stites as a wealthy dandy unwilling to soil his hands by getting himself arrested with his troops; they made fun of his highly visible wooings of local conservatives; they detected “an odor of hypocrisy” in everything he did.

On the other side of the fence, a coalition of local pro-choice groups was promising to flood Boston Common with a hundred thousand protesters during a rally on July 14. One of the organizers had written to Renée for permission to include her in a list of public figures supporting the rally. Renée had called the organizer and asked her, “Why do you want me on your list?”

“You’re the geologist. You were on TV.”

“A lot of people were on TV.”

“Are you saying you don’t want to be on the list?”

“No, no, go ahead. Put me on it.”

“All right.” The organizer had sounded annoyed. “We’ll put you on it.”

The regional administrative offices of the Environmental Protection Agency were on the eighth floor of a prewar granite block across from the Federal Courthouse, in the old part of downtown where if you studied the tops of the buildings and then looked at the street again you expected to see all the men wearing fedoras and dark narrow ties and Buddy Holly-style glasses.

Outside the courthouse, six female protesters in knitted mittens had wound Saran Wrap around their photographs of fetuses. Sheets of cold water were sliding over themselves on the slopes leading down into the combat zone, rain streaking the city’s gray-green windows and soaking the handcards advertising sex by telephone that were lodged under every wiper blade that wasn’t moving. It was a trick Renée had seen New England summers play many times before: a high of 53° today and more of the same expected on the weekend.

The hard plastic chairs in the vestibule of the EPA offices discouraged sitting. Some were grouped in a half circle that suggested clubbiness even though they were empty; the rest stood isolated at odd angles to the walls. When the deputy regional administrator, Susan Carver, came out to meet her, Renée left rain marks on the floor by the notice of equal employment opportunity she’d been reading.

Carver was a tall and heavy person with fleshy white cheeks and thick eyebrows. Her glasses had round cranberry-colored rims and lenses soaped by the federal lighting. She was like a brainy white rabbit stuffed into a size 14 suit. She was leading Renée back to her office when a balled-up piece of paper sailed out of an open door and glanced off her massive shoulder. She caught it on the fly, with surprising deftness, and stopped in the doorway. Four middle-aged male administrators wearing colors such as rust brown and silver-blue looked up from their desks with a guilt that was more like a bated delight. Wordlessly, Carver tossed the ball of paper through an orange hoop attached to the wall and returned to Renée while the men cheered.

“You wanted to talk to me about Sweeting-Aldren.”

“Yes.”

“This is in regard to the earthquakes in Peabody.”

“Yes.”

Obviously pleased with herself for making the basket, Carver sat down behind her desk and joined her white paws on the desk top, stretching the pinstripes at her elbows and shoulders. On the windowsill behind her stood framed photographs of her family: a chunky teenaged girl with a small nose and a flat, eager face who looked like she was good at computers, a doughy boy of eight or ten, and a skinny, grinning husband. There was a water pistol, a.38 revolver, by her Rolodex. With an amused maternal wariness, as if the company were another of her children, she said, “What has Sweeting-Aldren done, in your opinion?”

Renée reached for the shoulder bag that held her documents but slowly drew her hand back without having touched it. “There’s some evidence,” she said, “that they’ve been pumping liquids down a very deep well for a number of years, if not decades, and that they may have induced the earthquakes we’ve seen in Peabody.”

Carver’s eyebrows rose and fell almost imperceptibly. “Go on.”

Renée opened her bag and gave a poised and cautious presentation. She didn’t look up from her documents until she’d finished. Carver was wearing a faint, abstracted smile, as if continuing to savor the basket she’d made.

“Let me see if I’ve understood your chronology,” she said. “First Sweeting-Aldren begins to drill a deep well somewhere, in the late sixties. Then in 1987 there’s a swarm of small earthquakes near Peabody that lasts three months—”

“And tails off with unusual abruptness.”

“And tails off rapidly. Then there’s a spill in Peabody, not particularly large — at most a couple of years’ worth of undumpable effluents. And finally, not long after the spill is discovered, the Peabody earthquakes start up again, apparently in connection with the Ipswich earthquakes but actually not, according to you.”

“Not just me. Nobody in seismology has a persuasive model for linking Ipswich and Peabody.”

Carver nodded. She’d picked up her water pistol and was nibbling on the sight blade. “I understand. Although the impression I get is that there’s a lot that seismologists don’t know about what makes earthquakes happen when and where they do, especially earthquakes on the east coast.”

“A model of induced seismicity explains the Peabody swarm perfectly.”

“Yes, I understand. Although again it all depends on your assumption that a hole was actually drilled and drilled near Peabody. Since there may be other ‘models’ that are equally persuasive.”

“Such as?”

Carver shrugged. “Maybe a natural source of earthquakes in Peabody, and then a ‘model’ of cyclical demand that explains April’s spill there. You see, I’m not sure how well you understand the chemical industry. Short-term stockpiling of both raw materials and unprocessed wastes is very commonplace. Sweeting-Aldren stores incinerable wastes until demand improves for the products they make in their high-temperature reactors. And in the meantime, last month, an earthquake ruptured one of their storage tanks.”

Renée nodded. She’d expected — in fact, hoped — that Carver would play devil’s advocate. “Can I ask if you guys, the EPA, have actually been inside the Peabody plant to make sure they’re treating all these wastes the way they say they are?”

“Certainly you may ask. The answer is no. We have not been lowering probes into their tanks. We have not been watchdogging their internal processes. We have neither the staff nor the legal right to go checking every pipe and every valve in every factory in America.”

“Although of course this is kind of a suspicious case.”

“Ah, yes. A suspicious case.” Carver pushed on the arms of her chair and with considerable exertion repositioned herself. “Let me explain something to you, Renée. As a survivor of the eighties who’s still working for EPA. The reason we’re doing a minimally acceptable job of protecting this country’s environment is that we’re realistic, and we have priorities. This is the real world we’re dealing with, and in the real world you can’t acid-test every conceivable hypothesis. You have to focus on what’s coming out of the drainpipes and the smokestacks, and that means taking some things on faith occasionally. If a company like Sweeting-Aldren isn’t polluting the air or water—”

“Until the spill last month.”

Carver smiled. The smile meant: Will you let me finish? “Sweeting-Aldren is a responsibly managed company. Maybe if I had nobody else to worry about, I might go in there and doublecheck all this stuff. But I’m dealing with companies pouring half a ton of cadmium and mercury salts per hour into estuaries. I’m dealing with waste-management contractors taking oil with PCB levels in the parts per thousand and toluene and vinyl chloride levels in the parts per ten and dumping them in fifty-year-old tanks beneath abandoned gas stations. I’m dealing with landfills that are on the brink of contaminating groundwater pretty much statewide from here to Springfield. I’m dealing with companies who”—Carver counted the strikes on her fingertips—“ignore our regulations, ignore the fines we levy, ignore court orders, and finally go bankrupt and leave behind hundred-acre sites contaminated for eternity. On the other side we have a public prone to panic, and presidents who make it a point of pride every couple of years not to cut our funding any further.”

“But the spill in Peabody.”

“There were PCBs in it. I can hear you. And the company misled the public for a couple of days, not that Wall Street didn’t see right through it. Then again, it’s an extremely human response to deny something when you’re embarrassed. Hi, Stan.” Carver aimed her pistol at the doorway, where a man in a pea-green blazer was holding a manila folder. “I’ll be with you in a few minutes.”

Renée frowned. A few minutes?

“This hole of yours,” Carver said. “If it was drilled at all, it was supposedly drilled outside Hereford, Massachusetts. In order to make your ‘model’ fit, haven’t you more or less arbitrarily moved a five-mile-deep hole a hundred fifty miles east?”

“Eastern Massachusetts is what it says in Nature. Eastern Massachusetts.”

“Do you have any other references on that?”

“Not — yet.”

“And Nature is a. British publication. You know, I hate to say this, but I’m not particularly comfortable with a theory that depends on a British magazine editor’s grasp of American geography.”

Renée’s eyes narrowed.

“Other objections, off the top of my head. Why spend umpteen million dollars on a deep oil well in 1969? Do you know what a barrel of oil cost back then?”

“Yes. I do know. But I can’t believe there wasn’t anybody in America able to see 1973 coming. They had huge profits. They were probably glad to take the write-off.”

“You don’t make money on a write-off. And wouldn’t a company with so much foresight know about induced seismicity too? Anybody who opens an elementary seismology textbook must know about it. But according to you, the earthquakes in 1987 took them by surprise.”

“I assume they’d looked at the Denver study,” Renée said. “In Denver there was some history of earthquakes and the largest induced event was a magnitude 4.6. In Peabody there was no history of earthquakes and no reason to expect any. Plus they were pumping at a small fraction of the rate the Army pumped in Denver. And there’s something else, actually, that I forgot to mention, which is that the operations vice president of Sweeting-Aldren has his house insured against earthquake damage.”

Carver touched the muzzle of her pistol to her lips, as if blowing smoke off it. She smiled at Renée serenely. Was it possible she’d been corrupted by Sweeting-Aldren? Renée dismissed the idea. She could see that the problem here was that Carver simply didn’t like her.

“I take it you’re not a homeowner,” Carver said.

“That’s right. I’m not a homeowner.”

“Nothing wrong with that, of course. However, it may be that you don’t quite understand how much the people who do own homes are concerned about losing them. And that people who’ve been in Boston all their lives might remember the earthquakes in the forties and fifties. Who is that — Dave Stoorhuys?”

She made him sound like somebody she drank beer with. “Yes.”

Carver nodded. “Caution. Caution is the only word for him. Have you met him?”

“I know his son.”

“Yes, but you see I actually deal with these companies on a daily basis. And strange as it may sound, there happen to be some very decent and well-intentioned people in the industry. In fact I’ve seen as much or more self-interest and self-promotion on the academic side of the fence as I’ve seen on the commercial side. Is this what you wanted to hear? Obviously not. But I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you I think you’re barking up the wrong tree with Dave Stoorhuys and Sweeting-Aldren.”

“What if I found the pumping site myself and brought you pictures?”

“You want permission to spy and trespass? You want Mommy’s approval?” Carver’s eyes glittered. “I suppose if you showed me something more solid than an academic conjecture, I’d have somebody check it out. Although frankly there are a whole lot worse things a company can do with those chemicals than pump them four miles underneath the water table.”

“What if they’d come to you for a license to pump their waste underground. Would you have given it to them?”

“If you’re talking about legal liability for earthquake damage, you should be talking to somebody else.”

“Like who.”

“The press always loves a good story.” Carver looked at her watch. She stood up. “I’ve noticed they’re pretty keen on you too.”

“This is your responsibility,” Renée said. “If they are pumping, the only thing they’re violating is EPA regulations. I think somebody should at least go and see if they have a well on their property. And if they do, it should be seized before they have a chance to shut it down.”

“I’ll take a look at our records.” Carver was walking to the door now, forcing her visitor to stand up. Every government official knows that people who complain to agencies invariably consider themselves special, and that they become flustered when they finally realize they don’t seem special to the agency. A proud and self-conscious supplicant like Renée was particularly easy to fluster and get rid of. It was therefore a specific meanness on Carver’s part that she took the time to add: “I have to tell you, I’ve heard it all before. I’m afraid you’re tripping on a romance, a little bit.”

“What?”

“You know — a trip. How old are you?”

“I know what the word means.”

“We had an entomologist in here two months ago telling us there were dioxins in a spray the state fights gypsy moths with. He had a nice theory too. The only problem is there aren’t any dioxins in the spray. Last year another academic, from Harvard — Thetford? oceanographer? — talking about mercury on the continental shelf. Malfeasance and conspiracy. I guess I used to think that way myself, a long, long time ago. It’s very satisfying, very romantic. But 99.9 percent of the time it’s not the way the world really works. You might keep that in mind.”

In the street again, Renée held her fold-up umbrella right below its ribs and used her other hand to keep her shoulder bag from slipping off her shoulder as the wind blew and the rain fell. Naturally her bladder was overfull. People dodged irrationally in and out of doors. A young black man loitering at the bottom of the subway stairs pointed at the water on his pants and demanded: “What do you say?”

She skittered sideways.

He pursued her. “What do you say? You say excuse me. You say excuse me, please.”

“Excuse me,” she said.

“Excuse me, please. I’m sorry I splashed water on you. I’m sorry I got your pants wet.”

“I’m sorry I splashed water on you.”

“Thank you,” he shouted after her, over the turnstiles. “Thank you for your apology.”

This exchange echoed in her head until a train came.

A Globe had exploded in her car, covering the floor and collecting under seats. On the front page a headline stamped with a wet footprint read: second abortion clinic bombed in lowell.

At Central Square the local Angry Woman, driven underground by the weather, was cursing the motherfucking men who ruled the world. An old Chinese man carrying two goldfish in a Baggie full of water sat down next to Renée, who smiled at him kindly. “Rain rain rain,” he said.

“Rain rain rain, yeah.”

This exchange echoed in her head all the way to Harvard.

The ground floor of Hoffman Lab was quiet, the large white screens in the Sun room silently spitting up little statements in black as programs ran for students and post-docs eating a late lunch in the Square, the smaller brown screens in the system rooms awaiting log-ons or scrolling in bright green. Renée went straight from the women’s bathroom to a brown screen. While she worked, the phone on the radiator rang itself down several times. Even infrequent users of the computer had been informed by now that human life begins at conception. Nobody answered anymore, but the phone kept ringing.

Towards three o’clock Howard Chun and a Pekingese friend of his returned from lunch, exhaling garlic. Howard in his dripping nylon parka parked himself behind a Tectronix plotter. Renée had last seen him sprawled across her bed, snoring brokenly, when she left her apartment after breakfast.

“Why is this machine so slow,” she said to her screen.

“Disk B’s full,” said the Pekingese, furrowing his broad and remarkably expressive forehead. He was a good scientist and Renée liked him.

“Disk B is full. I see. Disk B that I spent half a night backing up four days ago.”

She entered the Operator directory, became SUPERUSER, and saw that in less than a week, users by the name of TERRY, TS, TBS, NBD1, and NBD2 had backed 375 megabytes onto Disk B and another 65 megabytes onto Disk A. All of these users were Terry Snall. His thesis topic was Non-Brittle Deformation. NBD1, an account feared and hated in the system rooms, single-handedly occupied 261 megabytes; this was four times the space taken up by any other student’s files; it was nearly half a disk.

SUPERUSER became SUPEROP. “Do you know what Terry did?” she said.

In the Tectronix corner, behind partitions, Howard’s keyboard clicked obliviously. The room was becoming murky with garlic vapors. SUPEROP addressed the Pekingese. “He brought back every single one of his program files. There are seventy megabytes of program files on this disk. It’s taking me twenty minutes to run a one-minute program and he has seventy megabytes of program files.”

“Cancel ’em,” the Pekingese recommended.

“I’m going to do just that.”

Program files were needed only when a program was actually being run, and could be re-created in minutes. SUPEROP zapped every one of Terry’s.

“Oh, much better,” the Pekingese said.

“Eight megabytes free on a 600-meg disk. Doesn’t he know? Doesn’t he understand?”

Howard stepped out of his corner and moved from console to console, logging onto each. Even when he was working for just a few minutes he didn’t feel comfortable if he wasn’t logged on from at least three or four. Some late nights he logged on from ten of them. All but the one he was using automatically went dim to save wear on the pixels.

In a new log-on announcement, SUPEROP stressed that files not needed immediately should not be backed onto the disk. Everyone knew who wrote these announcements, so she didn’t sign it. She became RS again.

“You get your message?” the Pekingese asked her.

“Somebody actually took a message for me?”

“Charles.”

“Oh.”

Across the hall, beneath her shoulder bag and damp jean jacket, she found a number and the message: mrs. Holland called. YOU MAY CALL COLLECT.

She dropped the message in the trash and returned to her console. The Pekingese had left the room. “Howard?” she said.

A parka rustled, but Howard didn’t answer. Behind the partition, she found him slouching and staring at a bright green seismic spectrum, his ankles crossed on a bed of cables, the keyboard on his lap.

“Do you still know somebody with a pilot’s license?” she said.

He shook his head and worked the keyboard.

“Didn’t you have a friend who used to take you up?”

A new spectrum blossomed on the screen. He shook his head. Renée frowned. “Are you mad at me?”

He shook his head.

She threw a cautious glance through the hall doorway. “Come on,” she whispered. “Don’t be mad at me. I really need you not to be mad at me.”

He blinked at the screen, resolutely ignoring her. With another glance into the hall, she knelt and put her hands on his chest. “Come on. Please. Don’t be mad at me now. Please.”

He tried to roll his chair away from her.

She took his hand and put her cheek against his chest. It was the first time she’d ever touched him inside the lab, and as soon as she did it she heard a rustle of clothing right behind her. A sense of inevitability enveloped her like dread as she turned and saw Terry Snall spinning around and heading back up the hallway.

She jumped to her feet. “Shit!” She began to follow Terry but came back to the Tectronix. “Shit! Shit!” She pulled on her hair. “What did I do to you?”

Howard typed casually on his keyboard.

“Oh God, this is going to finish me. This is really going to push me over.” She crouched by Howard again. “Just tell me what I did to you.”

He made a hideous face, all gums and stretched nostrils. “What I do to you?” he mocked. “What I do to you? What I do to you?”

“I let you sleep with me,” she whispered fiercely. “I let you sleep with me a lot.”

“I let you seep with me I let you seep with me.”

She stared at him, mouth trembling.

“Rouis, Rouis,” he said. “A rill bit pinch me hit me hit me.”

“Oh God.” She backed away from him and looked for a place to run but there was no place. Rounding the corner into the hall, she almost collided with Charles, one of the department secretaries. He was tall and balding and was writing a novel in his off hours. He wore suspenders instead of belts. “Melanie Holland,” he said. “She’s on the phone again.”

“Tell her I’m gone.”

“She wants to know where she can reach you.”

“Tell her to try me at home.”

“She already has been.”

“Tell her I’m out of town.”

“Oh, Renée.” Charles shook his head. “I’m not paid to lie for people. If you don’t want to talk to her, the honest thing is to tell her that. Then she won’t keep calling here and interrupting me and I won’t have to keep coming down two flights of stairs and bothering you.”

Renée pointed at the street door. “I’m leaving.”

“Oh, Renée. I advise you not to. Not if you ever want to use my copier again or have me take messages from other institutions or borrow my paper cutter. Are you interested in ever borrowing my paper cutter again?”

Without a word, she stalked up the hall towards the stairwell. “Don’t think I’m blackmailing you,” Charles said, following her. “This is a matter of courtesy and professionalism. I let you use my paper cutter as a courtesy. I’m not required to let you use it, you know.”

Her voice reverberated in the concrete-clad stairwell. “You are so.”

He followed her up the stairs. “You used to be so courteous, Renée. You used to be the most courteous person in this building. Do you know how many clicks I’ve given you on the copy counter? The copy counter that’s for department business only? Renée? Are you listening to me? Sixty-five hundred clicks!”

She stepped into the office of the absent department chairman and closed the door in Charles’s face. The office was dark and cool and agreeably odorless. She always enjoyed being here. The shelves held bound volumes of all the major journals dating back to the forties. There were file cabinets bursting with reprints, softcover proposals for interesting and useful multinational research initiatives, whole unbroken packages of colored pens and other scarce office supplies. In a few years she too would have an office like this, and some young fool like herself would run a computer system for her, and people would have to include her whenever major seismological doings were discussed. It would matter that she’d studied with X, Y and Z at Harvard — a university which, as she always remembered when she entered this office, could boast of a small but outstanding program in geophysics. Bad memories of the system rooms would fade. Trees would sway outside her window.

“Renée? Melanie Holland. Listen, I don’t want to take up your time while you’re at work, but I’m very interested in talking to you again and I wonder if you’d let me take you to lunch tomorrow. It being a Saturday. There’s a lovely restaurant in the Four Seasons, I’d love to take you there.”

“What for?” Renée said rudely. “I mean — that’s very nice of you.”

“Wonderful. You’ll come.”

“No. No, I won’t come. I mean, I can’t.”

“Oh, well, I’m not wedded to the day and hour, if you had other plans. We could brunch on Sunday, have dinner tomorrow night. Tonight even. It would be so nice if you would.”

“What is it that you want to talk to me about?”

“Everything and nothing. I think it would be very good for both of us to get acquainted. I’m calling you as a friend. Please have lunch with me, Renée.”

She frowned so hard it hurt. “What for?”

“Oh, really, let’s not be silly. Can I take you to lunch tomorrow or can’t I? Yes or no. It would mean a great deal to me. Tell me one good reason why you shouldn’t let me.”

Melanie could make her voice beautiful when she chose. It was like a brook in a valley running in and out of the sunshine and pooling among willows, the clear kind of brook you want to plunge your hands into and drink from and forget about the deer carcasses and feedlots upstream, which may not even be there anyway.

“Let me get back to you,” Renée said.

“I know. You’re busy busy busy. Do I need to be blunt? There is no one in the world more interested in seeing you than I am. No one in the world. Please come to lunch with me.”

Renée wandered dizzily around the chairman’s office, gripping the telephone. “Won’t you tell me what this is about?”

“Tomorrow. Is twelve-thirty fine with you? The restaurant’s called Aujourd’hui.”

Beyond thin lines of rain joining and breaking apart and descending on the window, a knot of Japanese tourists beneath identical umbrellas approached the entrance to the Peabody Museum, whose gorgeous collection of glass flowers, created a hundred years earlier by German glassblowers to reveal the structure and variety of the world’s flora to Harvard botany students, was the most popular tourist attraction in Cambridge. Renée had never seen it. The Japanese umbrellas stooped to the level of the sign on the museum door; rotating uncertainly, they conferred and scattered. Others surged up to the sign, which said that owing to recent earthquake damage the glass flowers were in storage until a safer means of displaying them could be found. To console themselves, the Japanese photographed one another by the sign, the white of their flashes lighting the wet asphalt and nearer trees. Two lung-shaped patches of breath and above them a fainter fog outline of a forehead stayed on the chairman’s window for several minutes after Renée had gone back downstairs.

For three semesters she’d shared her apartment with a seismologist named Claudia Guarducci, a thin, pouty, bored, and very smart Roman doing postdoctoral work for pay at Harvard. They cooked together, saw movies together, deplored colleagues together, accepted or declined dinner invitations together. Claudia bought a motorcycle and gave Renée rides to work on it. They never shared secrets.

When Claudia returned to Italy they kept in touch with laconic postcards. Missing the smell of her Merit Ultra Lights, Renée went out of her way to stand near smokers. She inquired about postdocs in Rome, thinking that if she went there she could call up Claudia and mention, merely mention, her current whereabouts. The future she wanted would begin in good earnest if she could live in Italy and be best friends with a Roman woman.

In hindsight it would seem as if all she ever did in life was lay foundations for future towers of shame and self-hatred. Some trusting, autonomous part of herself kept constructing uncool mid-western dreams: European evenings with Claudia Guarducci; domestic tranquillity with Louis Holland; a big pat on the back from the EPA and the citizens of Boston.

She was finishing her thesis when Claudia informed her, in a two-line postcard, that she had married her old boyfriend at the Istituto Nazionale.

Renée was amazed by how betrayed she felt. She couldn’t bring herself to write to Claudia again, and the months went by and Claudia didn’t write either. What hurt was knowing that she wasn’t jealous of the man for having Claudia but of Claudia for having a man. This, and knowing what a difference it made that she was female.

She was sure that if it had been a case of Renée and Claudio, good heterosexual friends, Renée wouldn’t have felt so betrayed. Men who’d gotten married or found girlfriends didn’t drift away from their single male friends, at least not as often as women did. Obviously, men were nobler spirits than women. It came of belonging to the default gender. If both men and women considered their relationships with men inviolable, then men inevitably remained true to their gender while women, equally inevitably, betrayed their own. Men’s moral superiority was structurally guaranteed.

However, Renée did not wish she were a man.

A man, if he was your college boyfriend, still “wanted to be friends with” you after he’d dumped you. His male faith in friendship was so unshakable, in fact, that he believed that you would welcome an invitation to his wedding.

A man, if he was your younger brother, fresh out of college, was realistic at the dinner table about how “women are simply not identical to men, they have different priorities,” speaking glibly and self-servingly this truth that it had taken you thirty years to learn, bolstered in his arrogance by a twenty-three-year-old wife who had “decided not to put off having children” and so considered herself more mature than you.

A man was a creature who thought it was a sympathetic portrayal of himself to say, “I love women.”

A man could not admit to a woman that he was wrong and remain a man. He would sooner cry and abase himself and beg forgiveness like a baby than admit to error as a man.

A man took for granted a woman’s understanding of his penis but congratulated himself for understanding the clitoris and its importance. He smiled inwardly at his superiority to all the men, past and present, who had not penetrated this female secret. He felt proud of his enlightenment and goodness when he quizzed a woman about whether she had come. The perfect gift for the man who had everything was a quarter-ounce bottle of feminism.

Inescapably immersed in a history made by people of his own sex, a man could never be as selfconscious as a woman: could never feel as much shame. Even a thoughtful man lacked a radical appreciation of how it was only luck, a pairing of X and Y, that had made his life straightforward. At some level he would always still believe that the ease of his life implied a moral superiority; this belief made him ridiculous.

Women knew their husbands were ridiculous. Therefore married women, especially ones with children, could be friends with each other. The shame of being wedded to a blunt instrument, a lovable but limited creature, and of bearing his children and enduring his superiority, was eased by intercourse with other women similarly burdened or with women whose most fervent wish was to be so burdened.

Renée, however, wasn’t married. She also believed that even if she were, the sorority of childbearers wouldn’t welcome her. It seemed to her that the sorority’s most successful members — professional women still managing to raise families — developed such steel-clad egos in coping with their lives that they had little imagination to spare for a complicated case like her. Mothers with less demanding jobs were defensive and tended to fear and despise her, because of her ambition. Mothers with no jobs at all attracted her — she felt, in fact, a particular tenderness towards unselfconscious women — but she could not be friends with them either, because they didn’t understand her, and to the extent that they did begin to understand her, they would be confused and hurt by her refusal to be like them.

Friendless, Renée saw stereotypes everywhere she looked. Her head was full of images of women, and she hated most the ones she most resembled.

The well-spoken and socially concerned and humorless and defensive female academic.

The thin, vulnerable, self-absorbed, vaguely haunted-looking single woman who is either a spiritual seeker or simply a loser and probably the latter.

The unsatisfied thirty-year-old professional female who sees the error of her ways and begins to crave a baby.

The boring scientist who lives in a computer room but considers herself less boring than others like her because ten years ago she went to Clash concerts.

The girl who, not having many female friends, grew up reading science fiction and science and popular philosophy and who, as a woman, is still so romantic as to believe in things like corporate malfeasance and heroes who make a difference.

The medium-attractive female academic who in her quest to feel very attractive acquires the reputation of an easy lay.

The woman who cannot get along with other women and who hangs out with men and who in the course of time ends up sleeping with many of them and who, a traitor to her own sex, is respected by men only to the extent that she is like a man.

The medium-attractive and well-spoken academic female whom no one likes but who nevertheless considers herself extremely special and lovable and unusual and wears a certain smile that shows this and is therefore disliked all the more.

As the hateful stereotypes homed in on her, the only thing that saved her from concluding that all she really hated was herself was her selfconsciousness. selfconsciousness was a guardian angel that accompanied her everywhere. In grocery stores it told her how to select foods — apples, eggs, fish, bread, butter, broccoli — that could be trusted not to put words in her mouth. Words like I am a yuppie or I am trying hard not to be a yuppie or See how original I am or See how timid I am as I try to avoid being like the people I don’t want to be, including those who are selfconsciously original. It required daily vigilance to keep herself from cooking like well-educated thirty-year-olds on TV, or like gastronomes who became orgasmic over nice pasta, or like women on a magazine diet, or like men who thought it made them sexy and sophisticated to cook with capers and chuckle greedily about ’71 Richebourgs. Or, conversely, like people who never gave a thought to food. Because unfortunately eating junk was not an option. In the future she imagined for herself, she would not be eating junk. She could hardly swallow junk.

Similarly, she couldn’t bring herself to wear ugly clothes or to furnish her apartment with trash. In fact, when she shopped in a department store, the clothes and utensils that struck her as unimplicating invariably turned out to be the most expensive in their class. Clearly, if you were rich enough, transparency could be purchased. Not being rich, she faced the task of finding attractive and moderately priced things while avoiding every implicating mass-produced contemporary style. This hunt for neutral tops and neutral shoes and neutral outerwear and neutral chairs was time-consuming and made her all the more painfully aware of herself.

She hated new things “inspired by” old things — products soiled by a modern designer’s nostalgia for the fifties or the twenties. The old things themselves she could trust, provided they hadn’t passed through the soiling hands of a consciousness like her own. It had been a pleasure to outfit her apartment from a naïve flea market held weekly in the Somerville Library parking lot. But when she stepped into a “vintage” clothing store, even a store with nice merchandise, she felt faint and ill and soon fled. Only in a naïve thrift store, such as the Salvation Army ran, could she hope to hold out long enough to find something, and then only if she was not in Boston, because in Boston these stores were haunted by other bargain-hunting young people dangerously similar to herself.

Once every month or two, year in, year out, she thought of the clothes her mother hadn’t given her.

They had come to light during her family’s last year in Lake Forest, when everyone but Renée was about to move to California. She discovered them in a roomful of belongings bound for Goodwill. She was rescuing one last armful of them — some classic narrow skirts, a jacket with an emerald-green velvet collar, a bright red high-waisted hourglass dress, a checkered wool overcoat, a pair of black-on-brown saddle shoes — when her mother caught her.

“What are you doing with these?”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I thought you were throwing them away.”

“I am throwing them away.”

“Well, can’t I have them, then?”

“I’m giving them to Goodwill. Please put them back where you found them.”

“Why can’t I have them?”

“Honey, you have so many outfits in your closet that you’ve hardly even tried on. What do you need these old things for?”

“They’re nice. I want them. Please let me have them.”

Her mother shook her head sadly. “I’m very sorry if you had your heart set on these. But I don’t want you wearing them.”

“Oh, why not, why not, why not?”

“I just don’t want to see you wearing them. They have associations for me.”

“But I’m going away. You won’t see me.”

“You know I’ll buy you anything you want. Things just like this. New things, better things. But think about if you had a boyfriend, that you broke up with. Would you give him to your best friend?”

“These are clothes.”

“For me it’s the same thing,” her mother said.

Renée marched unsteadily out of her own bedroom, eyes brimming. Her mother didn’t bend. The clothes went to Goodwill. In her memory they remained the most beautiful clothes she’d ever seen, the most perfect imaginable clothes for her. She might not have trusted her memory, except that there were pictures of the clothes in the family photo albums — pictures of the young Beth Macaulay on a tour of Europe that lasted through six seasons, pictures of the checkered coat in the Bois du Bologne. The checkered coat in Dublin. The striped sundress at Berck-Plage. Beth Macaulay in Arles, her perfect skin, her black-rimmed, black-lensed sunglasses, her funky saddle shoes, her diary. Her red dress in black-and-white in Rome. Her checkered coat in Venice.

She was three months pregnant when she married Daniel Seitchek, a young cardiologist from a West Side family of wholesalers and junior-college intellectuals. How painfully pained and washed out the young and pretty Elizabeth looked in black-and-white (the soot black of South Chicago, the white of fresh snow, the black-and-white of her checkered coat) as she held up her bundled baby girl for the camera.

How difficult it was to reconcile these images with the pink and white and kelly-green golfing outfits and tennis outfits worn by the woman Renée grew up knowing as her mother. This woman who eventually, in California, would drive a car with a plate that said MOMS JAG to high-school baseball games and sit in the stands with other mothers as tan as Egyptians and scream at her boys’ successes and groan laughingly and cover her eyes at their failures. This woman who in her daughter’s hearing once described herself as “kind of a Pollyanna,” and who confessed to being “addicted” to the novels of Tom Clancy. The pictures of the beautifully clad Beth Macaulay in Europe seemed to say that she had once been more like Renée — more romantic, more independent — than anyone watching her little skirts flounce around a tennis court would ever guess. Being afraid of death, Renée wanted to believe that despite their different circumstances she had exactly the same soul as her mother. And it was tempting to let the likelihood of the identity, the common sense of the assumption, stand as a certainty. Unfortunately, she was also rational, and she refused to believe she was the same person as this partygoing Orange County Pollyanna without some sort of proof. And it just so happened that the years when her mother had been a different and presumably more Renée-like individual were precisely the years before there was any such person as Renée.

Meanwhile she was too selfconscious to fail to see the ironies: That even as she was being vigilant about not turning into a superficial person like her mother, she was spending huge amounts of time worrying about decor, clothes, and cooking. That she’d developed a bourgeois obsession with merchandise and appearances far more profound than her mother’s. And that the intelligent and confident female types towards whom she felt a virulent, defensive animosity were precisely the types towards whom her mother also felt an animosity, though not as virulent and defensive as her daughter’s, since she had her sons and grandchildren to distract and comfort her.

Renée knew that if she would only call off her quest for a perfect life, and settle down and accept having children as her mother had at her age, then she too could achieve a measure of contentment and forgetfulness. But there was nobody who wanted to marry her, and anyway, she hated people who were obsessed with their parents. A family was birdlime to the people in it, boredom to the people not. She hated the word “obsessed.” She hated people who hated as many things as she did. She hated the life that made her hate so many things. But she didn’t entirely hate herself yet.

9

She had only one dress, a ten-year-old beltless cotton print, that she considered fit to wear to lunch with Melanie Holland. The flat dancing slippers that she put on with it were soaked by the time the bus to Lechmere station picked her up on Highland Avenue. A fine, heavy rain choked the airspace above the Charles. The river was so swollen it looked higher than the streets around it.

On Boylston Street, in front of the hotel, a cab door opened and a pair of legs in skin-tight jeans and cowboy boots swung out, followed by an umbrella, a Filene’s shopping bag, and finally, in a large-cut sealskin jacket, the rest of Melanie. She slammed the door and almost bumped into Renée, who was standing looking at her.

In the restaurant, hearty appetites were in evidence. Tourists were grinning and white-haired women were whispering about investments, each pair with an air of being the most important in the room. Melanie looked tired. She’d gotten some sun of late, but her skin was wrinkled and glossy, like old enamel work; the tan seemed not to want to stick to it. The silk lining of her jacket, which she’d slipped off her shoulders onto the cushion of the banquette, held her as tenderly as the tissue paper in which fine gifts come. She scrutinized Renée. “My goodness,” she said. “You’re wet!”

“Yeah, I’m a little wet.”

“You came by train.”

“Train and bus, yes.”

“You live — let’s see if I can guess.” She made a booklet of her hands and raised it to her lips. “You’re in. one of those old houses right on the Radcliffe side of the Square.”

Renée shook her head.

“More towards Inman Square?”

“I live in Somerville.”

“Oh.” Melanie smiled vaguely and looked away. “Somerville.” A waiter came. “Will you have a cocktail with me?”

“Campari with soda?” Renée said to the waiter.

“That sounds perfect,” Melanie said. “So red, so chic.”

The waiter nodded. So red. So chic.

“I’m glad you could come on short notice,” Melanie said. “I’m afraid it’s reached the point where I ought to be booking Boston from Chicago and vice versa. Wherever I am one week, I’ll be in the other place the next. But that’s the way it goes sometimes. That’s the way it goes. Do you do much traveling in your job?”

Renée opened her mouth to answer, but she lost heart. She slid her teaspoon sideways on the tablecloth. “No,” she said, “and maybe you should just tell me what you want.”

“What I want? I want us to relax and enjoy ourselves and get to know each other a little. I want to be your friend.”

“You want information.”

“Partly, yes, but—”

“Then why don’t you just ask me what you want to ask me? Because I’m not going to be able to help you, and so you might as well get it over with.”

Melanie turned her head to one side and narrowed her eyes, exactly the way her son sometimes did. “Is something wrong? Is this not a good day? Oh dear!” She leaned across the table. “You’re looking so unhappy. Was this not a good day?”

Renée returned her spoon to its original position. “I’m not unhappy.”

“You think I have no personal interest in you. You think I took you to lunch to cajole you into answering my questions. Is that what you think? Yes or no.”

“Yes.”

“You’re honest with me. I admire that. But you’re wrong, and I want to know how I can show you how wrong you are. Won’t you tell me?”

“I guess—” Renée was at a loss. “I guess if you didn’t ask me any questions, ever — then I’d have to think there was something else you wanted.”

“But you’d never believe I wanted to be your friend. Hm. Well, I suppose I can’t entirely blame you.” Melanie dug in her purse as the waiter deposited their drinks. She took out a flat velvet box and pushed it across the table. “This is for you.”

Renée looked at the box as if it happened to be where her eyes fell while she worried about something else.

“Do open it.”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

“Oh, really, Renée, I’m about to become quite impatient with you. You don’t need to refuse a gift just to show me you’re an honest person. We reach a point where it becomes insulting to me. Let’s not pretend our circumstances are the same. An older woman who enjoys shopping gives a younger woman a token of her respect and affection, I really don’t see any reason to be so morbidly scrupulous. There. That’s right.” Her eyes shone as Renée suddenly grabbed the box and, after a hesitation, removed a string of pearls.

“These are beautiful.”

“With your colors, your hair, your skin. Pearls, platinum, silver, diamonds, I know from similar experience. Put, put them on. That’s right. Of course we have to allow for this being something less than the ideal dress. ” She handed her compact across the table, mirror upright. “Would you have time for a little shopping after lunch? I’d hate you not wearing these because nothing went.” Renée returned the pearls to the box. “Actually, I’m not sure these are my style.”

“Oh, is that so? What is your style?”

“I don’t know. Somerville.”

“You! You are not a Somerville kind of person, anyone can see that. Not unless Somerville has changed greatly since I was growing up, which I can’t imagine it has.”

“What makes you think I’m not?”

“Your manners.”

“My manners are awful. I’m offending you right and left.”

“You’re offending me in the manner of a very well bred, well educated, and self-aware young woman. And you know it.”

Weak though it was, the Campari had gone straight to Renée’s cheeks. She was immune to many things, but not to alcohol and not to a word like “self-aware,” which, when used in reference to her, reliably touched off a small shudder in her body, a spasm of self-love. And after the spasm, a hotness of face, a weightlessness of limbs. She laughed, looking at the pearls. “How much did these cost you?”

“Yes, keep trying. But you’re going to find me very difficult to offend today.”

Renée put the pearls around her neck again and held up the compact. The mirror showed her a room broken into darkened, depthless fragments — chandeliers caught in the act of being, tables on a tilting floor, subliminal flashes of herself, a white throat. She spoke deliberately. “Maybe I’ll keep them after all. If it’s all the same to you.”

“No, in fact, nothing would please me more.”

“Perfect for the two of us, then.”

“You’re smiling, and you’re right: what does a professional woman care about jewelry?” Melanie’s own wrist jewelry jingled as she raised her glass. She drank with an actressy angling of her body and twisting of her hand. “But you see I’m just a silly housewife. I have no particularly noble deeds to my credit. And at my age it’s possible to feel as if all one has ever done in life is bring unhappiness to the world. Perhaps you can’t really imagine that unless you’ve had children, but—”

“I can imagine it.”

“I believe you, Renée. I believe you can. Perhaps you can also imagine how it feels to realize that your own children consider you a selfish person, and that there’s nothing you can do to change this. They may be quite, quite wrong about you. They are quite wrong about you. But the fact remains that they’re convinced that you’re a selfish old witch, and this hurts you so terribly that you can’t even explain to them why they’re wrong.”

All that was left of Renée’s drink was ice and pink water. “You know I know your son, don’t you?”

“You—? Oh yes, of course. I was very irritated with him that particular day. I was irritated that he’d invited people inside, with the house in such a state, although in hindsight I suppose it was all for the best.” Melanie stroked her glass, appearing more and more to speak to herself. “Because there are things I want to say — things I must say — to someone. And if I could only relieve certain anxieties I have — if you could only give me a little advice, or comfort, so we could get that out of the way — I’d want more than anything to spend time with you. I want to make someone happy. And you in particular, I don’t even know why.”

“What advice?”

“We don’t need to discuss that yet.”

Renée leaned forward confidentially. There was a new, wild light in her face, as if great ironies were dawning on her. “I think we should discuss it right now. Then it’s all over with, right?”

Melanie was about to speak but then she noticed Renée’s empty glass and attracted the waiter’s attention. When the fresh drink came, she watched Renée sip her way deeply into it.

“I own a house,” she said huskily, “that I can’t insure against earthquake damage and can’t get more than eighty percent of its January value for. Should I sell now and invest the money elsewhere at ten percent? Or are prices going to bounce back up in less than two years? That’s my first question. I also, because of the stupidity and stubbornness of my father, own three hundred thousand shares of a company whose stock has lost a quarter of its value since the first of April, largely because of the threat of earthquakes. I’m about to get control of those shares and I want to know, do I cut my losses, or are the earthquakes going to stop? And there you have it. I’ve told you more about myself than anyone but my attorney knows. Is that clear? I’ve opened my heart, Renée, and it’s in your hands. You can judge for yourself whether I’m simply desperate or whether I’m trusting you because I feel an affinity between us.” With sudden briskness, she took her half glasses from her purse. She scowled at her menu for exactly three seconds before asking Renée, whose menu appeared to be in Arabic, what she thought she was going to have. She was inclining towards the red snapper and the house salad. How did that sound?

“I need to read the menu,” Renée said.

Melanie tossed hers aside and gazed at a far corner of the dining room. Finally Renée gave up trying to make sense of the entries. She drank off the remainder of her Campari and soda. “What makes you think I have any advice for you? You read the paper. I read the paper.”

“I don’t give a hoot what’s in the paper,” said Melanie. “Why not?”

“Because everyone can read it. It’s automatically worthless as investment information. The markets are depressed now because of all the uncertainty in the papers. They say there probably won’t be any more major earthquakes. But they also say there might very well be.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Don’t you see? Probabilities don’t do me any good. I have to make a decision.”

“I know. I understand. But why don’t you assume there’s a fifty percent chance of further earthquakes, and sell fifty percent of your stock? Or do twenty percent, if you think there’s a twenty percent chance.”

“No! No!” Melanie bounced vehemently on her banquette. “You’re not following me. I’m saying that I have already lost one quarter of what I had three months ago, before I could do a thing about it. I’m saying that I will not lose any more, I will not, I will not. If I sell fifty percent of that stock and it rebounds to its March level, I’ll have suffered a pure loss on that fifty percent.”

“But you couldn’t do anything about that,” Renée said in a reasonable voice. “So why don’t you just decide that what you inherited is only as much as you have when you get control of it. That’s what you’re starting with, and you can sell it all, and that’s what you got. It still must be a lot, right?”

Melanie closed her eyes. “This is what I go through with my attorney. This is what my husband tells me. I was hoping that a woman might be able to understand why I refuse, I refuse to be told that this is all I get. This isn’t greed, Renée. It’s a matter of not being stupid. If I have to make the wrong decision, I at least want it to be on someone else’s recommendation. Because I simply could not live having to blame myself.”

“Blame your father,” Renée ventured.

“If only that would help. I can blame him for putting me in this position, but I’m still the one in this position.”

“Larry Axelrod? At MIT. I can put you in touch with him.” Melanie leaned forward, shaking her head and smiling at Renée’s innocence. “Don’t you see? Every investor in Boston is going to him or other people like him. They’ve already had their impact on the market. I don’t get any edge by taking their advice, and what’s more, I don’t believe them. I don’t think they can tell the truth, because they know that all the markets are listening. That’s why they say fifty percent this, fifty percent that.”

“So you think that because I don’t know anything about New England earthquakes I’m the perfect person to ask.”

“Yes.”

“That’s very rational of you.”

“I’m glad you think so. You see, because among other things, I’ve noticed that of all the institutions in Boston, Harvard is the only one not saying anything about the earthquakes. And I have to wonder why that is.”

“Nobody’s doing local studies right now. We do mainly theory, also global studies and research with global networks.”

“And you, as an intelligent seismologist, are unable to look at the work being done locally and come to any independent conclusions?”

“I can come to conclusions. But I don’t see why you think they’re worth more than Larry Axelrod’s.”

“Renée, I’ve spent half my life among academics, and I’ve seen these Larry Axelrods on television. I know a special mind when I see one. There’s no point in telling me not to trust you, because I’m not going to listen to you. I’m going to trust you, and you’re going to tell me how I can repay you. Because I do intend to repay you.”

Melanie had put her purse on her lap and rested her hand on the catch. Renée had been expecting this. “You want to know whether to sell the house, and whether to sell the stock. Two simple answers.”

“Yes.”

“What if I’m wrong?”

“Well, you’ll know that if you’re right, I’ll be grateful to you. And if I’m grateful to you, you’ll be very, very happy to be a friend of mine.”

“You mean money.”

Melanie looked down at her purse as though sorry to find it on her lap. “Preferably not. But whatever your style is. I wouldn’t want to give you something you didn’t find useful.”

“But if I’m wrong anyway?”

“I don’t expect you to be wrong, but if you are, I’ll know that you tried very hard to be right. I’ll know that I did everything I possibly could to make the right decision, that I consulted a person I trusted, and we simply had bad luck. As I said, it’s not that I’m so greedy. It’s that I can’t bear the responsibility.”

“This is Sweeting-Aldren we’re talking about.”

“That’s right.” Melanie laughed nervously. “I hope you didn’t find that out from Louis. He makes a point of being indiscreet.”

“I think I can help you,” Renée said.

“You haven’t seen him again, have you?”

“Pardon me?”

“You said you knew him. You meant the day of the earthquake. You didn’t see him again after that.”

“No, actually. Actually I did. He invited me to a party at your daughter’s.”

“Oh.” Melanie paled, touching her mouth. “I see. And did you go?

“Yes.”

“You didn’t tell me that.”

“I tried to.”

“You did not tell me that.” She twisted sideways in her seat, touching every part of her face with her fingers, as if she wasn’t sure it was all there. “And that — that should have been the very first thing you told me.” She nodded to herself. “The very first thing.”

“I tried to.”

She swung violently to face Renée. “Are you involved with my son?”

“No!”

“Have you been involved with him?”

“No. No! I went to a party with him. And a few weeks ago I— went to dinner at your sister’s. Your daughter’s. He seemed to think he needed a date. He was very polite to me.”

“Did you talk about me?”

“Not at all.”

“How come your hands are shaking?”

“Because you’re scaring me.”

“Did you tell him that I’d called you?”

“I mentioned it, yeah.”

“How many hours?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“How many hours have you spent with him?”

She shrugged. “Ten. Eight. I don’t know.”

Melanie leaned across the table and searched Renée’s face, touching it with her gaze as she’d been touching her own face with her fingers, her fear growing as it sent roots deeper into the gap between the sweetness of the face and the underlying possibility that Renée was lying. It was pathetically evident how much she longed to trust Renée. But she couldn’t get a definite answer from the face, and she’d placed such hopes in it that she couldn’t bear to keep on looking, lest she find her suspicions confirmed. “Oh God.” Again she turned sideways on the banquette. “Oh God, I don’t know what to do.”

“Why don’t you call Louis and ask him? If it’s so important to you.”

“Ten minutes ago you were trying to convince me not to trust you. Now you’re doing the opposite. It’s because I mentioned money. I dare you to say it’s not true.”

“What’s happened is that you seem to think I have some reason to be lying to you.”

“You’re not the same person I spoke with two months ago. And now I see why. Now I see why. How could I have not thought of this? Oh, why didn’t you tell me?”

“Are you ladies ready to order?” With a flourish the waiter produced a ballpoint pen.

Making severe eye contact with him, Melanie donned her glasses and placed her order. Then, while Renée ordered, she clutched the glasses in her fist, squeezing them so hard the plastic creaked, and stared hopelessly across the dining room. Renée covered the fist with her hand. She was thinking so hard that her lips stirred faintly. “I said I could help you,” she said. “I know what you should do with your stock, and you’ll be very happy you asked me. I’m going to help you.”

Melanie tilted her head back and swallowed.

“I’m going to tell you what to do,” Renée said. “And I’m so sure I’m right that I’m going to back it up with whatever money I have.”

The light in her face had become a glittering, intoxicated implacability. She stroked Melanie’s hand. Suddenly fingernails sank into her wrist. A face rushed forward; it smelled of breath, perfume, ingratiating skin cream. “Are you involved with my son?”

“No!”

“And you want money from me.”

“Yes.”

“You want to make a deal.”

“Yes.”

Melanie slumped back into her seat. “All right.” A full minute passed as she sat and bit her lips, her fears obviously undispelled. Finally Renée asked if she wanted wine.

“Not for me, thank you. You may order a glass for yourself.”

“Can I order a bottle?”

“Whatever you like.”

“Why don’t we relax and enjoy ourselves?”

Melanie shook her head hopelessly. “It would have been better to avoid money as a topic. It would have been better to wait. You can mock me now, but I really did have hopes for a different kind of lunch.”

“I’m going to give you good advice. You won’t be sorry.”

“I’m sorry already. I’m sorry to have involved you in this. I’m sorry to be involved in it myself.”

“Let’s just finish, then. Let’s just do the last thing. And then we can relax.”

Melanie stiffened at this mention of the “last thing.” She hesitated and hesitated before she finally took a matchbook from her purse, wrote a figure on the inside, and nudged it across the tablecloth.

Renée read the figure, took the pen, and calmly added a zero. “I may want more,” she said. “If I’m right. You’ll need to give me a few days. But I definitely won’t take less, unless. ” She considered. “Why don’t I take whatever cash I have in the bank and put it up as security? Then we can have a — what would you call it? A sliding scale. The less right I am, the less you give me. If I’m wrong, you keep the security.”

“I’m not going to discuss this with you. We’ll meet on Tuesday.”

“See if you can do better in the meantime.”

“I may do just that.”

“Uh-huh. Talk to Larry Axelrod.”

“Perhaps.”

Renée ate a plate of carpaccio drenched in yellow oil. She kept emptying her wineglass, until she began to glow like an object in a kiln, her selfconsciousness transmuted into volubility as she did her Why I Hate Boston number, her California’s Even Worse number. Melanie might have been listening to a daughter whom she liked and had every reason to be entertained by, and yet seeing in her only reminders of her own heavy heart. Of her relative proximity to death, of her inability to relax and enjoy a lunch, of her estrangement from the world of things that young people talk about. This really does happen to parents who are unhappy, even those who love their children.

Her tongue curled as she added up the figures on the check. Renée was glowing as if she’d been through a snowstorm. Back on the planet of ceaseless car traffic, in front of the hotel, she asked for money for a cab. Melanie opened her purse on her hip and dug a twenty out. “I’m sure you think it’s silly of me to keep asking. Perhaps it doesn’t even matter. But—”

Renée’s fingers closed on the bill. “But.”

“Well, only whether there is some involvement between you and Louis.”

She took Melanie by the shoulders. “What do you think?”

“I suppose I’m still inclined to think there is.”

“Really.” She pulled Melanie closer and kissed her on the mouth, the way any woman might kiss the person who’d wooed her over lunch with pearls and wine.

Melanie wrenched free and dusted herself off. “I’m going to have to reconsider this, Renée. We’ll assume you’ve had a little too much to drink. But I’m afraid I’m still going to have to reconsider.”

“Sliding scale. Security. Immediate terms.”

“I’ll talk to you on Tuesday morning.”

“See you then.”

The rain had turned to a fine warm mist, agreeable to the skin. As soon as Renée was in a cab, she stretched out on the seat.

“You OK there?” the Haitian driver said.

“Yes,” she said loudly.

Water trickled and made lenses on the window above her, a twisted aspect of the city in every droplet. The soaked façades upside down, the utility wires dipping and dividing. She was feverish. Three in the afternoon, drunk off her ass and lying in a cab. Romance, romance. Three in the afternoon, the warm rain, she’s coming home from seeing herself. She can still feel her warmth inside her and on her skin. She can smell her own nose, she can taste her own mouth.

“That’s twelve dollars, sixty cents.”

“Go up the hill here on Walnut.”

Her stomach upset by the carpaccio and wine, she lay on her bed until the windows stopped getting darker and became a little lighter and the rain turned to steam and silence. It was as if a tent had descended on the street, its damp canvas flaps coming to rest behind the houses; as if the street were a film lot hosed down for a nighttime shoot, with a loud, busy world beyond the houses. A near neighbor was cooking waffles. Girls and boys on the porch across the street turned on a heavy-metal anthem. It might have been playing in the next room, not outside. She plugged in her telephone and dialed a number. “Howard Chun, please.”

“He not here,” came the answer.

She changed her clothes and went down to the street. One of the porch girls — the fat one; there were also two skinny ones — turned up the music. Maybe they thought she was going to complain about it. She mounted the stairs. “Does somebody here have a joint I could buy?”

They turned the radio down, and she repeated the question, looking from skeptical face to skeptical face. The younger boy was ten or eleven. “Are you Jewish?” he said matter-of-factly.

“No.”

“What’s your last name?”

She smiled. “Smith.”

“Bernstein,” the boy countered.

“Greenstein,” said a girl.

“Shalom!”

Renée waited.

“How long you been living there?” the fat girl asked.

“Five years,” she said. “How long have you been here?”

“Where’s your Chinese boyfriend?”

“She’s got a bald one.”

“Hey. Hey. You got any beer?”

She crossed her arms. “How old are you guys?”

The older boy, silent until now, rose stiffly from a broken Adirondack chair. His puffy high-tops were carefully unlaced. “You gotta buy us some beer,” he said.

“All right. How much?”

The girls conferred, the older boy taking pains to appear uninvolved. “Ten, but they gotta be taw-boys,” the fat girl announced positively.

“They have to be what?”

“Taw-boys.”

“Taw-boys?” Renée smiled, not understanding.

“TAW BOYS. THE BIG CANS.”

“The sixteen-ounce cans!”

“The fucking taw cans!”

“Doy, doy, doy.”

“You know what sixty-nining is?”

“Steven, shut up, you little jerk.”

“Doy, doy, doy.”

Standing apart, the older boy rolled his eyes. Renée descended the steps to cries of Shalom! A smell of infrastructure was stealing from the bushes, and she could hear her own telephone ringing, another pro-lifer calling.

When she came back from Highland Avenue, the older boy led her into the front room of the first-floor apartment and broke two cans off one of the six-packs she’d bought, returning them to the paper bag. He showed her his dope. “It’s very fresh,” he said earnestly. “Steven, close the fucking door.” The door closed. “Which one you want? Take the big one. My name’s Doug.”

“How old are you?”

“Almost sixteen. I’m gonna get my license. You go out with me sometime?”

“I don’t think so.”

On her kitchen table she set out the joint, a pack of matches, and a saucer. She positioned a chair in front of them and turned off all but one light. She had a cassette marked dance that had been broken for five years. Training her desk light on it, she opened it up and spliced out the mangled stretch with Scotch Magic tape and nail scissors.

The dope tasted like April in college; like the music on the tape. She danced to “London’s Burning” and “Spinning Top” and “I Found That Essence Rare,” her arms and legs mixing the last faint banks of smoke into a haze. She thought she was crying when “Beast of Burden” played, but when she opened her eyes there were no tears and it seemed that she’d only imagined it.

Outside the kitchen window she lay down on the wet, sloping shingles. They were made of real slate.

In the morning she tracked down a mineralogy professor who liked her and had lent her one of his cars several times before. She also appropriated a departmental camera, with a zoom telephoto lens. The sun was blazing on Route 128. As methodically as she could, she drove every road and street in Danvers, western Peabody, northern Lynn, and South Lynnfield, stopping often to trace her route on a map with a red pencil. There were zero cars in the parking lot of Sweeting-Aldren corporate headquarters, a white Monticello-inspired structure set into a green hillside. From a Boston & Maine railroad bridge, from the back of an unfinished office complex, and from the rear corner of a cemetery, she surveyed company installations — regiments of horizontal tanks like giant caplets, towers with iron vines with iron tendrils spiraling up them. The corrugated siding of the major buildings was a certain pale blue she didn’t think she’d ever seen; on a color chart, the shades all around it were probably pleasing, but this particular blue was not. Dreamy fumes of acetone were native to the place.

By Monday the heat had reached full, white force. She dressed in cutoffs, sandals, and a tank top that she’d never worn except to sleep in. At the Peabody City Hall, on the ground floor outside the Assessor’s Office, she found listings for eight smaller, noncontiguous parcels of land owned by Sweeting-Aldren. The six of them that she could tour by car had nothing more interesting than horses on them; she didn’t try to reach the others. She was driving as fast as she dared, and still it was almost four o’clock by the time she got to Beverly airport.

A girl in the coffee shop was lifting a wire basket of french fries out of oil. She told Renée to talk to a man named Kevin in the hangar.

“I should just go right in?”

“Yeah, you’ll find him.”

As soon as she went through the hangar door someone whistled at her, but all she could see at first was a blinding square of white sky at the far end. Near where she stood, the cowlings had been removed from a Cherokee and from an eight-seat turboprop with a boxy grasshopper body. Two grease-blackened twosomes in blue coveralls were working on their shiny guts, reaching up with tools. Asked about Kevin, they pointed to a young man on a ladder by a baby jet farther down. He was spraying aerosol cleaner on the jet’s windshield.

“Are you Kevin?”

“That’s right.” He was in his early twenties, had sky-blue eyes, a crew cut, and straight-arrow posture. Across the corridor, the inside of another baby jet was being vacuumed, country music wafting out and an extension cord dangling from the door.

“I was told to talk to you about being taken for a ride.”

“Where to?”

“Just around the neighborhood.”

He came promptly down the ladder, leading her to think they’d be airborne in a matter of minutes, but in fact she had to breathe exhaust gases and fuel gases for nearly an hour. She handed over money and filled out and signed an insurance waiver. Kevin disappeared for a while and came back minus his coveralls, spent ten minutes determining that he didn’t like something about the oddly upside-down-looking plane he tried first, fiddled and diddled with an ordinary plane, a Cessna, and finally parked it outside the mouth of the hangar. He’d put dark shades on. “Where we going?”

“Just around Peabody a couple times. There are some things I’d like to look at.”

He brought the mike to his lips and muttered nothings into its plastic grooves. There was a small spiral notepad in a pocket below the instrument panel. He flipped the laminated pages one by one, raising and lowering flaps, feeding the engine until the propellers became invisible, muttering into the mike again, flipping switches. Cabin temperature rose twenty or thirty degrees. The engine noise reached screaming heights as they bounced along softened asphalt and firm concrete and swung out onto the runway, neatly astride the center-line stripe. Heated air and the scaly heads of weeds were the only things moving in the acres of vacancy around them.

They swung right and left and bounced on the air like a jeep on a hillside.

“There’s a control space right southeast here,” Kevin shouted. “I’m going to swing north of Danvers if that’s all right with you.”

“Sure.”

No noise in particular stood out, but it was hard to hear. Kevin kissed the mike and hung it up. “You can turn that lever there now, get a little air.”

It was an ugly day for flying, the rivers an evil turbid yellow, the glare inescapable. The atmospheric soup extended far above the altitude they were maintaining, and everything on the ground dissolved in blue unless she looked straight down. Lakes and rivers were like spills of shiny lead on the blue-black land, stretching towards a blue-brown horizon. Each time they flew over water the plane dropped like a yo-yo. Each plummet was followed by an upward rebound that could be expected but not prepared for. Kevin set a paper bag on Renée’s bare knee.

“You’re cute,” she essayed, at a shout.

“So are you. Not as cute as my wife, though.”

She nodded judiciously. “What’s your job?”

“I fly for a tool company in Lynn. They’ve got a jet and a couple planes. I’m number two, I don’t fly the jet much. I take the president to Maine a lot. Vacation house. His guests too. How about you?”

“I’m a photographer.”

“For—?” He pointed at the label on her camera. “Harvard Geophysics?”

“Yeah.”

“You interested in earthquakes?”

“No,” she shouted. “Land forms.”

“I thought you might be looking for faults or whatever. Lot of seismologists around here. Guy I know took one up last month, all up and down the coast.”

“Can I show you where I want to go?” She held up a map on which she’d circled in red the main Sweeting-Aldren property and the two smaller plots she hadn’t seen yet. Kevin put it on his lap, studied it a moment, and then looked straight ahead through the windshield. The plane leaped drastically into another thermal. The sound of the engine changed and stayed changed.

“Is this OK?” she shouted.

It was a while before he answered. “What do you want to look at Sweeting-Aldren for?”

She craned her neck, pretending to check the map. “Oh, is that what those are?”

“You got some special reason?”

“I’m looking at land forms.”

“I can’t take you any lower than three thousand feet.”

“How high are we now?”

“Three thousand feet.”

“Why not?”

“’Cause they don’t like it. They’re a company. They’ve got secrets.”

“What if I see something I want to see?”

“About half the corporate business at Beverly Municipal is Sweeting-Aldren. They’ve got six jets there. You know what I’m saying?”

“No.”

“I’m saying that’s where I work.”

“You work for Sweeting-Aldren?”

“I work for Barnett Die. But I’m at the airport. You know what I’m saying?”

He pointed out the two small properties, a pair of fields split by dirt roads. They hit another bump. The engine coughed as they banked, sun spilling crazily across Renée’s lap and out the other window. A hillside vomited smashed cars and clots of rusted waste. Proud mansions spread their green velvet skirts on land wedged between the old brick phalluses of industry and the newer plants — flat rectangles with gravel on the roof and trailers crowding to feed at troughs in back. The most permeable of membranes separated a country club from acres of bone-colored slag piles streaked with sulfuric yellow, like the pissings of a four-story dog. Low-rise condos with brand-new parking lots and BayBank branches were perched above algae-filled sinkholes littered with indestructibles. Everywhere wealth and filth were cheek by jowl. Before it gave way to Sweeting-Aldren’s property, the landscape seemed to hesitate, real-estate development dwindling to undernourished neighborhoods of flat, small houses, some mobile homes, lone taverns, and unpaved streets skirting woods and dying in front of a futile house or two, half-finished, with refuse cascading down embankments. On the company side of the woods, pipes and rails on low piers made beelines across wetlands, passing through industrial suburbs of identical circular pods, crossing over beltways of tangled pipes, plunging into downtown and then out along spokes to satellite developments. Vehicles crept through the ranks of ten thousand color-coded barrels; steam dribbled from the tops of silver tiparillos. There was an impression of good management, a logic to the coding and the movement. The black ocean sparkled just beyond.

Kevin dipped a wing so Renée could snap some pictures. “Seen enough?”

“No,” she shouted. “You have to take me lower.”

“You’re looking kind of gray.”

“You have to take me lower.”

“I’ll give you one pass at fifteen hundred. Then we go back.”

“Two passes at a thousand.”

He shook his head. The plane shot upward like a helium balloon.

“What can I give you?” She did her best to smile nicely. The plane fell so hard her teeth clicked.

“You don’t understand,” Kevin said. “They’re very, very touchy.”

“I’ll give you more money.”

He shook his head. “One pass at fifteen hundred. And I want to see your driver’s license or student ID or whatever. Something with a picture.”

He took her license and verified her name and image as they circled counterclockwise. “You’re thirty,” he said.

She nodded, lowering her head between her knees. She got her bag open just before a wave of motion ran up her back and shook her shoulders. The bag stiffened with the new weight inside it. Kevin handed her a fresh one.

“Throw that in the back seat. We’ll go up the western side, cut around east, and head back. It’ll all be out your window. Sun behind you. You gonna survive?”

The only thing that kept her upright was leaning on the camera with the lens against her window. She shot at everything, working the zoom. They were already past the central installation when she realized that she wasn’t seeing anything, that she should have just been looking.

They had to circle Wenham while a jet landed ahead of them and another one took off. She kept her eyes shut and her face pressed to the air vent. Each bump, even the smallest, deepened her misery. It appalled her that Kevin continued to give her information to digest. Facts were as unwelcome as a tuna salad sandwich.

“We’re into rush hour. They just cleared an inbound Sweeting-Aldren jet and there’s another one behind it. They should have their own little airline.”

The plane went up and down. The engine droned.

“Three minutes, you’ll be on the ground. A day like this will do it to almost anybody.”

Through one eye Renée glimpsed the runway spreading out in front of them. She didn’t open her eyes again until they’d taxied to a stop. “Check this out,” Kevin said, nodding at the hangar. Two men in suits, one of them wearing a hard hat, were standing just inside the entry.

“You didn’t believe me, did you?”

“Wait wait wait.” She was rewinding the camera.

“I’m not seeing this. I’m slowly getting out the door.”

Head down, she reloaded and fired twenty shots at nothing. The men were now standing on the apron. When she climbed out, one of them looked inside the plane and the other led her into the hangar.

“You’ve got to let her sit down,” Kevin said. “She’s very sick.”

She leaned mutely against a wall in a corridor while, behind her, her shoulder bag was searched. In the coffee shop she was allowed to slump into a booth that had a long, thin smear of ketchup running across the table. The man in the hard hat was holding her bag on his lap; his face was red and ingrown and astonished, a cervix with beady eyes. He remained silent for the entire interview, tirelessly assessing her breasts and shoulders.

The other man had a tonsure, thick straight hair the color of pencil lead bunching onto his shirt collar, and an eagle’s smart brow. He turned her IDs over in his fingers. “Renée Seitchek, 7 Pleasant Avenue, Somerville. Harvard University.” He pinned her with a look. “Renée, we hear you photographed some facilities. We’re frankly dying to know what moved you to photograph those particular facilities.”

“Can I have a glass of water?”

“Tummy upset? Maybe a little Sprite for that. Bruce?” He waved a hand at the counter, and Bruce rose. “But go on.”

“I’m a photographer.”

“A photographer! What kinds of things you enjoy taking pictures of, Renée?”

“Interesting, beautiful. things.”

“Ah. Art photographer. That’s fascinating.” Her interrogator gazed at her admiringly. “But you know, I can’t resist asking you, what’s so beautiful about an industrial facility? You want to try and explain that to me? Being as it runs more or less counter to our prejudices.”

“Who are you?” Renée said.

“Rod Logan, Process Security Manager, Sweeting-Aldren Industries. My assistant Bruce Feschting. We made a special little trip over here to meet you, Renée. Oh, and would you look at that. Bruce outdoes himself again. Sprite and water and a napkin. Apropos of which, Renée, you might want to give your chin a teeny wipe.”

A party of men in hard-soled shoes marched through the coffee shop, exchanging salutations with Logan and Feschting. Briefcases swung as they headed out the parking-side door.

“But these art photographs,” Logan said. “What’s the market like? You have a wealthy patron? A lot of corporations buying art these days.”

“It’s just for me.”

“Just for you! You don’t mind if I ask what brought you to these particular facilities, do you?”

“I saw them from the road.”

“Just driving by, eh? Was there anything in particular that struck you as interesting and beautiful about our facilities?”

“No. Just the whole thing. How it looked.”

“Gosh, if the world doesn’t have a way of throwing you for a loop sometimes.” Logan shook his head. “Just totally for a loop. You know, somewhere I’m sure there’s an Earth where a Harvard girl really does go to the airport closest to us and flies by in broad daylight in a well-marked plane and really does want to take pictures for the sheer joy it brings her. Infinite universe, infinity of worlds. But you see, which world am I really in? This one? Or maybe more like this one?” He chopped the air with his hands, suggesting galaxies in motion. “But listen, Renée. I’m a reasonable man. And legally, legally, I can’t really prevent you from snapping away to your little heart’s content. Were you aware of that? That I can’t legally prevent you? But you see, I’m holding your camera on my lap now, and Bruce is holding the other roll of film that was in your purse—”

“It’s unexposed.”

“Is it unexposed, Bruce? Yes, so it seems. So you’ll be happy to sell us that one for ten dollars. And as far as what’s in the camera, speaking practically, I’d like to offer you free processing and printing, and we’ll send it to you at your Somerville address. I frankly can’t think of a more amicable arrangement. Because you see, Renée, we take our trade secrets very seriously, and we have armed guards on our property and a million-dollar cash reserve specifically earmarked for prosecuting industrial spies to the fullest extent of the law, so why don’t you let me have these printed and sent to you at our expense? Does that sound reasonable, Bruce?”

“They’re private,” Renée said.

“Ah, they’re private, yes. But as a practical matter, in terms of who has the camera on his lap, I’d have to say your only other alternative would be to allow me to open the camera and expose the entire film to light.”

She clutched her head wretchedly. “Go ahead. Just leave me alone.”

“You’re sure?” Logan said, already opening the camera.

A new contingent of executives had entered the coffee shop. Feschting stood up awkwardly and stepped out of the booth. “Mr. Tabscott,” he said. “Mr. Stoorhuys.”

“Hey, Dave, Dick.” Logan nodded at the newcomers, his hands full of film.

“Rod, Bruce, where you in from?”

“In from nowhere. Got a little episode here.”

Tabscott left the coffee shop, but Stoorhuys stopped and leaned over the booth, his jacket bunching at the elbows, five inches of shirt cuff showing. He bowed his head, but he was looking at Renée, sideways. His lips curled away from his teeth.

“This is Renée Seitchek,” Logan said. “Our latest flyby. Art photographer. Harvard Geophysics student. Greenness of gills due to violent airsickness.”

Lips agape, Stoorhuys studied her more closely. “Mr. Logan explained our sensitivity?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll see to it you’re reimbursed for your film.”

She nodded, eyes cast down.

“She enjoys photographing beautiful and interesting things,” Logan remarked.

“She’s a beautiful and interesting thing herself,” Stoorhuys said with patent insincerity. He appeared to have lost interest. His lanky fingers squeezed Logan’s shoulder. “Take it easy.”

“Will do, Dave.”

Moments later she was left alone in the booth. She drank her water, put her head down, filled her lungs. A twenty-dollar bill was lying near her ear. Suddenly a paper bag landed on the table. She jumped.

“Here’s your barf,” Kevin said.

She took a handful of napkins when she left the coffee shop. She drove for twenty minutes and finally stopped in a Shawmut Bank parking lot. Crouching behind a dumpster like a raccoon, she tore open the airsickness bag and recovered the film canister from beneath the contents of her stomach. Highway lights flashed in her eyes as she cast a furtive glance over her shoulder.

It was becoming apparent that she wouldn’t be able to see the pictures before she met with Melanie. She doubted they’d show much in any case. If Sweeting-Aldren maintained a pumping station near its main installation, it was almost certainly hidden in a shed. She drove back to Cambridge, returned the car, and stayed in Widener Library until the closing bells rang.

The next morning she couldn’t keep her breakfast down. She smoked the remainder of her joint and had a second breakfast at Au Bon Pain before returning to the microfilm machines in Widener. At one-fifteen she made a copy of a picture in the Globe of March 9, 1970. It showed a newly opened four-story bank and office building on Andover Street in Peabody; just visible through the bare trees in the background was the top of a structure that arguably resembled a drilling derrick.

She took her Series E bond to her bank. It was the gift of a dead grandmother. The customer-service representative observed that it wouldn’t mature for another two years.

“What’s it worth now?”

She had eighty hundred-dollar bills in the left front pocket of her jeans when she stepped off the train in Salem with the first wave of returning commuters. The address she’d been given led her to the County Courthouse, across the street from which, in a restored white clapboard house bearing a plaque that said 1753, were the offices of Arger, Kummer & Rudman.

“Ms. Seitchek,” Henry Rudman said expansively, pressing his broad hand into the small of her back. He put her in a chair directly in front of his desk and hovered there, offering refreshments. “Some cold water, please.”

Behind his desk, in a corner of his office between a computer and a struggling window airconditioner, Melanie was sitting with her head bowed and her hands clasped on her lap. She gave Renée a single glance, full of hurt, like a woman in a courtroom who no longer expects anything from her husband but a share of his assets and future income. Love had died. It had come to this.

Renée crossed her arms and tossed her head indifferently. Standing on Rudman’s desk were small photos of a wife and three little girls, but ornamentally the office was dominated by three black-and-white enlargements on the wall, all of them autographed: Ted Williams on a cruise ship, his arm around a younger Rudman’s shoulders; Rudman and Yastrzemski cheek to cheek, at a banquet table; Rudman and Jim Rice, drivers in hand, on a golf course with palm trees in the background. Renée laughed. Her eyes were inflamed, her chin spotted with new pimples. Her hair had been growing out for months, and now all at once it was almost shoulder-length — unwashed, a tangle of stiff waves. She smelled like scalp and outdoor sweat. Altogether she was sleek with skin oil, sleek and dirty and animal and hot. She threw a sudden glance at Melanie, who lowered her eyes again.

Rudman carried in a cup of water and planted himself behind his desk. “So, ladies, are we all set?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Ms. Seitchek, Mrs. Holland tells me you’ve approached her about making a bet on the performance of a certain piece of real estate and the stock of a certain company. The piece of real estate being her property in Ipswich, and the stock being Sweeting-Aldren common. Is this correct?”

“No,” she said. “I didn’t approach her. She approached me. Also, I don’t have anything to say about the real estate. If she wants to draw conclusions based on what I say about the stock, fine.”

Rudman and Melanie exchanged glances. “You’re a seismologist, Ms. Seitchek.”

“Yes.”

“We can assume you’re basing your prediction on your interpretation of seismological data. But the prediction applies only to the stock.”

“Peabody and Ipswich are eleven miles apart.”

“This is news?”

“I’m saying there’s no obvious linkage.”

Rudman turned. “Mrs. Holland?”

Melanie pressed her lips together, counting the proverbial five. “I’d like to remind you, Renée, that while it’s true I did approach you, it was you who mentioned money and suggested an arrangement. I’d also like to remind you that you began by deliberately concealing that you had information that could help me, and you did not tell me this would not apply to real estate.”

Renée gave her a smiley smile. “You want me to leave?”

“Ladies, ladies.”

“I would appreciate it if you told the truth.” Melanie said whitely. “That is all I am saying.”

“All right, Ms. Seitchek? You try to tell the truth so we can move along? That goes for you too, Mrs. Holland.”

Melanie struck a righteous pose.

“Now, Ms. Seitchek, ah.” Rudman scratched his mustache. “Mrs. Holland represented that you hoped she’d wager, ah, fifty thousand dollars, which we can assume is—”

“No,” Renée said emphatically. “No. I said I wanted a minimum of fifty thousand dollars. I also said that the more right I am, the more I should be rewarded.”

“I never agreed to any such thing.”

“Did I say you did?”

“Ladies.”

“I also said I’d bet as much money as I could get my hands on. Which I’m ready to do.” She took out her wad of bills and tossed them onto Rudman’s desk.

“Cash!” he exclaimed like a horrified Faust, half rising from his chair.

“Put that away,” Melanie said.

“Ms. Seitchek. Please, ah. This is very touching, gesture-wise, but really, you want to keep that in a safe place. You don’t want that on people’s desks, with no rubber band, et cetera. I was on the point of telling you that Mrs. Holland respectfully declines the offer of security and a sliding scale. In return she insists on the cap of fifty thousand you proposed.”

Renée stood up and stuffed the bills back in her pocket. “No deal.”

“Mrs. Holland?”

Melanie cocked her head mechanically, like a bird. “What kind of a cap did you have in mind, Renée? Or did you want no cap at all? Perhaps you were thinking of a straight thirty percent?”

“One million dollars.”

Melanie blew air out derisively.

“How much cash do you have there, Ms. Seitchek? If I may ask.”

Ignoring him, she took a step towards Melanie and addressed her directly. “I’m going to tell you what this particular stock is going to do in the next three months or six months, whichever you prefer. You’ll either buy or sell your shares on my recommendation. If you make five hundred thousand dollars because I gave you the right advice, I want fifty thousand. If you make ten million, I want one million. That’s ten percent up to one million. If you make nothing at all, or if you lose money, you keep all the cash I have on me now. It’s eight thousand dollars.”

Rudman was shaking his head and waving his arms, trying to whistle the play dead. Melanie looked up at Renée wildly. “It’s Louis!” she said. “It’s not you at all. You — you’re not even here! It’s Louis!”

“Oh dear, Mrs. Holland. Really.”

“You are wrong,” Renée said, shaking with hatred. “You are so wrong.”

Rudman nodded at her. “You see? She says you’re wrong. You see? But, ah, Ms. Seitchek, you’ll have to excuse us for a second.”

He led Melanie across the office and into a conference room, lined with precedents, that opened off the rear. Hearing the latch click, Renée sat down and closed her eyes and breathed. Five minutes passed before Rudman stepped out. “Ten percent up to 200 K, eight thousand security.”

She didn’t turn around. “No,” she said, and added, as if it were a foreign word she wasn’t sure she’d pronounced right: “No.”

He retreated. This time he was back in less than a minute. “Last offer, Ms. Seitchek. Three hundred fifty K.”

“No.”

Again the latch clicked. She thought she was alone, but then she felt his hand on her shoulder, and his mustache bore down on her. “You said no?”

“That’s right.”

“Let me ask you a question, Ms. Seitchek. Little question, OK? What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

She stared straight ahead.

“Sure, Hahvahd’s a great school, and maybe you’re a great little grad student, but, uh, three hundred fifty thousand dollars—”

“Before taxes.”

“Aren’t we being a little fucking greedy here? You ever heard of a thing called moderation? Quitting while you’re ahead? Compassion for a lady who’s obviously not all there? I’m sure I don’t need to tell you she’s in there telling me to accept your terms. You know what she just told me? She told me you’re the Devil, Devil with a capital D, I’m telling you she means it literally, sweah to God. With a straight face! That’s the type person you’re putting the screws in. But just between you and me, little girl, you’re not the Devil. You’re a greasy little grad student that God only knows how she got her claws in a fine lady like Mrs. Holland. And you wanna know something else? You’re not getting more than 350 K. I don’t have to tell you we’re dealing with a person who’s lost perspective. She’d give you the whole million, but I’m not going to let her. She can crack in two and go sit in an asylum for all I care, but I’m not going to let her hand over a million bucks to some little sneak that’s selling secrets behind her employer’s back. I’m telling you that’s what I think of you, Ms. Seitchek. I think you are a greasy little piece of dead fish. You hear me?”

She was utterly motionless.

“Yeah, and for your information, guys don’t get much easier-going than me.”

“After taxes,” she said quietly. “Six hundred is 350 after taxes, more or less. And I am leaving if you don’t accept it.”

“Hey, great idea. Why don’t you leave right now? Or do you need me to explain about selling blocks of stock. Maybe a lesson in capital gains? You ever heard of that? Broker’s fees? Nah, what am I saying, you probably got the tax code memorized.”

She jumped up, and before he could stop her she was in the conference room. Melanie was leaning against the oval table, sobbing.

“Six hundred thousand,” Renée said as she wrenched free of Rudman’s grasp. “Six hundred thousand.”

“Shut up! Shut up!”

Melanie seized Rudman’s hand imploringly. “Henry, do it!”

“Mrs. Holland—”

“Do it. I said do it. Do it and we’re done with it.”

10

Midnight in the system rooms. The roar of fans and airconditioning fills them tightly, to the very corners, like the breath in an inflated mattress. All the consoles have gone dim. In its private closet, the line printer is drumming numbers onto paper. The day’s New York Times lies by the laser printer. A headline reads:

STUDY REVEALS DEPTH OF RELATIONSHIPS,

NOT QUANTITY, AS KEY TO HAPPINESS

Far away a door has closed, and someone’s footsteps seem to be getting fainter, but suddenly they are louder, echoing in the stairwell, louder and louder in their leisurely descent, impossibly loud by the time they reach the landing outside the system rooms. They don’t so much as pause here. The hallway has counted twenty-four of them when the loading-dock door is opened; the last sound is the sound of the door falling shut.

The diodes on the face of the CPU unit flicker knowingly.

The printer has filled its metal basket, and the oblong scene in the single street-side window has changed to the blue of fifty fathoms, to the green of ten fathoms, to the dripping misty yellows of a summer morning, by the time the first students come in. They carry coffee and move cautiously, as if wading through some waste-deep backwash of night.

In front of the building, outside the Peabody Museum and its collection of glass flowers, there is an unprepossessing dogwood tree. Tourists photograph themselves in front of this tree thirty or forty times a day, roping it into their lives like a bystander accused of imaginary crimes, and shooting it summarily. There are pictures of this tree in albums in Tokyo and Yokohama and Hokkaido, and Stuttgart and Padua, and Riyadh and Malmö.

On the terrace ringing the student lounge, up on the building’s penthouse floor, the sun has yet to burn the dew off the tandem of hemispherical charcoal grills, and the square bottle of lighting fluid, and the jumbo laboratory tongs that students manipulate their coals with. A bag of charcoal is slumped against the railing, exhausted. Inside the lounge, on a table by the elevator, discolored slabs of melon and a chunk of apple with the skin coming loose are floating in a clear plastic bowl. Howard Chun is sleeping on a sofa, a peaceful corpse, hands folded on his chest. Triangular potato chip fragments lie scattered on the brown carpeting.

P-wave residuals, lateral heterogeneity, core-mantle boundary, centroid-moment-tensor, rupture propagation, slab penetration, non-double-couple events, shear-strength coefficients, intraplate seismicity, deconvolution, source-time functions, normal modes, aseismic slip, migration of the poles. One student calls his programs things like “Kelly” and “Diane” and “Martha.” These are the names of women he has pursued or is pursuing. He likes to say his favorite commands aloud: “Do Martha. Run Kelly. Execute Diane.”

The newspaper says: It seems like centuries ago that men said blunt, self-satisfied things to credulous women.

The system can be irritable when overburdened. It may spend eternities on simple tasks. It may send upsetting messages to your console. It may sham dead.

If you forget to tell the system not to keep expecting something, it will keep expecting it. Every few minutes it will spit a message onto the paper in the system console, informing the world that although you have forgotten your appointment, it has not. It will spit these messages hour after hour.

When there is nothing for it to do, the system sleeps. It wakes up knowing the time to within a hundredth of a second.

Sometimes the system becomes irrational, and a young man in a too-tight suit has to come with his aluminum suitcases and bring it down. The CPU unit is opened up and suffers the indignity of having its boards removed, one after another, until the faulty one is found. Then everything is OK again.

The window is dark when Renée appears. The chairs have been herded into clusters, one by the telephone and one in the corner by the Tectronix screen. She rolls them back to where they belong, puts five soft-drink cans in the recycling box, and logs off consoles for the people who haven’t bothered to. Then she goes up the ramp to the inner sanctum and sits angled at the console by the optical-disk jukebox, her legs to one side of the chair. She is so alone and so motionless in the roar of the bright room, so technical in her coloration, that even though she’s plainly visible through the plate-glass window, a passing sedimentologist who sticks his head in the door is sure the room is empty.

An image of the earth beneath Tonga flows onto the color screen. Renée looks at each stationary object in the room, the system console, the storage disks, the walls, the CPU unit, the tape drives, the power supply, the array processor, the digitizer, the racks of tapes, her body, the walls, the jukebox. She feels the watchfulness and the perpetuity. She listens intently to the noise, trying to find sense or pattern or allusion in it, and knowing that she won’t. Beneath the noise there are, however, ghosts of noises — the scurrying, the titter, of calculating electrons.

Howard Chun enters the empty room at midnight carrying a milk shake and his boom box, which is the size of a two-drawer file cabinet. He logs onto the system from six consoles and listens to the Eroica while he works.

Later, after he has gone, a night wind rolls a paper cup across the pavement outside the window. System noise covers the sighing of the wind, but not the clatter of the cup.

Still later, the corner of an ocean map comes unstuck from a wall and bends forward. Three weeks from now another corner will come unstuck, and the first person in to work the next day will find the map in a heap on the floor.

It’s morning: the dogwood is being photographed. The newspaper says: Food may not be love, but it’s nice nevertheless, and it has its uses.

All the lights are burning. Soft-drink cans float on their sides on a sea of waste paper. The cracked plastic hemisphere belonging to the room’s globe has peanut shells inside it, and the front panel of the radiator, from whose fan cool air can also blow, is lying on the floor with its decaying sheet of foam insulation uppermost. In the equipment room, a Twinkies wrapper and a gummy sheet of Twinkies cardboard are lying on the CPU unit, by the modems.

In the seven years since it began, the noise has stopped only once. It was after midnight on a Saturday in August, when a belt in the airconditioner broke. An alarm bell alerted Campus Security, but there were no signs of a break-in, and the airconditioner was making its usual noise, so the officers disabled the alarm. The temperature in the equipment room rose to 130° F before Renée came to work and, duly aghast, shut the system down.

What a silence there was that day. It was like standing by an ocean from which all the water had been drained.

The system believes that the last twenty years have eliminated any significant distinction between human and artificial intelligence in America. The system believes that all vital functions of the average American intelligence can now be simulated by a program running to 11,000 lines supported by six Phrase libraries and one Opinions library together totaling less than eight megabytes. A medium-price laptop with a hard disk will run the program, which can perform exactly the same mental tasks as a randomly selected American: can realistically simulate his spending patterns, his crisis-response mechanisms, his political behavior.

The 5p.m. - 6:30p.m. segment of the weekday program for a male might look like this:

You may wish to object: Can the artificial intelligence read a book with comprehension? Can it paint a truly original painting or compose a symphony? Can it distinguish between fact and mere image, and make responsible political decisions on the basis of this distinction?

The system points out that the program simulates the intelligence of the average American in the 1990s.

You may still object that no machine, no matter how sophisticated, will ever be able to subjectively feel the color blue or taste the flavor cinnamon or be aware of itself as it thinks.

The system considers this a dangerous irrelevance. Because once you admit subjectivity into a logical discussion, once you grant reality to phenomena that can never be verified by a machine or a chemical reaction, once you say that a person’s subjective interpretation of cinnamon molecules as Oh! Cinnamon! has any meaning, you open a Pandora’s box. Next thing you know, the person will be telling you that she interprets the silence on a mountaintop as Oh! There is an eternal presence all around me, and the darkness of her bedroom late at night as Oh! I have a soul that transcends its physical enclosure; and that way madness lies.

It’s much wiser to live rationally, as a machine does. To vote for the man with the harshest views on drug kingpins. To maintain that what is real about the flavor of cinnamon is its informational content: it tells your brain — and this by sheer chemical accident, since cinnamon is non-nutritive—eat me, I am good for you. It’s absolutely wiser to laugh at the person who tells you that without your subjective experience of cinnamon you would have hanged yourself at the age of thirteen, and that without your subjective experience of the smell of melting snow your attitude towards your mother or your wife or your daughter would be no more than How can I make her give me what I want? And as some people cannot taste, and as the leader of a nation of the color-blind lives in his black Berlin or gray Tokyo or White House and sneers at those who say they have feelings about the color blue, you must learn to sneer at those who have been in the mountains and say they’ve felt the presence of an eternal God, and to reject any conclusions they draw from this experience.

Otherwise — if you let emotion trick you into thinking there’s something unique or transcendent about human subjectivity — you might find yourself wondering why you’ve organized your life as if you were nothing but a machine for the unpleasant production and pleasant consumption of commodities. And why, in the name of responsible parenthood, you are fostering in your children the same ethos of consumption, if the material is not the essence of humanity: why you’re guaranteeing that their life will be as cluttered with commodities as yours is, with tasks and loops and input and output, so that they will have lived for no more purpose than to perpetuate the system and will die for no more reason than that they’ve worn out. You might begin to worry that with every appliance that you buy, every piece of plastic that you discard, every gallon of hot water that you waste, every stock that you trade, every mile that you drive, you are hastening the day when there is no more land or air or water in the world that has not been changed, the day when spring will smell like hydrochloric acid and a summer rain will be paradichlorobenzene-flavored, and your tap water will be bright red and taste like Pepsi, and the only birds will be educated sparrows chirping “Just say no!” and blue jays crying “Sex!” and chickens hawking “White meat!” and you’ll eat beef one night and chicken the next night and beef the next night, and all the forests will be planted with the same kind of pine tree or the same kind of maple tree, and even a thousand miles out from shore the bottom of the ocean will be covered with rusty scum and plastic milk jugs, and only tunas and sardines and jumbo shrimps will swim there, and even at night on a remote mountaintop the wind will smell like the exhaust vent of a McDonald’s and you’ll hear car alarms and TV sets and the thunder of the jets in which passengers are being offered a choice of Chicken. or beef? — and the nature in which all people wittingly or not once felt the immanence of eternity will be dead, and the newspaper which you can read on the computer screen you labored hard at a different screen to purchase will tell you that Man is free and everyone is equal and that Miniature Golf Is the New City Game. And how disturbing it might be to find such a world insufficient. And so for your own peace of mind, since nothing can be proved or disproved anyway — since your science disqualifies itself from answering precisely those questions that concern the mind’s ability to feel that which is, in an absolute and verifiable sense, not there — isn’t it safer all around to assume machines have their own virtual souls and feelings?

Renée had come home from Arger, Kummer & Rudman with a blinding headache, a notarized agreement running to 270 words, and her eighty hundred-dollar bills. Melanie, irrational to the end, had refused to take the bills as a security.

She answered an ad for a ’74 Mustang convertible, fire-engine red. She gave a hundred-dollar bill to a mechanic who appraised the car, and thirty-eight more to the invertebrate zoologist who was selling it.

She went to the high-impact clothing stores in the Square, places that were branches of stores on lower Broadway in Manhattan. She bought short, tight skirts and shiny shoes, tubes of lipstick, summer tops that cost ten dollars an ounce, a pair of shades. She bought a leather jacket and plastic jewelry.

The next morning she returned to the Square, had her hair clipped, and shopped some more. She was standing in front of a clothing-store mirror, seeing if she could manage a lime-green skirt with a less than straight cut, when her reflection’s eyes suddenly caught her own and she was stricken by the thought that all she was doing was trying to look like Lauren Bowles.

She decided she’d bought enough for now.

The Mustang turned heads as she drove north with the top down through Cambridge and Somerville. She took the inside lane on I-93. The only disheartening thing was that she couldn’t stand any of the music on the radio.

The air in Peabody smelled like seaweed. On Main Street, a block east of the Warren Five Cents Savings Bank, she knocked twice on the window of The Peabody Times before she saw the sign saying closed this Friday. She leaned against a fender, pressing the thin fabric of her skirt against the sun-heated metal, and chewed down three fingernails as far as seemed advisable.

On Andover Street she located the middle-aged bank building that she’d seen pictured as a newborn in the Globe from 1970. Rust now stained the panels it was faced with; the sidewalk was cracked and tanned and weedy. Across the street stood a laundromat, a video rental place, and a “spa” selling beer and groceries. The man behind the spa counter was a Portuguese who said he’d owned the business for six years. She tossed the bottle of Pepsi she’d bought into the back seat of the Mustang.

She cruised the working people’s neighborhood behind the bank building, past white bungalows nearing condemnation, through varying concentrations of acetone fumes, up and down all the streets that dead-ended against the high corporate fence with its signs saying ABSOLUTELY NO TRESPASSING. She stopped by a house with a white-haired man on the porch. He staggered across his lawn, favoring a bad hip, and stared at her as if she were the Angel of Death who had come along in her red Mustang sooner than he’d expected. She said her name was Renée Seitchek and she was a seismologist from Harvard University and could she ask him a few questions? Then he was sure she was the Angel and he hobbled back to his porch and from this position of relative safety shouted, “Mind your own business!”

She tried other streets and accosted other old men. She wondered if there was something in the water that made them all so bizarre.

A stumpy woman turning the soil around some apparently dead roses saw her drive by for a third time and asked what she was looking for. Renée said she was looking for people who’d been in the neighborhood since at least 1970. The woman set down her hand spade. “Do I get some kind of prize if I say yes?”

Renée parked the car. “Can I ask you some questions?”

“Well, if it’s for science.”

“Do you remember sometime about twenty years ago a particularly tall. structure on the property over there, that looked like an oil well?”

“Sure,” the woman said immediately.

“Do you remember what years?”

“What’s this got to do with earthquakes?”

“Well, I think Sweeting-Aldren may be responsible for them.”

“I’ll be damned. Maybe they want to fix my kitchen ceiling.” The woman laughed. She was built like a mailbox and had a wide mouth, painted orange. “Jesus Christ, I can’t believe this.”

“My other question is whether you might have any old pictures that would show the, uh, structure.”

“Pictures? Come on inside.”

The woman’s name was Jurene Caddulo. She pointed at the gray crater in her kitchen ceiling and wouldn’t budge until Renée had found the right combination of phrases to express her sympathy and outrage. Jurene said she was a secretary at the high school and had been widowed for eight years. She had five thousand unsorted snapshots in a kitchen drawer.

“Can I offer you a cordial?”

“No thanks,” Renée said as bottles of apricot liqueur, Amaretto, and Cherry Heering were set down on the table. Jurene came back from another room with a pair of exceptionally ugly cut-glass tulips.

“If you can believe I’ve only got two of these left. I had eight until the earthquakes. You think I can sue? They’re antiques, they’re not available. You like Amaretto? Here. That’s good, isn’t it.”

Expired coupons punctuated the disordered photographic history of Caddulo family life. Jurene’s daughter in Revere and daughter in Lynn had hatched children in a variety of shapes and sizes; she puzzled over group shots, trying to get the names and ages right. Renée found herself saying, “This must be Michael Junior,” which made Jurene look again at the other pictures because she knew that this was not Michael Junior and therefore the child she had just called Michael Junior must be Petey, and then everything made sense again. Jurene’s younger son played guitar. There were dozens of prints of a picture of his band playing the heavy-metal mass that he had written at the age of seventeen and that the priest had said no to performing in the church, so it was performed right here in the basement without the sacraments. The son now had a different band and drove a customized 4x4 pickup. The older son showed up as an adult in San Francisco sporting a mustache and a leather vest, and as a distant, gowned blur in blue-toned shots of a high-school graduation on a dreary day. Jurene said he was a hair stylist. Renée nodded. Jurene said both her sons were still looking for the right girl. Renée nodded. In high school and junior high the daughters had worn their no-color hair in fantastic bouffants. Their bodies were deformed like pool toys by the affectionately squeezing tentacles of their father, now dead of cancer. All the sadness of the seventies was in Jurene’s drawer, all of the years in which Renée had not been happy and had not had what she wanted but instead had had pimples and friends who embarrassed her, years whose huge tab collars and platform soles and elephant flares and overgrown hair (Don’t the mentally ill neglect to cut their hair?) now seemed to her both the symbols and literal accoutrements of unhappiness.

Jurene still went to the same cottage she’d been renting for twenty years in Barnstable, on the Cape. She was going there Sunday. “After I’ve been at the Cape I can smell the smell here for about two days before I’m used to it again. You want to know something really peculiar, though, sometimes on the Cape I can smell it at the beach.”

“It’s like a ringing in your ear, except in your nose.”

“No, I’m talking about the smell. Here.” Jurene produced a handful of low-resolution pictures of a snowman and a snow fort and a snowball fight in the little front lawn. In the background of every one of them, well behind the houses across the street, was Sweeting-Aldren’s drilling derrick. There was nothing else it could be; no chemical process that Renée knew of required a structure like that. The date was stamped on the back: February 1970. “Can I have one of these?”

“Borrow ’em, sure. Why don’t I see if can find the negatives.” She opened a drawer in which negatives were under such pressure that some of them sprang out and fluttered to the floor. She left them there while, on second thought, she opened a tin of butter cookies and arranged them on a painted plate. Renée held her glass of Amaretto to the graying light in the window. A label on the bottle said According to the Surgeon General, women should not drink alcoholic beverages during pregnancy because of the risk of birth defects.

“I have to go,” she said.

The sky was deepening as if the land were on a slope and sliding towards a precipice. In the parking lot of an office complex affording a good view of Sweeting-Aldren, she sat on the hood of the Mustang with the Caddulo pictures and a 7¹/2-minute USGS topo map, comparing perspectives on a cooling tower, trying to triangulate a location for the derrick. Thousands of pig-sized and cow-sized boulders, some of them possibly glacial and native, shored up the hillside on which the complex stood.

A voice spoke from right behind her: “What ugly children.”

She turned and weathered a spasm of fright. Rod Logan was standing by the car, holding a picture that had been lying on the hood.

“Give me that,” she said.

Behind her in the parking lot, junior executives were walking to their shiny cars. Rather than risk a scene, Logan handed her the picture. He strolled to the brink of the asphalt and peered down at the yellow pond below the boulders.

“You know,” he said, “in the old days, people like you, they’d come around, they’d get warned, and if they kept coming around they’d have the shit beaten out of them, and nobody would really complain or litigate, it was just part of the way the game was played. But everybody’s gotten so gosh-damed kind and gentle lately. It’s reached a point where all I can really do is ask you politely to clear out, and if you choose not to, we’re no longer on terra firma, if you know what I mean. We don’t know what kind of procedures are required. There’s no literature on it.”

Renée got in the car.

“This is quite the stylish car, incidentally. Nice duds, too. Looks like you’ve found a wealthy patron.”

She started the engine. Logan leaned over her, looking straight down on her lap.

“Goodbye, Renée.”

She made another trip to the Square, stopping at the clinic in the Holyoke Center and then dropping off the Caddulo negatives for enlargements. The rest of the weekend, late into both nights, she worked at a console in the lab. Not a single person disturbed her until Sunday afternoon, when a few students drifted through, said hello, executed Diane, etc. No one looked at what she was writing.

Her abstract read:

Recent seismicity in Peabody, Mass., and the prolonged sequence in 1987 have displayed the swarm-like character of known instances of induced seismicity. Until now the resemblance has been disregarded because of the relatively great focal depths of the earthquakes (3-8km) and the absence of reservoirs and injection wells in the focal area. However, photographic and archival evidence strongly indicates that in 1969-70 Sweeting-Aldren Industries of Peabody drilled an exploratory well to a depth in excess of 6 km, and that the well has subsequently been used for waste disposal. Current research locates observed activity on a steeply dipping basement fault striking SW-NE. Models of fluid migration and fault activation are proposed, the temporal distribution of observed seismicity is explained, and the legal implications of Sweeting-Aldren’s role are briefly discussed.

She described the tectonic environment of the Peabody earthquakes. She marked likely well-sites on the best of her aerial photographs. In footnotes she mentioned Peter Stoorhuys and David Stoorhuys by name. She made pictures:

She wrote that the absence of earthquakes between 1971 and 1987 indicated that there were no stressed faults in the immediate vicinity of the injection well. It had taken as long as sixteen years for fluid to be forced far enough into the surrounding rock for it to reach the fault(s) on which the earthquakes were taking place. This indicated that very significant volumes of waste had been injected, and that the rock formation at a depth of 4 km was loose enough to accept this volume at pumping pressures low enough to be commercially attractive. The conventions of scientific prose served to clarify and heighten the passion with which she wrote. She was so absorbed in her arguments that it shocked her, at the mirror in the women’s bathroom on the second floor, to see the expensive, tarty clothes she was wearing.

Monday afternoon, after sleeping late, she picked up the Caddulo enlargements, bought some red nail polish, and stopped by the Holyoke Center again. Back in Hoffman she saw a flabby, sunburnt woman standing in the hall outside her office, looking very lost. Brown daisy-shaped pieces of felt were sewn onto the chest of her yellow sweat suit and the thighs of her yellow sweatpants; a button pinned to her shoulder said adoption not abortion. Renée had heard that people like this were still dropping in from time to time, but she hadn’t seen one personally since the week her phone and mail harassment started.

The woman sidled up to her and spoke confidentially. She had a twang. “I’m looking for a Dr. Seitchek?”

“Oh,” Renée said indifferently. “She’s dead.”

“She’s dead!” The woman drew her head back like an affronted hen. “I’m very sorry to hear that.”

“No, I’m joking. She’s not dead. She’s standing right in front of you.”

“She is? Oh, you. What’d you say you’re dead for?”

“Just a joke. Let me guess what you’re here for. You came to my abortion clinic to complain to me personally.”

“That’s right.”

“Clairvoyant,” Renée said, touching her temple. She saw that Terry Snall had stopped at the bottom of the staircase. He had his hands on his hips and was exuding tremendous discombobulation over the way she was dressed. She turned her back to him. “Let me ask you,” she said to the visitor. “Does this building look to you like an abortion clinic?”

“You know, I was just wondering that myself.”

“Well, you see, it’s not. And I’m not a medical doctor. I’m a geologist.” On an impulse, she spun and pointed. “Terry, though. Terry performs abortions. As a sideline, don’t you, Terry?”

“That’s not funny, Renée. That’s not at all funny.”

“He denies it,” she explained, “because he doesn’t want you to harass him. But he’s part of the whole — abortion — conspiracy.” She hugged herself tightly, turning one shoe on its heel. There was an awkward silence, disturbed only by the whining of the line printer behind a closed door.

“Well,” the visitor said. “She already lied to me once. She said she was dead!”

“That’s what Renée is like,” Terry said. “She thinks she can do anything she wants. She thinks she’s a cut above.”

Renée spun again, still hugging herself. “But that’s because I can do anything I want. And I’m going to, Terry! You watch me.” She approached the woman, who, though she was bigger and taller, took a wary step backward. “Where are you from?”

“You mean originally? I’m from Herculaneum, Missouri. But I live in Chelsea now.”

“You belong to Stites’s church.”

“The Reverend Stites.”

“The Reverend Stites who claims he has nothing to do with phone and mail harassment.”

“Oh, he don’t, see.” Oblivious to having let the word “harassment” pass, the woman unzipped her swollen beige purse. “This letter here I got forwarded from Herculaneum.”

Renée turned to throw an amused glance at Terry, but he was gone. “What’s your name?” she asked the woman.

“Me? Mrs. Jack Wittleder.”

“Glad to meet you, Jack.”

“Oh, not Jack. Jack’s my husband’s name.”

“Oh. So what’s your real name?”

“My friends and brethren call me Bebe. But that’s not my real, legal name. You see, Dr. Seitchek, I don’t know about you, but in my part of the world, when a woman marries—”

“Yeah yeah yeah.”

Mrs. Jack Wittleder was hurt. She sighed, batting her eyelashes. “I don’t know what you’re doing on my list, if it’s true what you say. This is number 20 Oxford Street? Couldn’t of been a mistake, if it’s Hoffman Laboratories and you’re Dr. Seitchek. I keep calling you and calling you, and no one answers. The phone rings and you don’t answer it?”

“That’s how it works, yes.”

“But there must be some reason why you’re on the list. Did you—? Tell me, when do you believe human life begins?”

“At thirty.”

Mrs. Jack Wittleder shook her head. “It is a far greater sin to mock the Lord than be atheistic, Dr. Seitchek. Now, I’m not an educated woman, not compared to a Harvard-University doctor, but the Bible tells us that we don’t know God with our mind, we know Him with our heart, and we don’t see Him with our eyes, we see Him with our heart, and it may be that my heart knows what’s right and wrong better than a professor’s brain can.”

“Doubtless. But you see, I’m kind of busy.”

“Too busy to think about what’s right and wrong.”

Renée smiled. “You got it.”

“Well. You’re honest. Say that for you. I don’t guess you read the Bible.”

“Nope.”

“Did you know that the truth about human life on earth is in the Bible and nowhere else?”

“Yeah, I understand, you want to draw me in, but—”

“No, Dr. Seitchek. I don’t want to draw you in. I want to take you to the place where I found happiness.”

“Where’s that?”

“In the church that is the bride of Christ. The Reverend Stites’s church.”

“Oh. I see. The bride of Christ is in a tenement in Chelsea.”

“That’s right.”

“And you go around to clinics like this one and try to enlist new members from all your sympathizers there.”

“No. Only when I find an opportunity to plant some seeds in people.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve already been sown.”

Mrs. Jack Wittleder glanced up and down the hall to make sure they were alone. She lowered her voice. “What exactly do you mean by that, Dr. Seitchek?”

The sport drained out of Renée’s face. “Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

“Come along with me,” Mrs. Jack Wittleder urged. “The Reverend Stites is a kind and erudite young man, he’s helped me so much. I’m sure he could help you too.”

“I don’t need his help.”

“You’re talking to me. Nobody else has given me the time of day. Come along and you’ll see.”

Renée walked up the hall and turned around in front of a giant picture of the earth at a depth of 1,500 kilometers. She came back wreathed in smileyness. “All right, Mrs. Wittleder.”

“Call me Bebe.”

“Bebe, I’d love to come with you. Are you happy about that? I’m going to come with you and see your lovely church. Terry!” she called. “Terry!”

A beard, red lips, and glasses appeared in a doorway. “What?”

“Do you want to go to Chelsea with me? See the famous church? You could talk to the people who’ve been tying up your telephone. Give ’em a piece of your mind.”

Terry shook his head ominously. “If I were you,” he said to Bebe, “I wouldn’t take her. She just wants to make you look bad.”

“Oh, thanks,” Renée said.

“She just wants to get even,” Terry said.

“God, what a sweet guy.”

“You did already lie to me twice,” Bebe reflected.

“Well, I’m not lying now. So just wait here a second.” She went into the console room and copied her new paper onto a 5¹/2-inch tape, inserted a write-protect ring, and left it in a drawer. She stowed the enlargements separately.

Then they went to Chelsea.

All the way to Park Street a Seeing Eye dog observed Renée with a sultry expression. Bebe conferred a condescending smirk on every rider in the subway car — even the blind man got one, and each black person received several — but Renée suspected this was more a product of midwestern insecurity than of arrogance.

“Do you have a pen?” she whispered, nodding at a Planned Parenthood announcement on the ad strip above the seats. “Why don’t you deface that advertisement? Or, wait. Why don’t you just go ahead and tear it down?”

“That’s not right.”

“Oh, come on,” Renée whispered. “Do it. It’s a lesser crime to prevent a greater crime.”

“It’s not right.”

“You’re afraid of what people will say. That means your faith isn’t strong enough.”

“My faith,” said Bebe, touching the brown daisy on her chest. “Is my business.”

It was a long walk from the Wood Island subway stop to the Church of Action in Christ. Chelsea Street traversed a neighborhood of giant cylinders marked with red numbers in white circles. It crossed a drawbridge whose gridwork surface sang beneath the tires of the heavy traffic. Renée looked up at the solid concrete counterweight suspended above her (it was the size of a mobile home) and considered how the glassy wealth of downtown Boston required a counterweight in these industrial square miles, where vacant lots collected decaying windblown newsprint, and the side streets were cratered, and the workers had faces the nitrite red of Fenway Franks. A Ford Escort with Day-Glo green custom windshield wipers crossed the bridge, tailgated by a Corvette that identified itself as an Official Pace Car, 70th Indianapolis 500, May 27th, 1985.

Bebe walked incredibly slowly. She said she’d been in the church for five months. Her day began at sunrise with communal prayers and hymn-singing, followed by breakfast. Missionary work, which was “voluntary but expected,” commenced at eight-thirty. There was a host of sites to be picketed, and members were encouraged to picket on a round-robin basis, in groups of three to six. “Groups of Twelve” were formed when the spirit moved among the community and twelve Chosen members spontaneously resolved to prevent a day’s complement of murders at one of several notorious clinics. Bebe had not yet been part of a Group of Twelve, though she had witnessed the arrest of one and had participated in the daily jail visitations. She told Renée that the last five months had been the most meaningful and light-filled time she’d ever known.

God is. Pro-Life! said the banner over the entrance to the tenement. The building was the last in a complex of brick cubes with small, square windows; as if the building’s architect had foreseen its future as a church, the central clerestory was vertically bisected by narrow windows reminiscent of cathedrals.

Several dozen women were at work in the main hall, a low-ceilinged linoleumed room that had probably once been a community center or nursery. A cheerful smell of tempera was in the air. “My sister will be among us tomorrow,” said one elderly artisan putting the finishing touches on a poster that Renée turned her head to read:

“I’d almost given up and then she called and said she was coming.”

“Praise the Lord, Jesus gets the glory.”

“Amen.”

Your convenience is homicide. Jesus was an unplanned pregnancy. THANKS MOM I LIFE.

Bebe had disappeared, leaving Renée alone in the center of the room, in her black clothing and black sunglasses, surrounded by women of all ages in their pastels and aggressively unerotic hairdos. More and more of them were looking at her. Just two weeks ago the gazes crawling all over her back might have broken down her self-possession, but she could stand them now.

At the front of the room a woman in a white sweat suit with a whistle and a cross around her neck was clapping her hands. She was like every gym teacher Renée had had in high school. “All right, everybody, time to clean it up. We’re going to watch a video together. Let’s go! Clean it up!” She walked around the perimeter, pulling down tattered blackout shades while the painters obediently closed their tempera jars. Renée planted herself against the rear wall. There were men here, a sad little assortment sitting cross-legged and looking at their hands.

The women clustered like Camp Fire Girls in front of a cart with video equipment on it. The lights went out. The show began.

To three-chord Marin County music, a mare suckles her foal in a summer field with the Tetons in the background. Adorable fox cubs trot down a forest path behind their mother. Birds sing and stuff food down the traps of their chicks. Cut to a club in TriBeCa, guitars screaming, strobes flashing. A woman in shades and purple lipstick laughs, showing teeth, and says, “Unnatural acts.” Back in the Tetons, a freckled mother in a gingham dress watches her toddlers pick wildflowers. The sun shines through her auburn hair. “Mommy!” a toddler cries. In the shimmering distance the father is chopping wood. We see the swell of a new pregnancy beneath the gingham. Guitars shriek outside the door of the high-tech ladies’ room, where two black girls in stiletto heels arch their backs like porn queens as they take cocaine nasally. A stutter zoom through the door of an empty stall: twenty-four-week fetus, red as life, is floating in the toilet bowl. Time-lapse blossoming of a downy gentian. Waddling prairie-dog pups. Calf craning its neck for teat of cow. Ducklings in Jackson Hole. By a dancing fire, behind a Vase-lined lens, Our Lady of the Gingham Dress holds a child on each knee and kisses them, kisses them, kisses them. The guitars more assonant yet white hands, black hands, hands with heavy jewelry push the flush lever viciously, but the fetus is like one of those turds that will not go down. Strobes flash. The thwarted hands contort in rage. A child rocks her doll to sleep. Mare and foal canter in super slo-mo.

The church members from rural AK, from rural MO, from NC and SC, from Buffalo and Indianapolis and Shreveport remained as calm as the hospitalized while they received this dose of filmic sophistication. The rear doors of the hall kept opening, admitting sunlight and weary missionaries who set their placards on the floor and widened the reverent circle around the TV screen. Renée’s mouth hung open. She was thinking what a lucky thing it was she’d come, how incredibly easily she might not have.

. At Sunnyvale Farms you won’t see pornography on display behind the counter. You won’t find birth control on racks within easy reach of your children. Sunnyvale Farms is more than a convenience store, it’s a home away from home — your home. And remember, for every ten-dollar purchase you make at Sunnyvale Farms, we’ll make a contribution to the war on drugs. To help make this world a sunnier place for your children. Sunnyvale Farms: The Family Convenience Store. ”

“So what magazine are you from?” a young Southern man at Renée’s elbow asked her. He had a burnished, chubby face and corn-silk hair, and there was an assertiveness to his posture, a pushiness to his glasses and to the angle of his head, that reminded her of Louis Holland. It was Philip Stites.

“No magazine,” she said.

“Newspaper, TV station, radio station?”

“No.”

“Shoot. You ruined my record.”

“My name’s Renée Seitchek.”

Stites leaned closer to her face, obliquely, like an ophthalmologist. “Sure! Of course. What are you doin’ here?”

“Watching. the most disgusting videos I’ve ever seen.”

“Pretty heavy, isn’t it. Listen, Renée, I’d love to talk to you. Can you come back, maybe? Or you can stay if you want. I’m busy till about six-thirty.”

“We’ll see how much of this I can stand.”

“Good deal. Hey.” He made her look at him. There were wrinkles in his navy blazer, and his yellow tie was loosened. “I’m real glad you came. I mean it.”

He crossed the darkened room, weaving through his flock, and went out by a side door. Several members rose and followed him. The rest continued to watch the advertising, which lasted nearly another hour. When the shades were finally raised, the light in the windows was golden. Three women in white aprons came in through a rear door, followed discreetly by an aroma of pork and beans. The gym teacher who had run the video quieted the crowd and read announcements from a clipboard.

She was pleased to welcome back June, Ruby, Amanda, Susan Dee, Stephanie, Mrs. Powers, Mrs. Moran, Mr. DiConstanzo, Susan H., Allan, Irene, and Mrs. Flathead, all released today from the Cambridge City Jail. Their twenty days behind bars had set the city back an estimated $11,000, not counting court costs, which the city was suing to recoup.

The Group of Twelve stood and received an ovation.

Other good news was that Intrafamily Services of Braintree had indefinitely suspended its death procedures as of today. “To all those who helped them reach that informed decision,” said the gym teacher, “my thanks, the church’s thanks, and above all the thanks of the countless sweet children to whom you’ll have given the gift of life. Praise the Lord, Jesus gets the glory.”

Another ovation.

New members present for the first time were Mrs. Jerome Shumacher of Trumbull, Connecticut, Mrs. Libby Fulton of Wallingford, Pennsylvania, Miss Anne Dinkins of Sparta, North Carolina, and Miss Lola Corcoran of Lexington, Massachusetts. After applauding, the congregation was urged to make the newcomers feel part of the family.

“Bebe Wittleder,” the gym teacher continued, “tells me we also have with us tonight a visitor from Harvard University, Dr. Renée Seitchek, a geologist you may remember from the special broadcast—”

The congregation swung to gape at her. An image of her small person formed on six hundred retinas.

“Peace and goodwill unto you in the name of Jesus Christ, Dr. Seitchek. You are welcome to celebrate and break bread with us, we are an open church.”

Stites returned in time to hear the last few announcements. When they were over, he immediately began a prayer, ending with a group recitation of Our Father. A woman at an upright piano guided the congregation through three hymns. Stites sang along, but it was impossible to pick his voice out. He sat down informally on the edge of a school-cafeteria table, the very tops of his argyle socks showing, and surveyed his flock, allowing anticipation to build. When he finally spoke, his voice rang through the hall.

“You’ve heard it said: God is love. People, God is love. God is two things: love and wisdom.

“People, I want you to try and picture God. Picture a being who is Love so much that He’s stronger than atoms or anything, He is pure and total love. Now, in the beginning, God had so much love inside Him that it created the universe, just through the force of love. He created the universe so there’d be something there for Him to love. And there was a Void? And the Void, the Book of Genesis tells us it became the universe, but it was still just a mass of nothing, just stuff. And He loved it and was wiser than it, and the reason it took shape—"

“Now listen. The reason it took the shape it did was because of the pain in God’s heart.”

Stites looked aside with an odd grin, as though God were this guy he’d known back in Carolina who did the damdest old things.

“You see,” he said, “even before He created the universe, He loved and He was wise. And because He was wise He knew that whatever He loved would know less than He knew. He is supreme, and it hurts Him very much to be supreme. He is an angry and hurt God. He knows more than anyone, and He loves everyone more than anyone loves anything, and so when we sin or we have thoughts — even when the smartest philosophers in the world have thoughts — He knows more. He knows we have to become dust again, and He never forgets. And He’s sad because He loves us even in our squalid earthly existence. In fact He loves us all the more.

“And so everything you see here — the walls, this table, this VCR, this coffee mug”—he held up a mug for all to see—“everything hangs together because of that pain. That’s why I can squeeze this here coffee mug and feel that it’s hard. It’s hard because God is sad. If God were happy, then there wouldn’t be any resistance in the world, your hand would go through everything. There wouldn’t be pain and suffering and death. You see what I’m saying? If things were all right with God, then there wouldn’t be any universe. There’s only a universe because He knows. Because He hurts because He knows.

“You’ve all heard the expression it’s lonely at the top? Well, that’s how it is with God. And isn’t that kind of comforting? To know that no matter how bad you feel, you can’t feel as bad as He does, because you don’t know how bad things really are. That’s how come He let them crucify His only son. Because He wanted us to know how much it hurt. And you know, when I think about how maybe the world’s going to end and I start feeling depressed because there are all these things I love so much. Well, I don’t despair, and you know why? It’s because I know that feeling of depression is holy. And if there is an Armageddon, then there’s going to be God to mourn us all when we’re gone, and all the things I love that don’t exist anymore, He didn’t forget any of those things, He loved them all along — loved them like you and I never can — and He won’t ever forget them for all eternity, and that’s what heaven is: heaven is living on in God’s love forever.”

The word “forever” hung in the air like a badminton birdie at the top of its arc.

“That’s the sermon for tonight, I thank you all.”

A final “Mighty Fortress” was sung, and then Stites walked back through the congregation, kneeling twice to take women’s hands in his own and have words with them. He ended up in front of Renée. “You hungry?”

“Not really.”

“Well I’m frankly famished.”

A ground-floor apartment behind the hall had had some walls knocked out, extending the existing kitchen. Three additional old stoves had been installed, and there was table seating for maybe fifty. Stites was given a big plate of beans from an institutional pot. He took four slices of white bread and an orange from the buffet, explaining to Renée that unless he got fed lunch by a rich patron he only ate two meals a day, the breakfast and the dinner here.

He led her up a dimly lit stairwell and down a plaster-strewn hall, one wall of which was lined with identical pieces of some kind of homemade exercise equipment, built of two-by-fours and galvanized pipe, resembling pillories. “What are these?” Renée said.

“These? These are pillories.”

“Oh my God.”

“Here, let me show you.” Stites set his plate on the floor. “All this plaster come loose in the earthquake. We sweep it up, but it seems like all you have to do is look at it, and down comes some more.” He put his head and wrists in slots in the crosspiece of a pillory. “See, you can lower the top piece with your foot, like this.” Foot in a ring, he unhooked a chain that let the upper beam lower onto the back of his neck, closing him in. “Or you can have a friend do it for you.”

He stood bent but relaxed in his khaki pants and brown loafers, facing the wall, a wallet bulging in his back pocket.

“Then what?” Renée said.

“Then you stand here. I think everybody ought to. I do it probably as much as anybody, mind you I’m not proud of it. It’s I have a special need for it, if I’ve been out in Weston all day at rich people’s houses. You stand here and look at the wall. You pray, or you can just relax. It humbles you. It feels really good. Physically, it hurts a little after a while. But that feels good too.”

With a practiced step, he raised the upper beam and freed himself. He looked at Renée, grinning intently. “You want to try it?”

“No thanks.”

“You sure? You kind of look like you do.”

“No!”

“You’d like it if you tried it.”

“I don’t want to.”

“OK, whatever. People feel vulnerable when they can’t see what’s going on behind their back and they can’t move. I believe real strongly that vulnerability’s something we oughtta nurture.”

He marched up the hall, taking big galumphing steps, as though crossing a marsh. His office had no door. Books stood in rough stacks on the red shag rug, which was stained with white paint and strewn with fallen plaster. A printed message on one wall said: And in the last days it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh. The window gave onto the courtyard of the complex, where members were picnicking and the gym teacher was organizing a volleyball game.

“The rest is bedroom and a kitchen,” Stites said. “I share it with two of the men. I took this whole outer room for myself because I’ve got all these books and papers. You can have the desk, I’ll sit on the floor.”

“No, you’re the one who’s eating.”

“Well, let’s both sit on the floor. Sorry about the plaster. It’s everywhere.”

He immediately began to shovel beans into himself. Renée was used to sitting Indian style, but shortness of skirt forced her to use a double-Z leg position. “You’re lucky the whole building hasn’t come down on you.”

He nodded, chewing.

“Do you really believe God can save a bad building from an earthquake?”

He broke bread. “Nope, and I never said I did. I bought this building because it was cheap. We’re here because it’s a place.”

“And you don’t worry that if it falls down you’ll be responsible for all the people hurt or killed?”

“They know the risks, same as me.”

“But you lead by example.”

“That’s right.” He held his fork genteelly, far up the handle. He seemed practiced at speaking with his mouth full. “I eat and sleep and work in this building by the grace of God. I’m aware that if God wills it, my life will end. That’s how it is for every living person, except the majority spend their time trying to ignore it. But if you live in what the authorities call a death trap, you’re in constant knowledge that your life is cradled in the hands of God. That’s a positive thing. It sure seems more positive to me than living out wherever, in Weston, and feeling immortal in your million-dollar house. Here I value every day. I used to despair because I never had time to do the things I wanted. I thought life was going to be too short. That’s how little I loved God. Now I’m even busier, but since I been in this building, suddenly I’m getting to everything I want to get to, including people like you. This is about as close to happiness as I think a person can be. I can live without fear because I can feel how I’m hanging right over death, in the hands of God. If you get your life in balance with your death, you stop panicking. Life stops being just the status quo that you hope won’t end for a long time.”

He bent over his plate to scrape his last beans into a pile. He pushed up his glasses with his middle finger on the bridge and sucked his teeth clean, peering up at Renée with penetrating curiosity. “You came here to tell me my building’s unsafe.”

“I came because one of your women was bothering me at work.”

“Mrs. Wittleder.”

“I said something on TV that you disagreed with, and my life has been a mess ever since.”

“You’re getting calls. Letters, visits.”

“Very offensive and invasive ones.”

“Yeah, I understand, it’s sort of the lunatic fringe. People who’re all anger and no love. I don’t know if you saw the news today, the drive-by shooting in Alston? Some jackass blew out all the windows of a clinic yesterday. The little teeny-weeny windows? I mean, that’s real bright. Same thing with the bombings in Lowell. Anger I understand, but not violence.”

“The only thing I did on TV was criticize you,” Renée said. “Who else but you would care?”

“How should I know? Somebody saw the show and didn’t like you. See, I personally didn’t even mind what you said. You were honest, you expressed the opposing point of view real nice. You happen to be dead wrong. But I can tell the difference between a geophysicist and an abortionist. I got a lot more useful things to do than picket your lab, frankly. And Bebe Wittleder is a fine woman who I can’t believe was ugly to you.”

“She wasn’t ugly. Not deliberately.”

“Well, so. Somehow she still made you mad enough to come down here.”

“No. I didn’t get mad until I saw the videos.”

Stites wiped his plate with a slice of bread. “What made you mad about them?”

“Women who have abortions are vicious sluts who sit around snorting coke. Women who have babies are sweet pretty wives who adore their children.”

“Understand it’s not journalism. It’s an advertisement.”

“Which uneducated people swallow as truth.”

“Ah.” The bread, folded twice, disappeared into his mouth. “So you want me — me who believes that human life is a mystery and not some chemical process, me who believes that in the eyes of God an individual begins to exist at the moment he’s conceived — you want me to show the congregation pictures of mothers abusing their children? And saintly women having abortions? Sort of a balanced view there? I don’t think you understand the essence of advertising.”

“A Nazi film showing gorgeous Aryans and filthy Jews is only an ad.”

“Well, except I don’t happen to be advocating genocide. I’m advocating the opposite. Aren’t I?”

“The persecution of pregnant women.”

He nodded. “Persecution, sure, that’s your line on it. But not deportation and murder. See, I think what’s bothering you about these videos is they’re effective. They affect you. But there’s even more effective ads on TV for buying jeans or buying beer. Ads that use sex, which is the most powerful and dishonest thing of all. You know, like if I drink Bud Light I’ll get my own hot little beach girl to mess around with. You talk about dishonest and manipulative and harmful. And if you’re up against a pernicious thing like that, you need some powerful images yourself. And the fact is, there is something beautiful about a mother and her baby, and there is something ugly about abortions. All I want’s an equal shot at the market. And the thing is I can’t get one. There’s no commercial station in America would run these. I’m into radio a little bit, but you can’t do diddly with radio, not compared to video. It’s pretty ironic you think we’re the persecutors here. We the persecuted minority.”

“Which is trying to impose its views on the majority.”

“No network station in America will run a single one of our ads. All Americans, every day, watch half an hour of advertising promoting sex for the sake of sex, and another half hour promoting the selfish consumption of material goods. All national news media have a consistently anti-religious, anti-life slant. You want to deny that? The same goes for prime-time programming. And this is going on every single day, seven days a week, year after year, sex sex, buy buy, abort abort. And still forty percent of all Americans are opposed to abortion except in cases of rape or incest. That’s our minority. We’re looking at the hugest propaganda effort in the history of mankind, and still only a little more than half the people are persuaded.”

A whistle blew sharply in the courtyard. The gym teacher cried, Let’s see some Christian volleyball!

Renée laughed. “You’re scary.”

Stites offered her half his orange. “Why’s that?”

She took the orange. “Because you’re smart and you’re so sure you’re right. You’re so sure that everything is simple.”

“You got it backwards. It’s your world thinks everything is simple: take what you want, and there won’t be any consequences. Because let me tell you, there’s two kinds of certainty: positive and negative. The Bible teaches us it’s wrong to be certain in a positive way, like being certain you’re right or that you’re saved. But the Bible is full of people with the other kind of certainty: my certainty that this society is wrong. I am full of that negative certainty.”

“It’s wrong about a lot of things,” Renée said, “but not about a woman’s right to privacy. And I don’t actually think it persecutes you. Running your ads is just bad business for a TV station. If the majority truly weren’t satisfied with their lives, they’d turn to religion. The fact that they don’t seems to indicate that they are satisfied.”

“You’re not the first person who proved revolution logically impossible: the fact that people haven’t revolted yet means they’re satisfied. That’s real persuasive.”

“I think people mainly want you not to interfere with their private lives.”

“I wouldn’t interfere if I didn’t think lives were at stake. But as it is, I’m morally bound to interfere. And you think my church’s anger is ugly, and my methods are extreme, but just think how ugly and extreme the hippie protesters must have looked to conservatives in 1969, even though they had a good moral argument, just like I have today. Plus it’d be one thing if society just openly worshipped mammon and said yes, we’re willing to destroy innocent lives for the sake of easy sex. What gets me is the piousness. The idea that you can turn people’s lives into hellish pursuits of pleasure and claim you’re doing them a favor. It’s hard to figure a world that sees religious belief as a form of psychosis but thinks the desire to own a better microwave is the most natural feeling there can be. People who send money to a TV preacher because they feel a lack in their lives are under a evil spell, but people who need fur coats to show off in at the grocery store are just normal folks like you and me. It’s like the most holy thing in this country is the U.S. Constitution. The human race has never been without suffering in its history, but Mr. Boston Globe and Mr. Massachusetts Senator are suddenly smarter than everybody else in human history. They’re certain they’ve got the answer, and the answer is statutory this and statutory that and university studies of human behavior and the U.S. Constitution. But I tell you, Renée, I tell you, the only reason anyone could possibly think the Constitution is the greatest invention in human history is that God gave America so many fantastic riches that even total idiocy could make a showing in the short run, if you don’t count thirty million poor people and the systematic waste of all the riches God gave us and the fact that to most of the downtrodden people of the world the word America is synonymous with greed, weapons, and immorality.”

“And freedom.”

“A code word for wealth and decadence. Believe me. What the majority of Russians think is great about America is McDonald’s and VCRs. Only politicians and anchormen are stupid or dishonest enough to act otherwise. Prime ministers come to Washington, we tell ’em, Welcome to the land of the free. The prime ministers say, Give us more money. I swear we must be the world’s laughingstock. What are you smiling at?”

“You remind me of a cynical man I knew.”

“Cynical, huh? You think it’s cynical to recognize that all human beings, myself included, want to gratify their senses without having to take responsibility for it? How about calling me Christian instead, or honest, or realistic? Because what I see on the other side is pure sentimentality and wishful thinking. This idea that human beings are essentially good and selfless. That you can cure sorrow and loneliness and envy and gluttony and lust and deceit and rage and pride with full employment and good psychologists. You know what my favorite modern-day fable is?”

“What.”

“Chappaquiddick. The perfect liberal sees what a human being really is all about, and he takes off running. Spends the rest of his life denying that what he saw has any meaning. Telling everybody else what’s wrong with them. Listen, liberalism’s so dishonest it won’t even admit that everything good about it, the supposed compassion at the center of it — which is irrational, mind you, just like all religion is — comes straight from the two-thousand-year tradition of Christianity. But at least it’s got that compassion. It’s innocent, same as a six-year-old. But God’s got a soft spot in His heart for all the innocents of the world. And so the thing I hate most is the conservative politician. The conservative side is just pure cynical economic self-interest. Granted it’s pretty realistic about human greed, so it’s fairly grownup, you know, like about the level of a smart-assed thirteen-year-old. But it’s even more to blame than liberalism for supplanting God with the pursuit of wealth. And I find that unforgivable.”

“And that’s why you live in this crummy building. With angry middle-class women.”

“You got it.”

“I guess you’re pretty admirable.”

“You said that. I didn’t. ’Cause of course it’s a danger everybody runs if they try to do some good. The idea that if you know you’re doing good, it doesn’t really count. But I say, what’s the alternative — being a jerk just so you know you’re not guilty of pridefulness?”

“Not a bad alternative. You should try it.”

“You’re a little bit of a cynic yourself. What’d you come here for?”

In the courtyard, outside the open window, a hush fell as the volleyball went thump, thump. Pieces of orange peel lay white side up on Stites’s cleaned plate. Renée smiled. “No reason at all.”

“Nobody comes for no reason,” he said.

“I came because I was bored.”

The light in the room had become personal, making facial expressions more ambiguous and eye contact less sure. “Are you married?” Stites said.

“No.”

“Got a boyfriend?”

“No.”

“No kids, I guess.”

She shook her head.

“You want kids?”

She shook her head.

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t like what happens to women when they have them.”

“What happens to them?”

“They just become women.”

“You mean: they grow up.”

Thump, thump went the volleyball. Sneakered feet scraped and fell on the hard dirt. The carpet pattern began to rearrange itself as Renée stared at it. “Do you want to sleep with me?” she said.

“Ha.” Stites smiled, apparently more amused than anything else. “I guess not.”

“Because you’re afraid I’ll tell somebody,” she said in a cruel voice. “Or you’re afraid you’ll go to hell. Or you’re afraid it’ll hurt your faith. Or I’m not attractive enough.”

“A person’s lost if he tries to find reasons to say no. He just has to say no, straight from the heart.”

“Why.”

“Because if you do, you can feel your love of God grow.”

“What if you don’t love God at all? What if you don’t believe there is a God?”

“Then you have to look.”

“Why.”

“Because, just from sitting here with you, I think you’d be happy if you did. Because I think you’re a real person, and I feel love for you, and your happiness would make me happy.”

“You feel love for me.”

“A Christian love.”

“That’s all?”

“I’m no more perfect than you are.”

She slid closer to him. “You could make me happy very quickly.”

The only thing giving expression to his face was the pair of lambent rectangles on his glasses, reflections of incandescence from the doorway. He crossed his arms. “Tell me what you feel like after you’ve had sex.”

“I feel good.” She sat up straighter, proud. “I feel like I know something about myself. Like I have a base line, and I know what the very bottom of me is like. Like I know that good and evil don’t have anything to do with it. Like I’m an animal, in a good way.”

The rectangles on Stites’s glasses seemed to take on wistfulness. “I guess you’re probably lucky,” he said.

“I don’t think I’m any different than any woman. I mean, any woman who hasn’t had her mind fucked up by male religion.”

“Them’s fightin’ words.”

She moved even closer. “Fight me.”

“You play fair and scoot back a little, I’ll fight you.”

She retreated. “Well?”

He joined his hands on his shins, above the argyle socks. “Well, I suppose it comes down to why God made sex such a great pleasure. You obviously consider this irrelevant, but what happens if you conceive a child in the course of making yourself feel good?”

“Funny you should ask.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean it’s funny you should ask.”

“Well, what’s the answer?”

“You know what my answer is. If I’m in a halfway decent shape emotionally and financially, I have the baby. Otherwise I have an abortion.”

“But what about the potentiality you destroy with an abortion?”

“I don’t know. What about the potentialities I destroyed when I broke up with a high-school boyfriend? We could have had eight kids by now. Am I an eight-time murderer?”

“Right. But have you ever known anybody who was conceived out of wedlock?”

“Well, me, for one.”

“You?”

“Yeah, I’m sure I’m the perfect example. I’m sure I would have been aborted, if it had been more convenient for my mother.”

“And how do you feel about that?”

“Completely indifferent,” she said. Her eyes fell on the fragment of scripture on the wall; she found the typeface ugly. “My life began at five. If anything had happened earlier — no loss to me. There was no me.”

“But no way you love yourself, if you’re so indifferent. No way you love the world. You must hate it. You must hate life.”

“I love myself, I hate myself. It adds up to zero.”

A long, long volley developed in the courtyard, the stillness and suspense around it growing deeper the longer it went on. Then the players groaned. Stites spoke quietly. “You don’t know how much it grieves me to hear you say that.”

“I can be fun to sleep with.”

“You think you have the right to throw your life away.”

“The thought has crossed my mind.”

“I think you’re very unhappy. I think you must have been very hurt by something.”

Renée raised her face to the pitted ceiling, leaning back on her hands, the image of a person enjoying weather at the beach. She was smiling and continued to smile, but after a while her breathing become rough, like a water pump that at first only brings up air, “I—” Her breathing turned to shudders. “I am hurt about somebody. I’m terribly hurt. I’m so hurt I want to die.”

Stites scrambled to his feet and went into the bathroom. He came back with a glass of water, but Renée was no longer there. She’d gone into the hall.

“I guess I’m going to leave,” she said.

“I want to help you.”

“You can’t help me.”

He set the water on the crossbeam of a pillory and took her bare arms in his hands. “You’re you,” he said. “You’re only you. And you’ve been you since the moment you were conceived. Your whole history was there when you were one minute old. And the hurt you feel is holy. It’s an inch away from being the truest happiness.”

Her face was an inch away from his. She stood on her toes and opened her mouth, planting the softest part of her lips on the sharp stubble around his mouth. The next thing she knew, an entire glass of water had been poured over her head.

“Fuck!” she cried, bouncing on her feet, throwing the water off in gobs. She backed up the hallway, fists clenched at her hips. “Fuck you!”

He’d disappeared into his office. People were coming up the stairwell behind her, and already some of the pillories were occupied, big female duffs in sweats hanging out, rolls of fat visible above some of the waistbands. Metal creaked as other pillories were activated.

Stites had sat down at his desk and begun to read the Bible in the light of a bare ceiling bulb. The window at his shoulder was dark now. He didn’t look up when Renée appeared in the doorway, one side of her hair matted, dissolved mascara pooling under one eye.

“I hate you,” she said. “I hate your church, I hate your religion. You’re nothing but hatred yourself. It’s just like you said. It’s all negative. You hate women, you hate sex, and you hate the world as it is.”

There were bare lightbulbs in his eyes. “I feel a love for you, Renée. You’re not a cold person. You’re full of emotion and need, and you came here, and just from an hour with you I feel a love for you. It’s a Christian love, but the Light gets filtered through the fact that I’m a man, and so I’d love to have you in my arms. I’d like to take you. All right? I’m telling you this because you seem to think it’s easy for me. I want you to know: I’m a man. I’m not made of stone. And you damn well better respect me.”

“I’d respect you if you went ahead and did it.”

He closed the Bible and leaned back in his chair. “You know, what I read about every day is what a tough life women have in today’s society. How they have to make all these hard choices, how they have to take so much responsibility for their families. They have to be mothers and they have to be working men too, if liberal society’s gonna function.”

“It’s not just women,” Renée said. “Men have to change too.”

“Oh, yeah, that’s how it’s supposed to work. Except you don’t hear so much about men complaining and men being caught in a bind. Do you? Men still have the choice, right? They have job satisfaction, and if they want to, they can feel good about parenting too. It’s like life is getting better for men, they’re getting options in a positive sense, while women are getting all these extra options in a negative sense. Wouldn’t you call this sort of the major paradox of the age? That the better things get for women liberal-politically, the worse things get in reality?”

“The fact that I sort of agree with you only makes me angrier, because I know what you’re going to say.”

“What? That the one thing people never seem to suspect is that it’s the politics itself that’s to blame? Because of course this society doesn’t understand things like ‘joy.’ The joy a mother feels. This society only understands ‘jobs,’ and ‘statutes,’ and especially ‘money.’”

“And that women are first-class citizens. That joy isn’t worth much if it’s forced on you. And that it’s better to have painful options than no options.”

“I was just going to say I don’t deny there are women like you. Our Lord tells us that some people are born eunuchs and some people are made into eunuchs along the way.”

“Well fuck you too.”

“But the fact is, most women want to have children. But society needs them for other stuff, you know, to make more money and more profits, so it has to kinda lure them away with their vanity and pride and greed. Which women have every bit as much of as men do.”

“So I’ve noticed.”

“But if a woman’s left to her own better instincts, she don’t need a big-shot job to make her feel good about herself.”

“Her rightful place is in the home.”

“That’s right. The church understands this about women. It understands the joy of motherhood.”

“Well then tell me one thing about this God of yours.” Renée took a step towards Stites. “Just one thing. If women aren’t supposed to have the same kind of life as men have, tell me why your God gave us the same kind of consciousness.”

Stites lunged forward like a trap springing closed. “He didn’t! He gave all people the commandment: Be fruitful, and multiply! And you yourself was the one who said this ‘consciousness’ doesn’t survive the birth of a woman’s first child. That she’s ‘just a woman’ then, right? See what I’m saying? The woman who’s unhappy because she’s got a man’s consciousness is the woman who has disobeyed the word of the Lord. The Lord promises you salvation if you obey His word. And this kind of consciousness problem you’re talking about vanishes in a woman who’s got a baby, just like the covenant says it will. She becomes an instinctive mother, just like you say, and just like the church knows she will. It’s a fact!”

She nodded impatiently. “But the fact remains that women are given consciousness only to have it taken away again. They get shown what they could have — if they were male — and then it’s denied them. And you can say, well, most women aren’t like me. But even if there was only one of me, which I can’t believe at all, I’m stuck with a nasty choice, and the only way you can justify it is to say we’re paying for Eve’s sin or some such garbage. And I’m telling you that’s a hole in your religion you can drive a truck through: the fact that life basically shits for women and always has.”

“And always will, Renée. As it ultimately shits for every person on earth. And so the real choice you have is either suffer for no reason, suffer and be bitter and bring evil to the lives around you, or else find a way to God through your suffering. And I think the Bible might agree with me that there are a lot more women in heaven than men. Just for the suffering they’ve endured and the pride they’ve swallowed. Because the last will be first and the first will be last.”

“If there is a heaven.”

“It’s at hand. It’s starin’ you in the face. That’s what you’re here for. You know your name means ‘born again’?”

“Oh my God,” Renée said, utterly disgusted.

Stites stood up and walked around his desk. “Will you at least come again? I won’t ask if I can pray for you, because you can’t stop me. But can I call you?”

She shook her head very slowly. She was staring at him, inscribing his image in her mind so that she’d always be able to find it there: the tired eyes behind the round tortoiseshell glasses, the yellow tie that now had a spot of bean juice on it, the male hips, the stubble on his cheeks.

“You’ve helped me enough already,” she said. “You’ve helped me incredibly.”

11

The raccoon woke up hungry and unrefreshed. There was hardly a glimmer of light on the still water beneath the ledge he’d slept on. Rats were waddling along the walls and through the filth on the narrow, rock-strewn mud flats, migrating as they did every evening from City Hall to the dumpsters of Union Square. The raccoon rose and yawned and stretched, chin low to the ground, like a Moslem praying.

Sometimes, when he came down from his ledge, he ran confusedly back and forth along the water, spooking the rats and being spooked by them; sometimes he ran for a block or more and then stopped, whiskers twitching, and looked into the inky, dripping blackness ahead of him and then, as if the blackness were a concrete barrier, turned back.

Tonight he went straight downhill. Street light fell through the small holes and larger slots above him. Paw over paw, he climbed the iron rungs he almost always climbed. Halfway up, he reversed and descended headfirst, then reversed again and climbed to the top and peered out through the slot. Between car bumpers he could see the Post Office. He never went out through this slot. Every night he recollected having been here innumerable times, but recollection was weaker than habit, and so invariably he retraced his steps up and down the iron rungs. These and all the other motions he repeated every night were like a sorrow.

The rats were like a sorrow. There were so many of them and only one of him. In rats the gray, hostile world ramified and mobilized and swirled around him. Superior size and intelligence counted for nothing when he experienced rats; he became clumsy and vulnerable. Although they gave him wide berth in the tunnels, their numbers made them unafraid. If they surprised him, he drew his shoulders up in anger like a cat, huffing impotently as the little evils shimmered away into the darkness. They could swim terribly well.

The raccoon was bigger also than squirrels and rabbits and opossums, and was smarter and more graceful in his proportions, but again there were many of them and only one of him. A squirrel’s world might have been nothing more than trees and nuts, a neurotic hither and thither, but there was an at-homeness — a confidence and oblivion — that came of belonging to a large population doing exactly the same inconsequential things. Solitary and omnivorous, the raccoon had no better reason to climb trees than the pleasure that following an instinct gave him. The high boughs he sought bowed wildly with his weight. And when a squirrel fell it contorted itself at lightning speed and glanced off branches and hit the ground running; but when the raccoon fell he went down with a crash, grasping futilely for purchase, making noises of distress, and landed in an undignified heap. At home in many environments, he was really at home in none.

Reaching the bottom of the tunnel, he surfaced through a grateless drain on the commuter-rail right-of-way. Cars on bridges crossed over the silence that pooled in this low, rubbly part of Somerville. Dozens of food smells mingled in the sea breeze, but few had the pungency of immediate forage. The track signals were green and red in both directions.

Beneath a bridge that saw heavy foot traffic in the daytime, he ate a stale piece of jelly doughnut and the crumbs of other doughnuts in a pink-and-orange box. He ate an apple core and some marshmallows, a novelty. He ate a moth.

Up on Prospect Hill there were good grubs, good crab apple trees, and a lot of organic garbage, but there were also dogs. Sometimes at the least opportune moment a back door would fly open and out would shoot a fanged and curly-haired cannonball, and the raccoon, which like as not had been eating the remains of the dog’s dry Purina dinner, would have to scramble up the nearest vertical surface. He had spent entire nights nervously pacing the crossbar of a swing set or the roof of a recreational vehicle while below him a dog kept the neighborhood awake. Various pets had bitten his hind legs and tail. A cat had laid open one of his cheeks (but the cat had paid for it with an eye). One night a pair of schnauzers trapped him in a free-standing twelve-foot fir tree; spotlights came on, a fat man emerged from the house and children followed, the schnauzers in frenzy all the while, and the red diode of a camcorder winked and the fat man worked the zoom and one of the children lifted a schnauzer as high as she could reach, so that its furiously righteous black German eyes and rose-petal tongue and pointed teeth were within a foot of the terrified and humiliated raccoon, and this confrontation was likewise committed to videotape.

Would a thing like this ever happen to a squirrel? To a rat? To an opossum or a skunk or a rabbit?

The raccoon had had two sisters. One had been killed by cats during a melee in which his mother was also mauled. Later the other sister stopped eating and died. He and his mother saw less and less of each other. Once he passed her in a tunnel and something made him jump on her, but she rebuffed him. Rats hastened through the trickle of water between them as they crouched, panting, on opposite sides of the tunnel. Then she ran uphill and turned back angrily. He didn’t see her again until winter. The streets were white with salt and moonlight when he found her rigid by a curb, her eyes cloudy with ice crystals. It was so cold he had to bury his nose in her fur before he could smell anything.

From Union Square, in the direction of the tall buildings, the right-of-way became narrower and rockier and less rich in edible things, until eventually there came vast tunnels in which diesel winds blew and the ground shook.

To the west there was more wildlife. In his second summer the raccoon had traveled that way for several miles, drawn by the smell of females. He ran into some males and they nosed each other and climbed a roof together, but mainly they were wrapped up in their odd, private behavior, his own as odd as any. He suffered repeated traumas involving automobiles, which in West Cambridge had a way of coming and coming and coming. Meanwhile the scent of females grew fainter. By Labor Day he was back in Union Square.

Seasons changed and came around again; he never did the thing animals most like to do. His fur darkened. Something in his stomach gave him steady pain. Fleas tormented him in cycles. Only once or twice more did he see another animal like himself; and, never fighting, never mating, never interacting with his own kind in any way, he almost ceased to have a nature. He became an individual living in a world that consisted entirely of his sorrowlike compulsions and afflictions and the pleasurable exercise of his abilities. The only real face he ever saw was his own, when he looked in dark water — not when he washed food, because then although he was looking at the food and at his busy paws and at the shrubs and car parts around him, his compulsion made him sightless — but when rain had filled a ditch along the tracks and in stopping to cross it he saw a furry, masked head descend from the urban sky with intense and tender slowness to touch noses with him, like a dream of the mate he had never met, and time folded back on itself, the repeated patterns of his existence lining up the way multiple reflections of a single object come together, so that instead of a succession of days there was just one day that was his life, in fact a single moment: this one.

The signals were red and green in both directions. The air had begun to throb. White beams of light coming from his right and left made his eyes glow yellow. He scampered across two sets of rails, holding in his mouth a fragment of hamburger bun swollen with ketchup like a tampon, and ran halfway up an oil-darkened embankment. An engine blasted its air horn, rocking a little as it trundled forward. The raccoon crossed the rails again, turned in a tight circle with swishing tail, ran up the embankment, and suddenly full of terror as the immense and roaring engines doubled their apparent speed in passing each other, he buried himself as well as he could in ragweed and shut the world out.

Renée watched the trains pass from the Dane Street bridge, the passenger cars flowing below her like the opposing belts of an airport people mover. On the roof of a windowless building, pink plastic letters three feet tall said precisi n motor rebui ding. It was midnight. She walked quickly across Somerville Avenue and past the ancient row houses of northern Little Lisbon. In a manila envelope she had the Caddulo pictures and a copy of the paper that she’d printed out on the way back from Chelsea. She passed a powder-blue toilet, complete with tank but somewhat dirty, on the sidewalk.

In her house, a Doberman whined pleadingly behind the hallway door. One floor up, the baby was crying and its parents were yelling at each other, as they’d done so often before the baby came. They had Ph.D.s and quarreled, for example, about the comparative labor value of keeping the refrigerator stocked and keeping the car running. Renée had heard the husband shout, “You want to switch? You want to switch? You want to do the car and I’ll do the shopping?” They were in their mid-thirties.

There was an open package of whole-wheat bread on her kitchen table. In the sink an eggy frying pan and stacks of plates and glasses. Wine bottles and fruit peels on the counter. Clothes in the hallway, clothes in piles in both main rooms, a brown ring and splashed barf in the toilet, towels on the floor by the sink. Shoes and newspapers and dust mice everywhere. Withered strands of spaghetti near the burners of the stove.

She took the cassette tape marked dance in her fingers and bent it until the plastic shattered in a shock whose pulse of high-frequency vibrations stung her skin. She did the same to her other tape, the one with the single song on it. Suddenly there was a new silence in the apartment, as if until this moment music had been playing for so long that she’d ceased to be aware of it, and heard it only after it had stopped.

She took off her clothes and lay face down on the kitchen floor, which was sticky and hot to the touch. Fragments of cassette dug into her elbows and ribs. She cried for a long time.

In her jeans again, she swept the whole apartment and washed and dried all the dishes and put them away. Every thing she’d bought in the previous week, even the leather jacket, she stuffed into Hefties which she carried down to the sidewalk. She kept stopping to cry, but eventually she got the apartment as clean and bare as it was the night she first slept with Louis Holland.

She opened the manila envelope and looked at her paper, wondering why she’d written it. Simply to make money? She sat on her tightly made bed and read the “AGREEMENT, made this 12th day of June” between Melanie Rose Holland of Evanston, Illinois, and Renée Seitchek of Somerville, Massachusetts. The agreement was printed on laser bond paper. She tore it into narrow strips. She tore the strips into squares which she held cupped in her hands for a full minute, as if she’d thrown up into her hands and couldn’t think of an appropriate receptacle. The toilet was where she finally dumped it.

Again she looked at her paper, trying to gauge its meaning to her now. Her eyes followed the words, but all the reader in her mind would say was You’re tripping on a romance. You’re tripping on a romance. After a while she found that she had put the paper back in its envelope and was holding it against her chest. She hugged it, rocking, grieving. She shivered and didn’t know what to do. She stood up and went to her desk, still cradling the thin envelope in both arms. She stuffed all her related photocopies inside it and began to wind brown plastic wrapping tape around the thick packet. She unrolled more and more tape, until the packet was completely covered, no envelope showing at all. Then she buried it in the bottom drawer of the desk. She looked at the closed drawer and hugged herself, grieving.

Later in the morning she took a shower and drove to Kendall Square. Her doctor at Harvard had referred her to a clinic called New Cambridge Health Associates, which occupied part of an old red-brick factory recently converted into offices, many of them high-tech MIT offshoots. She’d passed the clinic many times, on the way to seminars at MIT, without ever noticing it for what it was.

A Japanese noodle place, popular for lunch, blanketed the street with its breath of broth and scallions. In a parking space directly in front of the clinic, behind yellow police tape strung between two parking signs, five COAIC women stood in the strong midday sun holding the usual photographs. Bebe Wittleder looked at Renée. Renée looked at her. Bebe watched, wide-eyed and mute, as Renée pushed open the metal door.

A handsome counselor, fiftyish, with graying blond hair in a braid, took the envelope her doctor had given her.

“Renée Seitchek,” she said.

“I know who you are.”

“Yeah. So do the people outside.”

“Oh dear. This is an unfortunate coincidence for you.”

“Uh huh. I guess I think it isn’t.”

The counselor leaned back against a chart of reproduction, Fallopian tubes and ovaries framing her too-compassionate face. “Do you want me to ask you what you mean by that?”

“Well, I wonder. ” Renée wrinkled her forehead. Her skin was stiff from lack of sleep. “I wonder if the last few months have seemed strange to you.”

“Which months?”

“The last two or three. With the earthquakes, and what Stites is doing. To me they’ve been very strange, and all of a piece. But it occurs to me that not everyone feels what I do.”

The counselor clearly didn’t feel what Renée did. “It’s been. very interesting,” she said with a blank smile.

“Well. Anyway. I got angry. And when you get angry you get sloppy. You know, because men can be sloppy and nothing happens to them. And then I guess I got unlucky. I mean, within the context of my sloppiness. Within the context of my thinking it’s not a matter of luck at all.”

“You’re talking about contraception.”

“Yes. My diaphragm.”

She watched the counselor fill a space on her form with the word “diaphragm.” Somehow she managed to remain polite and humble while the counselor discussed its correct use and told her where she’d fallen short. She knew very well where she’d fallen short.

“Before we go any further,” the counselor said, “I want you to know we can easily refer you to a facility without picketers. We fully understand the threat to your privacy if you stay with us.”

“If I’m making things worse for you, I’ll go wherever you want me to.”

“Never. Never for our sake. But for yours?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Then I’ll need you to fill this out.” She passed a letter of informed consent across her desk. “And we ask that you pay before the procedure. I guess you know we don’t take checks.”

Renée took three hundreds from her pocket. A technician drew blood from her arm. The counselor led her to a hallway in the basement so that she could leave through a different door.

All day on Wednesday she thought and wrote about deep seismicity in Tonga. When she came home in the evening she found an envelope from Louis Holland in her mailbox. It had a Boston postmark and no return address. She neither opened it nor threw it away.

The baseball game she listened to after dinner went into extra innings, the Red Sox finally losing after midnight on a two-base throwing error.

“Howard,” she said. “Can I see you a second?”

It was steaming outside. Even in the shade of the big oaks on the lawn of the Peabody Museum the heat had grounded most winged insects. The squirrels were very listless. Howard put his hands in the pockets of his yachting pants and bounced on his toes. “What?”

“I’m having an abortion today. I want you to pick me up afterwards.”

“OK.”

She told him where to be. He nodded, hardly listening. She told him again where to be. She said it was very important that he be there.

“Yep.”

“So I’ll see you sometime between four-thirty and five-thirty.”

“Yep.”

“You don’t mind doing this?”

He pursed his lips and shook his head.

“And you’ll definitely be there,” she said.

“Yep.”

“At four-thirty.”

“Yep.”

“OK, then.” The shock waves from a helicopter passing overhead made her lungs vibrate. “Thank you.”

In her office she listened to the radio. Tuning briefly to WSNE, she heard an advertisement for Sunnyvale Farms convenience stores, followed by snatches of the Gospel of John. She took the letter from Louis Holland out of her shoulder bag, held it up to the light, and put it back. Outside her window, disappointed tourists were shaking their heads stoically. She didn’t let herself leave Hoffman until one-thirty.

When she came up from the subway at Kendall Square, she heard the unmistakable blurred, flattened voices of policemen speaking on their radios. Blue flashers fought the whiteness of the afternoon.

She’d been given a key to the basement door of the clinic, but she’d never planned to use it, and she didn’t now. She passed a foursome of Cambridge cops on the sidewalk and saw what they were waiting for. Fifty members of Stites’s church were standing in front of the clinic, pressed together in their allotted parking space like cows in a cattle car. The cops were waiting for them to cross the yellow tape.

Across the street, in the shadow of another twenty church members brandishing their placards, two news photographers were taking pictures, and a brassy-looking female reporter was adjusting her audio recording device.

STOP THE SLAUGHTER. ABORTION IS MURDER. THANKS MOM I LIFE.

Stites himself was standing at the yellow tape with a megaphone. He must have seen Renée before she saw him, because already, as she left the cops behind her, he was raising the tape. Twelve women ducked under it. In two rows of six they sat down and linked arms in front of the clinic door.

“We are here to rescue the unborn.” the megaphone said. “We are here to save innocent lives.”

Traffic was building up in the street. Stites looked straight at Renée. “Everyone here was once no more than a fertilized egg.” his megaphone said. “We are all here by the grace of our Lord and the living love of our parents.”

Twosomes in blue were taking limp grandmothers and stewardesses by the armpits and dragging them to waiting police vans. The gym teacher dug her heels into sidewalk cracks expertly.

“Renée,” Stites said, megaphone lowered.

She looked at the sky. She’d never seen it so white and empty.

“Take one second and think,” he said. “You were just a tiny speck of cells once. Everything you are, everything you ever felt, came out of that speck. And you’re no one but yourself, you’re no accident, you’re no random thing. You’re you. And that speck inside you is no one but himself, or herself, and she’s just waiting to be born and have the life God means for her to have.”

She looked at the ground. She wouldn’t have guessed her mind could ever feel so closed.

“We love you,” Stites said. “We love the person you are and the person you can be. Just think about what you’re doing.”

He leaned over the yellow tape imploringly, but the plane he inhabited did not intersect with hers. He belonged to a species that was not her own, and this word of his, “love,” was simply a function peculiar to his species. “We love you” made as little sense to her now as a whale saying, “You strain plankton with your baleen, just like me,” or a turtle saying, “You and I have shared this experience of laying eggs in a sandy pit.” It was revolting.

The way had cleared for her to enter the clinic. The Group of Twelve, in two police vans, was singing “Amazing Grace” in separate keys and time signatures.

“Renée,” Stites said, “Please listen to me.”

“This is unforgivable,” she said, merely stating the obvious. She went inside.

“Oh dear,” said the blond counselor. “Did you lose the key?”

Renée handed her the key. “How long have they been there?”

“Since this morning.”

“I think they’ll go away now.”

The clinic was frosty with airconditioning and bluish lighting. In a clean white cell, she took her clothes off and hung them on a hook. The jeans, outermost, unflattened, with one hip turned out and the knees slightly bent, were a vivid effigy of her.

“I don’t want a tranquilizer,” she told the nurse.

In the adjacent room the table had been set for her, with a smaller side table set for Dr. Wang, the essential stainless flatware gleaming on a paper placemat. No fish knife, no soup spoon — it was a one-course meal.

The subject lay down in her powder-blue smock. Her face, on the low end of a cushioned gradient, was a deep, purpled red. The speculum was inserted; it said: “This may pinch a little.” The tenaculum was applied, chloroprocaine hydrochloride administered by needle. With her slender, nimble fingers Dr. Wang tore the sterile paper wrapping from a 6-millimeter cannula.

K-Y jelly applied. Vacuum cleaner activated, hose attached. In and out the cannula went. In and out, up and down. A revelation was the scraping sound it made. It wasn’t a sound you expected from a body; it was the sound of an inanimate object, a trowel scraping the side of a plastic bucket, the last drops of milkshake being sucked from a waxed-paper cup. In and out the cannula went. Ruff, ruff, said the uterus.

“Ow,” the subject said, again stating the obvious, as the contractions started. She was trying to resist a riptide. Her foot muscles tightened in the stirrups of the pillory, which had wheels now and had been rolled out onto the sidewalk so that every passing scientist and secretary and adolescent and church member could, by simply glancing, see between her parted naked legs, up the speculum, and into the red center of her self. The nurse stroked her forehead. The vacuum cleaner was turned off.

“Everything seems to be very normal,” said Dr. Wang.

In the recovery room Renée was given orange juice, an Ergotrate tablet, and a powdered-sugar doughnut that was the first food she’d had since seven in the morning. The cramps weren’t bad, but she was given envelopes with Darvon and more Ergotrate. She was given various straightforward instructions and warnings. She was asked if she had a ride home.

On the dot of five they let her get dressed.

“Let me take you out the back way,” the counselor said.

She shook her head.

“You have to try to rest until tomorrow.”

“I will.”

She was surprised to find a darkened sky outside. A wind with thunder in it upended the hair of the remaining protesters, who were standing in their parking space exactly as they’d been when she last saw them, as if the parking space were the entirety of their planet and their hair were upended by its careening through the air. They looked at Renée somberly, without hatred. Across the street Stites was chatting with the brassy reporter, making her laugh. Smiling, he turned and looked right through Renée. There was a discrete crack of thunder. She waited for a blue Hyundai and a black Infiniti to pass. Then she crossed the street.

“Howdy, Renée. This is Lindsay, from the Herald.”

“Hi how are you today!” Lindsay said.

The church members in their parking space had turned 180 degrees and were looking at their minister. Before he knew what she was doing, Renée took his megaphone from his hand and darted behind a streetlight standard. She faced the congregation, the milling bystanders, the waiting cops, the photographers, the reporter and the minister.

“Hello,” she said, pressing harder on the plastic Speak button. “HELLO. MY NAME IS RENÉE SEITCHEK. I’M GOING TO INTERVIEW MYSELF.”

Stites stepped in front of her, grabbing for the megaphone. “That’s not yours, Renée.”

She dodged him. She backed up the sidewalk, keeping him in view. “MY STATEMENT,” she said. “SINCE YOU’RE ALL SO INTERESTED. MY STATEMENT IS I JUST HAD AN ABORTION.”

She stepped off the curb. “FIRST QUESTION: WHAT ELSE—” A car honked. “WHAT ELSE CAN I TELL YOU?

“ANSWER: MY ADDRESS IS NUMBER 7 PLEASANT AVENUE, SOMERVILLE. MY TELEPHONE NUMBER IS 360-9671. MY BLOOD TYPE IS 0. MY MIDDLE NAME IS ANN. MY INCOME LAST YEAR WAS $12,000. I STEAL OFFICE SUPPLIES FROM MY EMPLOYER. I LIKE TO MASTURBATE. MY SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER IS 351-40-1137. I USED TO DO DRUGS WHEN I WAS IN COLLEGE. I JUST DID SOME MORE LAST WEEK.”

A stream of workers leaving their offices had swelled the crowd. Cars were pulling over to the side of the street. Lindsay from the Herald was holding out her cassette recorder while Stites shook his head. Renée aimed the megaphone at him.

“QUESTION: HOW OLD WAS THE FETUS I JUST ABORTED?

“ANSWER: APPROXIMATELY FIVE WEEKS. I’M NOT POSITIVE, BECAUSE I’VE ALWAYS HAD IRREGULAR MENSTRUAL PERIODS.

“QUESTION: WHO WAS THE FATHER?

“ANSWER.” She took a deep breath. She had to tell one lie here. “ANSWER: I’M NOT SURE. I’VE HAD INTERCOURSE WITH MORE THAN ONE MAN IN THE LAST TWO MONTHS.

“QUESTION: WHY?

“ANSWER: BECAUSE I WAS LONELY AND UNHAPPY AND I WANTED TO FEEL GOOD. I WAS ALSO IN LOVE WITH ONE OF THE MEN. I WANTED TO MARRY HIM AND HAVE CHILDREN WITH HIM.

“QUESTION: WHAT WERE THE MEN’S NAMES?

“ANSWER: THAT’S PRIVATE. THEY’RE MEN THEY HAVE THE OPTION OF KEEPING THEIR PRIVACY.”

Here she heard two or three young female voices cheer. Unable to tell what direction the cheers had come from, she continued to aim the megaphone at Stites, who had taken off his glasses and was massaging the inner corners of his eyes.

“QUESTION: WHAT KIND OF BIRTH CONTROL DO I USE?

“ANSWER: I USE A DIAPHRAGM. IT WAS WHOLLY MY RESPONSIBILITY, AND WHEN IT FAILED, IT FAILED ME.

“QUESTION: HOW DO I FEEL NOW?

“ANSWER: I FEEL VERY, VERY SAD. I FEEL SAD FOR MYSELF AND SAD FOR ALL WOMEN, BECAUSE A MAN WILL NEVER HAVE TO COME TO A PLACE LIKE THIS, NEVER IN A MILLION YEARS. BUT THIS SADNESS BELONGS TO ME, AND NO MAN CAN HAVE IT, AND I AM GLAD TO BE A WOMAN.”

There was another roll of thunder. A wave of paper litter swept down the street. Renée, blushing, and doubling over with a cramp, set the megaphone on the curb and walked as fast as she could into the wind. She had no idea, no interest in knowing, how many people besides Stites and Lindsay had even listened to her.

Howard’s great white car was waiting at the intersection of Hampshire and Broadway, aimed in the direction of Harvard. In a fully paved neighborhood like this, with no green foliage in sight, the dark sky looked like a winter sky. Renée waited for a blue Cressida and a gray Accord and a black Infiniti and a silver Camry to pass. As soon as she crossed the street and got in the car, Howard stepped on the gas pedal. She slouched down so far that her eyes were even with the bottom of the window. She kicked aside Coke cans and a championship-size frisbee, rubbing her abdomen with her fist.

“You feeling OK?” Howard said.

“Could be worse.”

“OK if I stop by the lab?”

“Why don’t you take me home first.”

“Just for a second, OK? Gotta get a rope for Somerville Lumber.”

“What are you getting at Somerville Lumber?”

“Wall unit.”

She laughed emptily. “Are you going to want me to help you with that?”

The chugging of the car’s engine was like the noise of a window fan in a heat wave, keeping her discomfort within tolerable limits. When Howard turned it off, in the reserved-only parking lot outside the computer-room door, she felt weak and ill and slouched down even farther.

A gust of warm wind blew through the open front-seat windows. Tires squealed. A gray Cressida swung into the lot and stopped behind the car, blocking it in. A young Oriental woman in a business suit and sneakers jumped out and ran and pounded on the door to the computer room. It was Howard’s so-called fiancée, Sally Go. Someone let her in.

Beyond the green hedge and bank of mulch there was motion on Oxford Street, action within three independent frames of reference, the blurred whiz of car roofs, the floating by of bicyclists with their heads and shoulders high off the ground and their bikes obscured by the hedge, and the bouncing gait of pedestrians, students and working people heading home with noticeable haste because the trees were now showing the white undersides of their leaves and the boughs of the tallest ones were beginning to heave with some violence. The wind carried fragments of distant sounds. The thunder was increasing, booming like the earth in a New England earthquake. Renée half sat and half lay with her hand on her abdomen, drawing some of the cramp pain out into her fingertips. Already she could not have said how long she’d been waiting in the car.

Behind her, in a part of the sky that she was too enervated to turn to see, an eclipse-like darkness gathered. The trees were in constant motion, all the sounds from Oxford Street landing in pieces well to the north, but still the ground was dry, and people in dry clothes were on the sidewalk, and the air was warm and filled with petals and green leaves. She thought she’d never breathed more beautiful air. She felt badness draining out of her. The weather, which was nature’s, had taken over the green spaces and paved spaces between buildings. The air smelled of midsummer and late afternoon and thunder and love, and its temperature was so exactly the temperature of her skin that being in it was like being in nothing, or meeting no boundary between her self and the world. She could hear lightning static on the radios of passing cars. She felt the poignancy of cars and hot asphalt and brick buildings and radio transmissions, all the things that human beings had made, as the weather swept over them. How deeply they were immersed in the world, how deeply she was. Life not on the world’s skin but deep inside it, in the sea of atmosphere and churning trees, with a deep, vaulted ceiling of black cloud above it, electrons rising and descending on white ladders. She wanted to embrace it all by breathing it, but she felt that she could never breathe deeply enough, just as sometimes she thought she could never be close enough physically to a person she loved.

She wondered: what exactly did she love here? Thunder echoed and leaves followed spiral tracks into the dark green sky. Watching her mind from a safe ironic distance, she formed the thought: Thank you for making me alive to be here. It rang false, but not completely false. She tried again: Thank you for this world.

Half serious, half not, she tried again and again. She was still trying when the computer-room door flew open and Sally Go came running out. Sally pushed her tear-streaked face through Renée’s open window.

“I saw you!” she said. “I work right there, and I saw you! Me and my friends, we saw you!” She had one of those no-stick city voices. “I hate this kind of shit you’re pulling. He was supposed to marry me. You’re crazy. I hate you! I hope you die! I hate you so much.”

Renée opened her mouth to speak, but the girl was already in her car. She backed out with a screech and drove away.

Howard returned with a hank of nylon rope.

“Was that your girlfriend?”

He shrugged, starting the engine. By now the wind had blown most of the cars and people off the streets. A black curtain was hanging at the end of Kirkland Street, a November twilight.

“You’re going to get your wall unit wet,” Renée said.

“Got some plastic,” Howard said.

She remembered the letter from Louis and, without thinking, put her hand under the flap of her leather bag and tried to open it surreptitiously, but Howard looked at her. She slowly drew her hand out. Beneath the Dane Street bridge the wind was flattening stands of ragweed and cattail. The first drops of rain scored the windshield. She was coming home to Somerville, in her jeans and sneakers, with her emptied womb. The brown and yellow and white and blue clapboard had never looked so beautiful as in the green light of the beginning storm. She could already feel the overheatedness of her apartment, smell the rain on the hot slates outside the kitchen window, hear the water on the roof. She was so impatient to be home that when Howard stopped on Pleasant Avenue she hardly thanked him. She jumped out and slammed the door.

Huge raindrops were falling on the honeysuckle. Howard pulled away but had driven no more than thirty feet when, directly across the street from Renée, the driver-side window of a black Infiniti was powered down, and an arm reached out and shot her in the back with a small revolver and let fly four more bullets as she fell down the crumbling stoop. Howard hit the brakes. In his mirror he saw the Infiniti fishtail onto Walnut Street and disappear.