T. C. Boyle Stories

BEAT

Yeah, I was Beat. We were all Beat. Hell, I’m Beat now — is, was, and always will be. I mean, how do you stop? But this isn’t about me — I’m nobody, really, just window-dressing on the whole mother of Bop freight-train-hopping holy higher than Tokay Beat trip into the heart of the American night. No, what I wanted to tell you about is Jack. And Neal and Allen and Bill and all the rest, too, and how it all went down, because I was there, I was on the scene, and there was nobody Beater than me.

Picture this: seventeen years old, hair an unholy mess and a little loden-green beret perched up on top to keep it in place, eighty-three cents in my pocket and a finger-greased copy of The Subterraneans in my rucksack along with a Charlie Parker disc with enough pops, scratches and white noise worked into the grooves to fill out the soundtrack of a sci-fi flick, hitched all the way from Oxnard, California, and there I am on Jack’s front porch in Northport, Long Island, December twenty-three, nineteen fifty-eight. It’s cold. Bleak. The town full of paint-peeling old monster houses, gray and worn and just plain old, like the whole horse-blindered tired-out East Coast locked in its gloom from October to April with no time off for good behavior. I’m wearing three sweaters under my Levi’s jacket and still I’m holding on to my ribs and I can feel the snot crusting round my nostrils and these mittens I bummed from an old lady at the Omaha bus station are stiff with it, and I knock, wondering if there’s an officially cool way to knock, a hipster’s way, a kind of secret Dharma Bums code-knock I don’t know about.

Knock-knock. Knockata-knockata, knock-knock-knock.

My first surprise was in store: it wasn’t Jack, the gone hep satori-seeking poet god of the rails and two-lane blacktop, who answered the door, but a big blocky old lady with a face like the bottom of a hiking boot. She was wearing a dress the size of something you’d drape over a car to keep the dust off it, and it was composed of a thousand little red and green triangles with gold trumpets and silver angels squeezed inside of them. She gave me the kind of look that could peel the tread off a recapped tire, the door held just ajar. I shuddered: she looked like somebody’s mother.

My own mother was three thousand miles away and so square she was cubed; my dog, the one I’d had since childhood, was dead, flattened out by a big rig the week earlier; and I’d flunked English, History, Calculus, Art, Phys. Ed., Music and Lunch. I wanted adventure, the life of the road, freewheeling chicks in berets and tea and bongos and long Benzedrine-inflected bullshit sessions that ran on into morning, I wanted Jack and everything he stood for, and here was this old lady. “Uh,” I stammered, fighting to control my voice, which was just then deepening from the adolescent squeak I’d had to live with since consciousness had hit, “does, uh, Jack Kerouac live here, I mean, by any chance?”

“Go back where you came from,” the old lady said. “My Jacky don’t have time for no more of this nonsense.” And that was it: she shut the door in my face.

My Jacky!

It came to me then: this was none other than Jack’s mother, the Bop-nurturing freewheeling wild Madonna herself, the woman who’d raised up the guru and given him form, mother of us all. And she’d locked me out. I’d come three thousand miles, her Jacky was my Jack, and I was cold through to the bone, stone broke, scared, heartsick and just about a lungful of O₂ away from throwing myself down in the slush and sobbing till somebody came out and shot me. I knocked again.

“Hey, Ma,” I heard from somewhere deep inside the house, and it was like the rutting call of some dangerous beast, a muted angry threatening Bop-benny-and-jug-wine roar, the voice of the man himself, “what the hell is this, I’m trying to concentrate in here.”

And then the old lady: “It ain’t nothing, Jacky.”

Knock-knock. Knockata-knockata, knock-knock-knock. I paradiddled that door, knocked it and socked it, beat on it like it was the bald flat-topped dome of my uptight pencil-pushing drudge of a bourgeois father himself, or maybe Mr. Detwinder, the principal at Oxnard High. I knocked till my knuckles bled, a virtuoso of knocking, so caught up in the rhythm and energy of it that it took me a minute to realize the door was open and Jack himself standing there in the doorway. He looked the way Belmondo tried to look in Breathless, loose and cool in a rumpled T-shirt and jeans, with a smoke in one hand, a bottle of muscatel in the other.

I stopped knocking. My mouth fell open and the snot froze in my nostrils.

“Jack Kerouac,” I said.

He let a grin slide down one side of his mouth and back up the other. “Nobody else,” he said.

The wind shot down my collar, I caught a glimpse of colored lights blinking on and off in the room behind him, and suddenly it was all gushing out of me like something I’d been chewing over and digesting all my life: “I hitched all the way from Oxnard and my name’s Wallace Pinto but you can call me Buzz and I just wanted to say, I just wanted to tell you—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” he said, waving a hand in dismissal, and he seemed unsteady on his muscatel-impaired feet, the smoke curling up to snatch at his cracked blue squinting eyes, the words slow on his lips, heavy, weighted and freighted with the deep everlasting bardic wisdom of the road, the cathouse and the seaman’s bar, “but I tell you, kid, you keep drumming on the door like that you’re going to end up in the hospital”—a pause—“or maybe a jazz combo.” I just stood there in a kind of trance until I felt his hand — his Dharma Bum Subterranean On the Road Bop-master’s gone Mexican-chick-digging hand — take hold of my shoulder and tug me forward, over the threshold and into the house. “You ever been introduced to a true and veritable set of tight-skinned bongos?” he asked, throwing an arm over my shoulder as the door slammed behind us.

Two hours later we were sitting there in the front room by this totally gone Christmas tree bedecked with cherubim and little Christs and the like, indulging in a poor boy and a joint or two of Miss Green, my Charlie Parker record whizzing and popping on the record player and a whole big pile of red and green construction-paper strips growing at our feet. We were making a chain to drape over the Beatest tree you ever saw and the music was a cool breeze fluttering full of Yardbird breath and the smell of ambrosia and manna crept in from the kitchen where Mémère, the Beat Madonna herself, was cooking up some first-rate mouthwatering Canuck-style two-days-before-Christmas chow. I hadn’t eaten since New Jersey, the morning before, and that was only some pretty piss-poor diner hash fries and a runny solitary egg, and I was cutting up little strips of colored paper and pasting them in little circles as Jack’s chain grew and my head spun from the wine and the weed.

That big old lady in the Christmas dress just kind of vanished and the food appeared, and we ate, Jack and I, side by side, left our Beat plates on the sofa, threw our chain on the tree and were just pawing through the coats in the front hallway for another poor boy of sweet Tokay wine when there was a knock at the door. This knock wasn’t like my knock. Not at all. This was a delicate knock, understated and minimalistic, but with a whole deep continent of passion and expectation implicit in it — in short, a feminine knock. “Well,” Jack said, his face lit with the Beatest joy at discovering the slim vessel of a pint bottle in the inside pocket of his seaman’s pea coat, “aren’t you going to answer it?”

“Me?” I said, grinning my Beatest grin. I was in, I was part of it all, I was Jack’s confidant and compatriot, and we were in the front hallway of his pad in Northport, Long Island, a fine hot steaming mother-of-Jack-prepared meal in our gone Beat guts, and he was asking me to answer the door, me, seventeen years old and nobody. “You mean it?” and my grin widened till I could feel the creeping seeping East Coast chill all the way back to my suburban-dentist-filled molars.

Jack, uncapping, tipping back, passing the bottle: “That’s a chick knock, Buzz.”

Me: “I love chicks.”

Jack: “A gone lovely spring flower of a beret-wearing flipped long-legged coltish retrousse-nosed and run-away-from-home-to-big-Jack-Kerouac chick knock.”

Me: “I am crazy for gone lovely spring flower beret-wearing flipped long-legged coltish retrousse-nosed run-away-from-home-to-big-Jack-Kerouac chicks.”

Jack: “Then answer it.”

I pulled open the door and there she was, all the above and more, sixteen years old with big ungulate eyes and Mary Travers hair. She gave me a gaping openmouthed look, taking in my loden-green beret, the frizzed wildness of my hair sticking out from under it, my Beat Levi’s jacket and jeans and my tea-reddened joyous hitchmg-all-the-way-from-Oxnard eyes. “I was looking for Jack,” she said, and her voice was cracked and scratchy and low. She dropped her gaze.

I looked to Jack, who stood behind me, out of her line of vision, and asked a question with my eyebrows. Jack gave me his hooded smoldering dust-jacket-from-hell look, then stepped forward, took the poor boy from me and loomed over the now-eye-lifting chick and chucked her chin with a gone Beat curling index finger. “Coochie-coochie-coo,” he said.

Her name was Ricky Keen (Richarda Kinkowski, actually, but that’s how she introduced herself), she’d hitchhiked all the way down from Plattsburgh and she was as full of hero-worship and inarticulate praise as I was. “Dean Moriarty,” she said at the end of a long rambling speech that alluded to nearly every line Jack had written and half the Zoot Sims catalogue, “he’s the coolest. I mean, that’s who I want to make babies with, absolutely.”

There we were, standing in the front hallway listening to this crack-voiced ungulate-eyed long gone Beat-haired sixteen-year-old chick talk about making babies with Charlie Parker riffing in the background and the Christmas lights winking on and off and it was strange and poignant. All I could say was “Wow,” over and over, but Jack knew just what to do. He threw one arm over my shoulder and the other over the chick’s and he thrust his already-bloating and booze-inflamed but quintessentially Beat face into ours and said, low and rumbly, “What we need, the three of us hepsters, cats and chicks alike, is a consciousness-raising all-night bull session at the indubitable pinnacle of all neighborhood Bodhisattva centers and bar and grills, the Peroration Pub, or, as the fellaheen know it, Ziggy’s Clam House. What do you say?”

What did we say? We were speechless — stunned, amazed, moved almost to tears. The man himself, he who had practically invented the mug, the jug and the highball and lifted the art of getting sloshed to its Beat apotheosis, was asking us, the skinny underage bedraggled runaways, to go out on the town for a night of wild and prodigious Kerouackian drinking. All I could manage was a nod of assent, Ricky Keen said, “Yeah, sure, like wow,” and then we were out in the frozen rain, the three of us, the streets all crusted with ugly East Coast ice, Ricky on one side of Jack, me on the other, Jack’s arms uniting us. We tasted freedom on those frozen streets, passing the bottle, our minds elevated and feverish with the fat spike of Mary Jane that appeared magically between Jack’s thumb and forefinger and the little strips of Benzedrine-soaked felt he made us swallow like a sacrament. The wind sang a dirge. Ice clattered down out of the sky. We didn’t care. We walked eight blocks, our Beat jackets open to the elements, and we didn’t feel a thing.

Ziggy’s Clam House loomed up out of the frozen black wastes of the Long Island night like a ziggurat, a holy temple of Beat enlightenment and deep soul truths, lit only by the thin neon braids of the beer signs in the windows. Ricky Keen giggled. My heart was pounding against my ribs. I’d never been in a bar before and I was afraid I’d make an ass of myself. But not to worry: we were with Jack, and Jack never hesitated. He hit the door of Ziggy’s Clam House like a fullback bursting through the line, the door lurched back on its hinges and embedded itself in the wall, and even as I clutched reflexively at the eighty-three cents in my pocket Jack stormed the bar with a roar: “Set up the house, barkeep, and all you sleepy fellaheen, the Beat Generation has arrived!”

I exchanged a glance with Ricky Keen. The place was as quiet as a mortuary, some kind of tacky Hawaiian design painted on the walls, a couple of plastic palms so deep in dust they might have been snowed on, and it was nearly as dark inside as out. The bartender, startled by Jack’s joyous full-throated proclamation of Beat uplift and infectious Dionysian spirit, glanced up from the flickering blue trance of the TV like a man whose last stay of execution has just been denied. He was heavy in the jowls, favoring a dirty white dress shirt and a little bow tie pinned like a dead insect to his collar. He winced when Jack brought his Beat fist down on the countertop and boomed, “Some of everything for everybody!”

Ricky Keen and I followed in Jack’s wake, lit by our proximity to the centrifuge of Beatdom and the wine, marijuana and speed coursing through our gone adolescent veins. We blinked in the dim light and saw that the everybody Jack was referring to comprised a group of three: a sad mystical powerfully made-up cocktail waitress in a black tutu and fishnet stockings and a pair of crewcut Teamster types in blue workshirts and chinos. The larger of the two, a man with a face like a side of beef, squinted up briefly from his cigarette and growled. “Pipe down, asshole — can’t you see we’re trying to concentrate here?” Then the big rippled neck rotated and the head swung back round to refixate on the tube.

Up on the screen, which was perched between gallon jars of pickled eggs and Polish sausage, Red Skeleton was mugging in a Santa Claus hat for all the dead vacant mindless living rooms of America, and I. knew, with a deep sinking gulf of overwhelming un-Beat sadness, that my own triple-square parents, all the way out in Oxnard, were huddled round the console watching this same rubbery face go through its contortions and wondering where their pride and joy had got himself to. Ricky Keen might have been thinking along similar lines, so sad and stricken did she look at that moment, and I wanted to put my arms around her and stroke her hair and feel the heat of her Beat little lost body against my own. Only Jack seemed unaffected. “Beers all around,” he insisted, tattooing the bar with his fist, and even before the bartender could heave himself up off his stool to comply Jack was waking up Benny Goodman on the jukebox and we were pooling our change as the Teamsters sat stoically beside their fresh Jack-bought beers and the cocktail waitress regarded us out of a pair of black staved-in eyes. Of course, Jack was broke and my eighty-three cents didn’t take us far, but fortunately Ricky Keen produced a wad of crumpled dollar bills from a little purse tucked away in her boot and the beer flowed like bitter honey.

It was sometime during our third or fourth round that the burlier of the two Teamster types erupted from his barstool with the words Communist and faggot on his lips and flattened Jack, Ricky and me beneath a windmill of punches, kicks and elbow chops. We went down in a marijuana-weakened puddle, laughing like madmen, not even attempting to resist as the other Teamster, the bartender and even the waitress joined in. Half a purple-bruised minute later the three of us were out on the icy street in a jumble of limbs and my hand accidentally wandered to Ricky Keen’s hard little half-formed breast and for the first time I wondered what was going to become of me, and, more immediately, where I was going to spend the night.

But Jack, heroically Beat and muttering under his breath about squares and philistines, anticipated me. Staggering to his feet and reaching down a Tokay-cradling spontaneous-prose-generating railroad-callused hand first to Ricky and then to me, he said, “Fellow seekers and punching bags, the road to Enlightenment is a rocky one, but tonight, tonight you sleep with big Jack Kerouac.”

I woke the next afternoon on the sofa in the living room of the pad Jack shared with his Mémère. The sofa was grueling terrain, pocked and scoured by random dips and high hard draft-buffeted plateaus, but my stringy impervious seventeen-year-old form had become one with it in a way that approached bliss. It was, after all, a sofa, and not the cramped front seat of an A & P produce truck or road-hopping Dodge, and it had the rugged book-thumbing late-night-crashing bongo-thumping joint-rolling aura of Jack to recommend and sanctify it. So what if my head was big as a weather balloon and the rest of me felt like so many pounds and ounces of beef jerky? So what if I was nauseated from cheap wine and tea and Benzedrine and my tongue was stuck like Velcro to the roof of my mouth and Ricky Keen was snoring on the floor instead of sharing the sofa with me? So what if Bing Crosby and Mario Lanza were blaring square Christmas carols from the radio in the kitchen and Jack’s big hunkering soul of a mother maneuvered her shouldery bulk into the room every five seconds to give me a look of radiant hatred and motherly impatience? So what? I was at Jack’s. Nirvana attained.

When finally I threw back the odd fuzzy Canuck-knitted detergent-smelling fully Beat afghan some kind soul — Jack? — had draped over me in the dim hours of the early morning, I became aware that Ricky and I were not alone in the room. A stranger was fixed like a totem pole in the armchair across from me, a skinny rangy long-nosed Brahmin-looking character with a hundred-mile stare and a dull brown Beat suit that might have come off the back of an insurance salesman from Hartford, Connecticut. He barely breathed, squinting glassy-eyed into some dark unfathomable vision like a man trying to see his way to the end of a tunnel, as lizardlike a human as I’d ever seen. And who could this be, I wondered, perched here rigid-backed in Jack’s gone Beat pad on the day before Christmas and communing with a whole other reality? Ricky Keen snored lightly from her nest on the floor. I studied the man in the chair like he was a science project or something, until all at once it hit me: this was none other than Bill himself, the marksman, freighted all the way across the Beat heaving blue-cold Atlantic from Tangier to wish Jack and his Beat Madonna a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

“Bill!” I cried, leaping up from the sofa to pump his dead wooden hand, “this is … I mean, I can’t tell you what an honor,” and I went on in that gone worshipful vein for what must have been ten minutes, some vestige of the Benzedrine come up on me suddenly, and Ricky Keen snapped open her pure golden eyes like two pats of butter melting into a pile of pancakes and I knew I was hungry and transported and headachy and Bill never blinked an eye or uttered a word.

“Who’s that?” Ricky Keen breathed in her scratchy cracked throat-cancery rasp that I’d begun to find incredibly sexy.

“’Who’s that?’” I echoed in disbelief. “Why, it’s Bill.”

Ricky Keen stretched, yawned, readjusted her beret. “Who’s Bill?”

“You mean you don’t know who Bill is?” I yelped, and all the while Bill sat there like a corpse, his irises drying out and his lips clamped tight round the little nugget of his mouth.

Ricky Keen ignored the question. “Did we eat anything last night?” she rasped. “I’m so hungry I could puke.”

At that moment I became aware of a sharp gland-stimulating gone wild smell wafting in from the kitchen on the very same Beat airwaves that carried the corny vocalizations of Bing and Mario: somebody was making flapjacks!

Despite our deep soul brother- and sisterhood with Jack and his Mémère, Ricky and I were nonetheless a little sketchy about just bursting into the kitchen and ingratiating our way into a plate of those flapjacks, so we paused to knock on the hinge-swinging slab of the kitchen door. There was no response. We heard Mario Lanza, the sizzle of grease in the pan and voices, talking or chanting. One of them seemed to be Jack’s, so we knocked again and boldly pushed open the door.

If there was a climax to all that had come before, a Beat epiphany and holy epitomized moment, this was it: Jack was there at the kitchen table and his mother at the stove, yes, but there was a third person present, arrived among us like one of the bearded mystics out of the East. And who could it be with that mad calculating bug-eyed big-lipped look of Zen wisdom and froglike beauty? I knew in an instant: it was Allen. Allen himself, the poet laureate of Beatdom, come all the way from Paris for this far-out moment with Jack and his mother in their humble little Beat kitchen on the cold North Shore of Long Island. He was sitting at the table with Jack, spinning a dreidel and singing in a muddy moist sweet-wine-lubricated voice:

Dreidel, dreidel, dreidel,

I made it out of clay,

And when it’s dry and ready,

Then Dreidel I will play.

Jack waved Ricky and me into the room and pushed us down into two empty chairs at the kitchen table. “Flipped,” he murmured as the dreidel spun across the tabletop, and he poured us each a water glass of sticky Mogen David blackberry wine and my throat seized at the taste of it. “Drink up, man, it’s Christmas!” Jack shouted, thumping my back to jolt open the tubes.

That was when Mémère came into the picture. She was steaming about something, really livid, her shoulders all hunched up and her face stamped with red-hot broiling uncontainable rage, but she served the flapjacks and we ate in Beat communion, fork-grabbing, syrup-pouring and butter-smearing while Allen rhapsodized about the inner path and Jack poured wine. In retrospect, I should have been maybe a hair more attuned to Jack’s mother and her moods, but I shoved flapjacks into my face, reveled in Beatdom and ignored the piercing glances and rattling pans. Afterward we left our Beat plates where we dropped them and rushed into the living room to spin some sides and pound on the bongos while Allen danced a disheveled dance and blew into the wooden flute and Bill looked down the long tunnel of himself.

What can I say? The legends were gathered, we cut up the Benzedrine inhalers and swallowed the little supercharged strips of felt inside, feasted on Miss Green and took a gone Beat hike to the liquor store for more wine and still more. By dark I was able to feel the wings of consciousness lift off my back and my memory of what came next is glorious but hazy. At some point — eight? nine? — I was aroused from my seventeen-year-old apprentice-Beat stupor by the sound of sniffling and choked-back sobs, and found myself looking up at the naked-but-for-a-seaman’s-peacoat form of Ricky Keen. I seemed to be on the floor behind the couch, buried in a litter of doilies, antimacassars and sheets of crumpled newspaper, the lights from the Christmas tree riding up the walls and Ricky Keen standing over me with her bare legs, heaving out chesty sobs and using the ends of her long gone hair to dab at the puddles of her eyes. “What?” I said. “What is it?” She swayed back and forth, rocking on her naked feet, and I couldn’t help admiring her knees and the way her bare young hitchhiking thighs sprouted upward from them to disappear in the folds of the coat.

“It’s Jack,” she sobbed, the sweet rasp of her voice catching in her throat, and then she was behind the couch and kneeling like a supplicant over the jean-clad poles of my outstretched legs.

“Jack?” I repeated stupidly.

A moment of silence, deep and committed. There were no corny carols seeping from the radio in the kitchen, no wild tooth-baring jazz or Indian sutras roaring from the record player, there was no Allen, no Jack, no Mémère. If I’d been capable of sitting up and thrusting my head over the back of the sofa I would have seen that the room was deserted but for Bill, still locked in his comatose reverie. Ricky Keen sat on my knees. “Jack won’t have me,” she said in a voice so tiny I was hardly aware she was speaking at all. And then, with a pout: “He’s drunk.”

Jack wouldn’t have her. I mulled fuzzily over this information, making slow drawn-out turtlelike connections while Ricky Keen sat on my knees with her golden eyes and Mary Travers hair, and finally I said to myself, If Jack won’t have her, then who will? I didn’t have a whole lot of experience along these lines — my adventures with the opposite sex had been limited to lingering dumbstruck classroom gazes and the odd double-feature grope — but I was willing to learn. And eager, oh yes.

“It’s such a drag being a virgin,” she breathed, unbuttoning the coat, and I sat up and took hold of her — clamped my panting perspiring sex-crazed adolescent self to her, actually — and we kissed and throbbed and explored each other’s anatomies in a drifting cloud of Beat bliss and gone holy rapture. I was lying there, much later, tingling with the quiet rush and thrill of it, Ricky breathing softly into the cradle of my right arm, when suddenly the front door flew back and the world’s wildest heppest benny-crazed coast-to-coasting voice lit the room like a brushfire. I sat up. Groped for my pants. Cradled a startled Ricky head.

“Ho, ho, ho!” the voice boomed, “All you little boysies and girlsies been good? I been checkin’ my list!”

I popped my head over the couch and there he was, cool and inexplicable. I couldn’t believe my eyes: it was Neal. Neal escaped from San Quentin and dressed in a street-corner-Santa outfit, a bag full of booze, drugs, cigarettes and canned hams slung over his back, his palms hammering invisible bongos in the air. “Come out, come out, wherever you are!” he cried, and broke down in a sea of giggles. “Gonna find out who’s naughty and nice, yes indeed!”

At that moment Jack burst in from the kitchen, where he and Allen had been taking a little catnap over a jug of wine, and that was when the really wild times began, the back-thumping high-fiving jumping jiving tea-smoking scat-singing Beat revel of the ages. Ricky Keen came to life with a snort, wrapped the jacket round her and stepped out from behind the couch like a Beat princess, I reached for the wine, Jack howled like a dog and even Bill shifted his eyes round his head in a simulacrum of animacy. Neal couldn’t stop talking and drinking and smoking, spinning round the room like a dervish, Allen shouted “Miles Davis!” and the record player came to life, and we were all dancing, even Bill, though he never left his chair.

That was the crowning moment of my life — I was Beat, finally and absolutely — and I wanted it to go on forever. And it could have, if it wasn’t for Jack’s mother, that square-shouldered fuming old woman in the Christmas dress. She was nowhere to be seen through all of this, and I’d forgotten about her in the crazed explosion of the moment — it wasn’t till Jack began to break down that she materialized again.

It was around twelve or so. Jack got a little weepy, sang an a capella version of “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” and tried to talk us all into going to the midnight mass at St. Columbanus’ church. Allen said he had no objection, except that he was Jewish, Neal derided the whole thing as the height of corny bourgeois sentimentality, Bill was having trouble moving his lips and Ricky Keen said that she was Unitarian and didn’t know if she could handle it. Jack, tears streaming down his face, turned to me. “Buzz,” he said, and he had this wheedling crazed biggest-thing-in-the-world sort of edge to his voice, “Buzz, you’re a good Catholic, I know you are — what do you say?”

All eyes focused on me. Silence rang suddenly through the house. I was three sheets to the wind, sloppy drunk, seventeen years old. Jack wanted to go to midnight mass, and it was up to me to say yea or nay. I just stood there, wondering how I was going to break the news to Jack that I was an atheist and that I hated God, Jesus, and my mother, who’d made me go to parochial school five days a week since I’d learned to walk and religious instruction on Sundays to boot. My mouth moved, but nothing came out.

Jack was trembling. A tic started in over his right eye. He clenched his fists. “Don’t let me down, Buzz!” he roared, and when he started toward me Neal tried to stop him, but Jack flung him away as if he was nothing. “Midnight mass, Buzz, midnight!” he boomed, and he was standing right there in front of me, gone Beat crazy, and I could smell the booze on his stinking Beat breath. He dropped his voice then. “You’ll rot in hell, Buzz,” he hissed, “you’ll rot.” Allen reached for his arm, but Jack shook him off. I took a step back.

That was when Mémère appeared.

She swept into the room like something out of a Japanese monster flick, huge in her nightdress, big old Jack-mothery toes sticking out beneath it like sausages, and she went straight to the fireplace and snatched up the poker. “Out!” she screamed, the eyes sunk back in her head, “get out of my house, you queers and convicts and drug addicts, and you”—she turned on me and Ricky—“you so-called fans and adulators, you’re even worse. Go back where you came from and leave my Jacky in peace.” She made as if to swing the poker at me and I reflexively ducked out of the way, but she brought it down across the lamp on the table instead. There was a flash, the lamp exploded, and she drew back and whipped the poker like a lariat over her head. “Out!” she shrieked, and the whole group, even Bill, edged toward the door.

Jack did nothing to stop her. He gave us his brooding lumberjack Beat posing-on-the-fire-escape look, but there was something else to it, something new, and as I backpedaled out the door and into the grimy raw East Coast night, I saw what it was — the look of a mama’s boy, pouty and spoiled. “Go home to your mothers, all of you,” Mémère yelled, shaking the poker at us as we stood there drop-jawed on the dead brown ice-covered pelt of the lawn. “For god’s sake,” she sobbed, “it’s Christmas!” And then the door slammed shut.

I was in shock. I looked at Bill, Allen, Neal, and they were as stunned as I was. And poor Ricky — all she had on was Jack’s pea coat and I could see her tiny bare perfect-toed Beat chick feet freezing to the ground like twin ice sculptures. I reached up to adjust my beret and realized it wasn’t there, and it was like I’d had the wind knocked out of me. “Jack!” I cried out suddenly, and my creaking adolescent voice turned it into a forlorn bleat. “Jack!” I cried, “Jack!” but the night closed round us and there was no answer.

What happened from there is a long story. But to make it short, I took Meniere’s advice and went home to my mother, and by the time I got there Ricky had already missed her period. My mother didn’t like it but the two of us moved into my boyhood room with the lame college pennants and dinosaur posters and whatnot on the walls for about a month, which is all we could stand, and then Ricky took her gone gorgeous Beat Madonna-of-the-streets little body off to an ultra-Beat one-room pad on the other end of town and I got a job as a brakeman on the Southern Pacific and she let me crash with her and that was that. We smoked tea and burned candles and incense and drank jug wine and made it till we damn near rubbed the skin off each other. The first four boys we named Jack, Neal, Allen and Bill, though we never saw any of their namesakes again except Allen, at one of his poetry readings, but he made like he didn’t know us. The first of the girls we named Gabrielle, for Jack’s mother, and after that we seemed to kind of just lose track and name them for the month they were born, regardless of sex, and we wound up with two Junes — June the Male and June the Female — but it was no big thing.

Yeah, I was Beat, Beater than any of them — or just as Beat, anyway. Looking back on it now, though, I mean after all these years and what with the mortgage payments and Ricky’s detox and the kids with their college tuition and the way the woodworking shop over the garage burned down and how stinking close-fisted petit-bourgeois before-the-revolution pig-headed cheap the railroad disability is, I wonder now if I’m not so much Beat anymore as just plain beat. But then, I couldn’t even begin to find the words to describe it to you.

(1993)

HARD SELL

So maybe I come on a little strong.

“Hey, babes,” I say to him (through his interpreter, of course, this guy with a face like a thousand fists), “the beard’s got to go. And that thing on your head too — I mean I can dig it and all; it’s kinda wild, actually — but if you want to play with the big boys, we’ll get you a toup.” I wait right here a minute to let the interpreter finish his jabbering, but there’s no change in the old bird’s face — I might just as well have been talking to my shoes. But what the hey, I figure, he’s paying me a hundred big ones up front, the least I can do is give it a try. “And this jihad shit, can it, will you? I mean that kinda thing might go down over here but on Santa Monica Boulevard, believe me, it’s strictly from hunger.”

Then the Ayatollah looks at me, one blink of these lizard eyes he’s got, and he says something in his throat-cancer rasp — he’s tired or he needs an enema or something — and the interpreter stands, the fourteen guys against the wall with the Uzis stand, some character out the window starts yodeling the midday prayers, and I stand too. I can feel it, instinctively — I mean, I’m perceptive, you know that, Bob — that’s it for the day. I mean, nothing. Zero. Zilch. And I go out of there shaking my head, all these clowns with the Uzis closing in on me like piranha, and I’m thinking how in christ does this guy expect to upgrade his image when half the country’s in their bathrobe morning, noon, and night?

Okay. So I’m burned from jet lag anyway, and I figure I’ll write the day off, go back to the hotel, have a couple Tanqueray rocks, and catch some z’s. What a joke, huh? They don’t have Tanqueray, Bob. Or rocks either. They don’t have Beefeater’s or Gordon’s — they don’t have a bar, for christsake. Can you believe it — the whole damn country, the cradle of civilization, and it’s dry. All of a sudden I’m beginning to see the light — this guy really is a fanatic. So anyway I’m sitting at this table in the lobby drinking grape soda — yeah, grape soda, out of the can — and thinking I better get on the horn with Chuck back in Century City, I mean like I been here what — three hours? — and already the situation is going down the tubes, when I feel this like pressure on my shoulder.

I turn around and who is it but the interpreter, you know, the guy with the face. He’s leaning on me with his elbow. Like I’m a lamppost or something, and he’s wearing this big shit-eating grin. He’s like a little Ayatollah, this guy — beard, bathrobe, slippers, hat, the works — and he’s so close I can smell the roots of his hair.

“I don’t like the tone you took with the Imam,” he says in this accent right out of a Pepperidge Farm commercial, I mean like Martha’s Vineyard all the way, and then he slides into the chair across from me. “This is not John Travolta you’re addressing, my very sorry friend. This is the earthly representative of the Qā’im, who will one day come to us to reveal the secrets of the divinity, Allah be praised.” Then he lowers his voice, drops the smile, and gives me this killer look. “Show a little respect,” he says.

You know me, Bob — I don’t take shit from anybody, I don’t care who it is, Lee Iacocca, Steve Garvey, Joan Rivers (all clients of ours, by the way), and especially not from some nimrod that looks like he just walked off the set of Lawrence of Arabia, right? So I take a long swallow of grape soda, Mr. Cool all the way, and then set the can down like it’s a loaded.44. “Don’t tell me,” I go, “—Harvard, right?”

And the jerk actually smiles, “Class of ‘68.”

“Listen, pal,” I start to say, but he interrupts me.

“The name is Hojatolislam.”

Hey, you know me, I’m good with names — have to be in this business. But Hojatolislam? You got to be kidding. I mean I don’t even attempt it. “Okay,” I say, “I can appreciate where you’re coming from, the guy’s a big deal over here, yeah, all right … but believe me, you take it anyplace else and your Ayatollah’s got about as positive a public image as the Son of Sam. That’s what you hired us for, right? Hey, I don’t care what people think of the man, to me, I’m an agnostic personally, and this is just another guy with a negative public perception that wants to go upscale. And I’m going to talk to him. Straight up. All the cards on the table.”

And then you know what he does, the chump? He says I’m crass. (Crass — and I’m wearing an Italian silk suit that’s worth more than this joker’ll make in six lifetimes and a pair of hand-stitched loafers that cost me … but I don’t even want to get into it.) Anyway, I’m crass. I’m going to undermine the old fart’s credibility, as if he’s got any. It was so-and-so’s party that wanted me in — to make the Ayatollah look foolish — and he, Hojatolislam, is going to do everything in his power to see that it doesn’t happen.

“Whoa,” I go, “don’t let’s mix politics up in this. I was hired to do a job here and I’m going to do it, whether you and the rest of the little ayatollahs like it or not.”

Hoji kinda draws himself up and gives me this tight little kiss-my-ass smile. “Fine,” he says, “you can do what you want, but you know how much of what you said this morning came across? In my translation, that is?”

Then it dawns on me: no wonder the Ayatollah looks like he’s in la-la land the whole time I’m talking to him — nothing’s getting through. “Let me guess,” I say.

But he beats me to it, the son of a bitch. He leans forward on his elbows and makes this little circle with his thumb and index finger and then holds it up to his eye and peeks through it — real cute, huh?

I don’t say a word. But I’m thinking, Okay, pal, you want to play hardball, we’ll play hardball.

So it sounds like I’m in pretty deep, right? You’re probably thinking it’s tough enough to market this turkey to begin with, let alone having to deal with all these little ayatollahs and their pet gripes. But the way I see it, it’s no big problem. You got to ask yourself, What’s this guy got going for him? All right, he’s a fanatic. We admit it. Up front. But hell, you can capitalize on anything. Now the big thing about a fanatic is he’s sexy — look at Hitler, Stalin, with that head of hair of his, look at Fidel — and let’s face it, he’s got these kids, these so-called martyrs of the revolution, dying for him by the thousands. The guy’s got charisma to burn, no doubt about it. Clean him up and put him in front of the TV cameras, that’s the way I see it — and no, I’m not talking Merv Griffin and that sort of thing; I mean I can’t feature him up there in a luau shirt with a couple of gold chains or anything like that — but he could show some chest hair, for christsake. I mean he’s old, but hell, he’s a pretty sexy guy in his way. A power trip like that, all those kids dying in the swamps, giving the Iraqis hell, that’s a very sexy thing. In a weird way, I mean. Like it’s a real turn-on. Classic. But my idea is maybe get him a gig with GTE or somebody. You know, coach up his English like with that French guy they had on selling perfume a couple years back, real charming, sweet-guy kinda thing, right? No, selling the man is the least of my worries. But if I can’t talk to him, I’m cooked.

So I go straight to my room and get Chuck on the horn. “Chuck,” I tell him, “they’re killing me over here. Send me an interpreter on the next plane, will you? Somebody that’s on our side.”

Next morning, there’s a knock on my door. It’s this guy about five feet tall and five feet wide, with this little goatee and kinky hair all plastered down on his head. His name’s Parviz. Yesterday he’s selling rugs on La Brea, today he’s in Tehran. Fine. No problem. Only thing is he’s got this accent like Akim Tamiroff, I mean I can barely understand him myself, he’s nodding off to sleep on me, and I’ve got an appointment with the big guy at one. There’s no time for formalities, and plus the guy doesn’t know from shit about PR anyway, so I sit him down and wire him up with about sixty cups of crank and then we’re out the door.

“Okay, Parviz,” I say, “let’s run with it.”

Of course, we don’t even get in the door at the Ayatollah’s place and these creeps with the Uzis have Parviz up against the wall, feeling him up and jabbering away at him in this totally weird language of theirs — sounds like a tape loop of somebody clearing their throat. I mean, they feel me up too, but poor Parviz, they strip him down to his underwear — this skinny-strap T-shirt with his big pregnant gut hanging out and these boxer shorts with little blue parrots on them — and the guy’s awake now, believe me. Awake, and sweating like a pig. So anyway, they usher us into this room — different room, different house than yesterday, by the way — and there he is, the Ayatollah, propped up on about a hundred pillows and giving us his lizard-on-a-rock look. Hoji’s there too, of course, along with all the other Ayatollah clones with their raggedy beards and pillbox hats.

Soon as Hoji gets a load of Parviz though, he can see what’s coming and he throws some kind of fit, teeth flashing in his beard, his face bruised up like a bag of bad plums, pissing and moaning and pointing at me and Parviz like we just got done raping his mother or something. But hey, I’ve taken some meetings in my time and if I can’t handle it, Bob, I mean who can? So I just kinda brush right by Hoji, a big closer’s smile on my face, and shake the old bird’s hand, and I mean nobody shakes his hand — nobody’s laid skin on him in maybe ten years, at least since the revolution, anyway. But I figure the guy used to live in Paris, right? He’s gotta have a nose for a good bottle of wine, a plate of crayfish, Havana cigars, the track, he’s probably dying for somebody to press some skin and shoot the bull about life in the civilized world. So I shake his hand and the room tenses up, but at least it shuts up Hoji for a minute and I see my opening. “Parviz,” I yell over my shoulder, “tell him that I said we both got the same goal, which is positive name/face recognition worldwide. I mean billboards on Sunset, the works, and if he listens to me and cleans up his act a little, I’m ninety-nine percent sure we’re going home.”

Well, Parviz starts in and right away Hoji cuts him off with this high-octane rap, but the Ayatollah flicks his eyes and it’s like the guy just had the tongue ripped out of his head, I mean incredible, bang, that’s it. Hoji ducks his head and he’s gone. And me, I’m smiling like Mr. Cool. Parviz goes ahead and finishes and the old bird clears his throat and croaks something back.

I’m not even looking at Parviz, just holding the Ayatollah’s eyes — by the way, I swear he dyes his eyebrows — and I go, “What’d he say?”

And Parviz tells me. Twice. Thing is, I can’t understand a word he says, but the hell with it, I figure, be positive, right? “Okay,” I say, seeing as how we’re finally getting down to brass tacks, “about the beard. Tell him beards went out with Jim Morrison — and the bathrobe business is kinda kinky, and we can play to that if he wants, but wouldn’t he feel more comfortable in a nice Italian knit?”

The big guy says nothing, but I can see this kinda glimmer in his eyes and I know he’s digging it, I mean I can feel it, and I figure we’ll worry about the grooming later and I cut right to the heart of it and lay my big idea on him, the idea that’s going to launch the whole campaign.

This is genius, Bob, you’re going to love it.

I ask myself, How do we soften this guy a little, you know, break down the barriers between him and the public, turn all that negative shit around? And what audience are we targeting here? Think about it. He can have all the camel drivers and Kalashnikov toters in the world, but let’s face it, the bottom line is how does he go down over here and that’s like nowheresville. So my idea is this: baseball. Yeah, baseball. Where would Castro be without it? What can the American public relate to — and I’m talking the widest sector now, from the guys in the boardroom to the shlump with the jackhammer out the window there — better than baseball? Can you dig it: the Ayatollah’s a closet baseball fan, but his people need him so much — love him, a country embattled, he’s like a Winston Churchill to them — they won’t let him come to New York for a Yankee game. Can you picture it?

No? Well, dig the photo. Yeah. From yesterday’s New York Times. See the button here, on his bathrobe? Well, maybe it is a little fuzzy, AP is the pits, but that’s a “Go Yankees!” button I gave him myself.

No, listen, he liked it, Bob, he liked it. I could tell. I mean I lay the concept on him and he goes off into this fucking soliloquy, croaking up a storm, and then Parviz tells me it’s okay but it’s all over for today, he’s gotta have his hat surgically removed or something, and the guys with the Uzis are closing in again … but I’m seeing green, Bob, I’m seeing him maybe throwing out the first ball this spring, Yankees versus the Reds or Pirates — okay, okay, wrong league — the Birds, then — I’m telling you, the sun on his face, Brooks Brothers draping his shoulders, the cameras whirring, and the arc of that ball just going on and on, out over the grass, across the airwaves and into the lap of every regular Joe in America.

Believe me, Bob, it’s in the bag.

(1987)

THE MIRACLE AT BALLINSPITTLE

There they are, the holybugs, widows in their weeds and fat-ankled mothers with palsied children, all lined up before the snotgreen likeness of the Virgin, and McGahee and McCarey among them. This statue, alone among all the myriad three-foot-high snotgreen likenesses of the Virgin cast in plaster by Finnbar Finnegan & Sons, Cork City, was seen one grim March afternoon some years back to move its limbs ever so slightly, as if seized suddenly by the need of a good sinew-cracking stretch. Nuala Nolan, a young girl in the throes of Lenten abnegation, was the only one to witness the movement — a gentle beckoning of the statue’s outthrust hand — after a fifteen-day vigil during which she took nothing into her body but Marmite and soda water. Ever since, the place has been packed with tourists.

Even now, in the crowd of humble countrymen in shit-smeared boots and knit skullcaps, McGahee can detect a certain number of Teutonic or Manhattanite faces above cableknit sweaters and pendant cameras. Drunk and in debt, on the run from a bad marriage, two DWI convictions, and the wheezy expiring gasps of his moribund mother, McGahee pays them no heed. His powers of concentration run deep. He is forty years old, as lithe as a boxer though he’s done no hard physical labor since he took a construction job between semesters at college twenty years back, and he has the watery eyes and doleful, doglike expression of the saint. Twelve hours ago he was in New York, at Paddy Flynn’s, pouring out his heart and enumerating his woes for McCarey, when McCarey said, “Fuck it, let’s go to Ireland.” And now here he is at Ballinspittle, wearing the rumpled Levi’s and Taiwanese sportcoat he’d pulled on in his apartment yesterday morning, three hours off the plane from Kennedy and flush with warmth from the venerable Irish distillates washing through his veins.

McCarey — plump, stately McCarey — stands beside him, bleary-eyed and impatient, disdainfully scanning the crowd. Heads are bowed. Infants snuffle. From somewhere in the distance come the bleat of a lamb and the mechanical call of the cuckoo. McGahee checks his watch: they’ve been here seven minutes already and nothing’s happened. His mind begins to wander. He’s thinking about orthodontia — thinking an orthodontist could make a fortune in this country — when he looks up and spots her, Nuala Nolan, a scarecrow of a girl, an anorectic, bones-in-a-sack sort of girl, kneeling in front of the queue and reciting the Mysteries in a voice parched for food and drink. Since the statue moved she has stuck to her diet of Marmite and soda water until the very synapses of her brain have become encrusted with salt and she raves like a mariner lost at sea. McGahee regards her with awe. A light rain has begun to fall.

And then suddenly, before he knows what’s come over him, McGahee goes limp. He feels lightheaded, transported, feels himself sinking into another realm, as helpless and cut adrift as when Dr. Beibelman put him under for his gallbladder operation. He breaks out in a sweat. His vision goes dim. The murmur of the crowd, the call of the cuckoo, and the bleat of the lamb all meld into a single sound — a voice — and that voice, ubiquitous, timeless, all-embracing, permeates his every cell and fiber. It seems to speak through him, through the broad-beamed old hag beside him, through McCarey, Nuala Nolan, the stones and birds and fishes of the sea. “Davey,” the voice calls in the sweetest tones he has ever heard. “Davey McGahee, come to me, come to my embrace.”

As one, the crowd parts, a hundred stupefied faces turned toward him, and there she is, the Virgin, snotgreen no longer but radiant with the aquamarine of actuality, her eyes glowing, arms beckoning. McGahee casts a quick glance around him. McCarey looks as if he’s been punched in the gut, Nuala Nolan’s skeletal face is clenched with hate and jealousy, the humble countrymen and farmwives stare numbly from him to the statue and back again … and then, as if in response to a subconscious signal, they drop to their knees in a human wave so that only he, Davey McGahee, remains standing. “Come to me,” the figure implores, and slowly, as if his feet were encased in cement, his head reeling and his stomach sour, he begins to move forward, his own arms outstretched in ecstasy.

The words of his catechism, forgotten these thirty years, echo in his head: “Mother Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our—” “Yesssss!” the statue suddenly shrieks, the upturned palm curled into a fist, a fist like a weapon. “And you think it’s as easy as that, do you?”

McGahee stops cold, hovering over the tiny effigy like a giant, a troglodyte, a naked barbarian. Three feet high, grotesque, shaking its fists up at him, the thing changes before his eyes. Gone is the beatific smile, gone the grace of the eyes and the faintly mad and indulgent look of the transported saint. The face is a gargoyle’s, a shrew’s, and the voice, sharpening, probing like a dental tool, suddenly bears an uncanny resemblance to his ex-wife’s. “Sinner!” the gargoyle hisses. “Fall on your knees!”

The crowd gasps. McGahee, his bowels turned to ice, pitches forward into the turf. “No, no, no!” he cries, clutching at the grass and squeezing his eyes shut. “Hush,” a new voice whispers in his ear, “look. You must look.” There’s a hand on his neck, bony and cold. He winks open an eye. The statue is gone and Nuala Nolan leans over him, her hair gone in patches, the death’s-head of her face and suffering eyes, her breath like the loam of the grave. “Look, up there,” she whispers.

High above them, receding into the heavens like a kite loosed from a string, is the statue. Its voice comes to him faint and distant—“Behold … now … your sins … and excesses …”—and then it dwindles away like a fading echo.

Suddenly, behind the naked pedestal, a bright sunlit vista appears, grapevines marshaled in rows, fields of barley, corn, and hops, and then, falling from the sky with thunderous crashes, a succession of vats, kegs, hogsheads, and buckets mounting up in the foreground as if on some phantom pier piled high with freight. Boom, boom, ka-boom, boom, down they come till the vista is obscured and the kegs mount to the tops of the trees. McGahee pushes himself up to his knees and looks around him. The crowd is regarding him steadily, jaws set, the inclemency of the hanging judge sunk into their eyes. McCarey, kneeling too now and looking as if he’s just lurched up out of a drunken snooze to find himself on a subway car on another planet, has gone steely-eyed with the rest of them. And Nuala Nolan, poised over him, grins till the long naked roots of her teeth gleam beneath the skirts of her rotten gums.

“Your drinking!” shrieks a voice from the back of the throng, his wife’s voice, and there she is, Fredda, barefoot and in a snotgreen robe and hood, wafting her way through the crowd and pointing her long accusatory finger at his poor miserable shrinking self. “Every drop,” she booms, and the vast array of vats and kegs and tumblers swivels to reveal the signs hung from their sweating slats — GIN, BOURBON, BEER, WHISKEY, SCHNAPPS, PERNOD — and the crowd lets out a long exhalation of shock and lament.

The keg of gin. Tall it is and huge, its contents vaguely sloshing. You could throw cars into it, buses, tractor trailers. But no, never, he couldn’t have drunk that much gin, no man could. And beside it the beer, frothy and bubbling, a cauldron the size of a rest home. “No!” he cries in protest. “I don’t even like the taste of the stuff.”

“Yes, yes, yes,” chants a voice beside him. The statue is back, Fredda gone. It speaks in a voice he recognizes, though the wheezy, rheumy deathbed rasp of it has been wiped clean. “Ma?” he says, turning to the thing.

Three feet tall, slick as a seal, the robes flowing like the sea, the effigy looks up at him out of his mother’s face in miniature. “I warned you,” the voice leaps out at him, high and querulous, “out behind the 7-Eleven with Ricky Reitbauer and that criminal Tommy Capistrano, cheap wine and all the rest.”

“But Mom, Pernod?” He peers into the little pot of it, a pot so small you couldn’t boil a good Safeway chicken in it. There it is. Pernod. Milky and unclean. It turns his stomach even to look at it.

“Your liver, son,” the statue murmurs with a resignation that brings tears to his eyes, “just look at it.”

He feels a prick in his side and there it is, his liver — a poor piece of cheesy meat, stippled and striped and purple — dangling from the plaster fingers. “God,” he moans. “God Almighty.”

“Rotten as your soul,” the statue says.

McGahee, still on his knees, begins to blubber. Meaningless slips of apology issue from his lips—“I didn’t mean … it wasn’t … how could I know?”—when all of a sudden the statue shouts “Drugs!” with a voice of iron.

Immediately the scene changes. The vats are gone, replaced with bales of marijuana, jars of pills in every color imaginable, big, overbrimming tureens of white powder, a drugstore display of airplane glue. In the background, grinning Laotians, Peruvian peasants with hundreds of scrawny children propped like puppets on their shoulders.

“But, but—” McGahee stutters, rising to his feet to protest, but the statue doesn’t give him a chance, won’t, can’t, and the stentorian voice — his wife’s, his mother’s, no one’s and everyone’s, he even detects a trace of his high-school principal’s in there — the stentorian voice booms: “Sins of the Flesh!”

He blinks his eyes and the Turks and their bales are gone. The backdrop now is foggy and obscure, dim as the mists of memory. The statue is silent. Gradually the poor sinner becomes aware of a salacious murmur, an undercurrent of moaning and panting, and the lubricious thwack and whap of the act itself. “Davey,” a girl’s voice calls, tender, pubescent, “I’m scared.” And then his own voice, bland and reassuring: “I won’t stick it in, Cindy, I won’t, I swear … or maybe, maybe just … just an inch …”

The mist lifts and there they are, in teddies and negligees, in garter belts and sweat socks, naked and wet and kneading their breasts like dough. “Davey,” they moan, “oh, Davey, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me,” and he knows them all, from Cindy Lou Harris and Betsy Butler in the twelfth grade to Fredda in her youth and the sad and ugly faces of his one-night stands and chance encounters, right on up to the bug-eyed woman with the doleful breasts he’d diddled in the rest room on the way out from Kennedy. And worse. Behind them, milling around in a mob that stretches to the horizon, are all the women and girls he’d ever lusted after, even for a second, the twitching behinds and airy bosoms he’d stopped to admire on the street, the legs he’d wanted to stroke and lips to press to his own. McCarey’s wife, Beatrice, is there and Fred Dolby’s thirteen-year-old daughter, the woman with the freckled bosom who used to sunbathe in the tiger-skin bikini next door when they lived in Irvington, the girl from the typing pool, and the outrageous little shaven-headed vixen from Domino’s Pizza. And as if that weren’t enough, there’s the crowd from books and films too. Linda Lovelace, Sophia Loren, Emma Bovary, the Sabine women and Lot’s wife, even Virginia Woolf with her puckered foxy face and the eyes that seem to beg for a good slap on the bottom. It’s too much — all of them murmuring his name like a crazed chorus of Molly Blooms, and yes, she’s there too — and the mob behind him hissing, hissing.

He glances at the statue. The plaster lip curls in disgust, the adamantine hand rises and falls, and the women vanish. “Gluttony!” howls the Virgin and all at once he’s surrounded by forlornly mooing herds of cattle, sad-eyed pigs and sheep, funereal geese and clucking ducks, a spill of scuttling crabs and claw-waving lobsters, even the odd dog or two he’d inadvertently wolfed down in Tijuana burritos and Cantonese stir-fry. And the scales — scales the size of the Washington Monument — sunk under pyramids of ketchup, peanut butter, tortilla chips, truckloads of potatoes, onions, avocados, peppermint candies and after-dinner mints, half-eaten burgers and fork-scattered peas, the whole slithering wasteful cornucopia of his secret and public devouring. “Moooooo,” accuse the cows. “Stinker!” “Pig!” “Glutton!” cry voices from the crowd.

Prostrate now, the cattle hanging over him, letting loose with their streams of urine and clots of dung, McGahee shoves his fists into his eyes and cries out for mercy. But there is no mercy. The statue, wicked and glittering, its tiny twisted features clenching and unclenching like the balls of its fists, announces one after another the unremitting parade of his sins: “Insults to Humanity, False Idols, Sloth, Unclean Thoughts, The Kicking of Dogs and Cheating at Cards!”

His head reels. He won’t look. The voices cry out in hurt and laceration and he feels the very ground give way beneath him. The rest, mercifully, is a blank.

When he comes to, muttering in protest—“False idols, I mean like an autographed picture of Mickey Mantle, for christsake?”—he finds himself in a cramped mud-and-wattle hut that reeks of goat dung and incense. By the flickering glow of a bank of votary candles, he can make out the bowed and patchy head of Nuala Nolan. Outside it is dark and the rain drives down with a hiss. For a long moment, McGahee lies there, studying the fleshless form of the girl, her bones sharp and sepulchral in the quavering light. He feels used up, burned out, feels as if he’s been cored like an apple. His head screams. His throat is dry. His bladder is bursting.

He pushes himself up and the bony demi-saint levels her tranced gaze on him, “Hush,” she says, and the memory of all that’s happened washes over him like a typhoon.

“How long have I—?”

“Two days.” Her voice is a reverent whisper, the murmur of the acolyte, the apostle. “They say the Pope himself is on the way.”

“The Pope?” McGahee feels a long shiver run through him.

Nods the balding death’s-head. The voice is dry as husks, wheezy, but a girl’s voice all the same, and an enthusiast’s. “They say it’s the greatest vision vouchsafed to man since the time of Christ. Two hundred and fifteen people witnessed it, every glorious moment, from the cask of gin to the furtive masturbation to the ace up the sleeve.” She’s leaning over him now, inching forward on all fours, her breath like chopped meat gone bad in the refrigerator; he can see, through the tattered shirt, where her breasts used to be. “Look,” she whispers, gesturing toward the hunched low entranceway.

He looks and the sudden light dazzles him. Blinking in wonder, he creeps to the crude doorway and peers out. Immediately a murmur goes up from the crowd — hundreds upon hundreds of them gathered in the rain on their knees — and an explosion of flash cameras blinds him. Beyond the crowd he can make out a police cordon, vans and video cameras, CBS, BBC, KDOG, and NPR, a face above a trenchcoat that could once belong to Dan Rather himself. “Holy of holies!” cries a voice from the front of the mob — he knows that voice — and the crowd takes it up in a chant that breaks off into the Lord’s Prayer. Stupefied, he wriggles out of the hut and stands, bathed in light. It’s McCarey there before him, reaching out with a hundred others to embrace his ankles, kiss his feet, tear with trembling devoted fingers at his Levi’s and Taiwanese tweed — Michael McCarey, adulterer, gambler, drunk and atheist, cheater of the IRS and bane of the Major Deegan — hunkered down in the rain like a holy supplicant. And there, not thirty feet away, is the statue, lit like Betelgeuse and as inanimate and snot-green as a stone of the sea.

Rain pelts McGahee’s bare head and the chill seizes him like a claw jerking hard and sudden at the ruined ancient priest-ridden superstitious root of him. The flashbulbs pop in his face, a murmur of Latin assaults his ears, Sister Mary Magdalen’s unyielding face rises before him out of the dim mists of eighth-grade math … and then the sudden imperious call of nature blinds him to all wonder and he’s staggering round back of the hut to relieve himself of his two days’ accumulation of salts and uric acid and dregs of whiskey. Stumbling, fumbling for his zipper, the twin pains in his groin like arrows driven through him, he jerks out his poor pud and lets fly.

“Piss!” roars a voice behind him, and he swivels his head in fright, helpless before the stream that issues from him like a torrent. The crowd falls prostrate in the mud, cameras whir, voices cry out. It is the statue, of course, livid, jerking its limbs and racking its body like the image of the Führer in his maddest denunciation. “Piss on sacred ground, will you,” rage the plaster lips in the voice of his own father, that mild and pacifistic man, “you unholy insect, you whited sepulcher, you speck of dust in the eye of your Lord and maker!”

What can he do? He clutches himself, flooding the ground, dissolving the hut, befouling the bony scrag of the anchorite herself.

“Unregenerate!” shrieks the Virgin. “Unrepentant! Sinner to the core!” And then it comes.

The skies part, the rain turns to popcorn, marshmallows, English muffins, the light of seven suns scorches down on that humble crowd gathered on the sward, and all the visions of that first terrible day crash over them in hellish simulcast. The great vats of beer and gin and whiskey fall to pieces and the sea of booze floats them, the cattle bellowing and kicking, sheep bleating and dogs barking, despoiled girls and hardened women clutching for the shoulders of the panicked communicants as for sticks of wood awash in the sea, Sophia Loren herself and Virginia Woolf, Fredda, Cindy Lou Harris and McCarey’s wife swept by in a blur, the TV vans overturned, the trenchcoat torn from Dan Rather’s back, and the gardai sent sprawling—“Thank God he didn’t eat rattlesnake,” someone cries — and then it’s over. Night returns. Rain falls. The booze sinks softly into the earth, food lies rotting in clumps. A drumbeat of hoofs thunders off into the dark while fish wriggle and escargots creep, and Fredda, McCarey, the shaven-headed pizza vixen, and all the gap-toothed countrymen and farm wives and palsied children pick themselves up from the ground amid the curses of the men cheated at cards, the lament of the fallen women, and the mad frenzied chorus of prayer that speaks over it all in the tongue of terror and astonishment.

But oh, sad wonder, McGahee is gone.

Today the site remains as it was that night, fenced off from the merely curious, combed over inch by inch by priests and parapsychologists, blessed by the Pope, a shrine as reverenced as Lourdes and the Holy See itself. The cattle were sold off at auction after intensive study proved them ordinary enough, though brands were traced to Montana, Texas, and the Swiss Alps, and the food — burgers and snowcones, rib roasts, Fig Newtons, extra dill pickles, and all the rest — was left where it fell, to feed the birds and fertilize the soil. The odd rib or T-bone, picked clean and bleached by the elements, still lies there on the ground in mute testimony to those three days of tumult. Fredda McGahee Meyerowitz, Herb Buck-nell and others cheated at cards, the girl from the pizza parlor and the rest were sent home via Aer Lingus, compliments of the Irish government. What became of Virginia Woolf, dead forty years prior to these events, is not known, nor the fate of Emma Bovary either, though one need only refer to Flaubert for the besf clue to this mystery. And of course, there are the tourism figures — up a whopping 672 percent since the miracle.

McCarey has joined an order of Franciscan monks, and Nuala Nolan, piqued no doubt by her supporting role in the unfolding of the miracle, has taken a job in a pastry shop, where she eats by day and prays for forgiveness by night. As for Davey McGahee himself, the prime mover and motivator of all these enduring mysteries, here the lenses of history and of myth and miracology grow obscure. Some say he descended into a black hole of the earth, others that he evaporated, while still others insist that he ascended to heaven in a blaze of light, Saint of the Common Sinner.

For who hasn’t lusted after woman or man or drunk his booze and laid to rest whole herds to feed his greedy gullet? Who hasn’t watched them starve by the roadside in the hollows and waste places of the world and who among us hasn’t scoffed at the credulous and ignored the miracle we see outside the window every day of our lives? Ask not for whom the bell tolls — unless perhaps you take the flight to Cork City, and the bus or rented Nissan out to Ballinspittle by the Sea, and gaze on the halfsize snotgreen statue of the Virgin, mute and unmoving all these many years.

(1987)

TOP OF THE FOOD CHAIN

The thing was, we had a little problem with the insect vector there, and believe me, your tamer stuff, your Malathion and pyrethrum and the rest of the so-called environmentally safe products didn’t begin to make a dent in it, not a dent, I mean it was utterly useless — we might as well have been spraying with Chanel No. 5 for all the good it did. And you’ve got to realize these people were literally covered with insects day and night — and the fact that they hardly wore any clothes just compounded the problem. Picture if you can, gentlemen, a naked little two-year-old boy so black with flies and mosquitoes it looks like he’s wearing long Johns, or the young mother so racked with the malarial shakes she can’t even lift a diet Coke to her lips — it was pathetic, just pathetic, like something out of the Dark Ages…. Well, anyway, the decision was made to go with DDT. In the short term. Just to get the situation under control, you understand.

Yes, that’s right, Senator, DDT: Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane.

Yes, I’m well aware of that fact, sir. But just because we banned it domestically, under pressure from the birdwatching contingent and the hopheads down at the EPA, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the rest of the world — especially the developing world — is about to jump on the bandwagon. And that’s the key word here, Senator: developing. You’ve got to realize this is Borneo we’re talking about here, not Port Townsend or Enumclaw. These people don’t know from square one about sanitation, disease control, pest eradication — or even personal hygiene, if you want to come right down to it. It rains a hundred and twenty inches a year, minimum. They dig up roots in the jungle. They’ve still got head-hunters along the Rajang River, for god’s sake.

And please don’t forget they asked us to come in there, practically begged us — and not only the World Health Organization, but the Sultan of Brunei and the government in Sarawak too. We did what we could to accommodate them and reach our objective in the shortest period of time and by the most direct and effective means. We went to the air. Obviously. And no one could have foreseen the consequences, no one, not even if we’d gone out and generated a hundred environmental-impact statements — it was just one of those things, a freak occurrence, and there’s no defense against that. No that I know of, anyway….

Caterpillars? Yes, Senator, that’s correct. That was the first sign: caterpillars.

But let me backtrack a minute here. You see, out in the bush they have these roofs made of thatched palm leaves — you’ll see them in the towns too, even in Bintulu or Brunei — and they’re really pretty effective, you’d be surprised. A hundred and twenty inches of rain, they’ve got to figure a way to keep it out of the hut, and for centuries, this was it. Palm leaves. Well, it was about a month after we sprayed for the final time and I’m sitting at my desk in the trailer thinking about the drainage project at Kuching, enjoying the fact that for the first time in maybe a year I’m not smearing mosquitoes all over the back of my neck, when there’s a knock at the door. It’s this elderly gentleman, tattooed from head to toe, dressed only in a pair of running shorts — they love those shorts, by the way, the shiny material and the tight machine-stitching, the whole country, men and women and children, they can’t get enough of them…. Anyway, he’s the headman of the local village and he’s very excited, something about the roofs—atap, they call them. That’s all he can say, atap, atap, over and over again.

It’s raining, of course. It’s always raining. So I shrug into my rain slicker, start up the 4×4 and go have a look. Sure enough, all the atap roofs are collapsing, not only in his village, but throughout the target area. The people are all huddled there in their running shorts, looking pretty miserable, and one after another the roofs keep falling in, it’s bewildering, and gradually I realize the headman’s diatribe has begun to feature a new term I was unfamiliar with at the time — the word for caterpillar, as it turns out, in the Iban dialect. But who was to make the connection between three passes with the crop duster and all these staved-in roofs?

Our people finally sorted it out a couple weeks later. The chemical, which, by the way, cut down the number of mosquitoes exponentially, had the unfortunate side effect of killing off this little wasp — I’ve got the scientific name for it somewhere in my report here, if you’re interested — that preyed on a type of caterpillar that in turn ate palm leaves. Well, with the wasps gone, the caterpillars hatched out with nothing to keep them in check and chewed the roofs to pieces, and that was unfortunate, we admit it, and we had a real cost overrun on replacing those roofs with tin … but the people were happier, I think, in the long run, because let’s face it, no matter how tightly you weave those palm leaves, they’re just not going to keep the water out like tin. Of course, nothing’s perfect, and we had a lot of complaints about the rain drumming on the panels, people unable to sleep and what-have-you….

Yes, sir, that’s correct — the flies were next.

Well, you’ve got to understand the magnitude of the fly problem in Borneo, there’s nothing like it here to compare it with, except maybe a garbage strike in New York. Every minute of every day you’ve got flies everywhere, up your nose, in your mouth, your ears, your eyes, flies in your rice, your Coke, your Singapore sling and your gin rickey. It’s enough to drive you to distraction, not to mention the diseases these things carry, from dysentery to typhoid to cholera and back round the loop again. And once the mosquito population was down, the flies seemed to breed up to fill in the gap — Borneo wouldn’t be Borneo without some damned insect blackening the air.

Of course, this was before our people had tracked down the problem with the caterpillars and the wasps and all of that, and so we figured we’d had a big success with the mosquitoes, why not a series of ground sweeps, mount a fogger in the back of a Suzuki Brat and sanitize the huts, not to mention the open sewers, which as you know are nothing but a breeding ground for flies, chiggers and biting insects of every sort. At least it was an error of commission rather than omission. At least we were trying.

I watched the flies go down myself. One day they were so thick in the trailer I couldn’t even find my paperwork, let alone attempt to get through it, and the next they were collecting on the windows, bumbling around like they were drunk. A day later they were gone. Just like that. From a million flies in the trailer to none….

Well, no one could have foreseen that, Senator.

The geckos ate the flies, yes. You’re all familiar with geckos, I assume, gentlemen? These are the lizards you’ve seen during your trips to Hawaii, very colorful, patrolling the houses for roaches and flies, almost like pets, but of course they’re wild animals, never lose sight of that, and just about as unsanitary as anything I can think of, except maybe flies.

Yes, well don’t forget, sir, we’re viewing this with twenty-twenty hindsight, but at the time no one gave a thought to geckos or what they ate — they were just another fact of life in the tropics. Mosquitoes, lizards, scorpions, leeches — you name it, they’ve got it. When the flies began piling up on the windowsills like drift, naturally the geckos feasted on them, stuffing themselves till they looked like sausages crawling up the walls. Where before they moved so fast you could never be sure you’d seen them, now they waddled across the floor, laid around in the corners, clung to the air vents like magnets — and even then no one paid much attention to them till they started turning belly-up in the streets. Believe me, we confirmed a lot of things there about the buildup of these products as you move up the food chain and the efficacy — or lack thereof — of certain methods, no doubt about that….

The cats? That’s where it got sticky, really sticky. You see, nobody really lost any sleep over a pile of dead lizards — though we did the tests routinely and the tests confirmed what we’d expected, that is, the product had been concentrated in the geckos because of the sheer number of contaminated flies they’d consumed. But lizards are one thing and cats are another. These people really have an affection for their cats — no house, no hut, no matter how primitive, is without at least a couple of them. Mangy-looking things, long-legged and scrawny, maybe, not at all the sort of animal you’d see here, but there it was: they loved their cats. Because the cats were functional, you understand — without them, the place would have been swimming in rodents inside of a week.

You’re right there, Senator, yes — that’s exactly what happened.

You see, the cats had a field day with these feeble geckos — you can imagine, if any of you have ever owned a cat, the kind of joy these animals must have experienced to see their nemesis, this ultra-quick lizard, and it’s just barely creeping across the floor like a bug. Well, to make a long story short, the cats ate up every dead and dying gecko in the country, from snout to tail, and then the cats began to die … which to my mind would have been no great loss if it wasn’t for the rats. Suddenly there were rats everywhere — you couldn’t drive down the street without running over half-a-dozen of them at a time. They fouled the grain supplies, fell in the wells and died, bit infants as they slept in their cradles. But that wasn’t the worst, not by a long shot. No, things really went down the tube after that. Within the month we were getting scattered reports of bubonic plague, and of course we tracked them all down and made sure the people got a round of treatment with antibiotics, but still we lost a few and the rats kept coming….

It was my plan, yes. I was brainstorming one night, rats scuttling all over the trailer like something out of a cheap horror film, the villagers in a panic over the threat of the plague and the stream of nonstop hysterical reports from the interior — people were turning black, swelling up and bursting, that sort of thing — well, as I say, I came up with a plan, a stopgap, not perfect, not cheap; but at this juncture, I’m sure you’ll agree, something had to be implemented.

We wound up going as far as Australia for some of the cats, cleaning out the SPCA facilities and what-have-you, though we rounded most of them up in Indonesia and Singapore — approximately fourteen thousand in all. And yes, it cost us — cost us upfront purchase money and aircraft fuel and pilots’ overtime and all the rest of it — but we really felt there was no alternative. It was like all nature had turned against us.

And yet still, all things considered, we made a lot of friends for the U.S.A. the day we dropped those cats, and you should have seen them, gentlemen, the little parachutes and harnesses we’d tricked up, fourteen thousand of them, cats in every color of the rainbow, cats with one ear, no ears, half a tail, three-legged cats, cats that could have taken pride of show in Springfield, Massachusetts, and all of them twirling down out of the sky like great big oversized snowflakes….

It was something. It was really something.

Of course, you’ve all seen the reports. There were other factors we hadn’t counted on, adverse conditions in the paddies and manioc fields — we don’t to this day know what predatory species were inadvertently killed off by the initial sprayings, it’s just a mystery — but the weevils and whatnot took a pretty heavy toll on the crops that year, and by the time we dropped the cats, well, the people were pretty hungry, and I suppose it was inevitable that we lost a good proportion of them right then and there. But we’ve got a CARE program going there now, and something hit the rat population — we still don’t know what, a virus, we think — and the geckos, they tell me, are making a comeback.

So what I’m saying is, it could be worse, arid to every cloud a silver lining, wouldn’t you agree, gentlemen?

(1992)

THE HECTOR QUESADILLA STORY

He was no Joltin’ Joe, no Sultan of Swat, no Iron Man. For one thing, his feet hurt. And God knows no legendary immortal ever suffered so prosaic a complaint. He had shin splints too, and corns and ingrown toenails and hemorrhoids. Demons drove burning spikes into his tailbone each time he bent to loosen his shoelaces, his limbs were skewed so awkwardly that his elbows and knees might have been transposed and the once-proud knot of his frijole-fed belly had fallen like an avalanche. Worse: he was old. Old, old, old, the gray-beard hobbling down the rough-hewn steps of the senate building. The Ancient Mariner chewing on his whiskers and stumbling in his socks. Though they listed his birthdate as 1942 in the program, there were those who knew better: it was way back in ‘54, during his rookie year for San Buitre, that he had taken Asunción to the altar, and even in those distant days, even in Mexico, twelve-year-olds didn’t marry.

When he was younger — really young, nineteen, twenty, tearing up the Mexican League like a saint of the stick — his ears were so sensitive he could hear the soft rasping friction of the pitcher’s fingers as he massaged the ball and dug in for a slider, fastball, or change-up. Now he could barely hear the umpire bawling the count in his ear. And his legs. How they ached, how they groaned and creaked and chattered, how they’d gone to fat! He ate too much, that was the problem. Ate prodigiously, ate mightily, ate as if there were a hidden thing inside him, a creature all of jaws with an infinite trailing ribbon of gut. Huevos con chorizo with beans, tortillas, camarones in red sauce, and a twelve-ounce steak for breakfast, the chicken in mole to steady him before afternoon games, a sea of beer to wash away the tension of the game and prepare his digestive machinery for the flaming machaca-and-pepper salad Asunción prepared for him in the blessed evenings of the home stand.

Five foot seven, one hundred eighty-nine and three-quarters pounds. Hector Hernán Jesús y María Quesadilla. Little Cheese, they called him. Cheese, Cheese, Cheesus, went up the cry as he stepped in to pinch-hit in some late-inning crisis, Cheese, Cheese, Cheesus, building to a roar until Chavez Ravine resounded as if with the holy name of the Savior Himself when he stroked one of the clean line-drive singles that were his signature or laid down a bunt that stuck like a finger in jelly. When he fanned, when the bat went loose in the fat brown hands and he went down on one knee for support, they hissed and called him Viejo.

One more season, he tells himself, though he hasn’t played regularly for nearly ten years and can barely trot to first after drawing a walk. One more. He tells Asunción too—One more, one more—as they sit in the gleaming kitchen of their house in Boyle Heights, he with his Carta Blanca, she with her mortar and pestle for grinding the golden, petrified kernels of maize into flour for the tortillas he eats like peanuts. Una más, she mocks. What do you want, the Hall of Fame? Hang up your spikes, Hector.

He stares off into space, his mother’s Indian features flattening his own as if the legend were true, as if she really had taken a spatula to him in the cradle, and then, dropping his thick lids as he takes a long slow swallow from the neck of the bottle, he says: Just the other day, driving home from the park, I saw a car on the freeway, a Mercedes with only two seats, a girl in it, her hair out back like a cloud, and you know what the license plate said? His eyes are open now, black as pitted olives. Do you? She doesn’t. Cheese, he says. It said Cheese.

Then she reminds him that Hector Jr. will be twenty-nine next month and that Reina has four children of her own and another on the way. You’re a grandfather, Hector — almost a great-grandfather, if your son ever settled down. A moment slides by, filled with the light of the sad, waning sun and the harsh Yucatecan dialect of the radio announcer. Hombres on first and third, one down. Abuelo, she hisses, grinding stone against stone until it makes his teeth ache. Hang up your spikes, abuelo.

But he doesn’t. He can’t. He won’t. He’s no grandpa with hair the color of cigarette stains and a blanket over his knees, he’s no toothless old gasser sunning himself in the park — he’s a big-leaguer, proud wearer of the Dodger blue, wielder of stick and glove. How can he get old? The grass is always green, the lights always shining, no clocks or periods or halves or quarters, no punch-in and punch-out: this is the game that never ends. When the heavy hitters have fanned and the pitcher’s arms gone sore, when there’s no joy in Mudville, taxes are killing everybody, and the Russians are raising hell in Guatemala, when the manager paces the dugout like an attack dog, mind racing, searching high and low for the canny veteran to go in and do single combat, there he’ll be — always, always, eternal as a monument — Hector Quesadilla, utility infielder, with the.296 lifetime batting average and service with the Reds, Phils, Cubs, Royals, and L.A. Dodgers.

So he waits. Hangs on. Trots his aching legs round the outfield grass before the game, touches his toes ten agonizing times each morning, takes extra batting practice with the rookies and slumping millionaires. Sits. Watches. Massages his feet. Waits through the scourging road trips in the Midwest and along the East Coast, down to muggy Atlanta, across to stormy Wrigley, and up to frigid Candlestick, his gut clenched round an indigestible cud of meatloaf and instant potatoes and wax beans, through the terrible night games with the alien lights in his eyes, waits at the end of the bench for a word from the manager, for a pat on the ass, a roar, a hiss, a chorus of cheers and catcalls, the marimba pulse of bat striking ball, and the sweet looping arc of the clean base hit.

And then comes a day, late in the season, the homeboys battling for the pennant with the big-stick Braves and the sneaking Jints, when he wakes from honeyed dreams in his own bed that’s like an old friend with the sheets that smell of starch and soap and flowers, and feels the pain stripped from his body as if at the touch of a healer’s fingertips. Usually he dreams nothing, the night a blank, an erasure, and opens his eyes on the agonies of the martyr strapped to a bed of nails. Then he limps to the toilet, makes a poor discolored water, rinses the dead taste from his mouth, and staggers to the kitchen table, where food, only food, can revive in him the interest in drawing another breath. He butters tortillas and folds them into his mouth, spoons up egg and melted jack cheese and frijoles refritos with the green salsa, lashes into his steak as if it were cut from the thigh of Kerensky, the Atlanta relief ace who’d twice that season caught him looking at a full-count fastball with men in scoring position. But not today. Today is different, a sainted day, a day on which sunshine sits in the windows like a gift of the Magi and the chatter of the starlings in the crapped-over palms across the street is a thing that approaches the divine music of the spheres. What can it be?

In the kitchen it hits him: pozole in a pot on the stove, carnitas in the saucepan, the table spread with sweetcakes, buñuelos, and the little marzipan dulces he could kill for. Feliz cumpleaños, Asunción pipes as he steps through the doorway. Her face is lit with the smile of her mother, her mother’s mother, the line of gift givers descendant to the happy conquistadors and joyous Aztecs. A kiss, a dulce, and then a knock at the door and Reina, fat with life, throwing her arms around him while her children gobble up the table, the room, their grandfather, with eyes that swallow their faces. Happy birthday, Daddy, Reina says, and Franklin, her youngest, is handing him the gift.

And Hector Jr.?

But he doesn’t have to fret about Hector Jr., his firstborn, the boy with these same great sad eyes who’d sat in the dugout in his Reds uniform when they lived in Cincy and worshiped the pudgy icon of his father until the parish priest had to straighten him out on his hagiography; Hector Jr., who studies English at USC and day and night writes his thesis on a poet his father has never heard of, because here he is, walking in the front door with his mother’s smile and a store-wrapped gift — a book, of course. Then Reina’s children line up to kiss the abuelo—they’ll be sitting in the box seats this afternoon — and suddenly he knows so much: he will play today, he will hit, oh yes, can there be a doubt? He sees it already. Kerensky, the son of a whore. Extra innings. Koerner or Manfre-donia or Brooksie on third. The ball like an orange, a mango, a muskmelon, the clean swipe of the bat, the delirium of the crowd, and the gimpy abuelo, a big-leaguer still, doffing his cap and taking a tour of the bases in a stately trot, Sultan for a day.

Could things ever be so simple?

In the bottom of the ninth, with the score tied at five and Reina’s kids full of Coke, hot dogs, peanuts, and ice cream and getting restless, with Asunción clutching her rosary as. if she were drowning and Hector Jr.’s nose stuck in some book, Dupuy taps him to hit for the pitcher with two down and Fast Freddie Phelan on second. The eighth man in the lineup, Spider Martinez from Muchas Vacas, D.R., has just whiffed on three straight pitches, and Corcoran, the Braves’ left-handed relief man, is all of a sudden pouring it on. Throughout the stadium a hush has fallen over the crowd, the torpor of suppertime, the game poised at apogee. Shadows are lengthening in the outfield, swallows flitting across the. face of the scoreboard, here a fan drops into his beer, there a big mama gathers up her purse, her knitting, her shopping bags and parasol, and thinks of dinner. Hector sees it all. This is the moment of catharsis, the moment to take it out.

As Martinez slumps toward the dugout, Dupuy, a laconic, embittered man who keeps his suffering inside and drinks Gelusil like water, takes hold of Hector’s arm. His eyes are red-rimmed and paunchy, doleful as a basset hound’s. Bring the runner in, champ, he rasps. First pitch fake a bunt, then hit away. Watch Booger at third. Uh-huh, Hector mumbles, snapping his gum. Then he slides his bat from the rack — white ash, tape-wrapped grip, personally blessed by the archbishop of Guadalajara and his twenty-seven acolytes — and starts for the dugout steps, knowing the course of the next three minutes as surely as his blood knows the course of his veins. The familiar cry will go up — Cheese, Cheese, Cheesus — and he’ll amble up to the batter’s box, knocking imaginary dirt from his spikes, adjusting the straps of his golf gloves, tugging at his underwear, and fiddling with his battling helmet. His face will be impenetrable. Corcoran will work the ball in his glove, maybe tip back his cap for a little hair grease, and then give him a look of psychopathic hatred. Hector has seen it before. Me against you. My record, my career, my house, my family, my life, my mutual funds and beer distributorship against yours. He’s been hit in the elbow, the knee, the groin, the head. Nothing fazes him. Nothing. Murmuring a prayer to Santa Griselda, patroness of the sun-blasted Sonoran village where he was born like a heat blister on his mother’s womb, Hector Hernán Jesús y María Quesadilla will step into the batter’s box, ready for anything.

But it’s a game of infinite surprises.

Before Hector can set foot on the playing field, Corcoran suddenly doubles up in pain, Phelan goes slack at second, and the catcher and shortstop are hustling out to the mound, tailed an instant later by trainer and pitching coach. First thing Hector thinks is groin pull, then appendicitis, and finally, as Corcoran goes down on one knee, poison. He’d once seen a man shot in the gut at Obregón City, but the report had been loud as a thunderclap, and he hears nothing now but the enveloping hum of the crowd. Corcoran is rising shakily, the trainer and pitching coach supporting him while the catcher kicks meditatively in the dirt, and now Mueller, the Atlanta cabeza, is striding big-bellied out of the dugout, head down as if to be sure his feet are following orders. Halfway to the mound, Mueller flicks his right hand across his ear quick as a horse flicking its tail, and it’s all she wrote for Corcoran.

Poised on the dugout steps like a bird dog, Hector waits, his eyes riveted on the bullpen. Please, he whispers, praying for the intercession of the Niño and pledging a hundred votary candles — at least, at least. Can it be? — yes, milk of my mother, yes — Kerensky himself strutting out onto the field like a fighting cock. Kerensky!

Come to the birthday boy, Kerensky, he murmurs, so certain he’s going to put it in the stands he could point like the immeasurable Bambino. His tired old legs shuffle with impatience as Kerensky stalks across the field, and then he’s turning to pick Asunción out of the crowd. She’s on her feet now, Reina too, the kids come alive beside her. And Hector Jr., the book forgotten, his face transfigured with the look of rapture he used to get when he was a boy sitting on the steps of the dugout. Hector can’t help himself: he grins and gives them the thumbs-up sign.

Then, as Kerensky fires his warm-up smoke, the loudspeaker crackles and Hector emerges from the shadow of the dugout into the tapering golden shafts of the late-afternoon sun. That pitch, I want that one, he mutters, carrying his bat like a javelin and shooting a glare at Kerensky, but something’s wrong here, the announcer’s got it screwed up: BATTING FOR RARITAN, NUMBER 39, DAVE TOOL. What the—? And now somebody’s tugging at his sleeve and he’s turning to gape with incomprehension at the freckle-faced batboy, Dave Tool striding out of the dugout with his big forty-two-ounce stick, Dupuy’s face locked up like a vault, and the crowd, on its feet, chanting Tool, Tool, Tool! For a moment he just stands there, frozen with disbelief. Then Tool is brushing by him and the idiot of a batboy is leading him toward the dugout as if he were an old blind fisherman poised on the edge of the dock.

He feels as if his legs have been cut out from under him. Tool! Dupuy is yanking him for Tool? For what? So he can play the lefty-righty percentages like some chess head or something? Tool, of all people, Tool, with his thirty-five home runs a season and lifetime B.A. of.234; Tool, who’s worn so many uniforms they had to expand the league to make room for him — what’s he going to do? Raging, Hector flings down his bat and comes at Dupuy like a cat tossed in a bag. You crazy, you jerk, he sputters. I woulda hit him. I woulda won the game. I dreamed it. And then, his voice breaking: It’s my birthday, for Christ’s sake!

But Dupuy can’t answer him, because on the first pitch Tool slams a real worm burner to short and the game is going into extra innings.

By seven o’clock, half the fans have given up and gone home. In the top of the fourteenth, when the visitors came up with a pair of runs on a two-out pinch-hit home run, there was a real exodus, but then the Dodgers struck back for two to knot it up again. Then it was three up and three down, regular as clockwork. Now, at the end of the nineteenth, with the score deadlocked at seven all and the players dragging themselves around the field like gut-shot horses, Hector is beginning to think he may get a second chance after all. Especially the way Depuy’s been using up players like some crazy general on the Western Front, yanking pitchers, juggling his defense, throwing in pinch runners and pinch hitters until he’s just about gone through the entire roster. Asunción is still there among the faithful, the foolish, and the self-deluded, fumbling with her rosary and mouthing prayers for Jesus Christ Our Lord, the Madonna, Hector, the home team, and her departed mother, in that order. Reina too, looking like the survivor of some disaster, Franklin and Alfredo asleep in their seats, the niñitas gone off somewhere — for Coke and dogs, maybe. And Hector Jr. looks like he’s going to stick it out too, though he should be back in his closet writing about the mystical so-and-so and the way he illustrates his poems with gods and men and serpents. Watching him, Hector can feel his heart turn over.

In the bottom of the twentieth, with one down and Gilley on first — he’s a starting pitcher but Dupuy sent him in to run for Manfredonia after Manfredonia jammed his ankle like a turkey and had to be helped off the field — Hector pushes himself up from the bench and ambles down to where Dupuy sits in the corner, contemplatively spitting a gout of tobacco juice and saliva into the drain at his feet. Let me hit, Bernard, come on, Hector says, easing down beside him.

Can’t, comes the reply, and Dupuy never even raises his head. Can’t risk it, champ. Look around you — and here the manager’s voice quavers with uncertainty, with fear and despair and the dull edge of hopelessness — I got nobody left. I hit you, I got to play you.

No, no, you don’t understand — I’m going to win it. I swear.

And then the two of them, like old bankrupts on a bench in Miami Beach, look up to watch Phelan hit into a double play.

A buzz runs through the crowd when the Dodgers take the field for the top of the twenty-second. Though Phelan is limping, Thorkelsson’s asleep on his feet, and Dorfman, fresh on the mound, is the only pitcher left on the roster, the moment is electric. One more inning and they tie the record set by the Mets and Giants back in ‘64, and then they’re making history. Drunk, sober, and then drunk again, saturated with fats and nitrates and sugar, the crowd begins to come to life. Go, Dodgers! Eat shit! Yo Mama! Phelan’s a bum!

Hector can feel it too. The rage and frustration that had consumed him back in the ninth are gone, replaced by a dawning sense of wonder — he could have won it then, yes, and against his nemesis Kerensky too — but the Niño and Santa Griselda have been saving him for something greater. He sees it now, knows it in his bones: he’s going to be the hero of the longest game in history.

As if to bear him out, Dorfman, the kid from Albuquerque, puts in a good inning, cutting the bushed Braves down in order. In the dugout, Doc Pusser, the team physician, is handing out the little green pills that keep your eyes open and Dupuy is blowing into a cup of coffee and staring morosely out at the playing field. Hector watches as Tool, who’d stayed in the game at first base, fans on three pitches, then he shoves in beside Dorfman and tells the kid he’s looking good out there. With his big cornhusker’s ears and nose like a tweezer, Dorfman could be a caricature of the green rookie. He says nothing. Hey, don’t let it get to you, kid — I’m going to win this one for you. Next inning or maybe the inning after. Then he tells him how he saw it in a vision and how it’s his birthday and the kid’s going to get the victory, one of the biggest of all time. Twenty-four, twenty-five innings maybe.

Hector had heard of a game once in the Mexican League that took three days to play and went seventy-three innings, did Dorfman know that? It was down in Culiacán. Chito Marti, the converted bullfighter, had finally ended it by dropping down dead of exhaustion in center field, allowing Sexto Silvestro, who’d broken his leg rounding third, to crawl home with the winning run. But Hector doesn’t think this game will go that long. Dorfman sighs and extracts a bit of wax from his ear as Pantaleo, the third-string catcher, hits back to the pitcher to end the inning. I hope not, he says, uncoiling himself from the bench; my arm’d fall off.

Ten o’clock comes and goes. Dorfman’s still in there, throwing breaking stuff and a little smoke at the Braves, who look as if they just stepped out of The Night of the Living Dead. The home team isn’t doing much better. Dupuy’s run through the whole team but for Hector, and three or four of the guys have been in there since two in the afternoon; the rest are a bunch of ginks and gimps who can barely stand up. Out in the stands, the fans look grim. The vendors ran out of beer an hour back, and they haven’t had dogs or kraut or Coke or anything since eight-thirty.

In the bottom of the twenty-seventh Phelan goes berserk in the dugout and Dupuy has to pin him to the floor while Doc Pusser shoves something up his nose to calm him. Next inning the balls-and-strikes ump passes out cold, and Dorfman, who’s beginning to look a little fagged, walks the first two batters but manages to weasel his way out of the inning without giving up the go-ahead run. Meanwhile, Thorkelsson has been dropping ice cubes down his trousers to keep awake, Martinez is smoking something suspicious in the can, and Ferenc Fortnoi, the third baseman, has begun talking to himself in a tortured Slovene dialect. For his part, Hector feels stronger and more alert as the game goes on. Though he hasn’t had a bite since breakfast he feels impervious to the pangs of hunger, as if he were preparing himself, mortifying his flesh like a saint in the desert.

And then, in the top of the thirty-first, with half the fans asleep and the other half staring into nothingness like the inmates of the asylum of Our Lady of Guadalupe, where Hector had once visited his halfwit uncle when he was a boy, Pluto Morales cracks one down the first-base line and Tool flubs it. Right away it looks like trouble, because Chester Bubo is running around right field looking up at the sky like a birdwatcher while the balls snakes through the grass, caroms off his left foot, and coasts like silk to the edge of the warning track. Morales meanwhile is rounding second and coming on for third, running in slow motion, flat-footed and hump-backed, his face drained of color, arms flapping like the undersize wings of some big flightless bird. It’s not even close. By the time Bubo can locate the ball, Morales is ten feet from the plate, pitching into a face-first slide that’s at least three parts collapse, and that’s it, the Braves are up by one. It looks black for the hometeam. But Dorfman, though his arm has begun to swell like a sausage, shows some grit, bears down, and retires the side to end the historic top of the unprecedented thirty-first inning.

Now, at long last, the hour has come. It’ll be Bubo, Dorfman, and Tool for the Dodgers in their half of the inning, which means that Hector will hit for Dorfman. I been saving you, champ, Dupuy rasps, the empty Gelusil bottle clenched in his fist like a hand grenade. Go on in there, he murmurs, and his voice fades away to nothing as Bubo pops the first pitch up in back of the plate. Go on in there and do your stuff.

Sucking in his gut, Hector strides out onto the brightly lit field like a nineteen-year-old, the familiar cry in his ears, the haggard fans on their feet, a sickle moon sketched in overhead as if in some cartoon strip featuring drunken husbands and the milkman. Asunción looks as if she’s been nailed to the cross, Reina wakes with a start and shakes the little ones into consciousness, and Hector Jr. staggers to his feet like a battered middleweight coming out for the fifteenth round. They’re all watching him. The fans whose lives are like empty sacks, the wife who wants him home in front of the TV, his divorced daughter with the four kids and another on the way, his son, pride of his life, who reads for the doctor of philosophy while his crazy padrecito puts on a pair of long stockings and chases around after a little white ball like a case of arrested development. He’ll show them. He’ll show them some cojones, some true grit and desire: the game’s not over yet.

On the mound for the Braves is Bo Brannerman, a big mustachioed machine of a man, normally a starter but pressed into desperate relief service tonight. A fine pitcher — Hector would be the first to admit it — but he just pitched two nights ago and he’s worn thin as wire. Hector steps up to the plate, feeling legendary. He glances over at Tool in the on-deck circle, and then down at Booger, the third-base coach. All systems go. He cuts at the air twice and then watches Brannerman rear back and release the ball: strike one. Hector smiles. Why rush things? Give them a thrill. He watches a low outside slider that just about bounces to even the count, and then stands like a statue as Brannerman slices the corner of the plate for strike two. From the stands, a chant of Viejo, Viejo, and Asunción’s piercing soprano, Hit him, Hector!

Hector has no worries, the moment eternal, replayed through games uncountable, with pitchers who were over the hill when he was a rookie with San Buitre, with pups like Brannerman, with big-leaguers and Hall of Famers. Here it comes, Hector, 92 MPH, the big gringo trying to throw it by you, the matchless wrists, the flawless swing, one terrific moment of suspended animation — and all of a sudden you’re starring in your own movie.

How does it go? The ball cutting through the night sky like a comet, arching high over the center fielder’s hapless scrambling form to slam off the wall while your legs churn up the basepaths, you round first in a gallop, taking second, and heading for third … but wait, you spill hot coffee on your hand and you can’t feel it, the demons apply the live wire to your tailbone, your legs give out and they cut you down at third while the stadium erupts in howls of execration and abuse and the niñitos break down, faces flooded with tears of humiliation, Hector Jr. turning his back in disgust and Asunción raging like a harpy, Abuelo! Abuelo! Abuelo!

Stunned, shrunken, humiliated, you stagger back to the dugout in a maelstrom of abuse, paper cups, flying spittle, your life a waste, the game a cheat, and then, crowning irony, that bum Tool, worthless all the way back to his washerwoman grandmother and the drunken muttering whey-faced tribe that gave him suck, stands tall like a giant and sends the first pitch out of the park to tie it. Oh, the pain. Flat feet, fire in your legs, your poor tired old heart skipping a beat in mortification. And now Dupuy, red in the face, shouting: The game could be over but for you, you crazy gimpy old beaner washout! You want to hide in your locker, bury yourself under the shower-room floor, but you have to watch as the next two men reach base and you pray with fervor that they’ll score and put an end to your debasement. But no, Thorkelsson whiffs and the new inning dawns as inevitably as the new minute, the new hour, the new day, endless, implacable, world without end.

But wait, wait: who’s going to pitch? Dorfman’s out, there’s nobody left, the astonishing thirty-second inning is marching across the scoreboard like an invading army, and suddenly Dupuy is standing over you — no, no, he’s down on one knee, begging. Hector, he’s saying, didn’t you use to pitch down in Mexico when you were a kid, didn’t I hear that someplace? Yes, you’re saying, yes, but that was—

And then you’re out on the mound, in command once again, elevated like some half-mad old king in a play, and throwing smoke. The first two batters go down on strikes and the fans are rabid with excitement. Asunción will raise a shrine, Hector Jr. worships you more than all the poets that ever lived, but can it be? You walk the next three and then give up the grand slam to little Tommy Oshimisi! Mother of God, will it never cease? But wait, wait, wait: here comes the bottom of the thirty-second and Brannerman’s wild. He walks a couple, gets a couple out, somebody reaches on an infield single and the bases are loaded for you, Hector Quesadilla, stepping up to the plate now like the Iron Man himself. The wind-up, the delivery, the ball hanging there like a piñata, like a birthday gift, and then the stick flashes in your hands like an archangel’s sword, and the game goes on forever.

(1983)

WE ARE NORSEMEN

We are Norsemen, hardy and bold. We mount the black waves in our doughty sleek ships and go a-raiding. We are Norsemen, tough as stone. At least some of us are. Myself, I’m a skald — a poet, that is. I go along with Thorkell Son of Thorkell the Misaligned and Kolbein Snub when they sack the Irish coast and violate the Irish children, women, dogs and cattle and burn the Irish houses and pitch the ancient priceless Irish manuscripts into the sea. Then I sing about it. Doggerel like this:

Fell I not nor failed at

Fierce words, but my piercing

Blade mouth gave forth bloody

Bane speech, its harsh teaching.

Catch the kennings? That’s the secret of this skaldic verse — make it esoteric and shoot it full of kennings. Anyway, it’s a living.

But I’m not here to carp about a skald’s life, I’m here to make art. Spin a tale for posterity. Weave a web of mystery.

That year the winter ran at us like a sword, October to May. You know the sort of thing: permafrosting winds, record cold. The hot springs crusted over, birds stiffened on the wing and dropped to the earth like stones, Thorkell the Old froze to the crossbar in the privy. Even worse: thin-ribbed wolves yabbered on our doorstep, chewed up our coats and boots, and then — one snowy night — made off with Thorkell the Young. It was impossible. We crouched round the fire, thatch leaking and froze our norns off. The days were short, the mead barrel deep. We drank, shivered, roasted a joint, told tales. The fire played off our faces, red-gold and amber, and we fastened on the narrator’s voice like a log on a dark sea, entranced, falling in on ourselves, the soft cadences pulling us through the waves, illuminating shorelines, battlefields, mountains of plunder. Unfortunately, the voice was most often mine. Believe me, a winter like that a skald really earns his keep — six months, seven days a week, and an audience of hardbitten critics with frost in their beards. The nights dragged on.

One bleak morning we saw that yellow shoots had begun to stab through the cattle droppings in the yard — we stretched, yawned, and began to fill our boats with harrying materiel. We took our battle axes, our throwing axes, our hewing axes, our massive stroke-dealing swords, our disemboweling spears, a couple of strips of jerky and a jug of water. As I said, we were tough. Some of us wore our twin-horned battle helmets, the sight of which interrupts the vital functions of our victims and enemies and inspires high-keyed vibrato. Others of us, in view of fifteen-degree temperatures and a stiff breeze whitening the peaks of the waves, felt that the virtue of toughness had its limits. I decided on a lynx hat that gave elaborate consideration to the ears.

We fought over the gravel brake to launch our terrible swift ship. The wind shrieked of graves robbed, the sky was a hearth gone cold. An icy froth soaked us to the waist. Then we were off, manning the oars in smooth Nordic synch, the ship lurching through rocky breakers, heaving up, slapping down. The spray shot needles in our eyes, the oars lifted and dipped. An hour later the mainland winked into oblivion behind the dark lids of sea and sky.

There were thirteen of us: Thorkell Son of Thorkell the Misaligned, Thorkell the Short, Thorkell Thorkellsson, Thorkell Cat, Thorkell Flat-Nose, Thorkell-neb, Thorkell Ale-Lover, Thorkell the Old, Thorkell the Deep-minded, Ofeig, Skeggi, Grim, and me. We were tough. We were hardy. We were bold.

Nonetheless the voyage was a disaster. A northeaster roared down on us like a herd of drunken whales and swept us far off course. We missed our landfall — Ireland — by at least two hundred miles and carried past into the open Atlantic. Eight weeks we sailed, looking for land. Thorkell the Old was bailing one gray afternoon and found three menhaden in his bucket. We ate them raw. I speared an albatross and hung it round my neck. It was no picnic.

Then one night we heard the cries of gulls like souls stricken in the dark. Thorkell Ale-Lover, keen of smell, snuffed the breeze. “Landfall near,” he said. In the morning the sun threw our shadows on a new land — buff and green, slabs of gray, it swallowed the horizon.

“Balder be praised!” said Thorkell the Old.

“Thank Frigg,” I said.

We skirted the coast, looking for habitations to sack. There were none. We’d discovered a wasteland. The Thorkells were for putting ashore to replenish our provisions and make sacrifice to the gods (in those days we hadn’t yet learned to swallow unleavened bread and dab our foreheads with ashes. We were real primitives). We ran our doughty sleek warship up a sandy spit and leapt ashore, fierce as flayed demons. It was an unnecessary show of force, as the countryside was desolate, but it did our hearts good.

The instant my feet touched earth the poetic fit came on me and I composed this verse:

New land, new-found beyond

The mickle waves by fell

Men-fish, their stark battle

Valor failèd them not.

No Edda, I grant you — but what can you expect after six weeks of bailing? I turned to Thorkell Son of Thorkell the Misaligned, my brain charged with creative fever. “Hey!” I shouted, “let’s name this new-found land!” The others crowded round. Thorkell son of Thorkell the Misaligned looked down at me (he was six four, his red beard hung to his waist). “We’ll call it — Newfoundland!” I roared. There was silence. The twin horns of Thorkell’s helmet pierced the sky, his eyes were like stones, “Thorkell-land,” he said.

We voted. The Thorkells had it, 9 to 4.

For two and a half weeks we plumbed the coast, catching conies, shooting deer, pitching camp on islands or guarded promontories. I’d like to tell you it was glorious — golden sunsets, virgin forests, the thrill of discovery and all that — but when your business is sacking and looting, a virgin forest is the last thing you want to see. We grumbled bitterly. But Thorkell son of Thorkell the Misaligned was loath to admit that the land to which he’d given his name was uninhabited — and consequently of no use whatever. We forged on. Then one morning he called out from his place at the tiller: “Hah!” he said, and pointed toward a rocky abutment a hundred yards ahead. The mist lay on the water like flocks of sheep. I craned my neck, squinted, saw nothing. And then suddenly, like a revelation, I saw them: three tall posts set into the earth and carved with the figures of men and beasts. The sight brought water to my eyes and verse to my lips (but no sense in troubling you with any dilatory stanzas now — this is a climactic moment).

We landed. Crept up on the carvings, sly and wary, silent as stones. As it turned out, our caution was superfluous: the place was deserted. Besides the carvings (fanged monsters, stags, serpents, the grinning faces of a new race) there was no evidence of human presence whatever. Not even a footprint. We hung our heads: another bootyless day. Ofeig — the berserker — was seized with his berserker’s rage and wound up hacking the three columns to splinters with his massive stoke-dealing sword.

The Thorkells were of the opinion that we should foray inland in search of a village to pillage. Who was I to argue? Inland we went, ever hardy and bold, up hill and down dale, through brakes and brambles and bogs and clouds of insects that rushed up our nostrils and down our throats. We found nothing. On the way back to the ship we were luckier. Thorkell-neb stumbled over a shadow in the path, and when the shadows leaped up and shot through the trees, we gave chase. After a good rib-heaving run we caught what proved to be a boy, eleven or twelve, his skin the color of copper, the feathers of birds in his hair. Like the Irish, he spoke gibberish.

Thorkell Son of Thorkell the Misaligned drew pictures in the sand and punched the boy in the chest until the boy agreed to lead us to his people, the carvers of wood. We were Norsemen, and we always got our way. All of us warmed to the prospect of spoils, and off we went on another trek. We brought along our short-swords and disemboweling spears — just in case — though judging from the boy’s condition (he was bony and naked, his eyes deep and black as the spaces between the stars) we had nothing to fear from his kindred.

We were right. After tramping through the under- and overgrowth for half an hour we came to a village: smoking cook pots, skinny dogs, short and ugly savages, their hair the color of excrement. I counted six huts of branches and mud, the sort of thing that might excite a beaver. When we stepped into the clearing — tall, hardy and bold — the savages set up a fiendish caterwauling and rushed for their weapons. But what a joke their weapons were! Ofeig caught an arrow in the air, looked at the head on it, and collapsed laughing: it was made of flint. Flint. Can you believe it? Here we’d come Frigg knows how many miles for plunder and the best we could do was a bunch of Stone Age aborigines who thought that a necklace of dogs’ teeth was the height of fashion. Oh how we longed for those clever Irish and their gold brooches and silver-inlaid bowls. Anyway, we subdued these screechers as we called them, sacrificed the whole lot of them to the gods (the way I saw it we were doing them a favor), and headed back to our terrible swift ship, heavy of heart. There was no longer any room for debate: Ireland, look out!

As we pointed the prow east the westering sun threw the shadow of the new land over us. Thorkell the Old looked back over his shoulder and shook his head in disgust. “That place’ll never amount to a hill of beans,” he said.

And then it was gone.

Days rose up out of the water and sank behind us. Intrepid Norsemen, we rode the currents, the salt breeze tickling our nostrils and bellying the sail. Thorkell Flat-Nose was our navigator. He kept two ravens on a cord. After five and a half weeks at sea he released one of them and it shot off into the sky and vanished — but in less than an hour the bird was spotted off starboard, winging toward us, growing larger by turns until finally it flapped down on the prow and allowed its leg to be looped to the cord. Three days later Flat-Nose released the second raven. The bird mounted high, winging to the southeast until it became a black rune carved into the horizon. We followed it into a night of full moon, the stars like milk splattered in the cauldron of the sky. The sea whispered at the prow, the tiller hissed behind us. Suddenly Thorkell Ale-Lover cried, “Land ho!” We were fell and grim and ravenous. We looked up at the black ribbon of the Irish coast and grinned like wolves. Our shoulders dug at the oars, the sea sliced by. An hour later we landed.

Ofeig was for sniffing out habitations, free-booting and laying waste. But dawn crept on apace, and Thorkell Son of Thorkell the Misaligned reminded him that we Norsemen attack only under cover of darkness, swift and silent as a nightmare. Ofeig did not take it well: the berserker’s rage came on him and he began to froth and chew at his tongue and howl like a skinned beast. It was a tense moment. We backed off as he grabbed for his battle-axe and whirred it about his head. Fortunately he stumbled over a root and began to attack the earth, gibbering and slavering, sparks slashing out from buried stones as if the ground had suddenly caught fire. (Admittedly, berserkers can be tough to live with — but you can’t beat them when it comes to seizing hearts with terror or battling trolls, demons or demiurges.)

Our reaction to all this was swift and uncomplicated: we moved up the beach about two hundred yards and settled down to get some rest. I stretched out in a patch of wildflowers and watched the sky, Ofeig’s howls riding the breeze like a celestial aria, waves washing the shore. The Thorkells slept on their feet. It was nearly light when we finally dozed off, visions of plunder dancing in our heads.

I woke to the sound of whetstone on axe: we were polishing the blade edges of our fearsome battle weapons. It was late afternoon. We hadn’t eaten in days. Thorkell-neb and Skeggi stood naked on the beach, basting one another with black mud scooped from a nearby marsh. I joined them. We darkened our flaxen hair, drew grim black lines under our eyes, chanted fight songs. The sun hit the water like a halved fruit, then vanished. A horned owl shot out across the dunes. Crickets kreeked in the bushes. The time had come. We drummed one another about the neck and shoulders for a while (“Yeah!” we yelled. “Yeah!”), fastened our helmets, and then raced our serpent-headed ship into the waves.

A few miles up the coast we came on a light flickering out over the dark corrugations of the sea. As we drew closer it became apparent that the source of light was detached from the coast itself — could it be an island? Our blood quickened, our lips drew back in anticipation. Ravin and rapine at last! And an island no less — what could be more ideal? There would be no escape from our pure silent fury, no chance of secreting treasures, no hope of reinforcements hastily roused from bumpkin beds in the surrounding countryside. Ha!

An island it was — a tiny point of land, slick with ghostly cliffs and crowned with the walls of a monastery. We circled it, shadows on the dark swell. The light seemed to emanate from a stone structure atop the highest crag — some bookish monk with his nose to the paper no doubt, copying by the last of the firelight. He was in for a surprise. We rode the bosom of the sea and waited for the light to fail. Suddenly Thorkell the Old began to cackle. “That’ll be Inishmurray,” he wheezed. “Fattest monastery on the west coast.” Our eyes glowed. He spat into the spume. “Thought it looked familiar,” he said. “I helped Thorir Paunch sack it back in ‘75.” Then the light died and the world became night.

We watched the bookish monk in our minds’ eyes: kissing the text and laying it on a shelf, scattering the fire, plodding wearily to his cell and the cold gray pallet. I recited an incendiary verse while we waited for the old ecclesiast to tumble into sleep:

Eye-bleed monk,

Night his bane.

Darkness masks

The sea-wound,

Mickle fell,

Mickle stark.

I finished the recitation with a flourish, rolling the mickles like thunder. Then we struck.

It was child’s play. The slick ghostly cliffs were like rolling meadows, the outer wall a branch in our path. There was no sentry, no watchdog, no alarm. We dropped down into the courtyard, naked, our bodies basted black, our doughty death-dealing weapons in hand. We were shadows, fears, fragments of a bad dream.

Thorkell Son of Thorkell the Misaligned stole into one of the little stone churches and emerged with a glowing brand. Then he set fire to two or three of the wickerwork cells and a pile of driftwood. From that point on it was pandemonium — Ofeig tumbling stone crosses, the Thorkells murdering monks in their beds, Skeggi and Thorkell the Old chasing women, Thorkell Ale-Lover waving joints of mutton and horns of beer. The Irish defended themselves as best they could, two or three monks coming at us with barbed spears and pilgrim’s staffs, but we made short work of them. We were Norsemen, after all.

For my own part, I darted here and there through the smoke and rubble, seized with a destructive frenzy, frightening women and sheep with my hideous blackened features, cursing like a jay. I even cut down a doddering crone for the sake of a gold brooch, my sweetheart Thorkella in mind. Still, despite the lust and chaos and the sweet smell of anarchy, I kept my head and my poet’s eye. I observed each of the principal Thorkells with a reporter’s acuity, noting each valorous swipe and thrust, the hot skaldic verses already forming on my lips. But then suddenly I was distracted: the light had reappeared in the little chapel atop the crag. I counted Thorkells (no mean feat when you consider the congeries of legs and arms, sounds and odors, the panicked flocks of sheep, pigs and chickens, the jagged flames, the furious womanizing, gourmandizing and sodomizing of the crew). As I say, I counted Thorkells. We were all in sight. Up above, the light grew in intensity, flaming like a planet against the night sky. I thought of the bookish monk and started up the hill.

The night susurrated around me: crickets, katydids, cicadas, and far below the rush of waves on the rocks. The glare from the fires behind me gave way to blackness, rich and star-filled. I hurried up to the chapel, lashed by malice aforethought and evil intent — bookish monk, bookish monk — and burst through the door. I was black and terrible, right down to the tip of my foreskin. “Arrrrr!” I growled. The monk sat at a table, his hands clenched, head bent over a massive tome. He was just as I’d pictured him: pale as milk, a fringe of dark pubic hair around his tonsure, puny and frail. He did not look up. I growled again, and when I got no response I began to slash at candles and pitchers and icons and all the other superstitious trappings of the place. Pottery splashed to the floor, shelves tumbled. Still he bent over the book.

The book. What in Frigg’s name was a book anyway? Scratchings on a sheet of cowhide. Could you fasten a cloak with it, carry mead in it, impress women with it, wear it in your hair? There was gold and silver scattered round the room, and yet he sat over the book as if it could glow or talk or something. The idiot. The pale, puny, unhardy, unbold idiot. A rage came over me at the thought of it — I shoved him aside and snatched up the book, thick pages, dark characters, the mystery and magic. Snatched it up, me, a poet, a Norseman, an annihilator, an illiterate. Snatched it up and watched the old man’s suffering features as I fed it, page by filthy page, into the fire. Ha!

We are Norsemen, hardy and bold. We mount the black waves in our doughty sleek ships and we go a-raiding. We are Norsemen, tough as stone. We are Norsemen.

(1977)

THE CHAMP

Angelo D. was training hard. This challenger, Kid Gullet, would be no pushover. In fact, the Kid hit him right where he lived: he was worried. He’d been champ for thirty-seven years and all that time his records had stood like Mount Rushmore — and now this Kid was eating them up. Fretful, he pushed his plate away.

“But Angelo, you ain’t done already?” His trainer, Spider Decoud, was all over him. “That’s what — a piddling hundred and some-odd flapjacks and seven quarts a milk?”

“He’s on to me, Spider. He found out about the ulcer and now he’s going to hit me with enchiladas and shrimp in cocktail sauce.”

“Don’t fret it, Killer. We’ll get him with the starches and heavy syrups. He’s just a kid, twenty-two. What does he know about eating? Look, get up and walk it off and we’ll do a kidney and kipper course, okay? And then maybe four or five dozen poached eggs. C’mon, Champ, lift that fork. You want to hold on to the title or not?”

First it was pickled eggs. Eighty-three pickled eggs in an hour and a half. The record had stood since 1941. They said it was like DiMaggio’s consecutive-game hitting streak: unapproachable. A world apart. But then, just three months ago, Angelo had picked up the morning paper and found himself unforked: a man who went by the name of Kid Gullet had put down 108 of them. In the following weeks Angelo had seen his records toppled like a string of dominoes: gherkins, pullets, persimmons, oysters, pretzels, peanuts, scalloped potatoes, feta cheese, smelts, Girl Scout cookies. At the Rendezvous Room in Honolulu the Kid bolted 12,000 macadamia nuts and 67 bananas in less than an hour. During a Cubs-Phillies game at Wrigley field he put away 43 hot dogs — with buns — and 112 Cokes. In Orkney it was legs of lamb; in Frankfurt, Emmentaler and schnitzel; in Kiev, pirogen. He was irrepressible. In Stelton, New Jersey, he finished off 6 gallons of borscht and 93 four-ounce jars of gefilte fish while sitting atop a flagpole. The press ate it up.

Toward the end of the New Jersey session a reporter from ABC Sports swung a boom mike up to where the Kid sat on his eminence, chewing the last of the gefilte fish. “What are your plans for the future, Kid?” shouted the newsman.

“I’m after the Big One,” the Kid replied.

“Angelo D.?”

The camera zoomed in, the Kid grinned.

“Capocollo, chili and curry,

Big Man, you better start to worry.”

Angelo was rattled. He gave up the morning paper and banned the use of the Kid’s name around the Training Table. Kid Gullet: every time he heard those three syllables his stomach clenched. Now he lay on the bed, the powerful digestive machinery tearing away at breakfast, a bag of peanuts in his hand, his mind sifting through the tough bouts and spectacular triumphs of the past. There was Beau Riviere from Baton Rouge, who nearly choked him on deep-fried mud puppies, and Pinky Luzinski from Pittsburgh, who could gulp down 300 raw eggs and then crunch up the shells as if they were potato chips. Or the Japanese sumo wrestler who swallowed marbles by the fistful and throve on sashimi in a fiery mustard sauce. He’d beaten them all, because he had grit and determination and talent — and he would beat this kid too. Angelo sat up and roared: “I’m still the champ!”

The door cracked open. It was Decoud. “That’s the spirit, Killer. Remember D. D. Peloris, Max Manger, Bozo Miller, Spoonbill Rizzo? Bums. All of them. You beat ‘em, Champ.”

“Yeah!” Angelo bellowed. “And I’m going to flatten this Gullet too.”

“That’s the ticket: leave him gasping for Bromo.”

“They’ll be pumping his stomach when I’m through with him.”

Out in L.A. the Kid was taking on Turk Harris, number one contender for the heavyweight crown. The Kid’s style was Tabasco and Worcestershire; Harris was a mashed-potato and creamed-corn man — a trencherman of the old school. Like Angelo D.

Harris opened with a one-two combination of rice and kidney beans; the Kid countered with cocktail onions and capers. Then Harris hit him with baklava—400 two-inch squares of it. The Kid gobbled them like hors d’oeuvres, came back with chiles rellenos and asparagus vinaigrette. He KO’d Harris in the middle of the fourth round. After the bout he stood in a circle of jabbing microphones, flashing lights. “I got one thing to say,” he shouted. “And if you’re out there, Big Man, you better take heed:

I’m going to float like a parfait,

Sting like a tamale.

Big Man, you ‘ll hit the floor,

In four,”

At the preliminary weigh-in for the title bout the Kid showed up on roller skates in a silver lamé jumpsuit. He looked like something off the launching pad at Cape Canaveral. Angelo, in his coal-bucket trousers and suspenders, could have been mistaken for an aging barber or a boccie player strayed in from the park.

The-Kid had a gallon jar of hot cherry peppers under his arm. He wheeled up to the Champ, bolted six or seven in quick succession, and then held one out to him by the stem. “Care for an appetizer, Pops?” Angelo declined, his face dour and white, the big fleshy nostrils heaving like a stallion’s. Then the photographers posed the two, belly to belly. In the photograph, which appeared on the front page of the paper the following morning, Angelo D. looked like an advertisement for heartburn.

There was an SRO crowd at the Garden for the title bout. Scalpers were getting two hundred and up for tickets. ABC Sports was there, Colonel Sanders was there, Arthur Treacher, Julia Child, James Beard, Ronald McDonald, Mamma Leone. It was the Trenching Event of the Century.

Spider Decoud and the Kid’s manager had inspected the ring and found the arrangements to their satisfaction — each man had a table, stool, stack of plates and cutlery. Linen napkins, a pitcher of water. It would be a fourteen-round affair, each round going ten minutes with a sixty-second bell break. The contestants would name their dishes for alternate rounds, the Kid, as challenger, leading off.

A hush fell over the crowd. And then the chant, rolling from back to front like breakers washing the beach: GULLET, GULLET, GULLET! There he was, the Kid, sweeping down the aisle like a born champion in his cinnamon-red robe with the silver letters across the abdomen. He stepped into the ring, clasped his hands, and shook them over his head. The crowd roared like rock faces slipping deep beneath the earth. Then he did a couple of deep knee bends and sat down on his stool. At that moment Angelo shuffled out from the opposite end of the arena, stern, grim, raging, the tight curls at the back of his neck standing out like the tail feathers of an albatross, his barren dome ghostly under the klieg lights, the celebrated paunch swelling beneath his opalescent robe like a fat wad of butter-ball turkeys. The crowd went mad. They shrieked, hooted and whistled, women kissed the hem of his gown, men reached out to pat his bulge. ANGELO! He stepped into the ring and took his seat as the big black mike descended from the ceiling.

The announcer, in double lapels and bow tie, shouted over the roar, “Ladies and Gentlemen—” while Angelo glared at the Kid, blood in his eye. He was choked with a primordial competitive fury, mad as a kamikaze, deranged with hunger. Two days earlier Decoud had lured him into a deserted meat locker and bolted the door — and then for the entire forty-eight hours had projected pornographic food films on the wall. Fleshy wet lips closing on eclairs, zoom shots of masticating teeth, gulping throats, probing tongues, children innocently sucking at Tootsie Roll pops — it was obscene, titillating, maddening. And through it all a panting soundtrack composed of grunts and sighs and the smack of lips. Angelo D. climbed into the ring a desperate man. But even money nonetheless. The Kid gloated in his corner.

“At this table, in the crimson trunks,” bellowed the announcer, “standing six foot two inches tall and weighing in at three hundred and seventy-seven pounds … is the challenger, Kid Gullet!” A cheer went up, deafening. The announcer pointed to Angelo. “And at this table, in the pearly trunks and standing five foot seven and a half inches tall and weighing in at three hundred and twenty-three pounds,” he bawled, his voice rumbling like a cordon of cement trucks, “is the Heavyweight Champion of the World … Angelo D.!” Another cheer, perhaps even louder. Then the referee took over. He had the contestants step to the center of the ring, the exposed flesh of their chests and bellies like a pair of avalanches, while he asked if each was acquainted with the rules. The Kid grinned like a shark. “All right then,” the ref said, “touch midriffs and come out eating.”

The bell rang for Round One. The Kid opened with Szechwan hot and sour soup, three gallons. He lifted the tureen to his lips and slapped it down empty. The Champ followed suit, his face aflame, sweat breaking out on his forehead. He paused three times, and when finally he set the tureen down he snatched up the water pitcher and drained it at a gulp while the crowd booed and Decoud yelled from the corner: “Lay off the water or you’ll bloat up like a blowfish!”

Angelo retaliated with clams on the half shell in Round Two: 512 in ten minutes. But the Kid kept pace with him — and as if that weren’t enough, he sprinkled his own portion with cayenne pepper and Tabasco. The crowd loved it. They gagged on their hot dogs, pelted the contestants with plastic cups and peanut shells, gnawed at the backs of their seats. Angelo looked up at the Kid’s powerful jaws, the lips stained with Tabasco, and began to feel queasy.

The Kid staggered him with lamb curry in the next round. The crowd was on its feet, the Champ’s face was green, the fork motionless in his hand, the ref counting down. Decoud twisting the towel in his fists — when suddenly the bell sounded and the Champ collapsed on the table. Decoud leaped into the ring, chafed Angelo’s abdomen, sponged his face. “Hang in there, Champ,” he said, “and come back hard with the carbohydrates.”

Angelo struck back with potato gnocchi in Round Four; the Kid countered with Kentucky burgoo. They traded blows through the next several rounds, the Champ scoring with Nesselrode pie, fettuccine Alfredo and poi, the Kid lashing back with jambalaya, shrimp creole and herring in horseradish sauce.

After the bell ending Round Eleven, the bout had to be held up momentarily because of a disturbance in the audience. Two men, thin as tapers and with beards like Spanish moss, had leaped into the ring waving posters that read REMEMBER BIAFRA. The Kid started up from his table and pinned one of them to the mat, while security guards nabbed the other. The Champ sat immobile on his stool, eyes tearing from the horseradish sauce, his fist clenched round the handle of the water pitcher. When the ring was cleared the bell rang for Round Twelve.

It was the Champ’s round all the way: sweet potato pie with butterscotch syrup and pralines. For the first time the Kid let up — toward the end of the round he dropped his fork and took a mandatory eight count. But he came back strong in the thirteenth with a savage combination of Texas wieners and sauce diable. The Champ staggered, went down once, twice, flung himself at the water pitcher while the Kid gorged like a machine, wiener after wiener, blithely lapping the hot sauce from his fingers and knuckles with an epicurean relish. Then Angelo’s head fell to the table, his huge whiskered jowl mired in a pool of bechamel and butter. The fans sprang to their feet, feinting left and right, snapping their jaws and yabbering for the kill. The Champ’s eyes fluttered open, the ref counted over him.

It was then that it happened. His vision blurring, Angelo gazed out into the crowd and focused suddenly on the stooped and wizened figure of an old woman in a black bonnet. Decoud stood at her elbow. Angelo lifted his head. “Ma?” he said. “Eat, Angelo, eat!” she called, her voice a whisper in the apocalyptic thunder of the crowd. “Clean your plate!”

“Nine!” howled the referee, and suddenly the Champ came to life, lashing into the sauce diable like a crocodile. He bolted wieners, sucked at his fingers, licked the plate. Some say his hands moved so fast that they defied the eye, a mere blur, slapstick in double time. Then the bell rang for the final round and Angelo announced his dish: “Gruel!” he roared. The Kid protested. “What kind of dish is that?” he whined. “Gruel? Whoever heard of gruel in a championship bout?” But gruel it was. The Champ lifted the bowl to his lips, pasty ropes of congealed porridge trailing down his chest; the crowd cheered, the Kid toyed with his spoon — and then it was over.

The referee stepped in, helped Angelo from the stool and held his flaccid arm aloft Angelo was plate-drunk, reeling. He looked out over the cheering mob, a welter of button heads like B in B mushrooms-or Swedish meatballs in a rich golden sauce. Then he gagged. “The winner,” the ref was shouting, “and still champion, Angelo D.!”

(1977)

BLOODFALL

It started about three-thirty, a delicate tapping at the windows, the sound of rain. No one noticed: the stereo was turned up full and Walt was thumping his bass along with it, the TV was going, they were all stoned, passing wine and a glowing pipe, singing along with the records, playing Botticelli and Careers and Monopoly, crunching crackers. I noticed. In that brief scratching silence between songs, I heard it — looked up at the window and saw the first red droplets huddled there, more falling between them. Gesh and Scott and Isabelle were watching TV with the sound off, digging the music, lighting cigarettes, tapping fingers and feet, laughing. On the low table were cheese, oranges, wine, shiny paperbacks, a hash pipe. Incense smoked from a pendant urn. The three dogs sprawled on the carpet by the fireplace. Siamese cats curled on the mantel, the bench, the chair. The red droplets quivered, were struck by other, larger drops falling atop them, and began a meandering course down the windowpane. Alice laughed from the kitchen. She and Amy were peeling vegetables, baking pies, uncanning baby smoked oysters and sturgeon for hors d’oeuvres, sucking on olive pits. The windows were streaked with red. The music was too loud. No one noticed. It was another day.

When I opened the door to investigate, the three dogs sprang up and ran to me, tails awag; they stopped at the door, sniffing. It was hissing down now, a regular storm: it streamed red from the gutter over the door, splashing my pant-leg. The front porch smelled like raw hamburger. My white pants were spotted with red. The dogs inched out now, stretching their necks: they lapped at the red puddle on the doorstep. Their heads and muzzles were soon slick with it. I slammed the door on them and walked back into the living room. Gesh and Scott were passing the pipe. On the TV screen were pictures of starving children: distended bellies, eyes as big as their bony heads, spiders’ arms and spiders’ legs: someone was laughing in the kitchen. “Hey!” I shouted. “Do you dig what’s happening outside?” Nobody heard me. The windows were smeared with red: it fell harder. Gesh looked up to pass the pipe. “What happened to you?” he said. “Cut yourself?”

“No,” I said. “It’s raining blood.”

Gesh was in the shower when the TV screen went blank. Earlier, when everybody had crowded around the open door, holding out their hands to it as it dripped down from the eaves, wowing and cursing and exclaiming, Gesh had pushed through and stepped out, down the stairs and out under the maple tree. His white pants, shirt and shoes turned pinkish, then a fresh wet red, the color of life. “It’s fantastic out here!” he yelled. We held back. In a minute or two he came back up the steps, his face a mosaic mortared in blood, the clotted hair stuck to his forehead. He looked like the aftermath of an accident, or a casualty of war. “How do I look?” he said, licking the wet red from his lips. “Like the Masque of the Red Death or something? Huh?” Scott was taking pictures with his Nikkormat. The smell when Gesh stepped in reminded me of a trip I took with my mom and dad when I was in the third grade. An educational trip. Every weekend we took an educational trip. We went to the slaughterhouse. Gesh smelled like that when he came in. Amy made him take a shower with baby shampoo and peppermint soap. She laid out a fresh white shirt and pants for him, and his white slippers. Scott ran downstairs to the darkroom to develop his pictures. Basically he does black and whites of slum kids in rakish hats giving him the finger; old slum women, the fingers stewed to the bone; old slum men, fingering port pints in their pockets. These he enlarges and frames, and hangs about the house. One of them hangs in the corner over Alice’s Reclino Love-Chair with the dyed rabbit-fur cover; another hangs in the dining room over my 125-gallon aquarium. The rabbit fur is dyed black.

Walt took a break for a minute to change records and adjust the treble on his amp. In the ringing silence that ensued, we realized that the TV was emitting a thin high-pitched whistle. There was no picture. “What the fuck?” said Isabelle. She jumped up, flipped through the channels. All gray, all emitting the same whistle. Isabelle’s eyes were bleared. “Let’s try the radio!” she said. It too: the same insidious whine. “The phone!” she shouted. The phone hummed softly in her ear, my ear, Walt’s ear, Amy’s ear. It was the same sort of hum you get from an empty conch shell. “It’s dead,” I said. We stood there mute, staring at the receiver suspended from its cord, clickless and ringless. We theorized:

Maybe it’s a National Emergency—

Maybe it’s D-day — Maybe it’s the Nuclear Holocaust—

Maybe it’s Judgment Day—

Maybe it’s the Rockets they’re sending up—

But we all suspected the soundness of these extrapolations. Probably it was just some new form of pollution, and a few wires down in the storm. Gesh appeared in fresh white, smelling like a candy cane. He walked deliberately to the pipe, thumbed in a chunk of hash, and sucked the flame of a match through it. Is-abelle, quickly sedated, picked out a couple of albums and Walt ducked under the embroidered shoulder strap of his bass — the blast of music sealed the room, stopped the ticking at the panes. Alice brought in the hors d’oeuvres, and a comforting smell of exotic dishes abubble in the kitchen. I sat, smoked, and ate.

In the morning I slipped early from the warmth of the nest (Alice’s tender buttock, Gesh’s hairy satyr’s foot framed there beneath the sheets), wrapped my white robe over my white pajamas, stepped into my fluffy white slippers, and went downstairs, as I always do on Saturdays, to watch cartoons. My mind was a tabula rasa, wire-brushed with intoxicants; my dreams had been of cool colors, the green of the forest, the cerulean of the summer sky. In the living room, a pinkish light suffused the slats of the blinds. The window was like stained glass. In the early morning quiet, the red splashes drummed against it. I was stunned; and all alone there, at that early hour, frightened. Then I heard the scratching at the door: the dogs had been out all night. Without thinking, I opened the door and they rushed in, great living lumps of raw flesh, skinned carcasses come to life, slick with blood, their bellies bloated with it. “No, no, get down!” But they were already up on their hind legs, pawing affectionately at me, their fetid breath in my face. Their teeth were stained red, blood hung even in the sockets of their eyes. “Get down, goddamnit!” My robe, my pajamas, my fluffy white slippers were ruined: the blood crept through the white cotton like a stain in water. I kicked out at the dogs. They backed off and shook themselves — a fine bloodmist spotted the walls, the white rugs of the hallway, the potted plants. The dogs grunted, eased themselves down and licked their paws. Blood seeped from beneath them. I felt sick from the stink of it, and so upset with the mess that tears began to crowd my eyes — exasperated, hopeless tears. The hallway looked like a sacrificial altar, my arms like the gory High Priest’s. I would wash and go back to bed, face life later.

In the bathroom I stepped carefully out of my clothes in an effort to avoid staining the bathmat. It was no use. Blood oozed from the fluffy red slippers. I wiped my hands and face on the lining of the robe, bundled everything together and stuffed it into the hamper. Seven electric toothbrushes, seven cups, and seven hotcombs hung on the rack over the sink. We kept the seven electric shavers, each in its own carrying case, stacked neatly in the cabinet. I stepped into the shower, the tap of blood against the bathroom window loud in my ears, and turned on hot, full force. Eyes pressed tight, face in the spray, I luxuriated in the warm pure rush of the water. I’d always taken a great deal of pleasure in showering and bathing, in being clean — it reminded me of my mom and the baths she used to give, sponging my crotch, kissing my wet little feet … but there was something wrong — that odor — good God, it was in the water supply! Horrified, I leaped from the shower. In the steamed-over mirror I was newborn, coated in blood and mucus, pulled hot from the womb. Diluted blood streamed down my body, puddled at my feet. I lifted the toilet seat and puked into the red bowl. Hung my head and puked: puked and cried, until Amy came down and found me there.

Gesh sat back in the stuffed chair. He wore his white robe with the gold monogram, and his slippers. The bloodfall hammered on. “We’ve got to look at the precedents,” he said. There was a pie and a soufflé in the oven. We were in the living room, sipping apricot nectar, munching buns. Alice, in the entrance hall with detergent and scrub brush, was muttering like Lady Macbeth over the carpet stains. “What precedents?” I asked.

“Like all of that shit that went down in Egypt about thirty-five hundred years ago.”

Walt was tuning his bass: dzhzhzhzhtt. dzhzhzhzhtt. He picked a rumbling note or two and looked up. “You’re thinking of frogs, brother. Millions of frogs. Frogs under the bed, frogs in the flour, frogs in your shoes, clammy frogs’ flippers slapping at your ass when you take a shit.”

“No, no — there was something about blood too, wasn’t there?”

“Yeah,” said Walt. “Christ turned it into water. Or was it wine?”

“You know what happened in Egypt?! You want to know?” My voice cracked. I was getting hysterical. A cat jumped into my lap. I tossed it over my shoulder. Everything in the room had a red cast, like when you put on those red cellophane glasses as a kid, to read 3D comic books.

Gesh was staring at me: “So what happened?”

“Never mind,” I said.

Amy howled from the basement. “Hey you guys, guess what? The stuff is ankle-deep down here and it’s ruining everything. Our croquet set, our camping equipment, our dollhouse!” The announcement depressed us all, even Gesh. “Let’s blow a bowl of hash and forget about it,” he suggested.

“Anyhow,” said Walt, “it’ll be good for the trees.” And he started a bass riff with a deep throbbing note — the hum of it hung in the air even after the lights went out and the rest of his run had attenuated to a thin metallic whisper. “Hey!” he said. From the kitchen: “Oh shit!” A moment later, Isabelle came in wringing her hands. “Well. The breakfast’s ruined. We’ve got a half-baked pie and a flat soufflé sitting in the oven. And a raw-eggy blob purporting to be eggnog in the blender.”

There was a strange cast to the room now. Not the gloom-gray of a drizzly day, but a deep burgundy, like a bottle of wine.

“Well? What am I going to do with it all — give it to the dogs?”

The dogs glanced up briefly. Their hair was matted and brown with dried blood. They were not hungry.

Scott whined: “I’m hungry.”

I was scared. I’d been scared all along, scared from the moment I’d noticed the first drops on the window. I looked at Gesh, our leader: he was grinning in that lurid light, sucking reflectively on the pipe. “Don’t hassle it, Iz,” he said. “Mark and me’ll pop down to the deli and get some sandwiches.”

“I don’t want to go out there — I’ll lose my lunch.”

“Come on, don’t be such a candy ass. Besides, it’ll give us a chance to talk to somebody, find out what’s going on.” He stood up. “Come on, Mark, get your boots.”

Outside was incredible. Red sky, red trees, red horizon: the whole world, from the fence to the field to the mountains across the river, looked like the inside of some colossal organ. I felt like an undigested lump of food — Jonah in the belly of the whale. There was the stench of rotting meat. The bloodfall streamed down hard as hail. Under the eaves, on the porch, we were fooling with our rain hats, trying to get up the nerve to run for the car. Gesh too, I could see, was upset. Yesterday it had been a freak, today a plague. “Well, what do you think, bro — make a run for it?” he said.

We ran — down the steps and into the mud. I slipped and fell, while Gesh hustled off through the blinding downpour. It was deeper now, lying about the low spots in nasty red-black puddles. I could feel it seeping in, trickling down my leg, inside the boot: warm, sticky, almost hot. The smell of putrefaction nauseated me. I choked back the apricot nectar and biscuits, struggled up, and ran for the car. When I got there Gesh was standing beside the door, blooddrops thrashing about him. “What about the seats?” he said. “If we stain ‘em with this shit, it’ll never come off.”

“Fuck it. Let’s just get out of this—”

“I mean I got a lot of scratch invested in this here BMW, bro—”

The wind-whipped blood flailed our yellow slickers, dripped from the flapping brims of our silly yellow rain hats. We both climbed in. The engine started smooth, like a vacuum cleaner; the wipers clapped to and fro; the windshield smeared. “Let’s drive to the desert … the Arizona desert, and get away from this … shit,” I said. My voice was weak. I felt ill. Automatically I reached for the window. “Hey — what the fuck you doing?” Gesh said. It streamed down the inside of the glass, bubbled over the upholstered door, puddled in the ashtray on the armrest. I rolled the window up. “I feel sick,” I said. “Well for christsake, puke outside.” I didn’t. The thought of hanging my head out in that insane unnatural downpour brought it up right there. In the sealed compartment the bouquet of the vomit and the stink of the mud-blood on our shoes was insupportable. I retched again: then dry-retched. “Oh shit,” said Gesh.

“I’m going back in,” I said, the edge of a whimper in my voice.

Five minutes later, Gesh returned, cursing. Scott was on his way out the door, three cameras strung round his neck, to get some color slides of the dripping trees. “What’s the matter,” he said. “You back already?”

“Couldn’t see a fucking thing. I got down the end of the drive and smacked into the stone wall. The wipers are totally useless — they just smear the crap all over the windshield. It’s like looking through a finger painting.”

“So what happened to the car?”

“It’s not too bad — I was only going about two miles an hour.”

Alice emerged from the kitchen, a pair of lighted candles in her hand, egg-walking to avoid spilling the hot wax. “Gesh! Take your slicker off — you’re dripping that shit all over the floor…. Couldn’t make it, huh?”

“No.”

“What are we going to do for food?” she asked.

“Scoop it up!” Walt shouted from the living room. “Scoop it up and pour it into balloons. Make blood pudding.”

I was sitting in a chair, weak, stinking, blood crusting the lines of my hands. “I’m fed up with it,” I said. “I’m going up to lie down.”

“Good idea,” said Gesh. “Think I’ll join you.”

“Me too,” said Alice. “Can’t do anything here — can’t even read or listen to music.”

“Yeah,” said Walt. “Good idea. Save me a pillow.”

“Me too,” said Amy.

Scott stepped from beneath the cameras, strung them across the back of my chair. He yawned. Isabelle said it would be better if we all went to bed. She expressed a hope that after a long nap things would somehow come to their senses.

I woke from fevered dreams (a tropical forest: me in jodhpurs and pith helmet — queasy-faced — sharing a draft of warm cow’s blood and milk with tree-tall Masai warriors) to a rubicund dimness, and the gentle breathing of the rest of the crew. They loomed, a humpbacked mound in the bed beside me. My ears were keen. Still it beat on the roof, sloshed in the gutters. Downstairs, somewhere, I heard the sound of running water, the easy soughing gurgle of a mountain stream. I sat up. Were we leaking? I slipped into Amy’s slippers, lit a candle, crept apprehensively down the stairs. I searched the hallway, living room, dining room, kitchen, bathroom: nothing. A cat began wailing somewhere. The basement! The cat bolted out when I opened the door, peered down the dark shaft of the stairway. The flood was up nearly to the fifth step, almost four feet deep, I guessed, and more churning audibly in. The stench was stifling. I slammed the door. For the first time I thought of the dike: why ‘sblood! if the dike went — it must be straining at its foundations this very minute! I envisioned us out there, heroically stacking sandbags, the wind in our faces, whipping our hair back, the rising level of the flood registered in our stoic eyes — then I thought of the tepid plasma seething in my nose, my mouth, my eyes, and felt ill.

Gesh came down the stairs, scratching himself sleepily. “How’s it?” he said. I advised him to take a look at the cellar. He did. “Holy shit! We’ve got to do something — start making barricades, strapping floatables together, evacuating women and children — and dogs!” He paused. “I’m starving,” he said. “Let’s go see what we got left, bro.” From the kitchen I could hear him taking inventory: “Two six-packs of warm Coke; a jar of Skippy peanut butter, crunchy — no bread; ten cans of stewed tomatoes; half a box of granola; a quart of brown rice; one tin of baby smoked oysters. Not a fuck of a lot. Hey Mark, join me in a late-afternoon snack?”

“No thanks. I’m not hungry.”

We sat around the darkened living room that night, a single candle guttering, the sound of bloodfall ticking at the windows, the hiss of rapids rushing against the stone walls of the house, an insidious sloshing in the basement. Seepage had begun at the front door, and Isabelle had dumped a fifty-pound bag of kitty litter there in an attempt to absorb the moisture. Atop that was a restraining dike of other absorbent materials: boxes of cake mix, back issues of Cosmopolitan, electric blankets, Italian dictionaries, throw pillows, three dogs, a box of Tampax. A similar barricade protected the basement door. When Gesh had last opened the window to look, the red current eddying against the house had reached almost to the windowsill. We were deeply concerned, hungry, bored. “I’m bored,” said Amy.

“I’m hungry,” whined Scott. “And I’m sick of Coke. I want a hot cup of Mu tea.”

“It stinks in here,” carped Isabelle. “Reminds me of when I was fifteen, working in the meat department at the A & P.”

“My teeth are gritty,” Alice said. “Wish the water and the damned toothbrushes would work.”

Blood began to drip from the windowsill in the far corner of the room. It puddled atop the thirty-six-inch Fisher speaker in the corner. One of the cats began to lap at it.

Walt paced the room, a man dislocated. Deprived of his bass, he was empty, devoid of spirit, devoid of personality. He was incapable now of contributing to our meaningful dialogue on the situation. Gesh, however, tried to amuse us, take our minds off it. He said it was just a simple case of old mother earth menstruating, and that by tomorrow, the last day of the moon’s cycle, it would no doubt stop. He passed around a fifth of Châteauneuf and a thin joint. The pool beneath the door began to spread across the floor, creeping, growing, fanning out to where we sat in a small circle, the candlelight catching the blood in our flared nostrils. Shocked silent, we watched its inexorable approach as it glided out from the barricade in fingerlike projections, seeking the lowest point. The lowest point, it appeared, was directly beneath the Naugahyde pillow upon which my buttocks rested. Slowly, methodically, the bulbous finger of blood stretched toward me, pointed at me. When it was about a foot away, I stood. “I’m going to bed,” I said. “I’m taking two Tuinals. Try not to wake me.”

It was morning when I woke. Gesh sat in a chair beside the bed, smoking a cigarette. The others slept. “It stopped,” he said. He was right: the only sound was a sporadic drip-drip beyond the windows, a poststorm runoff. The celestial phlebotomy had ceased. “Good,” was all I could manage. But I was elated, overjoyed, secure again! Life returned to normal!

“Hey — let’s slip down to the deli and get some sandwiches and doughnuts and coffee and shit, sneak back, and surprise the rest of the crew,” Gesh said.

Curiosity stirred me, and hunger too. But my stomach curdled at the thought of the gore and the stink, the yard like a deserted battlefield. I stared down at my pajama sleeve. Amy’s sleeping wrist lay across mine. I studied the delicate contrast of her white wrist and the little pink and brown figures of cowboys on my pajamas. “Well? What do you say?” asked Gesh. I said I guessed so. We pulled on our corduroys, our white rubber boots, our mohair sweaters.

Downstairs the blood had begun to clot. In the hallway it was still sticky in places, but for the most part crusted dry. Outside a massive fibrinogenification was taking place under a dirt-brown sky. Scabs like thin coats of ice were forming over the deeper puddles; the mud was crusting underfoot: fresh blood ran off in streams and drainage ditches; the trees drooled clots of it in the hot breeze. “Wow! Dig that sky, bro—” Gesh said. “Brown as a turd.”

“Yeah,” I said, “it’s weird. But thank christ it stopped bleeding.”

Gesh started the car while I broke the scab-crust from the windshield; it flaked, and crumbled in dusty grains. I climbed in, laid some newspaper over the day-old vomit on the floor, steeled myself against the stench. Gesh accelerated in an attempt to back out from the wall: I could hear the wheels spinning. I poked my head out. We were stuck up to the frame in mud and gore. “Fuck it,” Gesh said. “We’ll take Scott’s car.” We started up the drive toward the other car. It was then that the first pasty lumps of it began to slap down sporadically; we reached the shelter of the porch just as it began to thunder down, heavy, feculent, and wet.

Upstairs we carefully folded our sweaters, pulled on our white pajamas, and sought out the warm spots in the huddled sleeping mass of us.

(1972)

RUPERT BEERSLEY AND THE BEGGAR MASTER OF SIVANI-HOOTA

It was on a dark, lowering day during one of the interstices of the monsoon that His Royal Highness Yadavindra Singh, nawab of the remote Deccan state of Sivani-Hoota, began to miss his children. That is, the children began to turn up missing, and to an alarming degree. It began with little Gopal, who had been born with a mottled, pale birthmark in the shape of a half moon under the crease of his left buttock. Miss Elspeth Compton-Divot, the children’s English governess, whose responsibility it was to instruct her wards in the dead language and living literature of Greece and to keep watch over them as a shepherd keeps watch over his flock (flock, indeed — there were twenty-five sibling Singhs under her care originally), was the first to discover little Gopal’s absence. She bowed her way into the nawab’s reception room immediately after lessons on that fateful afternoon, the sky so striped with cloud it might have been flayed, to find the nawab and his wife, the third begum, in attendance on several prominent local figures, including Mr. Bagwas the rubber-goods proprietor and Mr. Patel the grain merchant. “Most High, Puissant, Royal and Wise Hegemon Whose Duty It Is to Bring the Word of God and the Will of Just Government to the Peoples of Sivani-Hoota and Environs,” she began, “I come before you on a matter of gravest import.”

The nawab, a man in late middle age who had attended Oxford in the days of Pater and was given to ejaculations like “What ho!” and “L’art pour l’art!” told her to stuff the formality and come to the point.

“It’s your third youngest, sir — little Gopal.”

“Yes?”

“He seems to have disappeared.”

The nawab shifted his bulk uneasily in his chair — for he was a big man, fattened on ghee, sweet cream, and chapattis slathered with orange-blossom honey — glanced at his begum and then expelled a great exasperated puff of air. “What a damnable nuisance,” he said. “I don’t doubt the little beggar’s up to some mischief, hiding himself in the servants’ pantry or some such rot. Which one did you say it was?”

“Little Gopal, sir.”

“Gopal?”

It was then that the begum spoke rapidly to her husband in Tamil and he began almost simultaneously to nod his head, muttering, “Yes, yes, a good boy that. A pity, a real pity.”

The governess went on to explain the circumstances of the boy’s disappearance — the testimony of the night nurse who’d put him to bed, his eldest-brother-but-six’s assertion that they’d played together at cribbage before falling off to sleep, her own discovery of little Gopal’s absence early that day, when she commenced morning lessons by comparing her seating chart with the nearly identical moon-shaped grinning brown faces of the nawab’s brood.

Mr. Bagwas, who had been silently pulling at a clay pipe through all of this, abruptly pronounced a single word: “Leopards.”

But it was not leopards. Though the stealthy cats commonly carried off six or seven of the village’s children a night, the occasional toothless grandmother, and innumerable goats, dogs, cows, fowl, royal turtles, and even the ornamental koi that graced the nawab’s ponds, they were absolved of suspicion in the present case. After Abha, aged seven, and then the eleven-year-old Shanker vanished on successive nights, the nawab, becoming concerned, called in Mr. Hugh Tureen, game hunter, to put out baits and exterminate the spotted fiends. Though in the course of the ensuing week Mr. Tureen shot some seventy-three leopards, sixteen tigers, twelve wolves, and several hundred skunks, mongeese, badgers, and the like, the nawab continued to lose children. Santha, aged nine and with the mark of the dung beetle on the arches of both feet, vanished under the noses of three night nurses and half a dozen watchmen specially employed to stand guard over the nursery. This time, however, there was a clue. Bhupinder, aged six, claimed to have seen a mysterious shrouded figure hanging over his sister’s bed, a figure rather like that of an ape on whom a tent has collapsed. Two days later, when the harsh Indian sun poked like a lance into the muslin-hung sanctuary of the children’s quarters, Bhupinder’s bed was empty.

The nawab and his begum, who two and a half weeks earlier had been rich in children, now had but twenty. They were distraught. Helpless. At their wits’ end. Clearly, this was a case for Rupert Beersley.

We left Calcutta in a downpour, Beersley and I, huddled in our mackintoshes like a pair of dacoits. The train was three hours late, the tea was wretched, and the steward served up an unpalatable mess of curried rice that Beersley, in a fit of pique, overturned on the floor. Out of necessity — Beersley’s summons had curtailed my supper at the club — I ate my own portion and took a cup of native beer with it. “Really,” Beersley said, the flanges of his extraordinary nostrils drawn up in disgust, “how can you eat that slop?”

It was a sore point between us, the question of native food, going all the way back to our first meeting at Cawnpore some twenty years back, when he was a freshly commissioned young leftenant in the Eleventh Light Dragoons, India Corps, and I a seasoned sergeant-major. “I’ll admit I’ve had better, old boy,” I said, “but one must adapt oneself to one’s circumstances.”

Beersley waved his hand in a gesture of dismissal and quoted sourly from his favorite poem — indeed, the only poem from which he ever quoted — Keats’s “Lamia”: “’Not three score old, yet of sciential brain / To unperplex bliss from its neighbor pain.’”

An electric-green fly had settled itself on a congealed lamp of rice that lay on the table before us. I shrugged and lifted the fork to my mouth.

We arrived at the Sivani-Hoota station in the same downpour transposed a thousand miles, and were met by the nawab’s silver-plated Rolls, into the interior of which we ducked, wet as waterfowl, while the lackey stowed away our baggage. The road out to the palace was black as the caverns of hell and strewn with enough potholes to take the teeth out of one’s head. Rain crashed down on the roof as if it would cave it in, beasts roared from the wayside, and various creatures of the night slunk, crept, and darted before the headlights as if rehearsing for some weird menagerie. Nearly an hour after leaving the station, we began to discern signs of civilization along the dark roadway. First a number of thatch huts began to flash by the smeared windows, then the more substantial stone structures that indicated the approach to the palace, and finally the white marble turrets and crenellated battlements of the palace itself.

As we hurried into the entrance hall, dripping like jellyfish, the nawab, who had lost two more children in the interval between his summons and our arrival, came out to meet us, a distraught begum at his side. Servants sprang up like mushrooms after a rain, turbaned Sikhs with appropriately somber faces, house-boys in white, ladies-in-waiting with great dark staring eyes. “Mr. Beersley, I presume,” the nawab said, halting five paces from us and darting his eyes distractedly between Rupert’s puggree helmet and my plaid tam-o’-shanter.

“The same,” answered Beersley, bowing curtly from the waist and stepping forward to seize the nawab’s hand. “Pleased, I’m sure,” he said, and then, before pausing either to introduce me or to pay his respects to the begum, he pointed to the wild-haired sadhu seated in the corner and praying over the yellowish flame of a dung fire. “And what precisely is the meaning of this?” he demanded.

I should say at this juncture that Beersley, though undeniably brilliant, tended also to be somewhat mercurial, and I could see that something had set him off. Perhaps it was the beastly weather or the long and poorly accommodated trip, or perhaps he was feeling the strain of overwork, called out on this case as he was so soon after the rigorous mental exercise he’d put into the baffling case of the Cornucopia Killer of Cooch Behar. Whatever it was, I saw to my embarrassment that he was in one of his dark India- and Indian-hating moods, in which he is as likely to refer to a Sikh as a “diaper head” as he is to answer “Hello” on picking up the phone receiver.

“Beg pardon?” the nawab said, looking puzzled.

“This fellow over here in the corner, this muttering half-naked fakir — what precisely is his function?” Ignoring the shocked looks and dropped jaws of his auditors, Beersley rushed on, as if he were debating in a tavern. “What I mean to say, sir, is this: how can you expect me to take on a case of this nature when I find my very sensibilities affronted by this … this pandering to superstition and all the damnable mumbo jumbo that goes with it?”

The beards of the Sikhs bristled, their eyes flared. The nawab, to his credit, made an effort to control himself, and, with his welcoming smile reduced to a tight grim compression of the lips, he explained that the holy man in the corner was engaged in the Vedic rite of the sacred fire, energizer and destroyer, one of the three sacred elements of the Hindu trinity. Twice a day, he would also drink of the pancha garia, composed in equal parts of the five gifts of the sacred cow: milk, curds, ghee, urine, and dung. The nawab had felt that the performance of these sacred rites might help cleanse and purify his house against the plague that had assailed it.

Beersley listened to all this with his lip curled in a sneer, then muttered “Humbug” under his breath. The room was silent. I shuffled my feet uneasily. The begum fastened me with the sort of look reserved for the deviates one encounters in the Bois de Boulogne, and the nawab’s expression arranged itself in an unmistakable scowl.

“’Do not all charms fly / At the mere touch of cold philosophy?’” Beersley said, and then turned abruptly on his heel and strode off in the direction the lackey had taken with our baggage.

In the morning, Beersley (who had refused the previous evening to attend the dinner the nawab had arranged in his honor, complaining of fatigue and wishing only that a bit of yogurt and a bowl of opium be sent up to his room) assembled all the principals outside the heavy mahogany door to the nawab’s library. The eighteen remaining children were queued up to be interviewed separately, the nawab and begum were grilled in my presence as if they were pickpockets apprehended on the docks at Leeds, the night nurses, watchmen, chauffeurs, Sikhs, gardeners, cooks, and bottle washers were subject to a battery of questions on subjects ranging from their sexual habits, through recurring dreams and feelings about their mothers, to their recollections of Edward’s coronation and their perceptions as to the proper use of the nine iron. Finally, toward the end of the day, as the air rose from the gutters in a streaming miasma and the punkah wallah fell asleep over his task, Miss Compton-Divot was ushered into the room.

Immediately a change came over Beersley. Where he’d been officious, domineering, as devious, threatening, and assured as one of the czar’s secret police, he now flushed to his very ears, groped after his words, and seemed confused. I’d never seen anything like it. Beersley was known for his composure, his stoicism, his relentless pursuit of the evidence under even the most distracting circumstances. Even during the bloody and harrowing case of the Tiger’s Paw (in which Beersley ultimately deduced that the killer was dispatching his victims with the detached and taxidermically preserved paw of the rare golden tiger of Hyderabad), while the victims howled their death agony from the courtyard and whole families ran about in terror and confusion, he never flinched from his strenuous examination of the chief suspects. And now, here he was, in the presence of a comely russet-haired lass from Hertfordshire, as tongue-tied as a schoolboy.

“Miss Compton-Divot,” I said, to break the awkward silence. “May I present the celebrated Mr. Rupert Beersley?”

She curtsied and smiled like a plate of buttered scones.

“And may I take this opportunity to introduce myself as well?” I continued, taking her hand. “Sergeant-Major Plantagenet Randolph, retired, at your service. Please have a seat.”

I waited for Beersley to begin, but he said nothing, merely sitting there and fixing the governess with a vacuous, slack-jawed gaze. She blushed prettily and looked down to smooth her dress and arrange her petticoats. After an interval, Beersley murmured, “’And soon his eyes had drunk her beauty up, / Leaving no drop in the bewildering cup, / And still the cup was full.’”

And that was it; he had no more to say. I prompted him, but he wouldn’t be moved. Miss Compton-Divot, feeling, I think, the meaning of his stare, began to titter and twist the fabric of the dress in her hands. Finally, heaving an exhausted sigh and thinking ahead to dinner and the nawab’s fine Lisbon port, which I’d been pleased to sample the previous evening, I showed her out of the room.

That night, little Govind, aged three and a half, disappeared without a trace.

I found Beersley in the garden the following morning, bending close over a spray of blood-red orchids. Had he found something? I hurried up to him, certain he’d uncovered the minute but crucial bit of evidence from which the entire case would unravel like a skein of yarn, as when he’d determined the identity of the guilty party in the Srinagar Strangler case from a single strand of hair found among countless thousands of others in a barber’s refuse bin. Or when an improperly canceled stamp led him to the Benares Blackmailer. Or when half a gram’s worth of flaked skin painstakingly sifted from the faded homespun loincloth of a murdered harijan put him on the trail of the Leaping Leper of Mangalore. “Beersley,” I spurted in a barely suppressed yelp of excitement, “are you on to something, old boy?”

I was in for a shock. When he turned to me, I saw that the lucid reptilian sheen of his eyes had been replaced by a dull glaze: I might have been staring into the face of some old duffer in St. James’s Park rather than that of the most brilliant detective in all of Anglo-India. He merely lifted the corners of his mouth in a vapid smile and then turned back to the orchids, snuffing them with his great glorious nostrils like a cow up to his hocks in clover. It was the sun, I was sure of it. Or a touch of the malaria he’d picked up in Burma in ‘ought-two.

“Rupert!” I snapped. “Come out of it, old boy!” And then — rather roughly, I must admit — I led him to a bench in the shade of a banyan tree. The sun slammed through the leaves like a mallet. From the near distance came the anguished stentorian cries of the nawab’s prize pachyderms calling out for water. “Beersley,” I said, turning him toward me, “is it the fever? Can I get you a glass of water?”

His eyes remained fixed on a point over my left shoulder, his lips barely moved. “’Some demon’s mistress,’” he murmured, “’or the demon’s self.’”

“Talk sense!” I shouted, becoming ever more alarmed and annoyed. Here we’d been in Sivani-Hoota for some two days and we’d advanced not a step in solving the case, while children continued to disappear under our very noses. I was about to remonstrate further when I noted the clay pipe protruding from his breast pocket — and then the unmistakable odor of incinerated opium. It all became clear in that instant: he’d been up through the night, numbing his perceptions with bowl after bowl of the narcotizing drug. Something had disturbed him deeply, there was no doubt about it.

I led him straightaway to his suite of rooms in the palace’s east end and called for quinine water and hot tea. For hours, through the long, dreadful, heat-prostrated afternoon, I walked him up and down the floor, forcing the blood to wash through his veins, clear his perceptions, and resharpen his wits. By teatime he was able to sit back in an easy chair, cross his legs in the characteristic brisk manner, and unburden himself. “It’s the governess,” he croaked, “that damnable little temptress, that hussy: she’s bewitched me.”

I was thunderstruck. He might as easily have confessed that he was a homosexual or the Prince of Wales in disguise. “You don’t mean to say that some … some trifling sexual dalliance is going to come between Rupert Beersley and the pursuit of a criminal case?” My color was high, I’m sure, and my voice hot with outrage.

“No, no, no — you don’t understand,” he said, fixing me as of old with that keen insolent gaze. “Think back, Planty,” he said, lifting the teacup to his lips. “Don’t you remember the state I was in when I first came to you?”

Could I ever forget? Twenty-two or — three, straight as a ramrod, thin as a whippet, the pointed nose and outsized ears accentuated by a face wasted with rigor, he’d been so silent those first months he might as well have entered the Carthusian monastery in Grenoble as the India Corps. There’d been something eating at him then, some deep canker of the soul or heart that had driven him into exile on the subcontinent he so detested. Later, much later, he’d told me. It had been a woman, daughter of a Hertford squire: on the eve of their wedding she’d thrown him over for another man. “Yes,” I said, “of course I remember.”

He uncoiled himself from the chair, set down the teacup, and strode to the window. Below, on the polo maidan, the nawab and half a dozen of his retainers glided to and fro on pampered Arabians while the westering sun fell into the grip of a band of monsoon clouds. Beersley gazed out on the scene for half a moment, then turned to me with an emotion twenty years dead quivering in those magnificent nostrils. “Elspeth,” he said, his voice catching. “She’s her daughter.”

That evening the nawab threw a sumptuous entertainment. There was music, dancing, a display of moving lights. Turbaned Sikhs poured French wines, jugglers juggled, the begum beamed, and platter after platter of fine, toothsome morsels was set before us. I’d convinced Beersley to overcome his antipathy to native culture and accept the invitation, as a means both of drawing him out of his funk and of placating the nawab. As we were making our way into the banquet room, however, Beersley had suddenly stopped short and seized my arm. Mr. Bagwas and Mr. Patel were following close on our heels and nearly collided with us, so abruptly did we stop; Beersley waited for them to pass, then indicated a marble bench in the courtyard to our left. When we were alone he asked if I’d seen Miss Compton-Divot as we’d crossed the foyer on our way in.

“Why, yes,” I said. She’d been dressed in native costume — a saffron-colored sari and hemp sandals — and had pulled the ginger hair back from her forehead in the way of the Brahman women.

“Did you notice anything peculiar?”

“No, not a bit,” I said. “A charming girl really, nothing more.”

“Tell me,” he demanded, the old cutting edge restored to his voice, “if you didn’t see her bent over the fakir for a moment — just the hair of a moment — as we stepped through the door.”

“Well, yes, yes, old boy, I suppose I did. What of it?”

“Nothing, perhaps. But—”

At that moment we were interrupted by Mr. Bagwas, who stood grinning before us. “Most reverend gentlemen,” he said, drawing back his lips in an idiotic grin that showed off the reddened stumps of teeth ravaged over the years by the filthy habit of betel-nut chewing, “the nawab awaits.”

We were ushered to the nawab’s table and given the place of honor beside the nawab and his begum, several of the older children, Messrs. Bagwas and Patel, the nawab’s two former wives, six of his current concubines, and the keeper of the sacred monkeys. Miss Compton-Divot, I quickly ascertained”, was not present. I thought it odd, but soon forgot all about her, as we applauded the jugglers, acrobats, musicians, temple dancers, and trained bears until the night began to grow old. It was then that the nawab rose heavily to his feet, waved his hands for silence, and haw-hawed a bit before making a brief speech. “Even in the darkest hour shines a light,” he said, the customary fat pout of his lips giving way to a wistful grin. “What I mean to say, damn it, is that the begum here is pregnant, gravid, heavy with child, that even when we find ourselves swallowed up in grief over our lost lambs we discover that there is a bun in the oven after all.”

Beersley gave a snort of withering contempt and was about, I’m sure, to expatiate on the fatuity of the native mind and its lack of proportion and balance — not to mention rigor, discipline, and concentration — when the whole party was thrown into an uproar by a sudden ululating shriek emanating from the direction of the nursery. My companion was up like a hound and out the door before anyone else in the room could so much as set down a water glass. Though I tend to stoutness myself and am rather shorter of breath than I was in my military days, I was nevertheless the fourth or fifth man out the doorway, down the corridor, across the courtyard, and up the jade steps to the children’s nursery.

When I got there, heaving for breath and with the sweat standing out on my forehead, I found Beersley kneeling over the prostrate form of one of the watchmen, from between whose scapulae protruded the hilt of a cheap ten-penny nail file. The children had retreated screaming to the far end of the dormitory, where they clutched one another’s nightgowns in terror. “Poison,” Beersley said with a profound disgust at the crudity of the killer’s method as he slipped the nail file from its fatal groove. A single sniff of its bloody, sharpened point bore him out. He carefully wrapped the thing in his handkerchief, stowed it away in his breast pocket, and then leaped to his feet. “The children!” he cried. “Quickly now, line them up and count them!”

The nawab stood bewildered in the doorway; the begum went pale and fell to her knees while her retainers wrung their hands in distress and the children shuffled about confusedly, their faces tear-stained, their nightgowns a collision of sad airy clouds. And then all at once Miss Compton-Divot appeared, striding the length of the room to gather up two of her smaller wards in her lovely arms. “One,” she began, “two, three, four …” It wasn’t until several hours later that we understood what had happened. The murder in the dormitory had been a ruse. A diversion. Vallabhbhi Shiva, aged sixteen, a plump, oleaginous boy who’d sat directly across from Beersley and me during the entertainment, was nowhere to be found.

“A concentrate of the venom of the banded krait,” Beersley said, holding a test tube up to the light. It was early, not yet 9:00 A.M., and the room reeked of opium fumes. “Nasty stuff, Planty — works on the central nervous system. I calculate there was enough of it smeared on the nether end of that nail file to dispatch half the unwashables in Delhi and give the nawab’s prize pachyderms the runs for a week.”

I fell into an armchair draped with one of my companion’s Oriental dressing gowns. “Monstrous,” was all I could say.

Beersley’s eyes were lidded with the weight of the opium. His speech was slow; and yet even that powerful soporific couldn’t suppress the excitement in his voice. “Don’t you see, old boy — she’s solved the case for us.”

“Who?”

“The Lamia. It’s a little lesson in appearance and reality. Serpent’s venom indeed, the little vixen.” And then he was quoting: “‘She was a gordian shape of dazzling hue, / Vermilion-spotted, golden, green, and blue …’ Don’t you see?”

“No, Beersley,” I said, rising to my feet rather angrily and crossing the room to where the clay pipe lay on the dressing table, “no, I’m afraid I don’t.”

“It’s the motive that puzzles me,” he said, musing over the vial in his hand as I snatched the clay pipe from the table and stoutly snapped it in two. He barely noticed. All at once he was holding the nail file up before my face, cradling it carefully in its linen nest. “Do you have any idea where this was manufactured, old boy?”

I’d been about to turn on him and tell him he was off his head, about to curse his narcotizing, his non sequiturs, and the incessant bloody poetry-quoting that had me at my wits’ end, but he caught me up short. “What?”

“The nail file, old fellow.”

“Well, er, no. I hadn’t really thought much about it.”

He closed his eyes for a moment, exposing the peculiar deep-violet coloration of his eyelids. “Badham and Son, Manufacturers,” he said in a monotone, as if he were reading an advertisement. “Implements for Manicure and Pedicure, Number 17, Parsonage Lane”—and here he paused to flash open his eyes so that I felt them seize me like a pair of pincers—“Hertford.”

Again I was thunderstruck. “But you don’t mean to say that … that you suspect—?”

My conjecture was cut short by a sudden but deferential rap at the door. “Entrez,” Beersley called, the sneer he cultivated for conducting interrogations or dealing with natives and underlings scalloping his upper lip. The door swung to and a pair of shrunken little houseboys bowed into the room with our breakfast. Beersley, characteristically indifferent to the native distaste for preparing or consuming meat, had ordered kidneys, rashers, eggs, and toast with a pot of tea, jam, and catsup. He moved forward to the table, allowed himself to be seated, and then called rather sharply to the retreating form of the first servant. “You there,” he said, pushing his plate away. The servant wheeled round as if he’d been shot, exchanged a stricken look with his compatriot stationed behind the table, and bowed low. “I want the nawab’s food taster up here tout de suite—within the minute. Understand?”

“What is it, Beersley?” I said, inspecting the plate. “Looks all right to me.” But he would say nothing until the food taster arrived.

From beyond the windows came the fiendish caterwauling and great terrible belly roars of the nawab’s caged tigers as they impatiently awaited their breakfast. I stared down at the bloodied nail file a moment and then at the glistening china plate with its bulbous kidneys, lean red rashers, and golden eggs. When I looked up the food taster was standing in the doorway. He was a young man, worn about the eyes and thin as a beggar from the pressures and uncertainties of his job. He bowed his way nervously into the room and said in a tremulous voice, “You called for me, sahib?”

Beersley merely indicated the plate. “A bit of this kidney here,” he said.

The man edged forward, clumsily hacked off a portion of the suspect kidney, and, closing his eyes, popped it into his mouth, chewed perfunctorily, and swallowed. As his Adam’s apple bobbed on the recoil, he opened his eyes and smiled like a man who’s passed a harrowing ordeal. But then, alarmingly, the corners of his mouth began to drop and his limbs to tremble. Within ten seconds he was clutching his stomach, and within the minute he was stretched out prone on the floor, dead as a pharoah.

Things had taken a nasty turn. That evening, as Beersley interrogated the kitchen staff with a ferocity and doggedness unusual even for him, I found myself sniffing suspiciously at my bottle of porter, and though my stomach protested vigorously, I refused even to glance at the platter of jalebis the nawab’s personal chef had set before me. Beersley was livid. He raged, threatened, cajoled. The two houseboys who had brought the fatal kidney were so shaken that they confessed to all manner of peccancies, including the furtive eating of meat on the part of the one, and an addiction to micturating in the nawab’s soup on the part of the other — and yet clearly they were innocent of any complicity in the matter of the kidney. It was nearly midnight when Beersley dismissed the last of the kitchen servants — the third chutney spicer’s assistant — and turned to me with a face drawn with fatigue. “Planty,” he said, “I shall have your kidnapper for you by tea tomorrow.”

He was at it all night. I woke twice — at half past three and close on to six — and saw the light burning in his window across the courtyard. He was indefatigable when he was on the scent, and as I plumped the pillows and drifted off, I knew he would prove true to his word. Unfortunately, in the interval the nawab lost two more children.

The whole house was in a state of agitation the following afternoon when Beersley summoned the nawab and his begum, Messrs. Patel and Bagwas, Hugh Tureen, Miss Compton-Divot, and several other members of the household staff to “an enlightenment session” in the nawab’s library. Miss Compton-Divot, wearing a conventional English gown with bustle, sash, and uplifted bosom, stepped shyly into the room, like a fawn emerging from the bracken to cross the public highway. This was the first glimpse Beersley had allowed himself of her since the night of the entertainment and its chilling aftermath, and I saw him turn sharply away as she entered. Hugh Tureen, the game hunter, strode confidently” across the room while Mr. Patel and Mr. Bagwas huddled together in a corner over delicate little demitasses of tea and chatted village gossip. In contrast, the nawab seemed upset, angry even. He marched into the room, a little brown butterball of a man, followed at a distance by his wife, and confronted Beersley before the latter could utter a word. “I am at the end of my stamina and patience,” he sputtered. “It’s been nearly a week since you’ve arrived and the criminals are still at it. Last night it was the twins, Indira and er”—here he conferred in a brief whisper with his wife—“Indira and Sushila. Who will it be tonight?”

Outside, the monsoon recommenced with a sudden crashing fall of rain that smeared the windows and darkened the room till it might have been dusk. I listened to it hiss in the gutters like a thousand coiled snakes.

Beersley gazed down on the nawab with a look of such contempt, I almost feared he would kick him aside as one might kick an importunate cur out of the roadway, but instead he merely folded his arms and said, “I can assure you, sir, that the kidnapper is in this very room and shall be brought to justice before the hour is out.”

The ladies gasped, the gentlemen exclaimed: “What?” “Who?” “He can’t be serious?” I found myself swelling with pride. Though the case was as foggy to me as it had been on the night of our arrival, I knew that Beersley, in his brilliant and inimitable way, had solved it. When the hubbub had died down, Beersley requested that the nawab take a seat so that he might begin. I leaned back comfortably in my armchair and awaited the denouement.

“First,” Beersley said, clasping his hands behind his back and rocking to and fro on the balls of his feet, “the facts of the case. To begin with, we have a remote, half-beggared duchy under the hand of a despotic prince known for his self-indulgence and the opulence of his court—”

At once the nawab leaped angrily to his feet. “I beg your pardon, sir, but I find this most offensive. If you cannot conduct your investigation in a civil and properly respectful manner, I shall have to ask you to … to—”

“Please, please, please,” Beersley was saying as he motioned the nawab back into his seat, “be patient and you’ll soon see the method in all this. Now, as I was saying: we have a little out-of-the-way state despoiled by generations of self-serving rulers, rulers whose very existence is sufficient to provoke widespread animosity if not enmity among the populace. Next we have the mysterious and unaccountable disappearance of the current nawab’s heirs and heiresses — that is, Gopal, Abha, Shanker, Santha, Bhupinder, Bimal and Manu, Govind, Vallabhbhi Shiva, and now Indira and Sushila — beginning on a moonless night two weeks ago to this day, the initial discovery of such disappearance made by the children’s governess, one Miss Elspeth Compton-Divot.”

At the mention of the children, the begum, who was seated to my left, began to whimper softly. Miss Compton-Divot boldly held Beersley’s gaze as he named her, the two entrepreneurs — Bagwas and Patel — leaned forward attentively, and Hugh Tureen yawned mightily. As for myself, I began to feel rather sleepy. The room was terrifically hot despite the rain, and the glutinous breeze that wafted up from the punkah bathed me in sweat.

“Thus far,” Beersley continued, “we have a kidnapper whose motives remained obscure — but then the kidnapper turned murderer, and as he felt me close on his trail he attempted murder once again. And let me remind you of the method employed in both cases — a foul and feminine method, I might add — that is, the use of poison. I have here,” he said, producing the nail file, “the weapon used to kill the servant set to watch over the nawab’s flock. It is made of steel and was manufactured in England — in Hertford, to be precise.” At this point, Beersley turned to the governess and addressed her directly. “Is it not true, Miss Compton-Divot, that you were born and raised in Hertfordshire and that but six months ago you arrived in India seeking employment?”

The governess’s face lost its color in that instant. “Yes,” she stammered, “It is true, but—”

“And,” Beersley continued, approaching to within a foot of her chair and holding the nail file out before him as if it were a hot poker, “do you deny that this is your nail file, brought with you from England for some malignant purpose?”

“I don’t!” she shouted in obvious agitation. “Or rather, I do. I mean, yes, it is my nail file, but I lost it — or … or someone stole it — some weeks ago. Certainly you don’t think that I—?”

“That you are the murderer, Miss Compton-Divot?”

Her face was parchment, her pretty neck and bosom as white as if they’d never seen the light of day.

“No, my dear, not the murderer,” Beersley said, straightening himself and pacing back across the room like a great stalking cat, “but are murderer and kidnapper one and the same? But hold on a minute, let us consider the lines of the greatest poet of them all, one who knew as I do how artifice and deceit seethe through the apparent world and how tough-minded and true one must be to un-confound the illusion from the reality. ‘There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: / We know her woof,’” he intoned, and I realized that something had gone wrong, that his voice had begun to drag and his lids to droop. He fumbled over the next line or two, then paused to collect himself and cast his unsteady gaze out over the room. “’Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wing, / Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, / Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine—’”

Here I cut him off. “Beersley,” I demanded, “get on with it, old boy.” It was the opium. I could see it now. Yes, he’d been up all night with the case and with his pellucid mind, but with his opium bowl too.

He staggered back at the sound of my voice and shook his head as if to clear it, and then, whirling round, he pointed a terrible riveting finger at the game hunter and shrieked: “Here, here is your murderer!”

Tureen, a big florid fellow in puttees and boots, sprang from his chair in a rage. “What? You dare to accuse me, you … you preposterous little worm?” He would have fallen on Beersley and, I believe, torn him apart, had not the nawab’s Sikhs interceded.

“Yes, Hugh Tureen,” Beersley shouted, a barely suppressed rage shaking his voice in emotional storm, “you who’ve so long fouled yourself with the blood of beasts, you killed for the love of her, for the love of this, this”—and here the word literally burst from his lips like the great Lord’s malediction on Lucifer—“Lamia!”

A cry went round the room. “Oh yes, and she — black heart, foul seductress — led you into her web just as she led you,” he shouted, whirling on the nawab, “Yadavindra Singh. Yes, meeting with you secretly in foul unlawful embrace, professing her love while working in complicity with this man”—indicating Bag-was—“and your damned ragged fakir, to undermine your corrupt dynasty, to deprive you of your heirs, poison your wife in her sleep, and succeed to the throne as the fourth begum of Sivani-Hoota!”

Everyone in the room was on his feet. There were twenty disputations, rain crashed at the windows. Tureen raged in the arms of the Sikhs, and the nawab looked as if he were in the throes of an apoplectic fit. Over it all came the voice of Beersley, gone shrill now with excitement. “Whore!” he screamed, descending on the governess. “Conspiring with Bagwas, tempting him with your putrid charms and the lucre the nawab gave out in exchange for your favors. Yes, drugging the children and night nurses with your, quote, hot chocolate!” Beersley swung round again, this time to face the begum, who looked as confused as if she’d awakened to find herself amid the Esquimaux in Alaska. “And you, dear sinned-against lady: your little ones are dead, smothered by Bagwas and his accomplice Patel, sealed in rubber at the plant, and shipped in bulk to Calcutta. Look for them there, so that at least they may have a decent burial.”

I was at Beersley’s side now, trying to fend off the furious rushes of his auditors, but he seemed to have lost control. “Tureen!” he shrieked, “you fool, you jackanapes! You believed in this harlot, this Compton-Divot, this feminine serpent! Believed her when she lay in your disgusting arms and promised you riches when she found her way to the top! Good God!” he cried, breaking past me and rushing again at the governess, who stood shrinking in the corner, “’Lamia! Begone, foul dream!’”

It was then that the nawab’s Sikhs turned on my unfortunate companion and pinioned his arms. The nawab, rage trembling through his corpulent body, struck Beersley across the mouth three times in quick succession, and as I threw myself forward to protect him, a pair of six-foot Sikhs drew their daggers to warn me off. The rest happened so quickly I can barely reconstruct it. There was the nawab, foaming with anger, his speech about decency, citizens of the crown, and rural justice, the mention of tar and feathers, the hasty packing of our bags, the unceremonious bum’s rush out the front gate, and then the long, wearying trek in the merciless rain to the Sivani-Hoota station.

Some weeks later, an envelope with the monogram EC-D arrived in the evening mail at my bungalow in Calcutta. Inside I found a rather wounding and triumphant letter from Miss Compton-Divot. Beersley, it seemed, had been wrong on all counts. Even in identifying her with the woman he had once loved, which I believe now lay at the root of his problem in this difficult case. She was in fact the daughter of a governess herself, and had had no connection whatever with Squire Trelawney — whom she knew by reputation in Hertfordshire — or his daughter. As for the case of the missing children, she had been able, with the aid of Mr. Bagwas, to solve it herself. It seemed that practically the only suspicion in which Beersley was confirmed was his mistrust of the sadhu. Miss Compton-Divot had noticed the fellow prowling about the upper rooms in the vicinity of the children’s quarters one night, and had determined to keep a close watch on him. Along with Bagwas, she was able to tail the specious holy man to his quarters in the meanest street of Sivani-Hoota’s slums. There they hid themselves and watched as he transformed himself into a ragged beggar with a crabbed walk who hobbled through the dark streets to his station, among a hundred other beggars, outside the colonnades of the Colonial Office. To their astonishment, they saw that the beggars huddled round him — all of whom had been deprived of the power of speech owing to an operation too gruesome to report here — were in fact the children of the nawab. The beggar master was promptly arrested and the children returned to their parents.

But that wasn’t all: there remained the motive. When dragged before the nawab in chains and condemned to death by peine fort et dure, the beggar master spat forth his venom. “Don’t you recognize me?” he taunted the nawab. “Look closer.” Understanding animated the nawab’s features and a low exclamation escaped his lips: “Rajendra!” he gasped. “Yes,” sneered the beggar master, “the same. The man you wronged thirty-five years ago when you set your filthy minions on me, burned my house and barn to the ground, and took my wife for your own first begum. She turned her back on me for your promises, and you turned me out of the state to wander begging the rest of my life. I have had my revenge.” The nawab had broken down in tears, the beggar master was hauled off to be tortured to death, and the nine tongueless children were brought home to be instructed in sign language by Miss Compton-Divot, who became engaged to marry Mr. Bagwas the following week.

And so ends the baffling and ever-surprising case of the Beggar Master of Sivani-Hoota. I did not show the governess’s letter to Beersley, incidentally. I felt that he’d been under an unnatural strain over the course of the past several months, and determined instead to take him for a rest cure to a little hotel in the grassy hills of the Punjab, a place that, so they say, bears a striking resemblance to Hertfordshire.

(1983)

THE NEW MOON PARTY

There was a blizzard in the Dakotas, an earthquake in Chile, and a solar eclipse over most of the Northern Hemisphere the day I stepped up to the governor’s podium in Des Moines and announced my candidacy for the highest post in the land. As the lunar shadow crept over the Midwest like a stain in water, as noon became night and the creatures of the earth fell into an unnatural frenzy and the birds of the air fled to premature roosts, I stood in a puddle of TV lights, Lorna at my side, and calmly raked the incumbent over the coals. It was a nice campaign ploy — I think I used the term “penumbra” half a dozen times in my speech — but beyond that I really didn’t attach too much significance to the whole thing. I wasn’t superstitious. I wore no chains or amulets, I’d never had a rabbit’s foot, I attended church only because my constituents expected me to. Of portents, I knew nothing.

My awakening — I’ve always liked to refer to it as my “lunar epiphany”—came at the dog end of a disappointing campaign in the coach section of a DC-10 somewhere between Battle Creek and Montpelier. It was two months before the convention, and we were on our way to Vermont to spill some rhetoric. I was picking at something the airline optimistically called salade Madrid, my feet hurt, my digestion was shot, and the latest poll had me running dead last in a field of eight. My aides — a bunch of young Turks and electoral strong-arm men who wielded briefcases like swords and had political ambitions akin to Genghis Khan’s — were daintily masticating their rubbery coq au vin and trying to use terms like “vector,” “interface,” and “demographic volatility” in a single sentence. They were dull as doorknobs, dry as the dust on the textbooks that had given them life. Inspiration? They couldn’t have inspired a frog to croak. No, it was Lorna, former Rose Queen and USC song girl and the sweetest, lovingest wife a man could want, who was to lift me that night to the brink of inspiration even as I saw myself swallowed up in defeat.

The plane dipped, the lights flickered, and Lorna laid one of her pretty white hands on my arm. “Honey,” she whispered, with that soft throbbing City-of-Industry inflection that always made me think of surf caressing the pylons of the Santa Monica pier, “will you look at that moon?”

I stabbed at my salad in irritation, a speech about Yankee gumption, coydog control, and support prices for maple-sugar pinwheels tenting my lap, and took a hasty glance at the darkened porthole. “Yeah?” I said, and I’m sure there was more than a little edge to my voice: Couldn’t she see that I was busy, worn out, heartbroken, and defeated? Couldn’t she see I was like the old lion with a thorn in his paw, surrounded by wolves and jackals and facing his snaggle-toothed death in the political jungle? “What of it?” I snarled.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she murmured, her voice dreamy, seductive almost (had she been reading those women’s magazines again?). “It just looks so old and shabby.”

I squinted through that dark little porthole at the great black fathomless universe and saw the moon, palely glowing, looked at the moon probably for the first time in twenty years. Lorna was right. It did look pretty cheesy.

She hummed a few bars of “Shine On, Harvest Moon,” and then turned to me with those big pale eyes — still beautiful, still enough to move me after all these years — and said, “You know, if that moon was a loveseat I’d take it out to the garage and send to Bloomingdale’s for a new one.”

One of my aides — Colin or Carter or Rutherford, I couldn’t keep their names straight — was telling a joke in dialect about three Mexican gardeners and an outhouse, another was spouting demographic theory, and the stewardess swished by with a smell of perfume that hit me like a twenty-one-gun salute. It was then — out of a whirl of thoughts and impressions like cream whipped in a blender — that I had my moment of grace, of inspiration, the moment that moves mountains, solves for x, and makes a musical monument of the “Hymn to Joy,” the moment the mass of humankind lives an entire lifetime for and never experiences. “Of course,” I blurted, upending the salad in my excitement, “yes,” and I saw all the campaign trails of all the dreary, pavement-pounding, glad-handing years fall away beneath me like streamers from heaven, like ticker tape, as I turned to kiss Lorna as if I were standing before the cheering hordes on Inauguration Day.

Colin or Carter or Rutherford turned to me and said, “What is it, George — are you all right?”

“The New Moon,” I said.

Lorna was regarding me quizzically. A few of the other aides turned their heads.

I was holding my plastic cup of 7-Up aloft as if it were crystal, as if it were filled with Taittinger or Dom Pérignon. “To the New Moon!” I said with a fire and enthusiasm I hadn’t felt in years. “To the New Moon Party!”

The American people were asleep. They were dead. The great, the giving, the earnest, energetic, and righteous American people had thrown in the towel. Rape, murder, cannibalism, political upheaval in the Third World, rock and roll, unemployment, puppies, mothers, Jackie, Michael, Liza: nothing moved them. Their worst fears, most implausible dreams, and foulest conceptions were all right there in the metro section, splashed across the ever-swelling megalopic eye of the TV screen in living color and clucked over by commentators who looked as alike as bowling pins. Scandal and horror were as mundane as a yawn before bed; honor, decency, heroism, and enterprise were looked on as quaint, largely inapplicable notions that expressed an inexcusable naïveté about the way of the world. In short, no one gave a good goddamn about anything. Myself included. So how blame them when they couldn’t tell the candidates apart, didn’t bother to turn out at the polls, neither knew nor cared whether the honorable Mr. P. stood for Nazi rebirth or federally funded electronic walkers for the aged and infirm?

I’d seen it all, and nothing stirred me, either. Ultraism, conservatism, progressivism, communism, liberalism, neofascism, parties of the right, left, center, left of center, and oblate poles: who cared? I didn’t even know why I was running. I’d served my two terms as a fresh-faced, ambitious young representative during the Eisenhower years, fought through three consecutive terms in the senatorial wars, wielded the sword of power and influence in the most armor-plated committees on the Hill, and been twice elected governor of Iowa on a platform that promised industrial growth, environmental protection, and the eradication of corn blight through laser technology. And yet, for all that, I wasn’t satisfied. I guess, even at sixty-one, I was still afflicted with those hungry pangs of ambition that every boy who can’t play center field for the Yankees will never wholly shake: I wanted to be top dog, kick off my shoes in the Oval Office, and stir up a fuss wherever I went; I wanted to climb high atop the mountain and look down on the creeping minuscule figures of queens, rock stars, matinee idols, and popes. It was a cold life in a comfortless universe; I didn’t believe in God, afterlife, or leprechauns. I wanted to make my mark on history — what else was there?

And so I — we — came up with the issue that would take the country — no, the world itself — by storm. From the moment of my epiphany on that rattling howling DC-10 I never said another word about taxes, inflation, Social Security, price supports, or the incumbent’s lamentable record on every key issue from the decentralization of the Boy Scouts to relations with the Soviet Union. No, I talked only of the New Moon. The moon we were going to build, to create, to hurl into the sky to take its place among the twinkling orbs of the night and recover the dignity and economic stability of America in the process. Jupiter had twelve moons, Saturn ten, Uranus five. What were we? Where was our global pride when we could boast but one craggy, acne-ridden bulb blighting the nighttime sky? A New Moon. A New Moon Soon: it was on my lips like a battle cry.

In Montpelier they thought I’d gone mad. An audience of thirty-seven had turned out at the local ag school to hear me talk about coydogs and maple-sugar pinwheels, but I gave them a dose of the New Moon instead. I strode out onto the stage like a man reborn (which I was), shredded my prepared speech, and flung it like confetti over their astonished heads, my arms spread wide, the spontaneous, thrilling message of the lunar gospel pouring from me in evangelical fervor, LUNACY, mocked the morning headlines, THORKELSSON MOONSTRUCK. But the people listened. They murmured in Montpelier, applauded lightly — hands chapped and dry as comhusks — in Rutland. In Pittsburgh, where I really began to hit my stride (I talked of nothing but the steel it would take to piece together the superstructure of the new satellite), they got up on tables and cheered. The American people were tired of party bickering, vague accusations, and even vaguer solutions; they were sick to death of whiz-kid economists, do-nothing legislatures, and the nightmare specter of nuclear war. They wanted joy, simplicity, a goal as grand as Manifest Destiny and yet as straightforward and unequivocal as a bank statement. The New Moon gave it to them.

By the time the convention rolled around, the New Moon was waxing full. I remember the way the phones rang off the hook: would we take a back seat to Fritz, throw our support to John, accept the VP nomination on a split-issue platform? Seven weeks earlier no one had even deigned to notice us — half the time we didn’t even get press coverage. But New Moon fever was sweeping the country — we’d picked up a bundle of delegates, won in Texas, Ohio, and California, and suddenly we were a force to reckon with.

“George,” Colin was saying (I’m sure it was Colin, because I’d canned Carter and Rutherford to avoid the confusion), “I still say we’ve got to broaden our base. The one issue has taken us leagues, I admit it, but—”

I cut him off. I was George L. Thorkelsson, former representative, former senator, and current governor of the Mesopotamia of the Midwest, the glorious, farinaceous, black-loamed hogbutt of the nation, and I wasn’t about to listen to any defeatist twaddle from some Ivy League pup. “Hey diddle, diddle,” I said, “the cat and the fiddle.” I was feeling pretty good.

It was then that Gina — Madame Scutari, that is — spoke up. Lorna and I had discovered her in the kitchen of Mama Gina’s, a Nashville pasta house, during the Tennessee primary. She’d made an abbacchio alla cacciatora that knocked my socks off, and when we’d gone back to congratulate her she’d given me a look of such starstruck devotion I felt like the new Messiah. It seemed that the Madame (who wasn’t Italian at all, but Hungarian) was a part-time astrologist and clairvoyant, and had had a minor seizure at the very moment of my epiphany in the DC-10—her left arm had gone numb and she’d pitched forward into a platter of antipasto with the word “lunar” on her lips. She told us all this in a rush of malaproprisms and tortured syntax, while cauldrons of marinara sauce bubbled around her and her faintly mustachioed upper lip rose and fell like a shuttlecock. Then she’d leaned forward to whisper in my ear like a priestess of the oracle. Leo, she’d said, hitting my sign on the nose, Scorpio in the ascendant. Then she drew up her rouged face and gave me a broad Magyar wink and I could feel her lips moving against my ear: A New Moon Soon, she rasped. From that moment on she’d become one of my closest advisers.

Now she cleared her throat with a massive dignity, her heavy arms folded over her bust, and said, in that delicate halting accent that made you feel she could read the future like a Neapolitan menu, “Not to worry, Georgie: I see you rising like the lion coming into the tenth house.”

“But George”—Colin was nearly whining—“gimmicks are okay, but they can only take you so far. Think of the political realities.”

Lorna and the Madame exchanged a look. I watched as a smile animated my wife’s features. It was a serene smile, visionary, the smile of a woman who already saw herself decked out in a gown like a shower of gold and presiding over tea in the Blue Room.

I turned to Colin and tersely reminded him of the political realities his late colleagues were currently facing. “We need no naysayers here,” I added. “You’re either on the bus or you’re off it.” He looked at me as if he were about to say something he would regret, but the Madame cut him off, her voice elevated yet soft, the syllables falling together with a kiss that cut through the confusion and the jangling of telephones like a benediction: “Promise them the moon,” she said.

The convention itself was child’s play. We’d captured the imagination of the country, restored the average workingman’s faith in progress, given America a cause to stand up and shout about. We split the thing down the middle and I took my delegates outside the party to form the first significant rump party since the days of Henry Wallace. We were the New Moon Party and they came to us in droves. Had anyone ever stopped to consider how many amateur astrologists there were out there? How many millions who decided their every move — from love affairs to travel plans to stock purchases and the most auspicious time for doing their nails — according to the conjunction of the planets and the phases of the moon? Or how many religious fanatics and sci-fi freaks there were, Trek-kies, lunatics, werewolves, extraterrestrialists, saucer nuts, and the like? Not to mention women, who’ve had to carry that white-goddess baggage around with them since the dawn of time. Well, here was an issue that could unite them all. Nixon had put men on the moon; I was going to bring the moon to men. And women.

Oh, there were the usual cries of outrage and anathema, the usual blockheads, whiners, and pleaders, but we paid them no heed. NASA was behind us, one hundred percent. So were U.S. Steel, the AFL–CIO, the Teamsters, Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Big Oil, and just about anyone else in the country who worked for a living. A New Moon. Just think of the jobs it would create!

The incumbent — a man twelve years my senior who looked as if he’d been stuffed with sand — didn’t stand a chance. Oh, they painted him up and pointed him toward the TV monitors and told him when to laugh or cry or make his voice tremble with righteousness, and they had him recite the usual litany about the rights of the rich and the crying need for new condos on Maui, and they prodded him to call the New Moon a hoax, a technological impossibility, a white elephant, and a liberal-humanist threat to the integrity of the interplanetary heavens, but all to no avail. It almost hurt me to see his bowed head, smeared blusher, and plasticized hair as he conceded defeat to a national TV audience after I’d swept every precinct in the country with the exception of a handful in Santa Barbara, where he’d beaten me by seventeen votes, but what the hell. This was no garden party, this was politics.

Sadly, however, unity and harmony are not the way of the world, and no leader, no matter how visionary — not Napoleon, not Caesar, not Mohammed, Louis XVI, Jim Jones, or Jesus of Nazareth — can hope to stave off the tide of discord, malcontent, envy, hatred, and sheer seething anarchy that inevitably rises up to crush him with the force of a tidal wave. And so it was, seven years later, my second term drawing to a close and with neither hope nor precedent for a third, that I found the waves crashing at my very doorstep. I, who had been the most heralded chief executive in the country’s history, I, who had cut across social strata, party differences, ethnic divisions, and international mistrust with my vision of a better world and a better future, was well on my way to becoming the most vilified world leader since Attila the Hun.

Looking back on it, I can see that perhaps my biggest mistake was in appointing Madame Scutari to my Cabinet. The problem wasn’t so much her lack of experience — I understand that now — but her lack of taste. She took something truly grand — a human monument before which all the pyramids, Taj Mahals, and World Trade Centers paled by comparison — and made it tacky. For that I will never forgive her.

At any rate, when I took office back in January of ‘85, I created a new Cabinet post that would reflect the chief priority of my administration — I refer to the now infamous post of secretary for Lunar Affairs — and named Gina to occupy it. Though she’d had little formal training, she knew her stars and planets cold, and she was a woman of keen insight and studied judgment. I trusted her implicitly. Besides which, I was beleaguered by renegade scientists, gypsies, sci-fi hacks (one of whom was later to write most of my full-moon address to the nation), amateur inventors, and corporation execs, all clamoring for a piece of the action — and I desperately needed someone to sort them out. Gina handled them like diners without reservations.

The gypsies, Trekkies, diviners, haruspices, and the like were apparently pursuing a collective cosmic experience, something that would ignite the heavens; the execs — from U.S. Steel to IBM to Boeing to American Can — wanted contracts. After all, the old moon was some 2,160 miles in diameter and eighty-one quintillion tons of dead weight, and they figured whatever we were going to do would take one hell of a lot of construction. Kaiser proposed an aluminum-alloy shell filled with Styrofoam, to be shuttled piecemeal into space and constructed by robots on location. The Japanese wanted to mold it out of plastic, while Firestone saw a big synthetic gold-ball sort of thing and Con Ed pushed for a hollow cement glove that could be used as a repository for nuclear waste. And it wasn’t just the big corporations, either — it seemed every crank in the country was suddenly a technological wizard. A retired gym teacher from Sacramento suggested an inflatable ball made of simulated pigskin, and a pizza magnate from Brooklyn actually proposed a chicken-wire sphere coated with raw dough. Bake it with lasers or something, he wrote, it’ll harden like rock. Believe me. During those first few heady months in office the proposals must have come in at the rate of ten thousand a day.

If I wasn’t equipped to deal with them (I’ve always been an idea man myself), Gina was. She conferred before breakfast, lunched three or four times a day, dined and brunched, and kept a telephone glued to her head as if it were a natural excrescence. “No problem,” she told me. “I’ll have a proposal for you by June.”

She was true to her word.

I remember the meeting at which she presented her findings as keenly as I remember my mother’s funeral or the day I had my gall bladder removed. We were sitting around the big mahogany table in the conference room, sipping coffee. Gina flowed through the door in a white caftan, her arms laden with clipboards and blueprints, looking pleased with herself. She took a seat beside Lorna, exchanged a bit of gossip with her in a husky whisper, then leaned across the table and cleared her throat. “Glitter,” she said, “that’s what we want, Georgie. Something bright, something to fill up the sky and screw over the astrological charts forever.” Lorna, who’d spent the afternoon redesigning the uniforms of the Scouts of America (they were known as Space Cadets now, and the new unisex uniforms were to feature the spherical New Moon patch over the heart), sat nodding at her side. They were grinning conspiratonally, like a pair of matrons outfitting a parlor.

“Glitter?” I echoed, smiling into the face of their enthusiasm. “What did you have in mind?”

The Madame closed her heavy-lidded gypsy eyes for a moment, then flashed them at me like a pair of blazing guns. “The Bonaventure Hotel, Georgie — in L.A.? You know it?”

I shook my head slowly, wondering what she was getting at.

“Mirrors,” she said.

I just looked at her.

“Fields of them; Georgie, acres upon acres. Just think of the reflective power! Our moon, your moon — it’ll outshine that old heap of rock and dust ten times over.”

Mirrors. The simplicity of it, the beauty. I felt the thrill of her inspiration, pictured the glittering triumphant moon hanging there like a jewel in the sky, bright as a supernova, bright as the star of Bethlehem. No, brighter, brighter by far. The flash of it would illuminate the darkest corners, the foulest alleys, drive back the creatures of darkness and cut the crime rate exponentially. George L. Thorkelsson, I thought, light giver. “Yes,” I said, my voice husky with emotion, “yes.”

But Filencio Salmón, author of The Ravishers of Pentagord and my chief speech writer, rose to object. “Wees all due respet, Meeser Presiden, these glass globe goin’ to chatter like a gumball machine the firs’ time a meteor or anytin’ like that run into it. What you wan eeze sometin’ strong, Teflon maybe.”

“Not shiny enough,” Gina countered, exchanging a hurt look with Lorna. Obviously she hadn’t thought very deeply about the thing if she hadn’t even taken meteors into account. Christ, she was secretary for Lunar Affairs, with two hundred JPL eggheads, selenologists, and former astronauts on her staff, and that was the best she could come up with?

I leaned back in my chair and looked over the crestfallen faces gathered round the table — Gina, Lorna, Salmón, my national security adviser, the old boy in the Philip Morris outfit we sent out for sandwiches. “Listen,” I said, feeling wise as Solomon, “the concept is there — we’ll work out a compromise solution.”

No one said a word.

“We’ve got to. The world’s depending on us.”

We settled finally on stainless steel. Well buffed, and with nothing out there to corrode it, it would have nearly the same reflective coefficient as glass, and it was one hell of a lot more resistant. More expensive too, but when you’ve got a project like this, what’s a hundred billion more or less? Anyway, we farmed out the contracts and went into production almost immediately. We had decided, after the usual breast-beating, shouting matches, resignations, and reinstatements, on a shell of jet-age plastic strengthened by steel girders, and a façade — one side only — of stainless-steel plates the size of Biloxi, Mississippi. Since we were only going up about eighty thousand miles, we figured we could get away with a sphere about one-third the size of the old moon: its proximity to earth would make it appear so much larger.

I don’t mean to minimize the difficulty of all this. There were obstacles both surmountable and insurmountable, technologies to be invented, resources to be tapped, a great wealthy nation to be galvanized into action. My critics — and they were no small minority, even in those first few euphoric years — insisted that the whole thing was impossible, a pipe dream at best. They were defeatists, of course, like Colin (for whom, by the way, I found a nice little niche in El Salvador as assistant to the ambassador’s bodycount man), and they didn’t faze me in the least. No, I figured that if in the space of the six years of World War II man could go from biplanes and TNT to jets and nuclear bombs, anything was possible if the will was there. And I was right. By the time my first term wound down we were three-quarters of the way home, the economy was booming, the unemployment rate approaching zero for the first time since the forties, and the Cold War defrosted. (The Russians had given over stockpiling missiles to work on their own satellite project. They were rumored to be constructing a new planet in Siberia, and our reconnaissance photos showed that they were indeed up to something big — something, in fact, that looked like a three-hundred-mile-long eggplant inscribed at intervals with the legend NOVAYA SMOLENSK.) Anyway, as most of the world knows, the Republicans didn’t even bother to field a candidate in ‘88, and New Moon fever had the national temperature hovering up around the point of delirium.

Then, as they say, the shit hit the fan.

To have been torn to pieces like Orpheus or Mussolini, to have been stretched and broken on the rack or made to sing “Hello Dolly” at the top of my lungs while strapped naked to a carny horse driven through the House of Representatives would have been pleasure compared to what I went through the night we unveiled the New Moon. What was to have been my crowning triumph — my moment of glory transcendent — became instead my most ignominious defeat. In an hour’s time I went from savior to fiend.

For seven years, along with the rest of the world, I’d held my breath. Through all that time, through all the blitz of TV and newspaper reports, the incessant interviews with project scientists and engineers, the straw polls, moon crazes, and marketing ploys, the New Moon had remained a mystery. People knew how big it was, they could plot its orbit and talk of its ascending and descending nodes and how many million tons of materials had gone into its construction — but they’d yet to see it. Oh, if you looked hard enough you could see that something was going on up there, but it was as shadowy and opaque as the blueprint of a dream. Even with the telescope — and believe me, many’s the night I spent at Palomar with a bunch of professional stargazers, or out on the White House lawn with the Questar QM 1 Lorna gave me for Christmas — you couldn’t make out much more than a dark circle punched out of the great starry firmament as if with a cookie cutter.

Of course, we’d planned it that way. Right from the start we’d agreed that the best policy was to keep the world guessing — who wanted to see a piecemeal moon, after all, a moon that grew square by square in the night sky like some crazy checkerboard or something? This was no department store going up on West Twenty-third Street — this was something extraordinary, unique, this was the quintessence of man’s achievement on the planet, and it should be served up whole or not at all. It was Salmón, in a moment of inspiration, who came up with the idea of putting the reflecting plates on the far side, facing out on the deeps of the universe, and then swinging the whole business around by means of initial-thrust and retro-rockets for a triumphant — and politically opportune — unveiling. I applauded him. Why not? I thought. Why not milk this thing for everything it was worth?

The night of the unveiling was clear and moonless. Lorna sat beside me on the dais, regal and resplendent in a Halston moonglow gown that cost more than the combined gross product of any six towns along the Iowa-Minnesota border. Gina was there too, of course, looking as if she’d just won a fettuccine cook-off in Naples, and the audience of celebrities, foreign ambassadors, and politicos gathered on the south lawn numbered in the thousands. Outside the gates, in darkness, three-quarters of a million citizens milled about with spherical white-moon candles, which were to be lit at the moment the command was given to swing the New Orb into view. Up and down the Eastern Seaboard, in Quebec and Ontario, along the ridge of the Smokies, and out to the verge of the Mississippi, a hush fell over the land as municipalities big and small cut their lights.

Ferenc Syzgies, the project’s chief engineer, delivered an interminable speech peppered with terms like “photometric function” and “fractional pore space.” Anita Bryant sang a couple of spirituals, and finally Luciano Pavarotti rose to do a medley of “Moon River,” “Blue Moon,” and “That’s Amore.” Lorna leaned over and took my hand as the horns stepped in on the last number. “Nervous?” she whispered.

“No,” I murmured, but my throat had thickened till I felt I was going to choke. They’d assured me there would be no foul-ups — but nothing like this had ever been attempted before, and who could say for sure?

“When-a the moon-a hits your eye like a big pizza pie,” sang Pavarotti, “that’s amore.” The dignitaries shifted in their seats, Lorna was whispering something I couldn’t hear, and then Coburn, the VP, was introducing me.

I stood and stepped to the podium to spontaneous, thrilling and sustained applause, Salmón’s speech clutched in my hand, the shirt collar chafing at my neck like a garrote. Flashbulbs popped, the TV cameras seized on me like the hungry eyes of great mechanical insects, faces leaped out of the crowd: here a senator I loathed sitting cheek by jowl with a lobbyist from the Sierra Club, there a sour-faced clergyman I’d prayed beside during a dreary rally seven years earlier. The glowing, corn-fed visage of Miss Iowa materialized just beneath the podium, and behind her sat Coretta King, Tip O’Neill, Barbra Streisand, Carl Sagan, and Mickey Mantle, all in a row. The applause went on for a full five minutes. And then suddenly the audience were on their feet and singing “God Bless America” as if their lives depended on it. When they were finished, I held up my hands for silence and began to read.

Salmón had outdone himself. The speech was measured, hysterical, opaque, and lucid. My voice rang triumphantly through the PA system, rising in eulogy, trembling with visionary fervor, dropping to an emotion-choked whisper as I found myself taking on everything from the birth of the universe to Conestoga wagons and pioneer initiative. I spoke of interstellar exploration, of the movie industry and Dixieland jazz, of the great selfless, uncontainable spirit of the American people, who, like latter-day Prometheuses, were giving over the sacred flame to the happy, happy generations to come. Or something like that. I was about halfway through when the New Orb began to appear in the sky over my shoulder.

The first thing I remember was the brightness of it. Initially there was just a sliver of light, but the sliver quickly grew to a crescent that lit the south lawn as if on a July morning. I kept reading. “The gift of light,” I intoned, but no one was listening. As the thing began to swing round to full, the glare of it became insupportable. I paused to gaze down at the faces before me: they were awestruck, panicky, disgusted, violent, enraptured. People had begun to shield their eyes now; some of the celebrities and musicians slipped on sunglasses. It was then that the dogs began to howl. Faintly at first, a primal yelp here or there, but within thirty seconds every damn hound, mongrel, and cur in the city of Washington was baying at the moon as if they hadn’t eaten in a week. It was unnerving, terrifying. People began to shout, and then to shove one another.

I didn’t know what to do. “Well, er,” I said, staring into the cameras and waving my arm with a theatrical flourish, “ladies and gentleman, the New Moon!”

Something crazy was going on. The shoving had stopped as abruptly as it had begun, but now, suddenly and inexplicably, the audience started to undress. Right before me, on the platform, in the seats reserved for foreign diplomats, out over the seething lawn, they were kicking off shoes, hoisting shirt fronts and brassieres, dropping cummerbunds and Jockey shorts. And then, incredibly, horribly, they began to clutch at one another in passion, began to stroke, fondle, and lick, humping in the grass, plunging into the bushes, running around like nymphs and satyrs at some mad bacchanal. A senator I’d known for forty years went by me in a dead run, pursuing the naked wife of the Bolivian ambassador; Miss Iowa disappeared beneath the rhythmically heaving buttocks of the sour-faced clergyman; Lorna was down to a pair of six-hundred-dollar bikini briefs and I suddenly found to my horror that I’d begun to loosen my tie.

Madness, lunacy, mass hypnosis, call it what you will: it was a mess. Flocks of birds came shrieking out of the trees, cats appeared from nowhere to caterwaul along with the dogs, congressmen rolled about on the ground, grabbing for flesh and yipping like animals — and all this on national television! I felt lightheaded, as if I were about to pass out, but then I found I had an erection and there before me was this cream-colored thing in a pair of high-heeled boots and nothing else, Lorna had disappeared, it was bright as noon in Miami, dogs, cats, rats, and squirrels were howling like werewolves, and I found that somehow I’d stripped down to my boxer shorts. It was then that I lost consciousness. Mercifully.

These days, I am not quite so much in the public eye. In fact, I live in seclusion. On a lake somewhere in the Northwest, the Northeast, or the Deep South, my only company a small cadre of Secret Service men. They are laconic sorts, these Secret Service men, heavy of shoulder and head, and they live in trailers set up on a ridge behind the house. To a man, they are named Greg or Craig.

And as those who read this will know, all our efforts to modify the New Moon (Coburn’s efforts, that is: I was in hiding) were doomed to failure. Syzgies’s replacement, Klaus Erkhardt the rocket expert, had proposed tarnishing the stainless-steel plates with payloads of acid, but the plan had proved unworkable, for obvious reasons. Meanwhile, a coalition of unlikely bedfellows — Syria, Israel, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Great Britain, Argentina, the Soviet Union, and China among them — had demanded the “immediate removal of this plague upon our heavens,” and in this country we came as close to revolution as we had since the 1770s.

Coburn did the best he could, but the following November, Colin, Carter, and Rutherford jumped parties and began a push to re-elect the man I’d defeated in ‘84 on the New Moon ticket. He was old — antediluvian, in fact — but not appreciably changed in either appearance or outlook, and he was swept into office in a landslide. The New Moon, which had been blamed for everything from causing rain in the Atacama to fomenting a new baby boom, corrupting morals, bestializing mankind, and making the crops grow upside down in the Far East, was obliterated by a nuclear thunderbolt a month after he took office.

On reflection, I can see that I was wrong — I admit it. I was an optimist, I was aggressive, I believed in man and in science, I challenged the heavens and dared to tamper with the face of the universe and its inscrutable design — and I paid for it as swiftly and surely as anybody in all the tragedies of Shakespeare, Sophocles, and Dashiell Hammett. Gina dropped me like a plate of hot lasagna and went back to her restaurant, Colin stabbed me in the back, and Coburn, once he’d taken over, refused to refer to me by name — I was known only as his “predecessor.” I even lost Lorna. She left me after the debacle of the unveiling and the impeachment that followed precipitately on its heels, left me to “explore new feelings,” as she put it. “I’ve got to get it out of my system,” she told me, a strange glow in her eyes. “I’m sorry, George.”

Hell yes, I was wrong. But just the other night I was out on the lake with one of the Secret Service men — Greg, I think it was — fishing for yellow perch, when the moon — the age-old, scar-faced, native moon — rose up out of the trees like an apparition. It was yellow as the underbelly of the fish on the stringer, huge with atmospheric distortion. I whistled. “Will you look at that moon,” I said.

Greg just stared at me, noncommittal.

“That’s really something, huh?” I said.

No response.

He was smart, this character — he wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. I was just talking to hear myself anyway. Actually, I was thinking the damn thing did look pretty cheesy, thinking maybe where I’d gone wrong was in coming up with a new moon instead of just maybe bulldozing the old one or something. I began to picture it: lie low for a couple years, then come back with a new ticket—Clean Up the Albedo, A New Face for an Old Friend, Save the Moon!

But then there was a tug on the line, and I forgot all about it.

(1983)

THE SECOND SWIMMING

Mao flicks on the radio. Music fills the room, half notes like the feet of birds. It is a martial tune, the prelude from “The Long March.” Then there are quotations from Chairman Mao, read in a voice saturated with conviction, if a trifle nasal. A selection of the Chairman’s poetry follows. The three constantly read articles. And then the aphorism for the hour. Mao sits back, the gelid features imperceptibly softening from their habitual expression of abdominal anguish. He closes his eyes.

FIGHTING LEPROSY WITH REVOLUTIONARY OPTIMISM

Chang Chiu-chu of the Kunghui Commune found one day that the great toe of his left foot had become leprous. When the revisionist surgeons of the urban hospital insisted that they could not save the toe but only treat the disease and hope to contain it, Chang went to Kao Fei-fu, a revolutionary machinist of the commune. Kao Fei-fu knew nothing of medicine but recalled to Chang the Chairman’s words: “IF YOU WANT KNOWLEDGE, YOU MUST TAKE PART IN THE PRACTICE OF CHANGING REALITY. IF YOU WANT TO KNOW THE TASTE OF A PEAR, YOU MUST CHANGE THE PEAR BY EATING IT YOURSELF.” Kao then inserted needles in Chang’s spinal column to a depth of 18 fen. The following day Chang Chiu-chu was able to return to the paddies. When he thanked Kao Fei-fu, Kao said: “Don’t thank me, thank Chairman Mao.”

Mao’s face attempts a paternal grin, achieves the logy and listless. Out in the square he can hear the planetary hum of 500,000 voices singing “The East Is Red.” It is his birthday. He will have wieners with Grey Poupon mustard for breakfast.

How he grins, Hung Ping-chung, hurrying through the congested streets (bicycles, oxcarts, heads, collars, caps), a brown-paper parcel under one arm, cardboard valise under the other. In the brown-paper parcel, a pair of patched blue jeans for his young wife, Wang Ya-chin. Haggled off the legs of a Scandinavian tourist in Japan. For 90,000 yen. In the cardboard valise, Hung’s underwear, team jacket, paddle. The table-tennis team has been on tour for thirteen months. Hung thirsts for Wang.

There is a smear of mustard on Mao’s nose when the barber clicks through the bead curtains. The barber has shaved Mao sixteen hundred and seven times. He bows, expatiates on the dimension of the honor he feels in being of personal service to the Revolutionary Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party. He then congratulates the Chairman on his birthday. “Long live Chairman Mao!” he shouts. “A long, long life to him!” Then he dabs the mustard from Mao’s nose with a flick of his snowy towel.

Mao is seated in the lotus position, hands folded in his lap. Heavy of jowl, abdomen, nates. The barber strops.

“On the occasion of my birthday,” says Mao, “I will look more like the Buddha.” His voice is parched, riding through octaves like the creak of a rocking chair.

“The coiffure?”

Mao nods. “Bring the sides forward a hair, and take the top back another inch. And buff the pate.”

Out on the Lei Feng Highway a cold rain has begun to fall. Chang Chiu-chu and his pig huddle in the lee of a towering monolithic sculpture depicting Mao’s emergency from the cave at Yenan. Peasants struggle by, hauling carts laden with produce. Oxen bleat. A bus, the only motorized vehicle on the road, ticks up the hill in the distance. Chang’s slippers are greasy with mud. He is on his way to the city to personally thank Mao for the healing of his great toe (the skin has gone from black to gray and sensation has begun to creep back like an assault of pinpricks) and to present the Chairman with his pig. There are six miles to go. His feet hurt. He is cold. But he recalls a phrase of the Chairman’s: “I CARE NOT THAT THE WIND BLOWS AND THE WAVES BEAT: IT IS BETTER THAN IDLY STROLLING IN A COURTYARD,” and he recalls also that he has a gourd of maotai (120 proof) in his sleeve. He pours a drink into his thermos-cup, mixes it with hot water and downs it. Then lifts a handful of cold rice from his satchel and begins to chew. He pours another drink. It warms his digestive machinery like a shot of Revolutionary Optimism.

Hung is two blocks from home, hurrying, the collar of his pajamas fastened against the cold, too preoccupied to wonder why he and his class brothers wear slippers and pajamas on the street rather than overshoes and overcoats. He passes under a poster: fierce-eyed women in caps and fatigues hurtling toward the left, bayonets and automatic weapons in hand. It is an advertisement for a ballet: “The Detachment of Red Women.” Beneath it, a slogan, the characters big as washing machines, black on red: “GET IN THE HABIT OF NOT SPITTING ON THE GROUND AT RANDOM.” The phlegm catches in his throat.

When Hung turns into his block, his mouth drops. The street has been painted red. The buildings are red, the front stoops are red, the railings are red, the lampposts are red, the windows are red, the pigeons are red. A monumental poster of Mao’s head drapes the center of the block like an arras and clusters of smaller heads dot the buildings. Hung clutches the package to his chest, nods to old Chiung-hua where she sits on her stoop, a spot of gray on a carmine canvas, and takes the steps to his apartment two at a time.

Wang is in bed. The apartment is cold, dark. “Wang!” he shouts. “I’m back!” She does not rise to meet him, to leap into his arms in her aggressive elastic way (she a former tumbler, their romance a blossom of the People’s Athletic and Revolutionary Fitness Academy). Something is wrong. “Wang!” She turns her black eyes to him and all at once he becomes aware of the impossible tumescence of the blanket spread over her. What is she concealing? She bites the corner of the blanket and groans, the labor pains coming fiercer now.

Hung is stung. Drops package and valise. Begins to count the months on his fingers. All thirteen of them. His face shrinks to the size of a pea. “Wang, what have you done?” he stammers.

Her voice is strained, unsteady: “YOU CAN’T SOLVE A PROBLEM? WELL, GET DOWN AND INVESTIGATE THE PRESENT FACTS AND THEIR PAST HISTORY.”

“You’ve been unfaithful!”

“Don’t thank me,” she croaks, “thank Chairman Mao.”

Mao’s eyes are closed. His cheeks glow, freshly shaven. In his face, the soapy warm breath of the barber: in his ears, the snip-snip of the barber’s silver scissors. His shanks and seat and the small of his back register the faint vibration of the 500,000 voices ringing in the square. A warmth, an electricity tingling through the wood of the chair. Snip-snip.

Mao’s dream is immediate and vivid. The sun breaking in the east, sweet marjoram on the breeze, crickets singing along the broad base of the Great Wall, a sound as of hidden fingers working the blades of a thousand scissors. The times are feudal. China is disunited, the Han Dynasty in decline, the Huns (Hsiung-nu) demanding tribute of gold, spices, silk and the soft, uncallused hands of the Emperor’s daughters. They wear impossible fierce mustaches stiffened with blood and mucus, these Huns, and they keep the rain from their backs with the stretched skin of murdered children. An unregenerate lot. Wallowing in the sins of revisionism and capitalist avarice. Mao, a younger man, his brow shorter, eyes clearer, jowls firmer, stands high atop the battlements supervising the placement of the final stone. The Great Wall, he calls it, thinking ahead to the Great Leap Forward and the Great Hall of the People. Fifteen hundred miles long. Forty feet high, sixteen across.

In the distance, a duststorm, a whirlwind, a thousand acres of topsoil flung into the air by the terrible thundering hoofs of the Huns’ carnivorous horses. Their battle cry is an earthquake, their breath the death of a continent. On they come, savage as steel, yabbering and howling over the clattering cannonade of the horsehoofs while Mao’s peasants pat the mortar in place and quick-fry wonton in eighty-gallon drums of blistering oil. Mao stands above them all, the khaki collar visible beneath the red silk robe smoothing his thighs in the breeze. In his hand, held aloft, a Ping-Pong paddle.

The Huns rein their steeds. They are puzzled, their babble like the disquisitions of camels and jackals. From a breezy pocket Mao produces the eggshell-frail ball, sets it atop the paddle. The grizzled Hun-chief draws closer, just beneath the rippling Chairman. “Hua?” he shouts. Mao looks down. Cups his hands to his mouth: “Volley for serve.”

Chang is having problems with his legs, feet. The left is reluctant to follow the right, and when it does, the right is reluctant to follow suit. To complicate matters the leprous toe has come to life (feeling very much like a fragment of glowing iron pounded flat on an anvil), and the pig has become increasingly insistent about making a wallow of the puddled road. A finger-thick brass ring pierces the pig’s (tender) septum. This ring is fastened to a cord which is in turn fastened to Chang’s belt. From time to time Chang gives the cord a tug, gentle persuader.

Ahead the buildings of the city cut into the bleak horizon like a gap-toothed mandible. The rain raises welts in the puddles, thrushes wing overhead, a man approaches on a bicycle. Chang pauses for a nip of maotai, as a sort of internal liniment for his throbbing toe, when suddenly the pig decides to sit, flip, flounder and knead the mud of the road with its rump. The cord jerks violently. Chang hydroplanes. Drops his gourd. Comes to rest in a dark puddle abob with what appears to be spittle randomly spat. He curses the animal’s revisionist mentality.

There are two framed photographs on the wall over Wang’s bed. One a full-face of Mao Tse-tung, the other a profile of Liu Ping-pong, originator of table tennis. Hung tears the Mao from the wall and tramples it underfoot. Wang sings out her birth-pangs. In the street, old Chiung-hua totters to her feet, listening. Her ancient ears, withered like dried apricots, tell her the first part of the story (the raised voice, slamming door, footsteps on the stairs), and the glassy eyes relay the rest (Hung in the crimson street, flailing at the gargantuan head of Mao suspended just above his reach like the proud stiff sail of a schooner; his use of stones, a broom, a young child; his frustration; his rabid red-mouthed dash down the length of the street and around the corner).

Chiung-hua sighs. Mao’s head trembles in a gust. Wang cries out. And then the old woman hikes her skirts and begins the long painful ascent of the stairs, thinking of white towels and hot water and the slick red skulls of her own newborn sons and daughters, her spotted fingers uncertain on the banister, eyes clouding in the dark hallway, lips working over a phrase of Mao’s like a litany: “WHAT WE NEED IS AN ENTHUSIASTIC BUT CALM STATE OF MIND AND INTENSE BUT ORDERLY WORK.”

Mao is planted on one of the few toilet seats in China. The stall is wooden, fitted with support bars of polished bamboo. A fan rotates lazily overhead. An aide waits without. The Chairman is leaning to one side, penknife in hand, etching delicate Chinese characters into the woodwork. The hot odor that rises round him tells of aging organs and Grey Poupon mustard. He sits back to admire his work.

IMPERIALISM IS A PAPER TIGER

But then he leans forward again, the penknife working a refinement. The aide taps at the stall door. “Yes?” says Mao. “Nothing,” says the aide. Mao folds the blade back into its plastic sheath. The emendation pleases him.

IMPERIALISM SUCKS

The man lays his bicycle in the grass and reaches down a hand to help Chang from the mud. Chang begins to thank him, but the stranger holds up his hand. “Don’t thank me,” he says, “thank Chairman Mao.” The stranger’s breath steams in the chill air. He introduces himself. “Chou Te-ming,” he says.

“Chang Chiu-chu.”

“Chang Chiu-chu?”

Chang nods.

“Aren’t you the peasant whose leukemia was cured through the application of Mao Tse-tung’s thought?”

“Leprosy,” says Chang, his toe smoldering like Vesuvius.

“I heard it on the radio,” says Chou. “Two hundred times.”

Chang beams. “See that pig?” he says. (Chou looks. The pig breaks wind.)

“I’m on my way to the city to offer him up to the Chairman for his birthday. By way of thanks.”

Chou, it seems, is also en route to the capital. He suggests that they travel together. Chang is delighted. Shakes the mud from his pantlegs, gives the pig’s septum an admonitory tug, and then stops dead. He begins tapping his pockets.

“Lose something?” asks Chou.

“My gourd.”

“Ah. Maotai?”

“Home-brewed. And sweet as rain.”

The two drop their heads to scan the muddied roadway. Chang spots the gourd at the same moment the pig does, but the pig is lighter on its feet. Rubber nostril, yellow tusk: it snatches up the spotted rind and jerks back its head. The golden rice liquor drools like honey from the whiskered jowls. Snurk, snurk, snurk.

Old Chiung-hua lights the lamp, sets a pot of water on the stove, rummages through Wang’s things in search of clean linen. Her feet ache and she totters with each step, slow and awkward as a hard-hat diver. Wang is quiet, her breathing regular. On the floor, in the center of the room, a brown-paper parcel. The old woman bends for it, then settles into a chair beside the bed. A Japanese-made transistor radio hangs from the bedpost on a leather strap. She turns it on.

ASSISTING MORE DEAF-MUTES TO SING “THE EAST IS RED”

It was raining, and the children of the Chanchai People’s Revolutionary Rehabilitation Center could not go out of doors. The paraplegic children entertained themselves by repeating quotations of Mao Tse-tung and singing revolutionary songs of the Chairman’s sayings set to music. But one of the deaf-mute children came to Chou Te-ming, a cadre of a Mao Tse-tung’s thought propaganda team, in tears. She signed to him that it was her fondest wish to sing “The East Is Red” and to call out “Long live Chairman Mao, a long, long life to him!” with the others. While discussing the problem with some class brothers later that day, Chou Te-ming recalled a phrase of Chairman Mao’s: “THE PRINCIPLE OF USING DIFFERENT METHODS TO RESOLVE DIFFERENT CONTRADICTIONS IS ONE WHICH MARXIST-LENINISTS MUST STRICTLY OBSERVE.” He was suddenly inspired to go to the children’s dormitory and examine their Eustachian tubes and vocal apparatuses. He saw that in many cases the deaf-mute children’s tubes were blocked and frenums ingrown. The next morning he operated. By that evening, eighteen of the twenty children were experiencing their fondest desire, singing “The East is Red” in praise of Mao Tse-tung. This is a great victory of Mao Tse-tung’s thought, a rich fruit of the Great Proletarian Revolution.

In the shifting shadows cast by the lamp, old Chiung-hua nods and Wang wakes with a cry on her lips.

When Mao steps out on the balcony the square erupts. Five hundred thousand voices in delirium. “Mao, Mao, Mao, Mao,” they chant. Confetti flies, banners wave. Mammoth Mao portraits leap at the tips of upraised fingers. The Chairman opens his arms and the answering roar is like the birth of a planet. He looks down on the wash of heads and shoulders oscillating like the sea along a rocky shoreline, and he turns to one of his aides. “Tell me,” he shouts, “did the Beatles ever have it this good?” The aide, an intelligent fellow, grins. Mao gazes back down at the crowd, his frozen jowls trembling with a rush of paternal solicitude. It is then that the idea takes him, then, on the balcony, on his birthday, the grateful joyous revolutionary proletarian class brothers and sisters surging beneath him and bursting spontaneously into song (“The East Wind Prevails Over the West Wind”). He cups a hand to the aide’s ear. “Fetch my swimtrunks.”

Though the table-tennis team has taken him to Japan, Malaysia, Albania, Zaire, Togoland and Botswana, Hung’s mental horizons are not expansive. He is a very literal-minded fellow. When Wang made her announcement from between clenched teeth and dusky sheets, he did not pause to consider that “Thank Chairman Mao” has become little more than a catchword or that virgin births have been known to occur in certain regions and epochs and under certain conditions or even that some more prosaic progenitor may have turned the trick. But perhaps he didn’t want to. Perhaps the shock cauterized some vital portion of the brain, some control center, and left him no vent but a species of mindless frothing rage. And what better object for such a rage than that the ice-faced universal progenitor, that kindly ubiquitous father?

The pig is swimming on its feet, drunk, ears and testicles awash, eyes crossed, nostrils dripping. It has torn the cord free from Chang’s pants and now trots an unsteady twenty paces ahead of Chang and Chou. Chou is walking his bicycle. Chang, rorschached in mud and none too steady of foot himself, limps along beside him. From time to time the two lengthen their stride in the hope of overtaking the pig, but the animal is both watchful and agile, and holds its liquor better than some.

They are by this time passing through the outskirts of the great city, winding through the ranks of shanties that cluster the hills like tumbled dominoes. The river, roiled and yellow, rushes on ahead of them. Chang is muttering curses under his breath. The pig’s ears flap rhythmically. Overhead, somewhere in the thin bleak troposphere, the rain submits to a transubstantiation and begins to fall as snow. Chang flings a stone and the porker quickens its pace.

“But it’s snowing—”

“Thirty degrees—”

“Your shingles—”

“Blood pressure—”

“Hemorrhoids—”

Mao waves them away, his aides, as if they were so many flies and mosquitoes. His face is set. Beneath the baggy khaki swimtrunks, his thin thick-veined legs, splayed feet. He slips into his slippers, pulls on a Mao tunic, and steps down the stairs, out the door and into the crowd.

They are still singing. Holding hands. Posters wave, banners flash, flakes fall. By the time Mao’s presence becomes known through the breadth of the crowd, he has already mounted an elevated platform in the back of a truck. The roar builds successively — from near to far — like mortar rounds in the hills, and those closest to him press in on the truck, ecstatic, frenzied, tears coursing down their cheeks, bowing and beaming and genuflecting.

The truck’s engine fires. Mao waves his cap. Thousands pass out. And then the truck begins to inch forward, the crowd parting gradually before it. Mao waves again. Mountains topple, icebergs plunge into the sea. With the aid of an aide he climbs still higher — to the seat of a chair mounted on the platform — and raises his hand for silence. A hush falls over the crowd: cheers choke in throats, tears gel on eyelashes, squalling infants catch their breath. The clatter of the truck’s engine becomes audible, and then, for those fortunate thousands packed against the fenders, Mao’s voice. He is saying something about the river. Three words, repeated over and over. The crowd is puzzled. The Chairman’s legs are bare. There is a towel thrown over his shoulder. And then, like the jolt of a radio dropped in bathwater, the intelligence shoots through the crowd. They take up the chant. “To the River! To the River!” The Chairman is going swimming.

Chang and Chou feel the tremor in the soles of their feet, the blast on the wind. “They’re cheering in the square,” says Chou. “Must be the celebration for Mao’s birthday.” The trousers slap round his ankles as he steps up his pace. Chang struggles to keep up, slowed by drink and toethrob, and by his rube’s sense of amaze at the city. Periodically he halts to gape at the skyscrapers that rise from the bank of shanties like pyramids stalking the desert, while people course by on either side of him — peasants, workers, Red Guards, children — all rushing off to join in the rites. Ahead of him, the back of Chou, doggedly pushing at the handlebars of his bicycle, and far beyond Chou, just visible through the thicket of thighs and calves, the seductive coiled tail of the pig. “Wait!” he calls. Chou looks back over his shoulder. “Hurry!” There is another shout. And then another. The crowd is coming toward them!

Straight-backed and stiff-lipped, propped up by his aides, Mao rides the truckbed like a marble statue of himself, his hair and shoulders gone white with a fat-flake snow. The crowd is orderly (“THE MASSES ARE THE REAL HEROES,” he is thinking), flowing out of the square and into the narrow streets with the viscous ease of lightweight oil. There is no shoving or toe-stamping. Those in front of the truck fan to the sides, remove their jackets and lay them over the white peach fuzz in the road. Then they kneel and bow their foreheads to the pavement while the black-grid tires grind over the khaki carpet. Light as milkweed, the snow-flakes spin down and whiten their backs.

The sight of the river reanimates the Chairman. He lifts his arms like a conductor and the crowd rushes with hilarity and admiration. “Long live,” etc., they cheer as he strips off his jacket to reveal his skinny-strap undershirt beneath, the swell of his belly. (At this shout, Hung, who is in the process of defacing a thirty-foot-high portrait of the Chairman in a tenement street three blocks away, pauses, puzzling. It is then that he becomes aware of the six teenagers in Mao shirts and red-starred caps. They march up to him in formation, silent, pure, austere and disciplined. Two of them restrain Hung’s hands; the others beat him with their Mao-sticks, from scalp to sole, until his flesh takes on the color and consistency of a fermenting plum.) Mao steps down from the truck, his pudgy hand spread across an aide’s shoulder, and starts jauntily off for the shoreline. People weep and laugh, applaud and cheer: a million fingers reach out to touch the Chairman’s bare legs and arms. As he reaches the water’s edge they begin to disrobe, stripping to khaki shorts and panties and brassieres, swelling hordes of them crowding the littoral, their clothes mounting faster than the languid feathery snowflakes.

Two hundred yards up the shore Chou abandons his bike along the roadway and dashes for the water, Chang hobbling behind him, both neck-stretching to catch a glimpse of the Chairman’s entourage. Somewhere behind them a band begins to play and a loudspeaker cranks out a spate of Mao’s maxims. In the confusion, Chang finds himself unbuttoning his shirt, loosing the string of his trousers, shucking the mud-caked slippers. Chou already stands poised in the gelid muck, stripped to shorts, waiting for Mao to enter the water. His mouth is a black circle, his voice lost in the boom of the crowd.

And then, miracle of miracles, Mao’s ankles are submersed in the yellow current, his calves, his knees! He pauses to slap the icy water over his chest and shoulders — and then the geriatric racing dive, the breaststroke, the square brow and circular head riding smooth over the low-lapping waves! The people go mad, Coney Island afire, and rush foaming into the chill winter water — old women, children, expectant mothers, thrilled by Mao’s heroic example, charged by the passion to share in the element which washes the Revolutionary Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party.

Chou is in, Chang hesitating on the bank, the snow blowing, his arms prickled with gooseflesh. The water foams like a battle at sea. People fling themselves at the river, shouting praise of Chairman Mao. Chang shrugs and follows them.

The water is a knife. Colder than the frozen heart of the universe. The current takes him, heaves him into a tangle of stiffening limbs and shocked bodies, a mass of them clinging together like worms in a can, the air splintering in his lungs, the darkness below, a thousand hands, the mud, the cold. He does not catch a glimpse of the Chairman’s entourage, nor does he have an opportunity to admire the clean stroke, the smooth glide of the Chairman’s head over the storm-white waves, forging on.

Wang’s features are dappled with sweat. Old Chiung-hua sips white tea and dabs at Wang’s forehead with a handkerchief. “Push,” she says. “Bear down and heave.” At that moment, over the jabber of the radio and the clang of the pipes, a roar, as of numberless human voices raised in concert. Chiung-hua lifts her withered head and listens.

Suddenly the door pushes open. The old woman turns, expecting Hung. It is not Hung. It is a pig, black head, white shoulders, brass ring through the nose. “Shoo!” cries Chiung-hua, astonished. “Shoo!” The pig stares at her, then edges into the room apologetically. The old lady staggers angrily to her feet, but then Wang grabs her hand. Wang’s teeth are gritted, her gymnast’s muscles flexed. “Uh-oh,” she says and Chiung-hua sits back down: a head has appeared between Wang’s legs. “Push, push, push,” the old woman hisses, and Wang obeys. There is a sound like a flushing toilet and then suddenly the infant is in Chiung-hua’s wizened hands. She cuts the cord, dabs the blood and tissue from the puckered red face, and swaddles the tiny thing in the only clean clothes at hand: a pair of patched blue jeans.

Wang sits up and the old woman hands her the infant. She hefts it to look underneath. (A male. Heavy of jowl, abdomen, nates. And with hair on its head — the strangest growth of hair set across the most impossible expanse of brow. Square across.) Wang wrinkles her nose. “That smell,” she says. “Like a barnyard.”

Chiung-hua, remembering, turns to shoo the pig. But then her ancient face drops: the pig is kneeling.

Out in the street, so close it jars, a shout goes up.

(1976)

DADA

We were organizing the Second International Dada Fair. The first had been held fifty-seven years ago in Berlin. The second, we felt, was overdue. Friedrich had asked Jean Arp’s grandson, Guillaume, to exhibit his Static Hobbyhorse #2, and Marcel Duchamp’s daughter, Lise, had agreed to show her Nude Descending Escalator. All very well and fine. But we were stuck for a main attraction, a drawing card, the pièce de résistance. Then Werther came up with a suggestion that slapped us all with its brilliance: waves beat on the rocks, lights flashed in dark rooms. I remember it clearly. We were drinking imported beer in Klaus’s loft, laying plans for the Fair. Werther slouched against a molded polyethylene reproduction of Tristan Tzara’s Upended Bicycle, a silver paper knife beating a tattoo in his palm. Beside him, on the coffee table, lay a stack of magazines. Suddenly he jerked the knife to his lips, shouted “Dada Redivivus!” and thrust the blade into the slick cellulose heart of them. Then he stepped back. The knife had impaled a magazine in the center of the stack: we began to understand.

Werther extracted his prize and flipped back the page. It was a news magazine. Glossy cover. We gathered round. There, staring back at us, between the drum major’s braided cap and the gold epaulettes, were the dark pinguid features of Dada made flesh: His Excellency Al Haji Field Marshal and President for Life of Uganda: Idi Amin Dada.

“Crazee!” said Friedrich, all but dancing.

“Épatant!” sang Klaus.

My name is Zoë. I grinned. We had our piéce de résistance.

Two days later I flew into Entebbe via Pan African Airways. Big Daddy met me at the airport. I was wearing my thigh-high boots, striped culottes. His head was like a medicine ball. He embraced me, buried his nose in my hair. “I love Americans!” he said. Then he gave me a medal.

At the house in Kampala he stood among his twenty-two children like a sleepy brontosaur among the first tiny quick-blooded mammals. One of the children wore a white tutu and pink ribbons. “This one,” he said, his hand on the child’s head, “a girl.” Then he held out his broad pink palm and panned across the yard where the rest of the brood rolled and leaped, pinched, climbed and burrowed like dark little insects. He grinned and asked me to marry him. I was cagey. “After the Fair,” I said.

“The Fair,” he repeated. His eyes were sliced melons.

“Dada,” I said.

The plane was part of a convoy of three Ugandan 747s. All across Zaire, Cameroon and Mali, across Mauritania and the rocky Atlantic, my ears sang with the keen of infants, the cluck of chickens, the stringy flatulence of goats and pigs. I looked out the window: the wing was streaked with rust. To the right and left, fore and aft, Big Daddy’s bodyguards reclined in their reclining seats, limp as cooked spaghetti. High-heeled boots, shades and wristwatches, guns. Each held a transistor radio to his ear. Big Daddy sat beside me, sweating, caressing my fingers in a hand like a boxing glove. I was wearing two hundred necklaces and a turban. I am twenty-six. My hair is white, shag-cut. He was wearing a jumbo jumpsuit, khaki and camouflage, a stiff chest full of medals. I began to laugh.

“Why you laugh?” he said.

I was thinking of Bergson. I explained to him that the comical consists of something mechanical encrusted on the living. He stared at me, blank, his face misshapen as a decaying jack-o’-lantern.

“Dada,” I said, by way of shorthand explication.

He grinned. Lit a cigarette. “They do me honor,” he said finally, “to name such a movement for me.”

The Fair was already under way when we landed at Kennedy. Big Daddy’s wives, cattle and attendants boarded five rented buses and headed for Harlem, where he had reserved the fourth floor of the Hotel Theresa. His Excellency himself made a forty-five-minute impromptu speech at Gate 19E, touching on solutions to the energy crisis, inflation and overcrowded zoos, after which I hustled him into a cab and made for Klaus’s loft on Elizabeth Street.

We rattled up Park Avenue, dipping and jolting, lights raining past the windows. Big Daddy told me of his athletic and military prowess, nuzzled my ear, pinned a medal to my breast. “Two hundred cattle,” he said. “A thousand acres.” I looked straight ahead. He patted my hand. “Twenty bondmaids, a mountain of emeralds, fresh fish three days a week.”

I turned to look into the shifting deeps of his eyes, the lights filming his face, yellow, green, red, bright, dark. “After the Fair,” I said.

The street outside Klaus’s was thronged, the hallway choked. The haut monde emerged from taxis and limousines in black tie and jacket, Halston, Saint-Laurent, mink. “Fantastic!” I said. Big D. looked baleful. “What your people need in this country is savannah and hippo,” he said. “But your palace very fine.”

I knotted a gold brocade DADA sign around his neck and led him up the stairs to a burst of applause from the spectators. Friedrich met us at the door. He’d arranged everything. Duchamp’s Urinal stood in the corner; DeGroffs soiled diapers decorated the walls; Werther’s own Soir de l’Uganda dominated the second floor. Big Daddy squeezed my hand, beamed like a tame Kong. There were champagne, canapés, espresso, women with bare backs. A man was strapped to a bicycle suspended from the ceiling.

Friedrich pumped Big Daddy’s hand and then showed him to the seat prepared for him as part of the Soir de l’Uganda exhibit. It was magnificent. A thousand and one copper tulips against a backdrop of severed heads and crocodiles. Big D. affixed a medal to Friedrich’s sweatshirt and settled into his seat with a glass of champagne. Then he began his “People Must Love Their Leaders” speech.

A reporter took me by the arm and asked me to explain the controlling concept of the Fair and of our principal exhibit. It was a textbook question. I gave him a textbook answer. “Any object is a work of art if the artist proclaims it one,” I said. “There is static, cerebral art and there is living art, monuments of absurdity — acts of art. And actors.” Then he asked me if it was true that I had agreed to become Bid Daddy’s fifth wife. The question surprised me. I looked over at the Soir de l’Uganda exhibit. Two of the bodyguards were shooting craps against the bank of papier-mâché heads. Big Daddy slouched in his chair, elephantine and black, beleaguered by lords and ladies, photographers, reporters, envious artists. I could hear his voice over the natter of the crowd — a basso profundo that crept into the blood and punched at the kidneys. “I am a pure son of Africa,” he was saying. Overhead the bicycle wheels whirred. I turned back to the reporter, an idea forming in my head — an idea so outré that it shot out to scrape at the black heart of the universe. The ultimate act of art. Dada sacrifice!

He stood there, pen poised over the paper.

“Da,” I said. “Da.”

(1977)

TWO SHIPS

I saw him today. At the side of the road, head down, walking. There were the full-leafed trees, the maples, elms, and oaks I see every day, the snarl of the wild berry bushes, sumac, milkweed, and thistle, the snaking hot macadam road, sun-flecked shadows. And him. An apparition: squat, bow-legged, in shorts, T-shirt, and sandals, his head shaved to the bone, biceps like legs of lamb. I slowed with the shock of seeing him there, with the recognition that worked in my ankles and fingertips like sap, and for a stunned second or two I stared, fixated, as the car pulled me closer and then swept past him in a rush. I was dressed in white, on my way to crack stinging serves and return treacherous backhands in sweet arcing loops. He never looked up.

When I got home I made some phone calls. He was back in the country — legally — the government forgiving, his mind like damaged fruit. Thirty-one years old, he was staying with his parents, living in the basement, doing God knows what — strumming a guitar, lifting weights, putting pieces of wood together — the things he’d been doing since he was fourteen. Erica listened as I pried information from the receiver, a cigarette in the corner of her mouth, polished surfaces behind her.

I was pouring Haig & Haig over a hard white knot of ice cubes. The last of my informants had got off the subject of Casper and was filling me in on the pains in her neck, lips, toes, and groin as I cradled the receiver between ear and shoulder. The smile I gave Erica was weak. When the whiskey-cracked voice on the other end of the line paused to snatch a quick breath, I changed the subject, whispered a word of encouragement, and hung up.

“Well?” Erica was on her feet.

“We’ve got to move,” I said.

I was overdramatizing. For effect. Overdramatizing because humor resides in exaggeration, and humor is a quick cover for alarm and bewilderment. I was alarmed. He could stay indefinitely, permanently. He could show up at the tennis courts, at the lake, at my front door. And then what would I do? Turn my back, look through him, crouch behind the door and listen to the interminable sharp intercourse of knuckle and wood?

“Is it really that bad?” Erica said.

I sipped at my Scotch and nodded. It was really that bad.

Twelve years ago we’d been friends. Close friends. We’d known each other from the dawn of consciousness on. We played in the cradle, in the schoolyard, went to camp together, listened to the same teachers, blocked and batted for the same teams. When we were sixteen we declared war on the bourgeois state and its material and canonical manifestations. That is, we were horny adolescents sublimating glandular frustrations in the most vicious and mindless acts of vandalism. We smoked pot, gulped stolen vodka, and drove our parents’ cars at a hundred miles an hour. Each night we cruised the back streets till three or four, assaulting religious statues, churches, the slick curvilinear windshields of Porsches and Cadillacs. Indiscriminate, we burned crosses and six-pointed stars. We tore down fences, smashed picture windows, filled Jacuzzis with sand. Once we climbed a treacherous three-hundred-foot cliff in utter darkness so we could drop raw eggs on the patrons of the chic restaurant nestled at its base.

Casper saw the whole thing as a crusade. He was given to diatribe, and his diatribes had suddenly begun to bloom with the rhetoric of Marxism. We would annihilate a dentist’s plaster lawn ornaments — flamingoes and lantern-wielding pickaninnies — and he’d call it class warfare. Privately, I saw our acts of destruction as a way of pissing in my father’s eye.

We ran away from home at one point — I think we were fifteen or so — and it was then that I had my first intimation of just how fanatical and intransigent Casper could be. I’d never considered him abnormal, had never thought about it. There was his obsession with the bodily functions, the vehement disgust he felt over his parents’ lovemaking—I could hear them, he would say, his features pinched with contempt, grunting and slobbering, humping like pigs—the fact that he went to a shrink twice a week. But none of this was very different from what other fifteen-year-olds did and said and felt, myself included. Now, running away, I saw that Casper’s behavior went beyond the pale of wise-guyism or healthy adolescent rebellion. I recognized the spark of madness in him, and I was both drawn to it and repelled by it. He was serious, he was committed, his was the rapture of saints and martyrs, both feet over the line. He went too far; I drew back from him.

We’d planned this excursion with all the secrecy and precision of prison breakers. Twenty miles away, tucked deep in the leafy recesses of Fahnestock State Park, was a huge cache of canned food, an ax, two six-packs of Jaguar malt liquor, sleeping bags, and a tent. We signed in at school, ducked out the back door, hitchhiked the twenty miles, and experienced freedom. The following day, while we were exploring the park, my father stalked up to the campsite (my brother had broken down under interrogation and given us away) and settled down to wait. My father is a powerful and unforgiving man. He tapped a birch switch against a rock for an hour, then packed up everything he could carry — food, tent, sleeping bags, canteens — and hiked out to the highway. The sight of the barren campsite made my blood leap. At first I thought we were in the wrong spot, the trees all alike, dusk falling, but then Casper pointed out the blackened circle of rocks we’d cooked a triumphant dinner over the night before. I found my father’s note pinned to a tree. It was curt and minatory, the script an angry flail.

Casper refused to give in. Between us we had four dollars and twenty cents. He dragged me through swamps and brambles, the darkening stalks of the trees, past ponds, down hills, and out to the highway. Afraid to hitch — my father could be glaring behind each pair of headlights — we skirted the road and made our way to a clapboard grocery where we purchased a twenty-five-pound bag of Ken-L Ration. Outside, it was 29°F. We hiked back up into the woods, drank from a swamp, crunched the kibbled nuggets of glyceryl monostearate and animal fat preserved with BHA, and slept in our jackets. In the morning I slipped away, walked out to the road, and hitchhiked back home.

The state police were called in to track Casper down. They employed specially trained trackers and bloodhounds. Casper’s parents hired a helicopter search team for eighty-five dollars an hour. The helicopter spotted Casper twice. Whirring, kicking up a cyclone, the machine hovered over the treetops while Casper’s mother shouted stentorian pleas through a bullhorn. He ran. Two weeks later he turned up at home, in bed, asleep.

It was just after this that Casper began to talk incessantly of repression and the police state. He shuffled round the corridors at school with a huge, distended satchel full of poorly printed pamphlets in faded greens and grays: The Speeches of V. I. Lenin; State and Anarchy; Das Kapital. The rhetoric never appealed to me, but the idea of throwing off the yoke, of discounting and discrediting all authority, was a breath of fresh air.

He quit college at nineteen and went to live among the revolutionary workers of the Meachum Brothers Tool & Die Works in Queens. Six months later he was drafted. How they accepted him or why he agreed to report, I’ll never know. He was mad as a loon, fixated in his Marxist-Leninist phase, gibbering nonstop about imperialist aggressors and the heroic struggle of the revolutionary democratic peoples of the Republic of Vietnam. It was summer. I was living in Lake George with Erica and he came up for a day or two before they inducted him.

He was worked up — I could see that the minute he got off the bus. His feet shuffled, but his limbs and torso danced, elbows jerking as if they were wired, the big knapsack trembling on his back, a cord pulsing under his left eye. He was wearing a cap that clung to his head like something alive, and the first thing he did was remove it with a flourish to show off his bald scalp: he’d shaved himself — denuded himself — every hair plucked out, right down to his mustache and eyebrows. From the neck up he looked like a space invader; from the neck down, rigidly muscled, he was Charles Atlas. He couldn’t stop talking. Couldn’t sit down, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat. Said he was going into the army all right, but that he’d do everything in his power to subvert them, and that when they shipped him to Vietnam he’d turn his weapon on his own platoon and then join the NLF. I tried to joke with him, distract him — if only for a moment. But he was immovable. He played his one note till Erica and I just wanted to jump into the car and leave him there with the house, the books, the stereo, everything. Someone pulled a knife out of my ribs when he left.

I never saw him again. Until today.

Rumor had it that he’d disappeared from Fort Dix the first week. He was in Canada, he was in Sweden. The Finns had jailed him for entering the country illegally, the Swiss had expelled him. He was in Belize City stirring up the locals, the British had got hold of him and the United States was pressing for his extradition. Rumors. They sifted back to me through my mother, friends, people who claimed they’d seen him or talked to someone who had. I was in law school, student-deferred. There were exams, the seasons changed, Erica visited on weekends, and there were long breathy phone calls in between. In my second year, the packages began to show up in my mailbox. Big; crudely bundled manuscripts — manuscripts the size of phone books — sent from an address in London, Ontario.

There were no cover letters. But, then, cover letters would have been superfluous: the moment I saw the crabbed scrawl across the flat surface of the first package (lettering so small it could have been written with the aid of magnification), I knew who had sent it. Inside these packages were poems. Or, rather, loosely organized snatches of enjambed invective in strident upper-case letters:

THE FASCIST NAZI ABORTIONIST LOBBY THAT FEEDS

ON THE TATTERED FLESH OF ASIAN ORPHANS

MUST BE CIRCUMVENTED FROM ITS IMPERIALIST EXPANSIONIST DESIGN

TO ENSLAVE THE MASSES AND TURN ARTIFICIALLY NATIONALIZED

PROLETARIANS AGAINST BROTHER AND SISTER PROLETARIANS

IN THE INTERNECINE CONFLICT THAT FEEDS

THE COFFERS

OF THE REVISIONIST RUNNING DOGS

OF BOURGEOIS COMPLACENCY!

The poems went on for hundreds of pages. I couldn’t read them. I wondered why he had sent them to me. Was he trying to persuade me? Was he trying to justify himself, reach out, recapture some sympathy he’d deluded himself into thinking we’d once shared? I was in law school. I didn’t know what to do. Eventually, the packages stopped coming.

Erica and I married, moved back to Westchester, built a house, had a daughter. I was working in a law firm in White Plains. One night, 2:00 A.M., the phone rang. It was Casper. “Jack,” he said, “it’s me, Casper. Listen, listen, this is important, this is vital—” Phone calls in the night. I hadn’t spoken to him in seven years, gulfs had opened between us, I was somebody else — and yet here he was, with the same insistent, demanding voice that wraps you up in unasked-for intimacies like a boa constrictor, talking as if we’d just seen each other the day before. I sat up. He was nearly crying.

“Jack: you’ve got to do something for me, life and death, you got to promise me—”

“Wait a minute,” I said, “wait, hold on—” I didn’t want to hear it. I was angry, puzzled; I had to be at work in five and a half hours.

“Just this one thing. You know me, right? Just this: if anybody asks, you stick up for me, okay? No, no: I mean, tell them I’m all right, you know what I mean? That I’m good. There’s nothing wrong with me, understand?”

What could I say? The phone went dead, the room was dark. Beside me, in bed, Erica shifted position and let out a sigh that would have soothed all the renegades in the world.

I was busy. The incident slipped my mind. Three days later a man in an elaborately buckled and belted trenchcoat stepped into the anteroom at Hermening & Stinson, the firm that had given me my tenuous foothold in the world of corporate law. No one paid much attention to him until he announced that he was from the FBI and that he wanted to speak with me. The typist stopped typing. Charlie Hermening looked up at me like a barn owl scanning the rafters. I shrugged my shoulders.

The man was big and fleshy and pale, his irises like water, wisps of white hair peeping out from beneath the fedora that hugged his bullet head. When I showed him into my office he flashed his credentials, and I remember wondering if TV producers had studied FBI men, or if FBI men had learned how to act from watching TV. He took a seat, but declined to remove either his hat or trenchcoat. Was I acquainted with a Casper R. Mendelson, he wanted to know. Did I know his whereabouts? When had I seen him last? Had he telephoned, sent anything in the mail? What did I think of his mental state?

“His mental state?” I repeated.

“Yes,” the man said, soft and articulate as a professor, “I want to know if you feel he’s mentally competent.”

I thought about it for a minute, thought about Lake George, the poems, Casper’s tense and frightened voice over the phone. I almost asked the FBI man why he wanted to know: Was Casper in trouble? Had he done something illegal? I wanted to gauge the man’s response, listen for nuances that might give me a clue as to what I should say. But I didn’t. I simply leaned across the desk, looked the man in the eye, and told him that in my estimation Casper was seriously impaired.

That was a year ago. I’d forgotten the man from the FBI, forgotten Casper. Until now. Now he was back. Like a slap in the face, like a pointed finger: he was back.

“What are you afraid of?” Erica asked. “That he’ll say hello or shake your hand or something?”

It was dark. Moths batted against the screens; I toyed with my asparagus crêpes and spinach salad. The baby was in bed. I poured another glass of French Colombard. “No,” I said, “that’s not it.” And then: “Yes. That would be bad enough. Think of the embarrassment.”

“Embarrassment? You were friends, you grew up together.”

“Yes,” I said. That was the problem. I sipped at the wine.

“Look, I’m not exactly thrilled about seeing him either — the weekend at Lake George was enough to last me a lifetime — but it’s not the end of the world or anything…. I mean, nothing says you’ve got to invite him over for dinner so he can lecture us on the wisdom of Mao Tse-tung or tell us how miserable he is.”

She was in the kitchen area, spooning the foam off a cup of cappuccino. “Are you afraid he’ll vandalize the house — is that it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, we’re not kids anymore — he’s not that crazy.” I thought about it, listening to the hiss of the coffee maker. The house we’d put up was pretty cozy and dramatic. Modern. With decks and skylights and weathered wood and huge sheets of glass. It called attention to itself, stylish and unique, a cut above the slant-roofed cottages that lined the road. It was precisely the sort of house Casper and I had sought out and violated when we were sixteen. I looked up from my wine. “He might,” I admitted.

Erica looked alarmed. “Should we call the police?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, we can’t—” I broke off. It was futile. I wasn’t really afraid of that sort of thing — no, my fears went deeper, deeper than I wanted to admit. He would look at me and he would condemn me: I’d become what we’d reacted against together, what he’d devoted his mad, misguided life to subverting. That was the problem. That’s why I didn’t want to see him at the tennis courts or at the lake or even walking along the road with his shoulders hunched under the weight of his convictions.

“Hey”—she was at my side, massaging the back of my neck—“why not forget about it, you’ve got enough worries as it is.” She was right. The EPA was filing suit against one of our clients — a battery company accused of dumping toxic waste in the Hudson — and I’d been poring over the regulations looking for some sort of loophole. I was meeting with Charlie Hermening in the morning to show him what I’d come up with.

“You know something — didn’t Rose say he’d been back nearly a month already?” She was purring, the cappuccino smelled like a feast, I could feel the alcohol loosening my knotted nerves. “And you only saw him today for the first time? If he was going to come over, wouldn’t he have done it by now?”

I was about to admit she was right, finish my coffee, and take a look at the newspaper when there was a knock at the door. A knock at the door. It was nine-thirty. I nearly kicked the table over. “I’m not here,” I hissed. “No matter who it is,” and I slipped into the bedroom.

There were voices in the hallway. I heard Erica, and then the polite but vaguely querulous tones of — a woman? — and then Erica’s voice, projecting: “Jack. Jack, will you come out here, please?”

Mrs. Shapiro, our next-door neighbor, was standing in the doorway. “Sorry to bother you,” the old woman said, “but your garbitch is all over the driveway — I can’t even get the car through.”

Garbage? Her driveway was at least fifty feet from ours. What was she talking about?

The night was warm, redolent of flowers and grass clippings. There was a moon, and the crickets seemed to be serenading it, chirring in the trees like a steel band locked in a groove. I walked beside Mrs. Shapiro to where her car sat rumbling and sputtering, lights flooding the gumbo of vegetable peels, papers, milk cartons, and diapers strewn across her driveway. The cans had been deliberately hauled down the street, upended and dumped — no dog or raccoon could have been so determined or efficient. This was deliberate. As I bent to the mess, I thought of Casper.

“Kids.” Mrs. Shapiro, arms folded, stood silhouetted against the headlights. She spat the words out as if she were cursing. “Things just seem to get worse and worse, don’t they?”

I worked in silence, embarrassed, digging into the slop with my bare hands, trying not to think about baby stool, maggots, the yielding wet paste of coffee grounds and cantaloupe shells, scooping it up by the armload. When I was finished I told Mrs. Shapiro that I’d have Erica hose down the driveway for her in the morning. The elderly woman merely raised her hand as if to say “Forget about it,” tumbled into the car seat, and set the car in motion with a shriek of the steering mechanism and a rumble of rotten exhaust. I watched the taillights trace the arc of her driveway, then hauled the garbage cans back to my own yard, all the while expecting Casper to pop out at me with a laugh. Or maybe he was crouching in the bushes, giggling to himself like a half-witted adolescent. That was about his speed, I thought.

Inside, I washed up, fumed at Erica—“It was deliberate,” I kept saying, “I know it was”—and then shut myself up in the study with the brief I’d prepared on the battery manufacturer. I couldn’t read a word of it. After a while — it must have been twenty minutes or so — I heard Erica getting ready for bed — running water, brushing her teeth — and then the house went silent. I knew I should go over the brief a couple of times, have a mug of hot Ovaltine, and get a good night’s rest. But I was rooted to the chair, thinking about Casper — a grown man, thirty-one years old — sneaking around in the dark dumping people’s garbage. What could he be thinking of?

A muffled sound was pulsing through the house. At first it didn’t register, and then, with a flash of anger, I realized what it was: someone was knocking at the door. This was too much. If there was garbage in the neighbors’ driveway they could damn well clean it up themselves, I thought, storming down the hallway. I wrenched the door back, expecting Mrs. Shapiro.

It was Casper.

He stood there, his head bowed, the moon blanching the stiff bristle of his crown. He was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt, shorts, sandals. The veins stood out in his arms. When he looked up at me his eyes were soft and withdrawn. “Jack,” was all he said.

I was at a loss. The worst possible scenario was playing itself out on my doorstep, and I was caught up in it, against my will, suddenly forced to take a part. I felt like an unrehearsed actor shoved out onstage; I felt exhausted and defeated. My initial impulse had been to slam the door shut, but now, with Casper standing there before me, I could only clear my throat, wipe my features clean, and ask him in.

He hesitated. “No,” he said, “no, I couldn’t do that. I mean, I just came to … to say hello, that’s all.”

“Don’t be silly,” I said, insistent, already ushering him in. “Here, the living room. Have a seat. Can I get you something: beer? brandy? 7-Up?”

We were standing beside each other in the center of the living room. He took in the potted plants, the umbrella tree, the little Paul Klee my mother had given me. The nearest piece of furniture was the loveseat; he perched on the edge of it, apologetic. “No thanks,” he said, eyes on the floor.

I was halfway to the kitchen, needing a brandy. “You sure? It’s no trouble at all. I’ve got liqueur — how about a Drambuie?” It had suddenly become crucially important that I give him something, an offering of some sort, a peace pipe, the communal leg of lamb. “Are you hungry? I’ve got Brie and crackers — I could make a sandwich—?”

He was still staring at the floor. “Milk,” he said, so softly I wasn’t sure I’d heard him.

“You want a glass of milk?”

“Yes, thanks — if it’s not too much trouble.”

I made some deprecatory noises, poured out a brandy and a milk, arranged some Danish flatbread on a platter around the cheese. Two minutes later we were sitting across the room from each other. I was looking into my brandy snifter; he was studying the glass of milk as if he’d never seen anything like it before. “So,” I said, “you’re back.”

He didn’t answer. Just sat there, looking at his milk. There was something monkish about him — perhaps it was the crewcut. I thought of acolytes, nuns, the crop-headed Hare Krishnas in airport lounges. “It’s been a long time,” I offered. No response. It occurred to me to ask about the garbage cans — perhaps we could share the intimacy of the joke — but then I thought better of it: no sense in embarrassing him or stirring up any rancor.

“About the garbage cans,” he said, as if reading my thoughts, “I did it.”

I waited for an explanation. He stared at me so fixedly I finally looked away, and more as a means of breaking the silence than satisfying my curiosity, I asked him why.

He seemed to consider this. “I don’t know,” he said finally, took a tentative sip of milk, then downed the glass in a single gulp. He belched softly and settled back in the chair.

I was losing my patience. I had work in the morning. The last thing I wanted to do was sit here with this wacko, on edge in my own living room, mouthing the little platitudes of social formality when I knew both of us were seething. I made another stab at conversation, just because the silence was so inadmissible. “So,” I said, “we’ve wondered about you from time to time, Erica and I…. We have a daughter, did you know that? Her name’s Tricia.”

His arms were rigid, tense with muscle. He was staring down at his interlocked fingers, straining with the tension, as if he were doing an isometric exercise. “I was in the hospital,” he said.

The hospital. The syllables bit into me, made something race round the edge of my stomach. I did not want to hear it.

I got up to pour another brandy. “More milk?” I asked, the rigorous host, but he ignored me. He was going to tell me about the hospital. He raised his voice so I could hear him.

“They said it was a condition of giving me a clean slate. You know, they’d rehabilitate me. Eleven months. Locked up with the shit-flingers and droolers, the guys they’d shot up in the war. That was the hospital.”

I stood in the kitchen doorway, the brandy in my hand. He was accusing me. I’d started the war, oppressed the masses, wielded the dollar like an axe; I’d deserted him, told the FBI the truth, created the American Nazi Party, and erected the slums, stick by stick. What did he want from me — to say I was sorry? Sorry he was crazy, sorry he couldn’t go to law school, sorry Marx’s venom had eaten away the inside of his brain?

He was on his feet now. The empty glass flashed in his hand as he crossed the room. He handed it to me. We were inches apart. “Jack,” he said. I looked away.

“I’ve got to go now,” he whispered.

I stood at the door and watched him recede into the moonlight that spilled across the lawn like milk. He turned left on the macadam road, heading in the direction of his parents’ house.

Erica was behind me in her robe, squinting against the light in the hallway.

“Jack?” she said.

I barely heard her. Standing there in the doorway, watching the shadows close like a fist over the lawn, I was already packing.

(1981)

THE LITTLE CHILL

Hal had known Rob and Irene, Jill, Harvey, Tootle, and Pesky since elementary school, and they were all forty going on sixty.

Rob and Irene had been high-school sweethearts, and now, after quitting their tenured teaching jobs, they brokered babies for childless couples like themselves. They regularly flew to Calcutta, Bahrain, and Sarawak to bring back the crumpled brown-faced little sacks of bones they located for the infertile wives of dry cleaners and accountants. Though they wouldn’t admit it, they’d voted for Ronald Reagan.

Jill had a certain fragile beauty about her. She’d gone into a Carmelite nunnery after the obloquy of high school and the unrequited love she bore for Harvey, who at the time was hot for Tootle. She lived just up the street from Rob and Irene, in her late mother’s house, and she’d given up the nun’s life twelve years earlier to have carnal relations with a Safeway butcher named Eugene, who left her with a blind spot in one eye, a permanent limp, and triplets.

Harvey had been a high-school lacrosse star who quit college to join the Marines, acquiring a reputation for ferocity and selfless bravery during the three weeks he fought at Da Nang before taking thirty-seven separate bayonet wounds in his legs, chest, buttocks, and feet. He was bald and bloated, a brooding semi-invalid addicted to Quaalude, Tuinol, aspirin, cocaine, and Jack Daniel’s, and he lived in the basement of his parents’ house, eating little and saying less. He despised Hal, Rob and Irene, Jill, Tootle, and Pesky because they hadn’t taken thirty-seven bayonet wounds each and because they were communists and sellouts.

Tootle had been a cover girl; a macrobiot; the campaign manager for a presidential candidate from Putnam Valley, New York, who promised to push through legislation to animate all TV news features; and, finally, an environmentalist who spent all her waking hours writing broadsides for the Marshwort Preservationists’ League. She was having an off/on relationship with an Italian race-car driver named Enzo.

Pesky was assistant manager of Frampold’s LiquorMart, twice divorced and the father of a fourteen-year-old serial murderer whose twelve adult male victims all resembled Pesky in coloring, build, and style of dress.

And Hal? Hal was home from California. For his birthday.

Jill hosted the party. She had to. The triplets — Steve, Stevie, and Steven, now seven, seven, and seven, respectively — were hyperactive, antisocial, and twice as destructive as Hitler’s Panzer Corps. She hadn’t been able to get a baby-sitter for them since they learned to crawl. “All right,” Hal had said to her on the phone, “your house then. Seven o’clock. Radical. Really.” And then he hung up, thinking of the dingy cavern of her mother’s house, with its stained wallpaper, battered furniture, and howling drafts, and of the mortified silence that would fall over the gang when they swung by to pick up Jill on a Friday night and Mrs. Morlock — that big-bottomed, horse-toothed parody of Jill — would insist they come in for hot chocolate. But no matter. At least the place was big.

As it turned out, Hal was two hours late. He was from California, after all, and this was his party. He hadn’t seen any of these people in what — six years now? — and there was no way he was going to be cheated out of his grand entrance. At seven he pulled a pair of baggy parachute pants over his pink high-tops, stuck a gold marijuana-leaf stud through the hole in his left earlobe, wriggled into an Ozzie Osbourne Barf Tour T-shirt though it was twenty-six degrees out and driving down sleet, and settled into the Barcalounger in which his deceased dad had spent the last two-thirds of his life. He sipped Scotch, watched the TV blip rhythmically, and listened to his own sad old failing mom dodder on about the Jell-O mold she’d bought for Mrs. Herskowitz across the street. Then, when he was good and ready, he got up, slicked back his thinning, two-tone, forty-year-old hair that looked more and more like mattress stuffing every day, shrugged into his trenchcoat, and slammed out into the storm.

There were two inches of glare ice on the road. Hal thumped his mother’s stuttering Oldsmobile from tree to tree, went into a 180-degree spin, and schussed down Jill’s driveway, narrowly avoiding the denuded azalea bush, three Flexible Flyers, and a staved-in Renault on blocks. He licked his fingertips and smoothed down his sideburns on the doorstep, knocked perfunctorily, and entered, grinning, in all his exotic, fair-haired, California glory. Unfortunately, the effect was wasted — no one but Jill was there. Hunched in the corner of a gutted sofa, she smiled wanly from behind a mound of soggy Fritos and half a gallon of California dip. “Hi,” she said in a voice of dole, “they’re coming, they’re coming.” Then she winked her bad eye at him and limped across the room to stick her tongue in his mouth.

She was clinging to him, licking at his mustache and telling him about her bout with breast cancer, when the doorbell rang and Rob and Irene came hurtling into the room shrieking “My God, look at you!” They were late, they screamed, because the baby-sitter never showed for their daughter, Soukamathandravaki, whose frightened little face peered in out of the night behind them.

An instant later, Harvey swung furiously up the walk on his silver crutches, Tootle and Pesky staggered in together with reddened noses and dilated pupils, and Steve, Stevie, and Steven emerged from the back of the house on their minibikes to pop wheelies in the middle of the room. The party was on.

“So,” Harvey snarled, fencing Hal into the corner with the gleaming shafts of his crutches, “they tell me you’re doing pretty good out there, huh, bub?”

Pesky and Tootle were standing beside him, grinning till Hal thought their lips would dry out and stick to their teeth, and Pesky had his arm around Tootle’s shoulder. “Me?” Hal said, with a modest shrug. “Well, since you ask, my agent did say that—”

Harvey cut him off, turning to Pesky with a wild leer and shouting, “So how’s the kid, what’s his name — Damian?”

Dead silence fell over the room.

Rob and Irene froze, clutching Dixie cups of purple passion to their chests, and Jill, who’d been opening their eyes to the in-fighting, petty abuses, and catastrophic outrages of the food-stamp office where she worked, caught her tongue. Even Steve, Stevie, and Steven snapped to attention. They’d been playfully binding little Soukamathandravaki to one of the dining-room chairs with electrical tape, but at the mention of Damian, they looked round them in unison and vanished.

“You son of a bitch,” Pesky said, his fingers dug so deep in Tootle’s shoulder his knuckles went white. “You crippled fascist Marine Corps burnout.”

Harvey jerked his big head to one side and spat on the floor.

“What’d they give him, life plus a hundred and fifty years? Or’d they send him to Matteawan?”

“Hey,” Irene shouted, a desperate keening edge to her voice, “hey, do you guys remember all those wild pranks we used to pull back in high school?” She tore across the room, waving her Dixie cup. “Like, like when we smeared that black stuff on our faces and burned the Jewish star on Dr. Rosenbaum’s front lawn?”

Everyone ignored her.

“Harv,” Hal said, reaching out to take his arm, but Harvey jerked violently away—“Get your stinking hands off me!” he roared — before he lost his balance and fell with a sad clatter of aluminum into the California dip.

“Serves you right, you bitter son of a bitch,” Pesky growled, standing over him as if they’d just gone fifteen rounds. “The crippled war hero. Why don’t you show us your scars, huh?”

“Pesky,” Hal hissed, “leave it, will you?”

Rob and Irene were trying to help Harvey to his feet, but he fought them off, sobbing with rage. There was California dip on the collar of his campaign jacket. Hairless and pale, with his quivering jowls and splayed legs, he looked like a monstrous baby dropped there on the rug.

“Or the time Pesky ran up in front of Mrs. Gold’s class in the third grade and did squat thrusts till he passed out, remember that?” Irene was saying, when the room was rent by a violent, predatory shriek, as if someone had torn a hawk in half. It was Tootle. She twisted out from under Pesky’s arm and slammed her little white fist into his kidney. “You,” she sputtered, “who are you to talk, lording it over Harvey as if he was some kind of criminal or something. At least he fought for his country. What’d you do, huh?” Her eyes were swollen. There was a froth of saliva caught in the corner of her mouth.

Pesky swung around. He was wearing his trademark Levi’s — jeans, jacket, sweatshirt, socks, and big-buckled belt. If only they made shoes, he used to say. “Yeah, yeah, tell us about it,” he sneered, “you little whore. Peddling your ass just like—”

“Canada, that’s what you did about it. Like a typical wimp.”

“Hey, hold on,” Hal said, lurching out of the corner in his parachute pants, “I don’t believe this. We all tried to get out of it — it was a rotten war, an illegal war, Nixon’s and Johnson’s war — what’s the matter with you? Don’t you remember?”

“The marches,” Irene said.

“The posters,” Rob joined in.

“A cheap whore, that’s all. Cover girl, my ass.”

“Shut up!” Tootle shrieked, turning on Hal. “You’re just as bad as Pesky. Worse. You’re a hypocrite. At least he knows he’s a piece of shit.” She threw back a cup of purple passion and leveled her green-eyed glare on him. “And you think you’re so high and mighty, out there in Hollywood — well, la-de-da, that’s what I say.”

“He’s an artist,” Harvey said from the floor. “He co-wrote the immortal script for the ‘Life with Beanie’ show.”

“Fuck you.”

“Fuck you too.”

And then suddenly, as if it signaled a visitation from another realm, there was the deep-throated cough of a precision engine in the driveway, a sputter and its dying fall. As one, the seven friends turned to the door. There was a thump. A knock—dat dat-dat-dat da. And then: “Allo, allo, anybody is home?”

It was Enzo. Tall, noble, with the nose of an emperor and a weave of silver in his hair so rich it might have been hammered from the mother lode itself. He was dressed in a coruscating jumpsuit with Pennzoil and Pirelli patches across the shoulder and chest, and he held his crash helmet in his hand. “Baby,” he said, crossing the room in two strides and taking Tootle in his arms, “ciao.”

No one moved. No one said a thing.

“Beech of a road,” Enzo said. “Ice, you know.” Outside, through the open door, the sleek low profile of his Lazaretto 2200 Pinin Farina coupe was visible, the windshield plated with ice, sleet driving down like straight pines. “Tooka me seventeen and a half minutes from La Guardia — a beech, huh? But baby, at least I’m here.”

He looked round him, as if seeing the others for the first time, and then, without a word, crossed the room to the stereo, ran a quick finger along the spines of the albums, and flipped a black platter from its jacket as casually as if he were flipping pizzas in Napoli. He dropped the stylus, and as the room filled with music, he began to move his hips and mime the words: “Oooh-oooh, I heard it through the grapevine …”

Marvin Gaye. Delectable, smooth, icy cool, ancient.

Pesky reached down to help Harvey from the floor. Jill took Hal’s arm. Rob and Irene began to snap their fingers and Enzo swung Tootle out into the middle of the floor.

They danced till they dropped.

(1987)

A BIRD IN HAND

1980

They come like apocalypse, like all ten plagues rolled in one, beating across the sky with an insidious drone, their voices harsh and metallic, cursing the land. Ten million strong, a flock that blots out the huge pale sinking sun, they descend into the trees with a protracted explosion of wings, black underfeathers swirling down like a corrupt snow. At dawn they vacate the little grove of oak and red cedar in a streaming rush, heading west to disperse and feed in the freshly seeded fields; at dusk they gather like storm clouds to swarm back to their roost. Ten million birds, concentrated in a stand of trees no bigger around than a city block — each limb, each branch, each twig and bole and strip of bark bowed under the weight of their serried bodies — ten million tiny cardiovascular systems generating a sirocco of heat, ten million digestive tracts processing seeds, nuts, berries, animal feed, and streaking the tree trunks with chalky excrement. Where before there had been leafspill, lichened rocks, sunlit paths beneath the trees, now there are foot-deep carpets of bird shit.

“We’ve got a problem, Mai.” Egon Scharf stands at the window, turning a worn paperback over in his hand. Outside, less than a hundred feet off, ten million starlings squat in the trees, cursing one another in a cacophony of shrieks, whistles, and harsh check-checks. “Says here,” holding up the book, “the damn birds carry disease.”

A muted undercurrent of sound buzzes through the house like static, a wheezing, whistling, many-throated hiss. Mai looks up from her crocheting: “What? I can’t hear you.”

“Disease!” he shouts, flinging the book down. “Stink, fungus, rot. I say we got to do something.”

“Tut,” is all she says. Her husband has always been an alarmist, from the day Jack Kennedy was shot and he installed bulletproof windows in the Rambler, to the time he found a single tent-caterpillar nest in the cherry tree and set fire to half the orchard. “A flock of birds, Egon, that’s all — just a flock of birds.”

For a moment he is struck dumb with rage and incomprehension, a lock of stained white hair caught against the bridge of his nose. “Just a flock—? Do you know what you’re saying? There’s millions of them out there, crapping all over everything. The drains are stopped up, it’s like somebody whitewashed the car — I nearly broke my neck slipping in wet bird shit right on my own front porch, for Christ’s sake — and you say it’s nothing to worry about? Just a flock of birds?“

She’s concentrating on a tricky picot stitch. For the first time, in the silence, she becomes aware of the steady undercurrent of sound. It’s not just vocal, it’s more than that — a rustling, a whisper whispered to a roar. She imagines a dragon, breathing fire, just outside the house.

“Mai, are you listening to me? Those birds can cause disease.” He’s got the book in his hand again—The Pictorial Encyclopedia of Birds—thumbing through it like a professor. “Here, here it is: histoplasmosis, it says. Wind-borne. It grows in bird crap.”

She looks inexpressibly wise, smug even. “Oh, that? That’s nothing, no more serious than a cold,” she says, coughing into her fist. “Don’t you remember Permilla Greer had it two years back?”

“Can spread through the reticulo-something-or-other system,” he reads, and then looks up: “with a high percentage of mortality.”

Three days later a man in a blue Ford pickup with tires the size of tank treads pulls into the driveway. The bed of the truck is a confusion of wires and amplifiers and huge open-faced loudspeakers. Intrigued, Mai knots the belt of her housecoat and steps out onto the porch.

“Well, yes, sure,” Egon is saying, “you can back it over that pile of fence posts there and right up under the trees, if you want.”

A young man in mirror sunglasses is standing beside the open door of the pickup. He nods twice at Egon, then hoists himself into the truck bed and begins flinging equipment around. “Okay,” he says, “okay,” as if addressing a large and impatient audience, “the way it works is like this: I’ve got these tapes of starling distress calls, and when they come back tonight to roost I crank up the volume and let ‘em have it.”

“Distress calls?”

The man is wearing a T-shirt under his jacket. When he pauses to put his hands on his hips, Mai can make out the initials emblazoned across his chest — KDOG — red letters radiating jagged orange lightning bolts. “Yeah, you know, like we mike a cage full of starlings and then put a cat or a hawk or something in there with them. But that’s not when we start the tape. We wait till the cat rips one up, then we set the reels rolling.”

Egon looks dubious. Mai can see him pinching his lower lip the way he does when somebody tells him the Russians are behind high fertilizer prices or that a pack of coyotes chewed the udders off twenty dairy cows in New Jersey.

“Don’t worry,” the man says, a thick coil of electrical cord in his hand, “this’ll shake ‘em up.”

For the next two weeks, at dusk, the chatter of the roosting birds is entirely obliterated by a hideous tinny death shriek, crackling with static and blared at apocalyptic volume. When the Bird Man, as Mai has come to think of him, first switches on the amplifier each night, thirty or forty starlings shoot up out of the nearest tree and circle the yard twice before settling back down again. These, she supposes, are the highstrung, flighty types. As for the rest — the great weltering black mass hunkered down in the trees like all the generations of God’s creation stretching back from here to the beginning of time — they go about their business as if wrapped in the silence of the Ages. That is, they preen their wings, cackle, squawl, screech, warp the branches, and crap all over everything, as unruffled and oblivious as they were before the Bird Man ever set foot in the yard.

On this particular evening the racket seems louder than ever, the very win-dowpanes humming with it. Mai has not been feeling well — she’s got a cough that makes her want to give up smoking, and her forehead seems hot to the touch — and she was lying down when the Bird Man started his serenade. Now she gets up and shuffles over to the window. Below, parked in the shadow of the nearest oak, the Bird Man sits in his truck, wearing a set of headphones and the sunglasses he never removes. The hammering shriek of the bird call sets Mai’s teeth on edge, assaults her ears, and stabs at her temples, and she realizes in that instant that it is distressing her far more than it distresses the birds. She suddenly wants to bolt down the stairs, out the door and into the pickup, she wants to pull the plug, rake the sunglasses from the Bird Man’s face, and tell him to get the hell out of her yard and never come back again. Instead, she decides to have a word with Egon.

Downstairs the noise is even louder, intolerable, as if it had been designed to test the limits of human endurance. She rounds the corner into the den, furious, and is surprised to see Ed Bartro, from the McCracken Board of Supervisors, perched on the edge of the armchair. “Hello, Mai,” he shouts over the clamor, “I’m just telling your husband here we got to do something about these birds.”

Egon sits across from him, looking hunted. He’s got two cigarettes going at once, and he’s balancing a double gimlet on his knee. Mai can tell from the blunted look of his eyes that it isn’t his first.

“It worked in Paducah,” Ed is saying, “and over at Fort Campbell too. Tergitol. It’s a detergent, like what you use on your dishes, Mai,” he says, turning to her, “and when they spray it on the birds it washes the oil out of their feathers. Then you get them wet — if it rains, so much the better; if not, we’ll have the fire department come out and soak down the grove — and they freeze to death in the night. It’s not cheap, not by a long shot,” he says, “but the country’s just going to have to foot the bill.”

“You sure it’ll work?” Egon shouts, rattling the ice in his glass for emphasis.

“Nothing’s for certain, Egon,” Ed says, “but I’m ninety-nine and nine-tenths sure of it.”

The following night, about seven o’clock, a pair of helicopters clatter over the house and begin circling the grove. Mai is hand-mashing potatoes and frying pork chops. The noise startles her, and she turns down the flame, wipes her hands on her apron, and steps out onto the porch to have a look. Angry suddenly, thinking, Why must everything be so loud?, she cups her hands over her ears and watches the searchlights gleam through the dark claws of the treetops. Gradually, she becomes aware of a new odor on the damp night air, a whiff of soap and alcohol undermining the sour ammoniac stench of the birds. It’s like a dream, she thinks, like a war. The helicopters scream, the spray descends in a deadly fog, the pork chops burn.

An hour later the firemen arrive. Three companies. From Lone Oak, West Paducah and Woodlawn. The sequence is almost surreal: lights and shouts, black boots squashing the shoots in the garden, heavy-grid tires tearing up the lawn, the rattle of the pumps, coffee for thirty. By the time they leave, Mai is in bed, feeling as if she’s been beaten with a shoe. She coughs up a ball of phlegm, spits it into a tissue and contemplates it, wondering if she should call the doctor in the morning.

When Egon comes in it is past midnight, and she’s been dozing with the light on. “Mai,” he says, “Mai, are you asleep?” Groggy, she props herself up on her elbows and squints at him. He is drunk, trundling heavily about the room as he strips off his clothes, “Well, I think this is going to do it, Mai,” he says, the words thick on his tongue. “They knocked off six million in one shot with this stuff over at Russellville, so Ed tells me, and they only used half as much.”

She can’t make out the rest of what he says — he’s muttering, slamming at a balky bureau drawer, running water in the bathroom. When she wakes again the house is dark, and she can feel him beside her, heavy and inert. Outside, in the trees, the doomed birds whisper among themselves, and the sound is like thunder in her ears.

In the morning, as the sun fires the naked fingers of the highest branches, the flock lifts up out of the trees with a crash of wings and a riot of shrieks and cackles. Mai feels too weak to get out of bed, feels as if her bones have gone soft on her, but Egon is up and out the door at first light. She is reawakened half an hour later by the slam of the front door and the pounding of footsteps below. There is the sound of Egon’s voice, cursing softly, and then the click-click-click of the telephone dial. “Hello, Ed?” The house is still, his voice as clear as if he were standing beside her. A cough catches in her throat and she reaches for the bottle of cough syrup she’d fished out of the medicine cabinet after the firemen had left.

“… nothing at all,” her husband says below. “I think I counted eighty-six or — seven birds … uh-huh, uh-huh … yeah, well, you going to try again?”

She doesn’t have to listen to the rest — she already knows what the county supervisor is saying on the other end of the line, the smooth, reasonable politician’s voice pouring honey into the receiver, talking of cost overruns, uncooperative weather, the little unpleasantries in life we just have to learn to live with. Egon will be discouraged, she knows that. Over the past few weeks he’s become increasingly touchy, the presence of the birds an ongoing ache, an open wound, an obsession. “It’s not bad enough that the drought withered the soybeans last summer or that the damned government is cutting out price supports for feed corn,” he’d shouted one night after paying the Bird Man his daily fee. “Now I can’t even enjoy the one stand of trees on my property. Christ,” he roared, “I can’t even sit down to dinner without the taste of bird piss in my mouth.” Then he’d turned to her, his face flushed, hands shaking with rage, and she’d quietly reminded him what the doctor had said about his blood pressure. He poured himself a drink and looked at her with drooping eyes. “Have I done something to deserve this, Mai?” he said.

Poor Egon, she thinks. He lets things upset him so. Of course the birds are a nuisance, she’ll admit that now, but what about the man with the distress calls and the helicopters and firemen and all the rest? She tilts back the bottle of cough syrup, thinking she ought to call him in and tell him to take it easy, forget about it. In a month or so, when the leaves start to come in, the flock will break up and head north: why kill yourself over nothing? That’s what she wants to tell him, but when she calls his name her voice cracks and the cough comes up on her again, racking, relentless, worse than before. She lets the spasm pass, then calls his name again. There is no answer.

It is then that she hears the sputter of the chainsaw somewhere beyond the window. She listens to the keening whine of the blade as it engages wood — a sound curiously like the starling distress call — and then the dry heaving crash of the first tree.

1890

An utter stillness permeates the Tuxedo Club, a hush bred of money and privilege, a soothing patrician quiet insisted upon by the arrases and thick damask curtains, bound up in the weave of the rugs, built into the very walls. Eugene Schiefflin, dilettante, portraitist, man of leisure, and amateur ornithologist, sits before the marble fireplace, leafing through the Oologist Monthly and sipping meditatively at a glass of sherry. The red-eyed vireo, he reads, nests twice a year, both sexes participating in the incubation of the eggs. The eggs, two to four in number, are white with brown maculations at the larger extremity, and measure 5/16 by 2/3 of an inch…. When his glass is empty, he raises a single languid finger and the waiter appears with a replacement, removes the superfluous glass, and vanishes, the whole operation as instantaneous and effortless as an act of the will.

Despite appearances to the contrary — the casually crossed legs, the proprietary air, the look of dignity and composure stamped into the seams of his face — Eugene is agitated. His eyes give him away. They leap from the page at the slightest movement in the doorway, and then surreptitiously drop to his waistcoat pocket to examine the face of the gold watch he produces each minute or so. He is impatient, concerned. His brother Maunsell is half an hour late already — has he forgotten their appointment? That would be just like him, damn it. Irritated, Eugene lights a cigar and begins drumming his fingertips on the arm of the chair while the windows go gray with dusk.

At sixty-three, with his great drooping mustache and sharp, accipiter’s nose, Eugene Schiefflin is a salient and highly regarded figure in New York society. Always correct, a master of manners and a promoter of culture and refinement, a fixture of both the Society List and the Club Register, he is in great demand as commencement speaker and dinner guest. His grandfather, a cagey, backbiting immigrant, had made a fortune in the wholesale drug business, and his father, a lawyer, had encouraged that fortune to burgeon and flower like some clinging vine, the scent of money as sweet as jasmine. Eugene himself went into business when he was just out of college, but he soon lost interest. A few years later he married an heiress from Brooklyn and retired to hold forth at the Corinthian Yacht Club, listen to string quartets, and devote himself to his consuming passions — painting, Shakespeare, and the study of birds.

It wasn’t until he was nearly fifty, however, that he had his awakening, his epiphany, the moment that brought the disparate threads of his life together and infused them with import and purpose. He and Maunsell were sitting before the fire one evening in his apartment at Madison and Sixty-fifth, reading aloud from Romeo and Juliet. Maunsell, because his voice was pitched higher, was reading Juliet, and Eugene, Romeo. “Wilt thou be gone?” Maunsell read, “it is not yet near day: / It was the nightingale, and not the lark, / That pierc’d the fearful hollow of thine ear.” The iambs tripped in his head, and suddenly Eugene felt as if he’d been suffused with light, electrocuted, felt as if Shakespeare’s muse had touched him with lambent inspiration. He jumped up, kicking over his brandy and spilling the book to the floor. “Maunsell,” he shouted, “Maunsell, that’s it!”

His brother looked up at him, alarmed and puzzled. He made an interrogatory noise.

“The nightingale,” Eugene said, “and, and … woodlarks, siskins, linnets, chaffinches — and whatever else he mentions!”

“What? Who?”

“Shakespeare, of course. The greatest poet — the greatest man — of all time. Don’t you see? This will be our enduring contribution to culture; this is how we’ll do our little bit to enrich the lives of all the generations of Americans to come—”

Maunsell’s mouth had dropped open. He looked like a classics scholar who’s just been asked to identify the members of the Chicago White Stockings. “What in Christ’s name are you talking about?”

“We’re going to form the American Acclimatization Society, Maunsell, here and now — and we’re going to import and release every species of bird — every last one — mentioned in the works of the Bard of Avon.

That was thirteen years ago.

Now, sitting in the main room of the Tuxedo Club and waiting for his brother, Eugene has begun to show his impatience. He jerks round in his seat, pats at his hair, fiddles with his spats. He is imbibing his fourth sherry and examining a table enumerating the stomach contents of three hundred and fifty-nine bay-breasted warblers when he looks up to see Maunsell in the vestibule, shrugging out of his overcoat and handing his hat and cane over to the limp little fellow in the cloakroom.

“Well?” Eugene says, rising to greet him. “Any news?”

Maunsell’s face is flushed with the sting of the March wind. “Yes,” he says, “yes,” the timbre of his voice instantly soaked up in the drapes and rugs and converted to a whisper. “She’s on schedule as far as they know, and all incoming ships have reported clear weather and moderate seas.”

Any irritation Eugene may have shown earlier has vanished from his face. He is grinning broadly, the dead white corners of his mustache lifted in exultation, gold teeth glittering. “That’s the best news I’ve heard all week,” he says. “Tomorrow morning, then?”

Maunsell nods. “Tomorrow morning.”

At eight the following morning, the two brothers, in top hats and fur-lined overcoats, are perched, anxiously on the edge of the broad leather seat of Maunsell’s carriage, peering out at the tapering length of the Fourteenth Street pier and the Cunard steamer edging into the slips. Half an hour later they are on deck, talking animatedly with a man so short, pale, and whiskerless he could be mistaken for a schoolboy. It is overcast, windy, raw, the temperature lurking just below the freezing mark. “They seem to have held up pretty well, sir,” the little fellow is shouting into the wind. “Considering the Cunard people made me keep them in the hold.”

“What? In the hold?” Both brothers look as if they’ve been slapped, indignation and disbelief bugging their eyes, mad wisps of silver hair foaming over their ears, hands clutching savagely at the brims of their hats.

“’Loive cargo goes in the ‘old,’” the little fellow says, his voice pinched in mockery, “’and Oy’m vewy sowwy, Oy am, but them’s the regelations.’” He breaks into a grin. “Oh, it was awful down there — cold, and with all those horses stamping and whinnying and the dogs barking it’s a wonder any of the birds made it at all.”

“It’s a damned outrage,” Eugene sputters, and Maunsell clucks his tongue. “How many did you say made it, Doodson?”

“Well, as you’ll see for yourself in a minute, sir, the news is both good and bad. Most of the thrushes and skylarks came through all right, but there was a heavy mortality among the nightingales — and I’ve got just three pairs still alive. But the starlings, I’ll tell you, they’re a hardy bird. Didn’t lose a one, not a single one.”

Eugene looks relieved. In what has become a reflex gesture over the past few days, he consults his pocket watch and then looks up at Doodson. “Yes, they’re a glorious creature, aren’t they?”

Maunsell directs the driver to Central Park East — Fifth and Sixty-fifth — and then settles back in the seat beside his brother. Two cabs fall in behind them, the first containing Doodson and a portion of the transatlantic aviary, the second packed to the roof with bird cages. There is the steady adhesive clap of hoofs, the rattling of the springs. Eugene glances over his shoulder to reassure himself that the cabs — and birds — are still there, and then turns to his brother, beaming, his fingers tapping at the stiff crown of the hat in his lap, an aureole of hair radiating from his head. “When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding; / Sweet lovers love the spring,” he recites with a laugh, unscrewing the cap of his flask and nudging Maunsell. “I think we’ve really got it this time,” he says, laughing again, the sound of his voice softening the cold clatter of the coach. “I can feel it in my bones.”

Outwardly, his mood is confident — celebratory, even — but in fact his high hopes are tempered by the Acclimatization Society’s history of failure over the course of the thirteen years since its inception. Eugene has released thrushes, skylarks, and nightingales time and again. He has released siskins, woodlarks, and common cuckoos. All have failed. Inexplicably, the seed populations disappeared without a trace, as if they’d been sucked up in a vacuum or blown back to Europe. But Eugene Schiefflin is not a man to give up easily — oh no. This time he’s got a new ace in the hole, Sturnus vulgaris, the starling. Certainly not the Bard’s favorite bird — in all the countless lines of all the sonnets, histories, comedies, and tragedies it is mentioned only once — but legitimate to the enterprise nonetheless. And hardy. Doodson’s report has got to be looked upon as auspicious: not a single bird lost in the crossing. It’s almost too good to be true.

He is musing with some satisfaction on the unexpected beauty of the bird — the stunning metallic sheen of the plumage and the pale butter pat of the beak revealed to him through the mesh of the cage — when the carriage pulls up along the curb opposite the park. Before the percussive echo of the horses’ hoofs has faded, Eugene is out of the carriage and shouting directions to Doodson, the two cabbies, and Maunsell’s driver. In one hand he clutches a pry bar; in the other, a bottle of Moët et Chandon. “All right,” he calls, rigorous as a field marshal. “I want the cages laid side by side underneath those elms over there.” And then he strikes out across the grass, Maunsell bringing up the rear with three long-stemmed glasses.

It is still cold, a crust of ice stretched over the puddles in the street, the cabbies’ breath clouding their faces as they bend to negotiate the wooden cages. “Here,” Eugene barks, striding across the field and waving his arm impatiently, “hurry it along, will you?” Well-tipped, but muttering nonetheless, the cabbies struggle with one cage while Doodson — his nose red with cold and excitement-helps Maunsell’s chauffeur with another. Within minutes all eight cages are arranged in parallel rows beneath the elms, laid out like coffins, and Eugene has begun his customary rambling speech outlining his and the society’s purposes, eulogizing Shakespeare and reciting quotations relevant to the caged species. As he stoops to pry the lid from the first cage of thrushes, he shouts out an injunction from Hamlet: “Unpeg the baskets on the house’s top,” he calls, liberating the birds with a magisterial sweep of his arm, “Let the birds fly.”

The cabbies, paid and dismissed, linger at a respectful distance to watch the mad ceremony. Deliberate, methodical, the old fellow in the top hat and silk muffler leans down to remove the tops of the cages and release the birds. There is a rustle of wings, a cry or two, and then the appearance of the first few birds, emerging at random and flapping aimlessly into the branches of the nearest tree. The pattern is repeated with each box in succession, until the old man draws up to the single remaining cage, the cage of starlings. The other old fellow, the rickety one with the drawn face and staring eyes, steps forward with the glasses, and then there’s the sound of a cork popping. “A toast,” the first one shouts, and they’re raising their glasses, all three of them, the two old duffers and the young cub with the red nose. “May these humble creatures, brought here with goodwill and high expectation, breed and prosper and grace the land with beauty and song.”

“Hear, hear!” call the others, and the chauffeur as well, though he hasn’t been offered any wine.

Behind the mesh of their cage, the big dull birds crouch in anticipation, stuffed like blackbirds in a pie, their voices wheezing with a sound of metal on metal. The cabbies shake their heads. A cold wind tosses the dead black limbs of the trees. Then the old gentleman bends to the cage at his feet, his hair shining in the pale sunlight, and there is a sudden startling explosion as the birds stream from the opening as if propelled, feathers rasping, wings tearing at the air, a single many-voiced shriek of triumph issuing from their throats. En masse, almost in precision formation, they wheel past the spectators like a flock of pigeons, and then, banking against the sun, they wing off over the trees, looking for a place to roost.

(1981)

THE ARCTIC EXPLORER

I. DAY

Departure

Posing in full dress uniform at the bow of the little brig Endeavor, rigid as the mast looming behind him, he raises a stiff arm in acknowledgment of the small send-off parties spotting the Kings’ shore of the Narrows. With his perfect posture, immaculate uniform and manicured mustache, he looks very much the Hero, a reincarnated admixture of Henry Hudson, John Paul Jones and El Cid.

His solemn eyes scan the bandless, bannerless shore. A paltry crowd, he reflects, for an occasion so momentous. After all, he is sailing cheekily off into the frigid unknown, beyond the reaches of men’s maps, to probe regions whose very existence is but rumor. Yet such, he supposes, is the lot of Heroes: all but ignored by the self-satisfied Present, revered by Posterity. Glebe cows. If it were up to them Kentucky would be a wilderness still.

Beyond the Narrows, the open Atlantic, rolling pleasantly underfoot to a gentle June breeze. Captain John Pennington Frank (M.D., U.S.N.) breathes deeply, closes his eyes, and removes his cap to let the Seabreeze tickle through his hair. As he does so, the last spangles of confetti are sucked up in the wind and shot away to starboard (this the confetti that his mother and two unmarried sisters had solemnly flung at him just half an hour earlier when the brig had been launched at the Brooklyn Naval Yard). Like Ishmael too long a-land, he feels the salt breeze raking up all the old sailor’s pluck: Ah! The Open Sea! Adventure! Man against the Elements! It is then that the brig pitches forward and an icy slap intrudes itself upon the Captain’s meditations. His eyelids snap-to like the surprise of a stroke and he lurches forward against the rail: the cap sails out from his hand in a graceful arc, to be sucked down by the frothing waves below. When he recovers himself he glances furtively about before digging out the handkerchief, thankful that none of the crew had been watching. The ceremonies over, and the voyage begun, the Captain retires to his cabin, where the crisp and neatly lined pages of the logbook await him.

Of course he knows nothing as yet of the Arctic Night.

Captain’s Log, June 2

Set sail from NY Harbor at 1100 hours Eastern Time. Momma, Evangeline and Euphonia saw us off with a not inconsiderable crowd. As we passed the Narrows, quite ten thousand I should think turned out to cheer us. It was heartening thus to witness the deep reverence and goodwill the people of this great nation show for our venture.

My party consists of fifteen: eight officers (myself included); five crewmen; Phillip Blackwark, cook; and Harlan Hawkins, cabin boy. Our stores include a large supply of navy ration salt beef and pork, hard biscuit, flour, some barrels of exsiccated potato, two thousand pounds of pemmican, a quantity of dried fruits, and twelve barrels of pickled cabbage. (Surreptitiously, I laid in a supply of party hats and whistles, to cheer the men during our winter confinement.) It is my expectation to reach the northern coast of Newfoundland by the twentieth. There we will supplement our stores with a few sides of fresh beef, God and Governor Pickpie willing.

Glut at Anoatuk

Kresuk’s bare chest is bespattered with blood, his face a smear, the oily black hair at his cheeks congealed with blood and birdfat. His incisors dig at the purple vein along the breastbone, his lips suck at the tatters of pink flesh still clinging to the pink ribs. As he gnaws, the denuded breast and its few dangling particles flap flat against his greasy knuckles. The remains of nine eider-ducks lie beside his bare thigh, a wet neck and ribcage beneath it. His right nostril is crammed white with fat and bits of raw meat.

Ooniak, his woman, patiently cracks auk eggs and drains the contents into the yawning maw of Sip-su, their defective son. Mouth agape, head thrown back, Sip-su is a birdling in the nest, begging the sky for food. Five winters, thinks Kresuk, looking hard at his son. I give him one more. Then he lies back with a sigh, his head buried in a heap of bloodied feathers. He breaks wind. He picks his teeth. And thinks of walrus, bearded seal, narwhal. He does not suspect the existence of New York Harbor 2800 miles to the south, nor does he suspect the existence of the brig Endeavor, already making its way north to ripple the placid waters of his life. There are legends telling of tribes of gaunt, pale men, but Kresuk has no time for legends — the Night, the season of frozen ice, of terror and of want, is over, and the birds have returned to Anoatuk.

Dining at St. John’s, Newfoundland

(A dainty tinkle of silverware, china and crystal accompanies the dialogue.)

Oh, excellent, You know I haven’t titillated my palate with such northern delicacies as these since — oh, ‘47 I guess it was, up in Finland.

It’s only on special occasions that I can get them myself, you know, Captain. I don’t expect you picture me glutting on poached wapiti tongue all the time—

No, no, no. And I’m deeply flattered that you consider our visit one of those special occasions, Governor Pickpie … these smell ducky — what are they?

We call them St. John’s marbles. The genitalia of the male musk-ox, braised in port. Care for some more wine?

Oh yes, thank you…. Quite tasty, these marrrbles. Ho. Ho-ho.

Have you tried the smoked salmon in soured cream? Cochlearia salad?

Um yes. Superb. You know, Governor Pickpie, I think the memory of this feast alone will sustain us through the long winter to come.

You’re very kind, sir. At any rate, I wish you greater success than the last party that came through — Sir Regis Norton’s expedition.

Oh?

Yes. Their ship was found by a Swedish fellmonger no more than a month ago, frozen solid as a rock into the ice sheet — all hands dead from frost. Preserved like pickles.

Down

Kresuk smiles to himself in the loud sun, mirror-whiteness, bird squabble. He stoops to collect eider-down from around the eider-nests, occasionally pausing to poke a hole in an egg and suck its contents. Ooniak squats on a lichen-crowned rock, stuffing a new walrus sleeping bag with eider-down and the ass feathers of the arctic tern. Nearby Sip-su sits: circular, drooling, eyes focused on nothing. Work a son should be doing, thinks Kresuk. The seal are back. I should hunt. I give him one winter more.

Captain’s Log, June 28

Entered Baffin’s Bay, bearing to northwest by north, looking for open water. Great bergs like floating mountains hem us in. We keep in sight of the dramatic coastline, navigating from headland to headland — it takes us steadily westward, and always to the north.

The sixty-two Esquimau dogs we purchased at Fiskarnaes are perhaps not even half-a-step removed from their lupine ancestors. One is afraid to go on deck anymore — they surge about one in a snarling pack, nosing about for food, snapping and tearing at each other. Yesterday they pulled down two sides of beef from the rigging, and before Mr. Mallaby could get through the seething pack, they had reduced the rock-hard frozen meat to bare bone, like a swarm of those carnivorous Amazonian fishes. The men complain bitterly of these ravening wolves infesting our decks, and I explain that we shall need them to pull our sledges during the fall and spring explorations. Still the men grumble. Perhaps I shall break out the party hats this evening to brighten their spirits.

UFO

Metek is agitated. He can barely contain himself. Nervously he cuts strip after strip from the walrus carcass and nervously he wedges them in his mouth. Across from him squat Kresuk and Ooniak, their faces slimed with the buttery wet liver that had served as an hors d’oeuvre — they too are now cutting strips of walrus-beef and feeding them into their mouths. Sip-su sits on, an autistic little Buddha. It was big as the floating ice, Metek says finally. No one looks up. The assiduous gorging continues, to the accompaniment of lip-smacks, grunts, booming eructations. It had great white wings, and it flew atop the water like a flock of eider coming in to feed. I saw it from Pekiutlik Lookout where I am hunting. A great creature, of color like the summer fox, and wings that hum like the auk.

Kresuk, without breaking the studied hand-to-mouth rhythm he has established, looks up and utters a single word: Sealshit.

Berg-Beleaguered

Like a foundling among wolves, a shot-glass of Wild Turkey among winos, a bridge over the River Kwai, the Endeavor drifts among ice peaks that rear malevolently a hundred feet above the water. The bergs are drifting too: battering together like gargantuan rams, shattering the arctic stillness with explosions as the ship-sized blocks thunder down. The brig rocks dizzily in the concussive waves; the men are panic-struck; the sixty-two dogs beshit the decks in fright. But the Captain seems unmoved, absorbed as he is in thinking up names for salient coastal features. Aunt, Aunt, Aunt? he thinks aloud.

Soon the black channel before them vanishes — two titantic bergs roll gently together and lock with a kiss: the open passage has become a cul-de-sac. Accordingly, First Officer Mallaby orders the brig turned 180 degrees. But wait! Even the channel they’ve just passed through is stoppered tight as a nun’s orifices — the brig’s wake trails off into the gullets of two implacable bergs, tall and white as the chalk cliffs at Dover. The open sea becomes a lake — no, a pond — inexorably the ring of ice closes in, like a mountain range seen creeping in time-stop photography through ten million years. Captain Frank! shouts Mallaby. Captain Frank! The Captain looks up, and for the first time assesses the situation. How embarrassing, he mutters, and returns to his notebook, annoyed with the interruption — he’d almost had it, the name he’d been searching for — his great aunt on his mother’s side.

Two hours later the Endeavor bobs in a puddle, surrounded by the sheer ice faces, kicked about now and again by their feet — the feet which even now, deep in the black and secretive depths, are welding themselves together, freezing across in a grim sort of net.

Five hundred yards distant, from their vantage point in Pekiutlik Lookout, two figures, swathed in the hair of beasts, are watching. One grunts: Hmph. What’d I tell you. The other, incredulous, mouths his reply: Mother of Walrus!

Captain’s Log, July 17

It is with great sorrow that I must report the loss of our ship. In searching for a northwest passage we entered a blind bay, became beleaguered by ice, and were finally crushed by the shifting floes. All hands escaped without incident, and due to my own foresight, much of our stores were saved, including a great quantity of wood from the crushed hull. She was a stout little brig, and we all hated to see her go — especially as it means making the eight-hundred-mile journey to Fiskarnaes, on the South Greenland coast, by foot. I have given orders to establish a winter camp here, as the season is so far progressed as to render any attempt at escape impracticable. About five hundred yards from the scene of the Endeavor’s demise is an outcropping of greenstone. I have named it Pauce Point, in honor of my great aunt, Rudimenta Pauce. It is in the lee of this cliff that we shall make our winter quarters with the heavy timber salvaged from the brig, insulating the walls and ceilings with packed ice, Esquimau-fashion. God willing, we shall live to see the spring, and other eyes will come to peruse what I have written here — the record of our tribulations.

The Glare

Out on the floes Kresuk is bent over a tiny hole, no more than two inches in diameter. His ear is to the ice, his fist curled round the harpoon. The seal responsible for this hole is at that very moment gamboling about the ice-blue depths, gobbling fish, undulating sealishly through the water, out of breath now, darting back to the airhole for a heaving gasp of oxygen. It will be his last gasp, smiles Kresuk.

Some distance off, the man with rifle and notebook is busy naming headlands, cliffs and glaciers after himself and members of his family. The jagged pencil line of the coast grows northward on the paper as each day he hikes farther, ostensibly in search of game. Soon, he thinks, he will have a team of dogs trained and will be able to cover twice the distance in a sledge — but for now he must walk, and haul back meat for the crew and ravenous dog-pack. Up ahead he catches sight of a movement out on the ice — he strains his eyes, but with the glare, and his sun-blindness, the object drifts and melds with the red and blue spots before his eyes. But isn’t it a bear? A fat bear, rich with meat and suet, bent now over a hole in the ice? The man folds the notebook into his parka and begins his stalk. When he gets within two hundred feet he lies flat, braces the rifle on an ice pedestal, takes careful aim, and fires.

Captain’s Log, August 15

Have made contact with the Esquimaux. I found one of these savages unconscious on the ice, suffering apparently from shock as a result of a recent flesh wound in the gluteus maximus. With the aid of a sledge drawn by six of the crew (we’ve not yet been able to train the dogs), I brought the poor fellow back to camp, where I was able to perform a crude operation, dressing his wound and treating the shock with a dose of morphine. He lies asleep now in the main cabin the fellows have constructed from the remains of the Endeavor. In appearance, he is very much like his Christianized counterparts to the south, but in size he greatly surpasses them, measuring six feet from toe to crown, and weighing nearly one hundred ninety pounds. He is dressed in rude garments fashioned from the pelts of his prey — he wears a sort of breeches fabricated from the hindquarters of the polar bear, the claws still attached and trailing upon the ground as he stands. His boots are of sealskin and his parka of arctic fox. He exudes a strong odor of urine.

I am quite anxious to speak with our primitive guest (hopefully through the office of my interpreter, Second Officer Moorhead Bone), as information regarding the indigenous Esquimau tribes and their seasonal wanderings should prove invaluable to us in effecting our spring escape.

Gaunt, and Pale

Kresuk awakes groggy, and with a distant ache in his anak, from a dream in which he had harpooned Osoetuk, the great narwhal, God of the Seas, and been dragged through the ice, down to Osoetuk’s lair in the icy depths. There Osoetuk had given him a wonderful elixir, the spirit of fishes and heart of walrus, and it had made him warm beneath the ice and the dark waters — warm, and drowsy.

Now he lies still, eyes closed, listening to the beat and wash of a strange tongue, remembering the flank attack and the lost seal. He struggles to open his eyes but the elixir prevents him. It takes all his concentration to crack the heavy lids just enough to catch a glimpse of the ceiling, its wooden beams. Wood! The last thing he’d expect to see at Pekiutlik. Hard and carvable, just the ticket for tools and totems — but up here the best he’d ever done was a forked branch washed up from the south. His conclusion is inevitable: I am dead, he thinks, and lifted into another world. The voices drone. His eyes open, close. He looks again: wood all around him, so precious, so rare, a forest above his heavy lids — the lids which now close as if weighted, while the dream seeps back into his consciousness. When again they open he twists his head in the direction of the voices, strains to see, focuses finally … on legends! Men with hair on their faces, gaunt and pale as winter, legends incarnate.

II. NIGHT

Captain’s Log, November 7

So cold your axillary hair shatters like glass, and the spittle freezes in your throat.

Captain’s Log, November 8

We have just enough light at noon to read the thermometer without aid of a lantern. Temperature at noon today was −38 degrees F., with a stiff breeze kicking up. Mr. Mallaby is lost somewhere out on the floes. At ten this morning he went out to feed the dogs and has not been seen since. I have sent out a search party.

The supply of fresh meat I commissioned from Kresuk in early September is nearly gone. It was well worth the price (some three hundred pounds of walrus and bear in exchange for a string of glass beads and six red wooden buttons). Judging from his look of idiot delight as I dangled the beads before his nose, I think I could have got another six hundred pounds of meat in the bargain. My only complaint is that the savage has not returned since, and we are in dire need of further barter. I presume he is wintering at Etah, the Esquimau village sixty miles south of us.

Captain’s Log, November 12

The search party has not returned; no trace either of Mr. Mallaby. I regret to report that of the men remaining (five went out on the search) only four are well enough to be up and about. Frostbite has been our biggest enemy, with scurvy running a close second. All the men suffer from the latter, and to complicate matters, our meager supply of dried fruits has been already exhausted. Even the pickled cabbage is beginning to go quickly — yet all of us show signs of scorbutic weariness and bleeding at the gums.

The incessant hacking and wheezing, and the groaning of the amputees, is trying on my nerves. Besides which I am bored witless — nothing to do but tend the sick and wait for the sun — nearly 140 days distant. Nursing is not exactly my idea of an heroic occupation — I long for the more active fight.

Captain’s Log, November 15

The remains of Mr. Mallaby’s fur suit have been found by Mr. Bone among the dogs: I can only conjecture his fate. The dog-pack, incidentally, is now down to twenty-seven survivors — it appears they have been eating one another, as we have been unable to provide them with fresh meat, and the pemmican (unpalatable though it is), we must conserve for our own use. Yet Mr. Bone reminds me that without dogs we should be hard-pressed in making our spring trek to civilization. Something must be done.

The search party has not yet returned. I have dispatched a second search party, composed of our three ablest men (Tiggis, Tuggle and Mr. Wright), to search for the missing search party.

Barter

Kresuk returns. His round cheeks, white furs, slit eyes. His shaggy frame in the doorway. The stiff seal flipper clutched in his mittens.

The Captain beckons him in, slamming the door against the wind. A dying wood-fire glows in the corner, shadows mount the walls. The men snuff and wheeze. The Captain nods at Kresuk, smiling. Kresuk nods back, smiling. “Bone!” shouts the Captain. “Bone!”

Mr. Bone lifts himself from his pallet, breath steaming around his head like a pot of coffee, and hobbles out to join his superior. “Mr. Bone, speak with this fellow. I feel certain that he’s come to exchange meat for beads, and I don’t think I need emphasize how sorely necessitous we are at this juncture.” Bone coughs, relieves himself of a wad of sputum. “Wuk noah tuk-ha,” he says. Kresuk stares past him for a moment, then turns to sift through the murky low room. He pokes into each cabinet, each bed, beneath each man’s pillow. “What’s he about, Bone?” demands the Captain. “Here now!”

Kresuk is collecting things: fine glittering knives, pewter mugs, pocket watches, axes. A sack of red wooden buttons. He clatters them down in the center of the room, holds out the seal flipper to Mr. Bone.

Captain’s Log, November 21

Kresuk has been back. We exchanged a few of our things for a new, if small, supply of fresh meat. The savage drives a hard bargain. He has us, as they say, over a barrel.

Mr. Bone’s great toe has suppurated to such a degree that I fear gangrenous infection if it is not removed. Once again, I think, as the surgical blade splashes through to negotiate the bone in a quick down-and-across stroke, the damnable frost has cost us another part of our bodies. We’ll all of us be amputees by the time the sun returns to us — a pack of sniveling, scurvied cripples.

No word from either search party. I would organize a third search party to search for the two missing search parties, but there are just five of us here, and I am the only one with two serviceable legs and feet, arms and hands. Really, I feel like chief attendant at a leper colony.

Captain’s Log, November 22

Funeral obsequies for Mr. Mallaby today. My bedridden mates hobbled outside where we gathered round a memorial plaque and sang hymns. What with the coughing and slobbering of the men, and the groans of the wind, it was difficult, but we did manage a fairly respectable job of “Art thou weary, art thou languid?”—one of my personal favorites. Young Harlan Hawkins wept as I read “ashes to ashes, dust to dust, ice to ice” (I thought the insertion quite apposite), and scattered the remaining strands of Mr. Mallaby’s furs to the wind. It was a pitiable sight indeed — the poor boy swabbing at the frozen tears with his right stump as the soul of his valiant shipmate was set free to be gathered to the bosom of his Maker. The boy’s own soul, I’m afraid, will not be long with us either.

Lost on the Floes

The wind howls a gale, the cold shatters steel, splinters wood, transubstantiates flesh to ice. Misshapen ice-hummocks rear up like bad dreams, gray and ghostly in the perennial dark. All living things perish here: only the ice belt lives on — thrives — in the searing winds and falling temperatures.

The search parties, having found one another, are faced with a secondary problem: finding their way back. Their progress for the past six hours has been geometrical — on feet long dead, they have plodded out the shaky hypotenuses of a dozen right triangles, one atop the other. They are drunk with the cold, enraptured with it; cold no longer, they lie down to rest. Pekiutlik Lookout (known variously as Pauce Point) lies but half a mile south of them. Half a mile through the black moonscape of the Arctic Night.

Natural Selection

In his igloo at the Etah settlement Kresuk and his neighbors are lounging about naked, skin on fur, sunning in the prodigious heat put out by their seal-blubber lamps. At this particular moment Kresuk is bending over to display the tiny circular scar on his anak, the badge of his first encounter with the gaunt men. The badge of his later encounters with the gaunt men dangles beneath his chin: a necklace of red wooden buttons, glass beads and gold pocket watches. His neighbors are threading similar necklaces, chipping away at the icy floor with their steel knives, trying their teeth against the smoky pewter mugs. They look up as Kresuk begins retelling the story of the wound, a story they’ve heard as many as ninety-seven times. They are fascinated nonetheless. Beads, knives and mugs drop, mouths hang open. And pairs of quick black eyes follow the necklace twisting and slapping against Kresuk’s breastbone as he pantomimes the action of his sealhunt. When he speaks, the gibbous cheeks part to reveal his smile, and his eyes flash like headlights beneath the fleshy lids.

When the tale is finished and Metek sits up to tell his story of the great winged whale that brought the gaunt men, the others turn back to their beads, knives, mugs. Kresuk stretches out and begins picking at his sealhaunch. He chews thoughtfully, only half-attending his friend’s narrative, his mind on the glory he’s won, glory that will pass down through generations. He sees himself a king, his sons princes. It is then that Sip-su raises himself and waddles over to his father, where he squats to deposit a turd, wet and shapeless, on Kresuk’s foot. The friends laugh. Ooniak stares down at her toe. And Kresuk explodes, slaps the fat-headed child across the igloo — Sip-su totters, spins off the kotluk, scalds himself, wails. The neighbors look down at their beads and laps, faces elongate, and fight to suppress chuffles and snorts while Kresuk pulls on his furs, orders Ooniak to dress the child. Wordless, he snatches up the screeching Sip-su and crawls out the door. The old men nod.

Outside, in the wind so sharp it takes away the child’s squalling breath, Kresuk harnesses the dogs, straps the child to his back, and starts off toward Pekiutlik Lookout, tomb of his ancestors.

Plaint

Driven by the insufferable stench of the accumulated slops, he determines to make a slop-emptying expedition. Doggedly he hefts the slop bucket and doggedly he steps out into the glacial dark: the hairs in his nostrils fuse with his first steaming breath. When he exhales he can hear the vapor crystallize, whisper to the ground in tiny pellets. Already the reeking paste has become a bucket-shaped block, no more offensive than an ice cube. He stops, whale-oil lantern in hand, intent on checking the thermometer for his meteorological records. As he stoops to clear the glass an exceptionally virulent gust extinguishes his light, and brings to his ears the unmistakable plaint, weak and attentuated, of a child in distress.

He drops the bucket, holds his breath, uncovers his ears (the lobes freeze through instantaneously). Yes, there it is again — borne down on the wind from above, up on Pauce Point!

Captain’s Log, January 5

The Esquimau child is doing well, fully recovered from the effects of his exposure. I only wish I could say as much for the men. Blackwark and Hoofer are alternately comatose and delirious; young Harlan Hawkins has contracted erysipelas in his left stump; Bone, who could hardly walk in any case, is suffering from a new attack of frostbite. Yesterday he reeled out to chop wood from our scrap heap to keep the fire going. After half an hour I began to wonder what had become of him, and went out searching. I found him asleep in the snow, his cheek frozen fast to the beam he’d been chopping — it was necessary to hack half his beard away in order to extricate the poor fellow. On one of my downward strokes I inadvertently swiped off his left ear. Little matter: I hardly expect the poor beggar to make it through the night.

The child, though about five or six years of age, appears to be defective mentally, from all indications suffering from mongoloidism. He must be hand-fed, and insists on fouling himself. I can only pity the savage heart that left him to the cold.

Captain’s Log, January 10

Disaster. The dogs have broken loose and got at our cache of pemmican — practically all we had left, better than two hundred pounds, is gone. I’ve managed to round up five of them, bloated as they are. Four will pull my sledge (or be whipped raw) and the fifth will grace our table. I can’t see how we’ll survive — we’ve almost no provisions left, and the night has barely begun.

Captain’s Log, January 11

Bone and Hoofer dead, Blackwark on the brink. I must leave them in their bunks, as I’ve barely the strength to drag them outside, and I must conserve my resources for the days ahead. With an interior temperature of +35 degrees F., I do not expect an overly rapid decomposition. Temperature outside at noon today was −54 degrees F.

Captain’s Log, January 21

Mad with hunger. The last two days we’ve had nothing to eat but a broth made from bits of wood and the more tender portions of Mr. Bone’s boots. Blackwark expired early this morning — there were no hymns, as Harlan Hawkins is in a coma, and the Esquimau child, my only other companion, can do nothing but wail for food and defecate. Clearly, without edibles, there is no hope for us here. As a result, I’ve come to a decision — I’ve determined to strap Hawkins and the child to a sledge drawn by the four curs I’ve spared (what a temptation it’s been to roast them!) and make for the Esquimau settlement at Etah. When they see the condition we’re in, and when they see the child — one of their own — I trust they’ll help us.

Hegira

A Hero indeed! he triumphantly thinks as he brings the lash down across the muzzles of the four dogs. If only Momma and the girls could see me now! But it is dark as Styx-mist and cold as Proserpine’s breath — so cold the thoughts begin to freeze in his head. Beneath his feet the ice is a jagged saw’s edge, cutting into each agonizing step, overturning the sledge, abrading the hard pads of the dog’s paws as if they were wax. Sip-su and the comatose Hawkins are lashed to the sledge, greatly impeding its progress, and from time to time the dogs stop and begin devouring one another and it is all he can do to whip them back to order. But indomitable, he presses on, a navy fight tune frozen in his cerebrum. Ard! he bellows (he had meant to yell “On you Bastards!” but the wind had driven the words back at him, right down his throat and into his shocked lungs). Soon his fingers will become brittle, and the fluid in his eyes will turn to slush.

At Etah

Outside the wind tells of a gale as it sweeps smooth over the glassy surface of the igloo. Inside it is sweating hot, and the three seal-blubber lamps, burning simultaneously, circulate a thick greasy smoke which stings the eyes. In the center of the domed ceiling a black helix winds and dances as it is sucked up through the chimney-piece and out, to rush before the deadly gusts.

Kresuk is sitting on the floor, dressed in furs, breathing heavily, his eyebrows white with frost. The carcass of a big bearded seal is wedged in the narrow entrance passage, its head and whiskers and cold dead eyes at Kresuk’s feet. The seal’s tail is outside, in the wind and dark, the bloated belly jammed like a cork in the neck of the entranceway. Kresuk turns, tugs at the animal’s head. He smiles. He’d been improvident in his early dealings with the gaunt men, trading away half his winter cache of meat for a few buttons and beads. And so he’d been forced out on the dark floes, hungry, hunting. There was no choice about it: Ooniak grumbling, the dogs howling, Metek muttering every time Kresuk stepped next door for dinner. But now he looks down at the seal. And thinks feast.

Then the voices outside: Ooniak, Metek, Metek’s woman. Kresuk rises to his knees, works a hand under each flipper and leans back. He can feel the others pushing at the seal’s fat flank. There is a moment of inertia, effort in suspension, and then a lewd wet sucking release and Kresuk is on his anak, the seal in his lap, Ooniak and his friends scrambling in: laughing.

Later, his belly full, Kresuk crawls over to Ooniak and lies beside her, the string of beads and watches clacking as he throws himself down. She is rounder than normal. He puts his ear to her stomach, and then barks out a laugh: something is moving, just beneath the skin. He sits up, grinning. Metek says something about sons sturdy as bears. The wind howls. And Kresuk looks down, suddenly startled. Beneath the smooth crystal, inching like an insect, the second hand has begun to trace its way around a watch face, and the watch has begun to tick.

A Soporific

A soporific, it lulls, soothes, spreads its uterine warmth — and you want to lie down on the floes, tired, ineffably tired, impervious now to the sting of it — bed down right there, on the floes. The child and Hawkins are still lashed down, but stiff as flagpoles: a patina of frost glosses their lips. The dogs have given up, ice-blood crusting between their toes: they lie doubled, nose to tail, whimpering, and still in their traces. Have you the strength to crack the whip? Hardly. It’s all you can do to grip the sledgehandles, woozy and reeling as you are. But warm, strangely warm, and tired. This is no gale, but gentle windsong, a lullaby in your tired ears. If only to lie down … for just a moment …

(1973)

RAPTURE OF THE DEEP

“We must go deeper,” Cousteau says. He is haggard, worn to bone, his splendid Gallic nose a wedge driven into his face. He uses his utensils to illustrate — his fork has become a crane, his spoon the diving machine, a pool of sauce the ocean. I feel the ship roll under my feet, an undulation as gentle as a breath. “Mais oui!” a chorus of voices sings out. “Deeper!”

I’m working my way round the cramped table, pouring coffee into a desolation of plates, cutlery, crusts of bread and fish bones. “But why?” I hear myself asking. “Haven’t we gone deep enough? What crime have we committed that we don’t deserve to see a port, a tree, the inside of a good brasserie?”

Twenty pairs of eyes settle on me. I can see that this last bit about the brasserie is having its effect. Cousteau glances up. “I will never rest,” he says, “until I see with my own two eyes what lies on the bottom. Who knows what miracles will be revealed, what kaleidoscopic vistas of the unknown and silent world?”

I bite my tongue, though I could say plenty. Cousteau is getting old. We’re all getting old. We’ve plumbed every body of water on earth, from McMurdo Sound to the Arafura Sea and the Firth of Clyde, we’ve found every wreck and frolicked with every fish, and I just don’t see the point of it anymore. But Cousteau is the perennial Boy Scout, intoxicated with adventure, if not the cru bourgeois the Calypso carries in her three-ton stainless steel wine tank. For him, everything is “kaleidoscopic,” “dreamlike,” “phantasmagoric,” from the life of the coral reef to the dregs of vin rouge left in the bottom of his glass after dinner. The whole watery world is his to embrace, but for me it’s the galley and the galley only, for me it’s a dwindling supply of veal chops and limp vegetables and nothing but pois-son, poisson, poisson. Twenty ravenous gastronomes stare up at me from the table each night, and what do I have to offer them? Poisson.

The first to break the silence is Saôut. He has bags under his eyes, and his chest, once sculpted and firm with his years of manhandling winches and hawsers, droops like an old woman’s. “Bernard has a point,” he says. “We’ve gone over two months now without liberty.”

“Two months without women,” Didier growls.

“Or meat,” Sancerre puts in.

I try to keep from smirking as I lean over the sun-blasted nape of this man or that to pour my bitter black brew. But Cousteau is oblivious. He merely waves the lank flap of his hand and says, “Deeper.”

We are anchored — have been anchored for two months now and counting — some 160 miles off the coast of West Africa, hovering over a deep sea canyon that for all intents and purposes has no bottom. Sense and sonar indicate that it is there, somewhere between thirteen and fourteen thousand feet, but because of poor maneuverability, undersea mudslides and senile dementia on the part of captain and crew, we have been unable to locate it. As if it matters. As if we haven’t already sounded out the sterile bottoms of a hundred canyons just like it and found absolutely nothing that would change anyone’s life one way or the other. The usual complement of scientists is aboard, of course, eager boyish men with pinched features, oversized eyeglasses, clipboards and calculators. They are geniuses. Learned professors. World-renowned authorities on the sponge or the sea cucumber. Tant pis. To me they are simply mouths to feed, mouths that tighten perceptibly at the mention of fish.

I am up, as always, an hour before dawn, preparing breakfast. I still have flour — thank God for that or we’d have a full-scale mutiny on our hands — and am busy fashioning crěpes from thin air. I find myself absently filling them with artificial pastry creme and the obscenely flavorless pulp of defrosted strawberries, but what can I do? Even the batter is bastardized, the eggs produced from a tin in the form of a noxious yellow powder that looks like something you’d use in a chemistry experiment. What I wouldn’t give for a dozen fresh eggs. Half a dozen. Merde: even a single one. But of course there are no chickenhouses on the open sea.

Busy with my whisk, I fail to notice Sancerre creeping into the galley. I hear him before I see him. “Who’s there?” I demand, the portholes black with the vestiges of yet another night at sea, the ship undulating beneath my feet in an incipient morning swell.

Sheepish, the sleep still glued to his eyes, Sancerre emerges from the pool of shadow behind the deep freeze. “Me,” he says simply.

“What are you doing here?”

I watch as his long mulish face reconstitutes itself in the glare of the galley lights, a face yellowed by the shambling years and the hostility of the sun. He shuffles his big feet, drops his shoulders and spreads his hands wide. “I’m hungry,” he says.

“Hungry, eh?”

My first impulse is to toy with him, make him squirm a bit, offer to perhaps fry up a batch of the flying fish that lie stunned on the deck each morning. Fish isn’t what he wants. He wants sausage, cheese, croissants pregnant with butter, he wants cold chicken, thick slices of Bayonne ham, beefsteaks and pâté maison spread on crusty rounds of peasant bread. Yes, of course, but he too must suffer through this hell of fish.

“A little something would do,” he says almost apologetically. “Just a bite to settle the stomach.”

And in that moment, even before I reach for the smoked sausage I keep hidden behind the saucepans, I realize I have an ally.

As soon as breakfast has been tucked away, down goes the bathyscaph, accompanied partway by the soucoupe plongeant—our diving saucer — and all hands are hungrily occupied till lunch. Cousteau himself is piloting the bathyscaph, though he’s too old to sit for hours in the moist cramped bubble of steel and glass down there in the ultimate hole of the earth, too old by far, just as I’m too old to prepare fillets of loup de mer in this straitjacket of a galley or ladle scalding chaudrée from the pot in an unsettled sea — and I have the scars to prove it. One of the scientists has gone down with him, an American with big American teeth and a braying American laugh that makes me want to kill every time I hear it. His very name — Dr. Mazzy Gort — sticks in my throat. I wish no one harm, but sometimes I fantasize. What if Cousteau and Dr. Mazzy Gort never come up again? What if the lifeline fails or a mudslide buries them two miles down in ooze a hundred feet thick and they join the fishes forever? It’s an evil thought. But it’s not my first, nor, I suspect, will it be my last.

For lunch I serve a grouper Falco speared last night. I’ve taken some care with it, marinated the fine white flesh in olive oil and fennel — the last of my fennel — and a soupçon of pastis. I serve it with fresh bread, the remaining potatoes and defrosted green beans in an explosion of aromas, pretending, for all and sundry, that this is not fish at all, that this is not the open sea, that we are not prisoners of Cousteau’s madness. And what do I get for it?

Saôut: “Oh, merde, not fish again.”

Piccard: “What else?”

Sancerre: “I want my mother.”

Didier: “I want a whore. Two whores. One for this — and one for this.” (A manual demonstration, very nimble and expressive.)

Afterward, in the interval between morning and afternoon dives, I find my feet directing me to the main deck and the cabin Cousteau used to share with his wife, back in the days when we were young and such things mattered. I am thinking. Talking to myself, actually. Making speeches. In one of the rear compartments of my brain, uninfected by the primordial reek of the sea and the visible evidence of the portholes, is the image of a modest auberge in Cluny or Trévoux, a tasteful little place that specializes in country dishes, viands mostly, heavy on cassoulets, game and sweetbreads, though perhaps, after a year or two on dry land, the chef might consider adding a pike quenelle or a truite aux amandes to the bill of fare. In the forefront of my consciousness an argument simmers for Cousteau.

Jacques-Yves, mon vieux, be reasonable, I will tell him. We are out of butter, eggs, cream, vegetables and herbs, we have less than a gallon of olive oil, no meats to speak of, no shallots or onions or potatoes. Release us. Release me. I’m fed up. Thirty years of clinging to the drainboard while the sea jerks my feet out from under me, thirty years of dicing leeks on a counter that won’t stand still, thirty years of racking my brain to come up with new ways and yet more new ways to prepare fish, and I’ve had it. I want to retire. I want to cook for tourists and the petite bourgeoisie. I want to cook meat, I want an herb garden and a chickenhouse. I want to feel the earth under my feet.

This is my speech, the one gathering itself on my lips as I seek out Cousteau. Unfortunately, I never get to deliver it. Because by the time I get to Cousteau’s cabin and stick my head in the door, he is lost to me, lost to us all, as faraway as if he were on another ship off another coast. The portholes are smothered, the room bathed in shadow: Cousteau is absorbed in the ritual of the voice-over. He sits before the TV monitor, a weird greenish glow on his face, mesmerized by images of the sea. Nothing moves but his lips, his voice murmurous and rapt: “As we go deeper into the somnolent depths, a kaleidoscope of fishes whirling round us like painted stars in a night sky, we cannot help but wonder at the phantasmagoric marvels that await us below….”

That evening, as the grouper appears in the guise of a saffronless bouillabaisse that is short on all ingredients except fish, Sancerre takes me aside. We are in the galley, the ship rolling in a moderate-to-heavy swell, the crew loud and raucous in the main cabin. His skin is the color of a baked yam, his eyes sunk deep in his head. “Bernard,” he says, lowering his voice to a whispery rasp, “I’ve been talking to some of the men….”

The pans rattle. A knife shoots across the expanse of the cutting board and lodges in the wall. I grab hold of the counter to keep from pitching face forward into the dessert. “Yes?” I prompt.

Sancerre’s face is like an old boot. The swell doesn’t faze him — he might as well be a fly clinging to the wall. “We want to go home,” he says finally.

Relief washes over me. I can feel the tears coming to my eyes as I take the blistered hide of Sancerre’s hand in mine and give it an affirmative squeeze. “Me too,” I say, “me too,” and I can hardly contain my emotion.

Sancerre glances over his shoulder, furtive and sly, then comes back to me with a wink. “We were just thinking,” he whispers, and it’s a strain to hear him over the habitual roar of the sea and the brouhaha of the crew at their sorry dinner, “about what you said last night over coffee, standing up to Cousteau like that—”

The ship dips to port, then jerks back at the long leash of its anchor, which is mired in the muck on top of a submerged mountain five hundred feet down. “Yes,” I say, afraid of moving too fast, afraid of scaring him off, “go on.”

But he just shrugs, the big idiot, and jams his hands into his pockets even as the swell rocks the deck under his feet.

“Listen,” I say, “Sancerre, old friend, could you find room for another little morsel of sausage? And some cheese I’ve been saving — some Gruyere?”

Sancerre’s eyes leap at me like caged beasts. The ship heaves back again and there’s a sharp curse from the main cabin followed by the sound of breaking glass. “Cheese? Did you say cheese?”

I am expansive, generous to a fault. Not only do I break out the cheese and sausage but two neat little glasses of the culinary pastis as well, and in the next minute we’re seated side by side atop the deep freeze like two old cronies on a country picnic. I wait till he’s wolfed down half a dozen wedges of the Gruyere and three plump slices of sausage before I say anything, and when I say it I am already pouring his second glass full to the brim with the clear fragrant liquor. “How many of you are in on it?” I whisper.

“Six of us,” he says before he can think.

“And the American?”

A look of disgust creeps across his features, settling finally into the ropy bulge of his lower lip. “The American,” he spits, and I know exactly what he means: if push comes to shove, the American will have to be sacrificed, along with anyone else who gets in our way.

“Falco?” I ask.

“He’s with the Captain, you should know that. They’re like two peas in a pod.”

Am I trembling — or is it just the boat rocking under my feet? Are we really sitting here in the galley over a bottomless pit in a rolling swell, contemplating mutiny? The thought thrills me till I feel as if I’ve been rung like a bell. Strange to say, though, I’m not thinking of Cousteau or fathomless depths or crashing waves or even courts of inquiry, but of forest mushrooms — forest mushrooms growing in sweet pale clumps among the ferns in a deep pool of shade.

It is then that Saôut slips in the door with his old woman’s tits and a broken plate held out conspicuously before him, looking secretive, looking like a spy — or a conspirator. His eyes take in the scene and without a word he goes straight for the sausage. One bite, two: he doesn’t bother with the knife. I watch his jaws work around the bleached-out bristle of his beard. The ship lurches, but he’s glued to the floor. “Are you with us?” he says finally, and as the sea lashes at the porthole and the ship comes back up and shakes itself like an old dog emerging from a bath, I can only nod.

In the morning, though it hurts me to do it, though it goes against every principle I’ve held sacrosanct since I successfully reduced my first Béarnaise some forty years ago, I serve a breakfast even an American wouldn’t eat. The coffee — strained through yesterday’s grounds — is the color of turpentine, watery and thin and without benefit of cream. There is no bread. Instead of baking, I made use of the old crusts I’ve been saving for croûtons, dipping them in a paste made of powdered egg and water and then frying them hard in twice-used oil and serving them with an accompaniment of flying fish poached in sea water and nothing else, not even a dash of pepper or a pass of the bouquet garni. I feel like an imp, a demon, a saboteur. I set out the plates in the main cabin, ring the breakfast bell, and slink away to my berth, heart pounding in my chest.

It doesn’t take long. The rumble of outrage spreads through the ship like some seismic event, radiating outward from the epicenter of the main cabin till every last bolt and iron plate thrums with it. I’m taking a calculated risk, and I know it. For the moment, at least, the gastronomic outrage is directed at me, and I’m not surprised when fifteen minutes later a deputation of the crew seeks me out in my bunk. It is led by Piccard and one of the scientists — Laffite, the sponge man — but to my relief, as I look up long-faced from my pillow, I see that Sancerre and Saôut are hovering protectively in the background.

“What’s the matter with you, Bernard?” Piccard demands. “Are you sick, is that it? Dizzy spells again?”

The sponge man is more direct: “How could you serve such, such”—he’s so overwrought he can barely get the words out—“such offal? It’s nothing short of criminal.”

I gaze up at them with a composed face, calm as the sacrificial lamb. “Sick, yes,” I say. “But not in the body — in my heart.”

Laffite is a bomb choking on its own fuse. He is a big man, bloated with his cravings, a priest worshipping at the temple of the gustatory pleasures. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” he cries. “Get out of that bed, you slacker, you assassin!”

Fortunately, Saôut is able to wrestle hold of his arms, or the first blood might have been spilled right then and there — and it would have been mine. “Calm yourself, Laffite,” he growls, and only I detect the quick slice of his wink. I let my eyes fall shut, and the sea, quiet now, rocks me in my cradle. A minute passes, the four of them squabbling like schoolchildren, and then I listen to the retreat of their footsteps. But my ears deceive me: when I open my eyes I see that Sancerre has stayed behind. He is grinning, and his jaundiced face seems to be lit from within, glowing like a freshly picked lemon. “We are eight,” he whispers, and I give him a look. Who? I silently mouth.

Sancerre glances over his shoulder. “It’s all a charade,” he says. “Piccard has capitulated.”

Lunch is a triumph of negativity: the selfsame flying fish, baked to the texture of wood pulp, their veiny winglike fins dried to stumps and served in a crimson jacket of American catsup, with canned niblet corn and sweet gherkins desecrating the rest of the plate under a garnish of seaweed. Again I retreat to my berth, again an incensed mob seeks me out. This time Sancerre shepherds Borchardt, Pépin and Fasquelle into my presence, and by the time they leave, we are eleven.

And then the pièce de résistance, the straw that breaks the camel’s back, our ticket to freedom: dinner. During the course of the afternoon, Cousteau and Dr. Mazzy Gort have descended again, ever deeper, seeking their solutions in the eternal muck. The crew has worked doggedly beneath an unsympathetic sun, their wizened biceps and arthritic backs straining, stomachs rumbling, the taste of mutiny burning like some bitter potion in their throats. And I? I have made my slow deliberate way through the reefs and shoals of my saucepans, my cruets, my knives and sieves and whisks. For the first time in as long as I can remember, I am working from a recipe, a curiosity from a thin volume left behind ten or fifteen years ago by a scientist from a place called Missouri: The Show Me State Cookbook. I do not have the butter, the crème fraîche, the milk, the champignons or the Parmesan, but the tinned tuna, the yellow wax beans and the packets of egg noodles exist in a sedimentary layer at the very bottom of the larder in a box labeled Emergency Rations.

Fair enough. I wouldn’t want to spoil the thing with any hint of flavor, after all. The sun slides across the porthole. I whistle while I work.

It is past seven by the time the bathyscaph is back on deck and Cousteau and Dr. Mazzy Gort have extricated their cramped limbs from its bowels. The crew steps lively, working furiously to secure everything against the night, lurching across the deck on aching feet, their noses turned optimistically to the air in the hope of catching a whiff of what the prandial hour promises to bring them. I overhear snatches of conversation, Cousteau’s voice raised in giddy triumph — they’ve found something, but not the bottom, not yet — and as the sun swells on the horizon the first cigarettes are lit, the first glasses of wine circulated. This is the hour when an air of festivity prevails aboard the Calypso, a time when labors are set aside and the mind drifts toward the simple pleasures to come. And so it is tonight, and yet, as bits and pieces of hushed dialogue float in through the open porthole and as this man or that sticks his head in the galley for a premonitory sniff, I can sense the tension underlying it all, the nasty nagging collective memory of that unforgivable breakfast and the obscenity of a lunch that followed it. They tread lightly. They are afraid. Deeply afraid.

This time I stand my ground. With a grand flourish I set the three big steaming pans down in the center of the table for each man to serve himself: the moment of truth is at hand. I note the sly, guilty looks of my co-conspirators as they suck at their wine glasses like condemned men, resigned to going hungry, and it props up my resolve. A lull falls over the conversation, hands fiddling with cutlery, with napkins, reaching out for the salt shaker, the pepper, the quietly oozing pans of my chef d’oeuvre. And now I have eyes only for the head of the table, where Cousteau sits absorbed in talk of the deeps with Dr. Mazzy Gort, Falco and Laffite. They retract unconsciously into the shells of their bent heads and bunched shoulders; their noses sniff the air warily. Steam rises. The first pan is breached, then the second and third, and all but the conspirators dig in.

Laffite is the first to react. “Good Christ!” he explodes, coughing up a mouthful of the stuff.

“I’m poisoned!” gasps Falco, and all round the table men lurch back from their plates in shock and horror. Even the Captain, whose taste buds must have withered and died long ago, lifts his head to give me a look of astonishment. Only Mazzy Gort seems unaffected, feeding the mucilaginous paste into the slot of his mouth as unconcernedly as if he were at a hot dog stand in some fantastical place like Peoria or Oshkosh.

Through the general tumult that ensues, one voice begins to take command: Laffite’s. “Murderer!” he cries, leaping from his seat in a frenzy. “And what do you call this, this, this shit?!“

I am a rock, a pillar, the statue of a man in a crisp white toque, arms folded across my chest. “Tuna noodle casserole,” I announce, and the place erupts.

Later, after the walls of the main cabin have been scrubbed down and the belligerents separated and sent wheezing to their bunks, Sancerre appears in the doorway to the galley to inform me that the Captain would like to have a word with me. Poor Sancerre. His dried yellow fig of a face is as mournful as a Greek mask, but his bloodied nose and the flapping rags of his eyes show that he isn’t licked yet. “What happened?” I ask, not bothering to look up or offer him a portion of the sausage I’m feeding into my mouth, one compulsive slice after another. “I thought you said we were eleven?”

“Son of a bitch,” he mutters. “It was Piccard. Did you see him?”

Only too clearly. Piccard stood with the Captain when the fight broke out, and when the food began to fly it wasn’t Cousteau who took the brunt of the abuse, but me, as if everything I’d done wasn’t for the general good and benefit of all. “What next?” I want to know, my voice a miserable croak. “I’ve given it everything I have.”

Framed in the doorway like some ghost of the larder, Sancerre replies in a voice as miserable as mine. “Give it time,” he says. “The men can’t hold out much longer. They can’t.” He steps closer, eyeing my sausage, his hands spread wide in extenuation. “They’re sucking on hard candy and drinking wine like it was gravy, they’re cracking jars of peanuts, raiding the emergency supplies in the lifeboats. They’re in an ugly mood, Bernard. I tell you, if it wasn’t for the wine—”

Suddenly we lock eyes. The wine. Of course: the wine. Deny a Frenchman his bread and he is angry, deny him his foie gras and his truffles and he is savage, but deny him his wine and he is nothing short of homicidal. Sancerre is grinning, and his grin has a country village in it, a kitchen garden, fruit trees, rabbits on a hook. I am grinning too, and my grin contains all that and more. “The wine,” I repeat, and though Cousteau awaits and my stomach plunges and everywhere the stink of fish infests my nostrils, I find myself laughing, laughing till the tears begin to stream down my face.

“Bernard,” Cousteau intones, and there is nothing left of his face but nose and two huge and liquidly suffering eyes, “I am chagrined. And puzzled too. It almost seems as if you’re deliberately trying to provoke the crew.”

We are in Cousteau’s cabin, a dark void rocking on the night of the sea and lit only by the subaquatic glow of the TV monitor. Finned legs kick across the screen, fish appear. Coral. The deeps. There is a plea on my tongue, a plea for our thirty years, for understanding and compassion, a mon vieux and a mon ami, but I kill it. “That’s right,” I say. “I am.”

“But what are you thinking?” Here the nose becomes a slash of shadow, the eyes luminous with the reflection of the screen — in this moment he looks like nothing so much as a fish himself. “Don’t you realize that we’ve almost reached our objective?”

“I don’t care.”

“Don’t care? But what of the kaleidoscopic wonders, what of the fishes in their undersea grottoes?”

The sea is calm, the ship motionless beneath us, held fast in a liquid vise. “I’m too old for exploring,” I say finally. “My feet hurt. There are no more wonders for me.” I look him dead in the eye. “I’ve cooked my last meal aboard this ship.”

And now the look of surprise, of consternation, of a befuddlement so deep you would have thought I was a talking eel or a puffer fish reciting La Nymphe de la Seine. “But you can’t do that — you’ve signed the articles. I’d have to, to put you in chains….”

I feel myself giving way — I can’t take this anymore, not another minute. I spit my words out, vomit them up, and I don’t care, I don’t. “Spanish Rice!” I shout. “Chuck Wagon Beans, Tuna Surprise, Macaroni and Cheese!”

And so, the next morning, as dawn breaks over the sea, I find myself confined to quarters, Laffite, the sponge man, standing guard over me as if I were some shipwrecked loon or common provocateur. I can smell from afar the sordid amateur attempts at breakfast, the blackened and fallen bread, the ruined coffee. My stomach stirs as I watch Laffite slump over the farce of his pistol, his heavy face drawn with hunger and fatigue. “What would you give, Laffite,” I say, as the morning swell drops us into a trough and buffets us back up again, “for a nice crisply presented caneton Tour d’Argent or a filet de boeuf en croûte? Eh? How many baskets of your precious sponges? Or would you prefer to eat them?“

The big man, with his big head and suffering eyes, looks queasy. “I warn you,” he says, and he clutches at the pistol with fat sweating fingers.

“Remember the petites brioches I used to make in the mornings, still hot from the oven? The way the butter would sink into them? Or the pain de campagne, a loaf per man?”

“Madman,” he snarls. “Fiend. Shut up!”

But I go on and on till he’s at the breaking point, till he’s either going to have to shoot me or give up the charade and let me climb above decks and guide the misguided. He’s giving way, I can see it, but then, right in the middle of my loving re-creation of the recipe for roast leg of venison with poivrade sauce, there’s a shout from above followed almost immediately by the most piteous outpouring of shock and lament I’ve ever heard. Laffite drops the pistol as if it’s suddenly come to life and bitten him and we leap simultaneously to our feet and fling ourselves out the door and up the companionway. A moment later, out of breath, we emerge on deck to a scene of purgatorial despair. Borchardt is beating his head against the rail, Falco striding up and down the boards shouting “All hands on deck!” Piccard hiding his face and weeping like a schoolgirl. The Captain and Dr. Mazzy Gort, huddled by the babyscaph in their deep-sea explorer’s costumes, can only blink and stare — they couldn’t look any more confused if the ship had hit a reef.

There in the water, all round the ship, is a deep red stain, a stain that might have been the life’s blood of a hundred crews, already paling to dissolution in the brine. I look to Sancerre and his reckless smile, to Saôut and his suicidal eyes, and I know that this is not blood, but wine, cru bourgeois, five hundred gallons at least. The voyage is over. The bottom will remain inviolate, the fishes undisturbed. Cousteau is defeated.

It is my moment, and I seize it. “Rally round, men!” I cry, my heart contracting like a fist. “Weigh anchor! We’re going home!”

No one moves. The wind lifts the hair over our ears, the wine-dark sea heaves at the hull. All eyes turn to Cousteau. Wearily, sunk into the pouches and wrinkles of his obsession, he takes a step forward and burns us all with his eyes.

“Deeper,” he says, “we must go deeper.”

Falco is the first to fracture the tableau. Stooped and sun-blasted, his face unreadable, he breaks ranks with the men to stride across the deck and stand with the Captain. Dr. Mazzy Gort is next. He looks from Falco to Cousteau and then to the rest of us and can’t suppress a whinny of apprehension: he may be an American, but he can see what’s coming. “It’s all over!” I shout. “Give it up!”

Cousteau ignores me. He just pulls on his hood and thermal jacket and climbs into the bathyscaph, that fat sputnik of the deeps suspended from the crane at the stern of the ship. I can see him there, in hawkish profile, fiddling with the controls through the rictus of the open door. He gestures impatiently to Mazzy Gort, but the American hesitates, and in the moment of his hesitation Falco moves to the Captain’s side, disappearing aloft in the shadows of the diving capsule. The steel doors crank shut.

It’s up to me now. Up to me to order the bathyscaph set in motion and dropped over the side into the yawning mouth of the waves, up to me to cut the throats of thirty individual years, one by one, as cleanly and surely as I cut the lifeline with a torch and insure, once and for all, that Costeau finds what he’s seeking. For a moment the responsibility paralyzes me. The men — Sancerre, Saôut, Piccard, even Laffite and Dr. Mazzy Gort — watch me in silence, hardly daring to swallow. And then the breeze shifts direction, carrying all the way out from some distant shore, a breeze smelling impossibly of pork roast, of beef, of goose and quail and duck à l’orange, and I know I can do anything, anything at all.

(1995)

56-0

It wasn’t the cast that bothered him — the thing was like rock, like a weapon, and that was just how he would use it — and it wasn’t the hyperextended knee or the hip pointer or the yellowing contusions seeping into his thighs and hams and lower back or even the gouged eye that was swollen shut and drooling a thin pale liquid the color of dishwater; no, it was the humiliation. Fifty-six to nothing. That was no mere defeat; it was a drubbing, an ass-kicking, a rape, the kind of thing the statisticians and sports nerds would snigger over as long as there were records to keep. He’d always felt bigger than life in his pads and helmet, a hero, a titan, but you couldn’t muster much heroism lying facedown in the mud at fifty-six to nothing and with the other team’s third string in there. No, the cast didn’t bother him, not really, though it itched like hell and his hand was a big stippled piece of meat sticking out of the end of it, or the eye either, though it was ugly, pure ugly. The trainer had sent him to the eye doctor and the doctor had put some kind of blue fluid in the eye and peered into it with a little conical flashlight and said there was no lasting damage, but still it was swollen shut and he couldn’t study for his Physical Communications exam.

It was Sunday, the day after the game, and Ray Arthur Larry-Pete Fontinot, right guard for the Caledonia College Shuckers, slept till two, wrapped in his own private misery — and even then he couldn’t get out of bed. Every fiber of his body, all six feet, four inches and two hundred sixty-eight pounds of it, shrieked with pain. He was twenty-two years old, a senior, his whole life ahead of him, and he felt like he was ready for the nursing home. There was a ringing in his ears, his eyelashes were welded together, his lower back throbbed and both his knees felt as if ice picks had been driven into them. He hobbled, splayfooted and naked, to the bathroom at the end of the hall, and there was blood in the toilet bowl when he was done.

All his life he’d been a slow fat pasty kid, beleaguered and tormented by his quick-footed classmates, until he found his niche on the football field, where his bulk, stubborn and immovable, had proved an advantage — or so he’d thought. He’d drunk the protein drink, pumped the iron, lumbered around the track like some geriatric buffalo, and what had it gotten him? Caledonia had gone 0-43 during his four years on the varsity squad, never coming closer than two touchdowns even to a tie — and the forty-third loss had been the hardest. Fifty-six to nothing. He’d donned a football helmet to feel good about himself, to develop pride and poise, to taste the sweet nectar of glory, but somehow he didn’t feel all that glorious lying there flat on his back and squinting one-eyed at Puckett and Poplar’s Principles of Physical Communications: A Text, until the lines shifted before him like the ranks of X’s and O’s in the Coach’s eternal diagrams. He dozed. Woke again to see the evening shadows closing over the room. By nightfall, he felt good enough to get up and puke.

In the morning, a full forty hours after the game had ended, he felt even worse, if that was possible. He sat up, goaded by the first tumultuous stirrings of his gut, and winced as he pulled the sweats over each bruised and puckered calf. His right knee locked up on him as he angled his feet into the laceless high-tops (it had been three years at least since he’d last been able to bend down and tie his shoes), something cried out in his left shoulder as he pulled the Caledonia sweatshirt over his head, and then suddenly he was on his feet and ambulatory. He staggered down the hall like something out of Night of the Living Dead, registering a familiar face here and there, but the faces were a blur mostly, and he avoided the eyes attached to them. Someone was playing Killer Pussy at seismic volume, and someone else — some half-witted dweeb he’d gladly have murdered if only his back didn’t hurt so much — had left a skateboard outside the door and Ray Arthur Larry-Pete damn near crushed it to powder and pitched right on through the concrete-block wall in the bargain, but if nothing else, he still had his reflexes. As he crossed the courtyard to the cafeteria in a lively blistering wind, he noted absently that he’d progressed from a hobble to a limp.

There was no sign of Suzie in the cafeteria, and he had a vague recollection of her calling to cancel their study date the previous evening, but as he loaded up his tray with desiccated bacon strips, mucilaginous eggs and waffles that looked, felt and tasted like roofing material, he spotted Kitwany, Moss and DuBoy skulking over their plates at one of the long tables in the back of the room. It would have been hard to miss them. Cut from the same exaggerated mold as he, his fellow linemen loomed over the general run of the student body like representatives of another species. Their heads were like prize pumpkins set on the pedestals of their neckless shoulders, their fingers were the size of the average person’s forearm, their jaws were entities unto themselves and they sprouted casts like weird growths all over their bodies.

Ray Arthur Larry-Pete made the long limp across the room to join them, setting his tray down gingerly and using both his hands to brace himself as he lowered his bruised backside to the unforgiving hardwood slats of the bench. Then, still employing his hands, he lifted first one and then the other deadened leg over the bench and into the well beneath the table. He grunted, winced, cursed, broke wind. Then he nodded to his teammates, worked his spine into the swallowing position and addressed himself to his food.

After a moment, DuBoy spoke. He was wearing a neck brace in the place where his head was joined to his shoulders, and it squeezed the excess flesh of his jowls up into his face so that he looked like an enormous rodent. “How you feeling?”

You didn’t speak of pain. You toughed it out — that was the code. Coach Tundra had been in the army in Vietnam at some place Ray Arthur Larry-Pete could never remember or pronounce, and he didn’t tolerate whiners and slackers. Pain? he would yelp incredulously at the first hint that a player was even thinking of staying down. Tell it to the 101st Airborne, to the boys taking a mortar round in the la Drang Valley or the grunts in the field watching their buddies get blown away and then crawling six miles through a swamp so thick it would choke a snake with both their ears bleeding down their neck and their leg gone at the knee. Get up, soldier. Get out there and fight! And if that didn’t work, he’d roll up his pantleg to show off the prosthesis.

Ray Arthur Larry-Pete glanced up at DuBoy. “I’ll live. How about you?”

DuBoy tried to shrug as if to say it was nothing, but even the faintest lift of a shoulder made him gasp and slap a hand to the neck brace as if a hornet had stung him. “No … big thing,” he croaked finally.

There was no sound then but for the onomatopoeia of the alimentary process — food going in, jaws seizing it, throats closing on the load and opening again for the next — and the light trilling mealtime chatter of their fellow students, the ones unencumbered by casts and groin pulls and bloody toilets. Ray Arthur Larry-Pete was depressed. Over the loss, sure — but it went deeper than that. He was brooding about his college career, his job prospects, life after football. There was a whole winter, spring and summer coming up in which, for the first time in as long as he could remember, he wouldn’t have to worry about training for football season, and he couldn’t imagine what that would be like. No locker room, no sweat, no pads, no stink of shower drains or the mentholated reek of ointment, no jock itch or aching muscles, no training table, no trainer — no chance, however slim, for glory….

And more immediately, he was fretting about his coursework. There was the Phys. Comm. exam he hadn’t been able to study for, and the quiz the professor would almost certainly spring in Phys. Ed., and there were the three-paragraph papers required for both Phys. Training and Phys. Phys., and he was starting to get a little paranoid about Suzie, one of the quintessentially desirable girls on campus, with all her assets on public view, and what did he have to offer her but the glamour of football? Why had she backed out on their date? Did this mean their engagement was off, that she wanted a winner, that this was the beginning of the end?

He was so absorbed in his thoughts he didn’t register what Moss was saying when he dropped his bomb into the little silence at the table. Moss was wearing a knee brace and his left arm was in a sling. He was using his right to alternately take a bite of his own food and to lift a heaping forkful from Kitwany’s plate to Kitwany’s waiting lips. Kitwany was in a full-shoulder harness, both arms frozen in front of him as if he were a sleepwalker cast in plaster of Paris. Ray Arthur Larry-Pete saw Moss’s mouth working, but the words flew right by him. “What did you say, Moss?” he murmured, looking up from his food.

“I said Coach says we’re probably going to have to forfeit to State.”

Ray Arthur Larry-Pete was struck dumb. “Forfeit?” he finally gasped, and the blood was thundering in his temples. “What the hell do you mean, forfeit?”

A swirl of snow flurries scoured his unprotected ears as he limped grimly across the quad to the Phys. Ed. building, muttering under his breath. What was the Coach thinking? Didn’t he realize this was the seniors’ last game, their last and only chance to assuage the sting of 56-0, the final time they’d ever pull on their cleats against State, Caledonia’s bitterest rival, a team they hadn’t beaten in modern historical times? Was he crazy?

It was cold, wintry, the last week in November, and Ray Arthur Larry-Pete Fontinot had to reach up with his good hand to pull his collar tight against his throat as he mounted the big concrete steps brushed with snow. The shooting hot-wire pains that accompanied this simple gesture were nothing, nothing at all, and he barely grimaced, reaching down automatically for the push-bar on the big heavy eight-foot-tall double doors. He nodded at a pair of wrestlers running the stairs in gym shorts, made his way past the woefully barren trophy case (Caledonia College, Third Place Divisional Finish, 1938 read the inscription on the lone trophy, which featured a bronzed figurine in antiquated leather headgear atop a pedestal engraved with the scores of that lustrous long-ago 6-and-5 season, the only winning season Caledonia could boast of in any of its athletic divisions, except for women’s field hockey and who counted that?), tested his knees on the third grueling flight of stairs, and approached the Coach’s office by the side door. Coach Tundra almost never inhabited his official office on the main corridor, a place of tidy desks, secretaries and seasonal decorations; of telephones, copiers and the new lone fax machine he could use to instantaneously trade X’s and O’s with his colleagues at other colleges, if he so chose. No, he preferred the back room, a tiny unheated poorly lit cubicle cluttered with the detritus of nineteen unprofitable seasons. Ray Arthur Larry-Pete peered through the open doorway to find the Coach slumped over his desk, face buried in his hands. “Coach?” he said softly.

No reaction.

“Coach?”

From the nest of his hands, the Coach’s rucked and gouged face gradually emerged and the glittering wicked raptor’s eyes that had struck such bowel-wringing terror into red-shirt freshman and senior alike stared up blankly. There was nothing in those eyes now but a worn and defeated look, and it was a shock. So too the wrinkles in the shirt that was always pressed and pleated with military precision, the scuffed shoes and suddenly vulnerable-looking hands — even the Coach’s brush cut, ordinarily as stiff and imperturbable as a falcon’s crest, seemed to lie limp against his scalp. “Fontinot?” the Coach said finally, and his voice was dead.

“I, uh, just wanted to check — I mean, practice is at the regular time, right?”

Coach Tundra said nothing. He looked shrunken, lost, older in that moment than the oldest man in the oldest village in the mountains of Tibet. “There won’t be any practice today,” he said, rubbing his temple over the spot where the military surgeons had inserted the steel plate.

“No practice? But Coach, shouldn’t we — I mean, don’t we have to—”

“We can’t field a team, Fontinot. I count sixteen guys out of forty-two that can go out there on the field and maybe come out of their comas for four consecutive quarters — and I’m counting you among them. And you’re so banged up you can barely stand, let alone block.” He heaved a sigh, plucked a torn battered shoe from the pile of relics on the floor and turned it over meditatively in his hands. “We’re done, Fontinot. Finished. It’s all she wrote. Like at Saigon when the gooks overran the place — it’s time to cut our losses and run.”

Ray Arthur Larry-Pete was stunned. He’d given his life for this, he’d sweated and fought and struggled, filled the bloated vessel of himself with the dregs of defeat, week after week, year after year. He was flunking all four of his Phys. Ed. courses, Suzie thought he was a clown, his mother was dying of uterine cancer and his father — the man who’d named him after the three greatest offensive linemen in college-football history — was driving in from Cincinnati for the game, his last game, the ultimate and final contest that stood between him and the world of pay stubs and mortgages. “You don’t mean,” he stammered, “you don’t mean we’re going to forfeit, do you?”

For a long moment the Coach held him with his eyes. Faint sounds echoed in the corridors — the slap of sneakers, a door heaving closed, the far-off piping of the basketball coach’s whistle. Coach Tundra made an unconscious gesture toward his pant leg and for a moment Ray Arthur Larry-Pete thought he was going to expose the prosthesis again. “What do you want me to do,” he said finally, “go out there and play myself?”

Back in his room, Ray Arthur Larry-Pete brooded over the perfidy of it all. A few hours ago he’d been sick to death of the game — what had it gotten him but obloquy and bruises? — but now he wanted to go out there and play so badly he could kill for it. His roommate — Malmo Malmstein, the team’s kicker — was still in the hospital, and he had the room to himself through the long morning and the interminable afternoon that followed it. He lay there prostrate on the bed like something shot out in the open that had crawled back to its cave to die, skipping classes, blowing off tests and steeping himself in misery. At three he called Suzie — he had to talk to someone, anyone, or he’d go crazy — but one of her sorority sisters told him she was having her nails done and wasn’t expected back before six. Her nails. Christ, that rubbed him raw: where was she when he needed her? A sick sinking feeling settled into his stomach — she was cutting him loose, he knew it.

And then, just as it was getting dark, at the very nadir of his despair, something snapped in him. What was wrong with him? Was he a quitter? A whiner and slacker? The kind of guy that gives up before he puts his cleats on? No way. Not Ray Arthur Larry-Pete Fontinot. He came up off the bed like some sort of volcanic eruption and lurched across the room to the phone. Sweating, ponderous, his very heart, lungs and liver trembling with emotion, he focused all his concentration on the big pale block of his index finger as he dialed Gary Gedney, the chicken-neck who handled the equipment and kept the Gatorade bucket full. “Phone up all the guys,” he roared into the receiver.

Gedney’s voice came back at him in the thin whistling whine of a balloon sputtering round a room: “Who is this?”

“It’s Fontinot. I want you to phone up all the guys.”

“What for?” Gedney whined.

“We’re calling a team meeting.”

“Who is?”

Ray Arthur Larry-Pete considered the question a moment, and when finally he spoke it was with a conviction and authority he never thought he could command: “I am.”

At seven that night, twenty-six members of the Caledonia Shuckers varsity football squad showed up in the lounge at Bloethal Hall. They filled the place with their presence, their sheer protoplasmic mass, and the chairs and couches groaned under the weight of them. They wore Band-Aids, gauze and tape — miles of it — and the lamplight caught the livid craters of their scars and glanced off the railway stitches running up and down their arms. There were casts, crutches, braces, slings. And there was the smell of them, a familiar, communal, lingering smell — the smell of a team.

Ray Arthur Larry-Pete Fontinot was ready for them, pacing back and forth in front of the sliding glass doors like a bear at the zoo, waiting patiently until each of them had gimped into the room and found a seat. Moss, DuBoy and Kitwany were there with him for emotional support, as was the fifth interior lineman, center Brian McCornish. When they were all gathered, Ray Arthur Larry-Pete lifted his eyes and scanned the familiar faces of his teammates. “I don’t know if any of you happened to notice,” he said, “but here it is Monday night and we didn’t have practice this afternoon.”

“Amen,” someone said, and a couple of the guys started hooting.

But Ray Arthur Larry-Pete Fontinot wasn’t having any of it. He was a rock. His face hardened. He clenched his fists. “It’s no joke,” he bellowed, and the thunder of his voice set up sympathetic vibrations in the pole lamps with their stained and battered shades. “We’ve got five days to the biggest game of our lives, and I’m not just talking about us seniors, but everybody, and I want to know what we’re going to do about it.”

“Forfeit, that’s what.” It was Diderot, the third-string quarterback and the only one at that vital position who could stand without the aid of crutches. He was lounging against the wall in the back of the room, and all heads now turned to him. “I talked to Coach, and that’s what he said.”

In that moment, Ray Arthur Larry-Pete lost control of himself. “Forfeit, my ass!” he roared, slamming his forearm, cast and all, down on the nearest coffee table, which fell to splinters under the force of the blow. “Get up, guys,” he hissed in an intense aside to his fellow linemen, and Moss, DuBoy, Kitwany and McCornish rose beside him in a human wall. “We’re willing to play sixty minutes of football,” he boomed, and he had the attention of the room now, that was for sure. “Burt, Reggie, Steven, Brian and me, and we’ll play both ways, offense and defense, to fill in for guys with broken legs and concussions and whatnot—”

A murmur went up. This was crazy, insane, practically sacrificial. State gave out scholarships — and under-the-table payoffs too — and they got the really topflight players, the true behemoths and crackerjacks, the ones who attracted pro scouts and big money. To go up against them in their present condition would be like replaying the Gulf War, with Caledonia cast in the role of the Iraqis.

“What are you, a bunch of pussies?” Ray Arthur Larry-Pete cried. “Afraid to get your uniforms dirty? Afraid of a little contact? What do you want — to have to live with fifty-six-to-nothing for the rest of your life? Huh? I don’t hear you!”

But they heard him. He pleaded, threatened, blustered, cajoled, took them aside one by one, jabbered into the phone half the night till his voice was hoarse and his ear felt like a piece of rubber grafted to the side of his head. In the end, they turned out for practice the following day — twenty-three of them, even Kitwany, who could barely move from the waist up and couldn’t get a jersey on over his cast — and Ray Arthur Larry-Pete Fontinot ascended the three flights to the Coach’s office and handed Coach Tundra the brand-new silver-plated whistle they’d chipped in to buy him. “Coach,” he said, as the startled man looked up at him from the crucible of his memories, “we’re ready to go out there and kick some butt.”

The day of the game dawned cold and forbidding, with close skies, a biting wind and the threat of snow on the air. Ray Arthur Larry-Pete had lain awake half the night, his brain tumbling through all the permutations of victory and disaster like a slot machine gone amok. Would he shine? Would he rise to the occasion and fight off the devastating pass rush of State’s gargantuan front four? And what about the defense? He hadn’t played defense since junior high, and now, because they were short-handed and because he’d opened his big mouth, he’d have to go both ways. Would he have the stamina? Or would he stagger round the field on rubber legs, thrust aside by State’s steroid-swollen evolutionary freaks like the poor pathetic bumbling fat man he was destined to become? But no. Enough of that. If you thought like a loser — if you doubted for even a minute — then you were doomed, and you deserved 56-0 and worse.

At quarter to seven he got out of bed and stood in the center of the room in his undershorts, cutting the air savagely with the battering ram of his cast, pumping himself up. He felt unconquerable suddenly, felt blessed, felt as if he could do anything. The bruises, the swollen eye, the hip pointer and rickety knees were nothing but fading memories now. By Tuesday he’d been able to lift both his arms to shoulder level without pain, and by Wednesday he was trotting round the field on a pair of legs that felt like bridge abutments. Thursday’s scrimmage left him wanting more, and he flew like a sprinter through yesterday’s light workout. He was as ready as he’d ever be.

At seven-fifteen he strode through the weather to the dining hall to load up on carbohydrates, and by eight he was standing like a colossus in the foyer of Suzie’s sorority house. The whole campus had heard about his speech in the Bloethal lounge, and by Wednesday night Suzie had come back round again. They spent the night in his room — his private room, for the duration of Malm-stein’s stay at the Sisters of Mercy Hospital — and Suzie had traced his bruises with her lips and hugged the tractor tire of flesh he wore round his midsection to her own slim and naked self. Now she greeted him with wet hair and a face bereft of makeup. “Wish me luck, Suze,” he said, and she clung to him briefly before going off to transform herself for the game.

Coach Tundra gathered his team in the locker room at twelve-thirty and spoke to them from his heart, employing the military conceits that always seemed to confuse the players as much as inspire them, and then they were thundering out onto the field like some crazed herd of hoofed and horned things with the scent of blood in their nostrils. The crowd roared. Caledonia’s colors, chartreuse and orange, flew in the breeze. The band played. Warming up, Ray Arthur Larry-Pete could see Suzie sitting in the stands with her sorority sisters, her hair the color of vanilla ice cream, her mouth fallen open in a cry of savagery and bloodlust. And there, just to the rear of her — no, it couldn’t be, it couldn’t — but is was: his mom. Sitting there beside the hulking mass of his father, wrapped up in her windbreaker like a leaf pressed in an album, her scalp glinting bald through the dyed pouf of her hair, there she was, holding a feeble fist aloft. His mom! She’d been too sick to attend any of his games this year, but this was his last one, his last game ever, and she’d fought down her pain and all the unimaginable stress and suffering of the oncology ward just to see him play. He felt the tears come to his eyes as he raised his fist in harmony: this game was for her.

Unfortunately, within fifteen seconds of the kickoff, Caledonia was already in the hole, 7–0, and Ray Arthur Larry-Pete hadn’t even got out onto the field yet. State’s return man had fielded the kick at his own thirty after Malmstein’s replacement, Hassan Farouk, had shanked the ball off the tee, and then he’d dodged past the entire special teams unit and on into the end zone as if the Caledonia players were molded of wax. On the ensuing kickoff, Bobby Bibby, a jittery, butterfingered guy Ray Arthur Larry-Pete had never liked, fumbled the ball, and State picked it up and ran it in for the score. They were less than a minute into the game, and already it was 14-0.

Ray Arthur Larry-Pete felt his heart sink, but he leapt up off the bench with a roar and butted heads so hard with Moss and DuBoy he almost knocked himself unconscious. “Come on, guys,” he bellowed, “it’s only fourteen points, it’s nothing, bear down!” And then Bibby held on to the ball and Ray Arthur Larry-Pete was out on the field, going down in his three-point stance across from a guy who looked like a walking mountain. The guy had a handlebar mustache, little black eyes like hornets pinned to his head and a long wicked annealed scar that plunged into his right eye socket and back out again. He looked to be about thirty, and he wore Number 95 stretched tight across the expanse of his chest. “You sorry sack of shit,” he growled over Diderot’s erratic snap-count. “I’m going to lay you flat out on your ass.”

And that’s exactly what he did. McCornish snapped the ball, Ray Arthur Larry-Pete felt something like a tactical nuclear explosion in the region of his sternum, and Number 95 was all over Diderot while Ray Arthur Larry-Pete stared up into the sky. In the next moment the trainer was out there, along with the Coach — already starting in on his Ia Drang Valley speech — and Ray Arthur Larry-Pete felt the first few snowflakes drift down into the whites of his wide-open and staring eyes. “Get up and walk it off,” the trainer barked, and then half a dozen hands were pulling him to his feet, and Ray Arthur Larry-Pete Fontinot was back in his crouch, directly across from Number 95. And even then, though he hated to admit it to himself, though he was playing for Suzie and his mother and his own rapidly dissolving identity, he knew it was going to be a very long afternoon indeed.

It was 35-0 at the half, and Coach Tundra already had his pant leg rolled up by the time the team hobbled into the locker room. Frozen, pulverized, every cord, ligament, muscle and fiber stretched to the breaking point, they listened numbly as the Coach went on about ordnance, landing zones and fields of fire, while the trainer and his assistant scurried round plying tape, bandages and the ever-present aerosol cans of Numzit. Kitwany’s replacement, a huge amorphous red-faced freshman, sat in the corner, quietly weeping, and Bobby Bibby, who’d fumbled twice more in the second quarter, tore off his uniform, pulled on his street clothes without showering and walked on out the door. As for Ray Arthur Larry-Pete Fontinot, he lay supine on the cold hard tiles of the floor, every twinge, pull, ache and contusion from the previous week’s game reactivated, and a host of new ones cropping up to overload his nervous system. Along with Moss and DuBoy, he’d done double duty through the first thirty minutes — playing offense and defense both — and his legs were paralyzed. When the Coach blew his whistle and shouted, “On the attack, men!” Ray Arthur Larry-Pete had to be helped up off the floor.

The third quarter was a delirium of blowing snow, shouts, curses and cries in the wilderness. Shadowy forms clashed and fell to the crunch of helmet and the clatter of shoulder pads. Ray Arthur Larry-Pete staggered around the field as if gutshot, so disoriented he was never quite certain which way his team was driving — or rather, being driven. But mercifully, the weather conditions slowed down the big blue barreling machine of State’s offense, and by the time the gun sounded, they’d only been able to score once more.

And so the fourth quarter began, and while the stands emptied and even the most fanatical supporters sank glumly into their parkas, Caledonia limped out onto the field with their heads down and their jaws set in grim determination. They were no longer playing for pride, for the memories, for team spirit or their alma mater or to impress their girlfriends: they were playing for one thing only: to avoid at all cost the humiliation of 56-0. And they held on, grudging State every inch of the field, Ray Arthur Larry-Pete coming to life in sporadic flashes during which he was nearly lucid and more often than not moving in the right direction, Moss, DuBoy and McCornish picking themselves up off the ground at regular intervals and the Coach hollering obscure instructions from the sidelines. With just under a minute left to play, they’d managed (with the help of what would turn out to be the worst blizzard to hit the area in twenty years) to hold State to only one touchdown more, making it 49-0 with the ball in their possession and the clock running down.

The snow blew in their teeth. State dug in. A feeble distant cheer went up from the invisible stands. And then, with Number 95 falling on him like an avalanche, Diderot fumbled, and State recovered. Two plays later, and with eight seconds left on the clock, they took the ball into the end zone to make it 55-0, and only the point-after attempt stood between Caledonia and the unforgivable, unutterable debasement of a second straight 56-0 drubbing. Ray Arthur Larry-Pete Fontinot extricated himself from the snowbank where Number 95 had left him and crept stiff-legged back to the line of scrimmage, where he would now assume the defensive role.

There was one hope, and one hope only, in that blasted naked dead cinder of a world that Ray Arthur Larry-Pete Fontinot and his hapless teammates unwillingly inhabited, and that was for one man among them to reach deep down inside himself and distill all his essence — all his wits, all his heart and the full power of his honed young musculature — into a single last-ditch attempt to block that kick. Ray Arthur Larry-Pete Fontinot looked into the frightened faces of his teammates as they heaved for breath in the defensive huddle and knew he was that man. “I’m going to block the kick,” he said, and his voice sounded strange in his own ears. “I’m coming in from the right side and I’m going to block the kick.” Moss’s eyes were glazed. DuBoy was on the sidelines, vomiting in his helmet. No one said a word.

State lined up. Ray Arthur Larry-Pete took a deep breath. The ball was snapped, the lines crashed with a grunt and moan, and Ray Arthur Larry-Pete Fontinot launched himself at the kicker like the space shuttle coming in for a landing, and suddenly — miracle of miracles! — he felt the hard cold pellet of the ball glancing off the bandaged nubs of his fingers. A shout went up, and as he fell, as he slammed rib-first into the frozen ground, he watched the ball squirt up in the air and fall back into the arms of the kicker as if it were attached to a string, and then, unbelieving, he watched the kicker tuck the ball and sprint unmolested across the goal line for the two-point conversion.

If it weren’t for Moss, they might never have found him. Ray Arthur Larry-Pete Fontinot just lay there where he’d fallen, the snow drifting silently round him, and he lay there long after the teams had left the field and the stands stood empty under a canopy of snow. There, in the dirt, the steady drift of snow gleaming against the exposed skin of his calves and slowly obliterating the number on the back of his jersey, he had a vision of the future. He saw himself working at some tedious, spirit-crushing job for which his Phys. Ed. training could never have prepared him, saw himself sunk in fat like his father, a pale plain wife and two grublike children at his side, no eighty-yard runs or blocked points to look back on through a false scrim of nostalgia, no glory and no defeat.

No defeat. It was a concept that seemed all at once to congeal in his tired brain, and as Moss called out his name and the snow beat down, he tried hard, with all his concentration, to hold it there.

(1992)

THE BIG GARAGE

For K.

B. stands at the side of the highway, helpless, hands behind his back, the droopy greatcoat like a relic of ancient wars. There is wind and rain — or is it sleet? — and the deadly somnolent rush of tires along the pavement. His own vehicle rests on the shoulder, stricken somewhere in its slippery metallic heart. He does not know where, exactly, or why — for B. is no mechanic. Far from it. In fact, he’s never built or repaired a thing in his life, never felt the restive urge to tinker with machinery, never as a jittery adolescent dismantled watches, telephone receivers, pneumatic crushers. He is woefully unequal to the situation at hand. But wait, hold on now — shouldn’t he raise the hood, as a distress signal? Isn’t that the way it’s done?

Suddenly he’s in motion, glad to be doing something, confronting the catastrophe, meeting the challenge. He scuttles round to the front of the car, works his fingers under the lip of the hood and tugs, tugs to no effect, slips in the mud, stumbles, the knees of his trousers soaked through, and then rises to tug again, shades of Buster Keaton. After sixty or seventy seconds of this it occurs to him that the catch may be inside, under the dashboard, as it was in his late wife’s Volvo. There are wires — bundles of them — levers, buttons, handles, cranks and knobs in the cavern beneath the steering wheel. He had no idea. He takes a bundle of wire in his hand — each strand a different color — and thinks with a certain satisfaction of the planning and coordination that went into this machine, of the multiple factories, each dominating its own little Bavarian or American or Japanese town, of all the shifts and lunch breaks, the dies cast and what do you call them, lathes — yes, lathes — turned. All this — but more, much more. Iron ore dug from rock, hissing white hot vats of it, molten recipes, chromium, tall rubber trees, vinyl plants, crystals from the earth ground into glass. Staggering.

“Hey pal—”

B. jolted from his reverie by the harsh plosive, spasms of amber light expanding and contracting the interior of the car like the pulse of some predatory beast. Looking up into a lean face, slick hair, stoned eyes. “I was ah trying to ah get the ah latch here—”

“You’ll have to ride back in the truck with me.”

“Yeah, sure,” B. sitting up now, confused, gripping the handle and swinging the door out to a shriek of horns and a rush of air. He cracks something in his elbow heaving it shut.

“Better get out this side.”

B. slides across the seat and steps out into the mud. Behind him, the tow truck, huge, its broad bumper lowering over the hood of his neat little German-made car. He mounts the single step up into the cab and watches the impassive face of the towman as he backs round, attaches the grappling hook and hoists the rear of the car, spider and fly. A moment later the man drops into the driver’s seat, door slamming with a metallic thud, gears engaging. “That’ll be forty-five bucks,” he says.

A white fracture of sleet caught up in the headlights, the wipers clapping, light flashing, the night a mist and a darkness beyond the windows. They’ve turned off the highway, jerking right and left over a succession of secondary roads, strayed so far from B.’s compass that he’s long since given up any attempt at locating himself. Perhaps he’s dozed even. He turns to study the crease folded into the towman’s cheek. “Much farther?” he asks.

The man jerks his chin and B. looks out at a blaze of light on the dark horizon, light dropped like a stone in a pool of oil. As they draw closer he’s able to distinguish a neon sign, towering letters stamped in the sky above a complex of offices, outbuildings and hangars that melt off into the shadows. Eleven or twelve sets of gas pumps, each nestled under a black steel parasol, and cars, dark and driverless, stretching across the whitening blacktop like the reverie of a used-car salesman. The sign, in neon grid, traces and retraces its colossal characters until there’s no end and no beginning: GARAGE. TEGELER’S. BIG. GARAGE. TEGELER’S BIG GARAGE.

The truck pulls up in front of a deep, brightly lit office. Through the steamed-over windows B. can make out several young women, sitting legs-crossed in orange plastic chairs. From here they look like drum majorettes: white calf boots, opalescent skirts, lace frogs. And — can it be? — Dale Evans hats! What is going on here?

The towman’s voice is harsh. “End of the road for you, pal.”

“What about my car?”

A cigarette hangs from his lower lip like a growth, smoke squints his eyes.

“Nobody here to poke into it at this hour, what do you think? I’m taking it around to Diagnosis.”

“And?”

“Pfft.” The man fixes him with the sort of stare you’d give a leper at the Inaugural Ball. “And when they get to it, they get to it.”

B. steps into the fluorescent blaze of the office, coattails aflap. There are nine girls seated along the wall, left calves swollen over right knees, hands occupied with nail files, hairbrushes, barrettes, magazines. They are dressed as drum majorettes. Nappy Dale Evans hats perch atop their layered cuts, short-and-sassies, blown curls. All nine look up and smile. Then a short redhead rises, and sweet as a mother superior welcoming a novice, asks if she can be of service.

B. is confused. “It … it’s my car,” he says.

“Ohhh,” running her tongue round her lips. “You’re the Audi.”

“Right.”

“Just wait a sec and I’ll ring Diagnosis,” she says, high-stepping across the room to an intercom panel set in the wall. At that moment a buzzer sounds in the office and a car pulls up to the farthest set of gas pumps. The redhead jerks to a halt, peers out the window, curses, shrugs into a fringed suede jacket and hurries out into the storm. B. locks fingers behind his back and waits. He rocks on his feet, whistles sotto voce, casts furtive glances at the knee-down of the eight majorettes. The droopy greatcoat, soaked through, feels like an American black bear (Ursus americanus) hanging round his neck.

Then the door heaves back on its hinges and the redhead reappears, stamping round the doormat, shaking out the jacket, knocking the Stetson against her thigh. “Brrrr,” she says. In her hand, a clutch of bills. She marches over to the cash register and deposits them, then takes her seat at the far end of the line of majorettes. B. continues to rock on his feet. He clears his throat. Finally he ambles across the room and stops in front of her chair. “Ahh …”

She looks up. “Yes? Can I help you?”

“You were gong to call Diagnosis about my car?”

“Oh,” grimacing. “No need to bother. Why, at this hour they’re long closed up. You’ll have to wait till morning.”

“But a minute ago—”

“No, no sense at all. The Head Diagnostician leaves at five, and here it’s nearly ten. And his staff gets off at five-thirty. The best we could hope for is a shop steward — and what would he know? Ha. If I rang up now I’d be lucky to get hold of a janitor.” She settles back in her chair and leafs through a magazine. Then she looks up again. “Listen. If you want some advice, there’s a pay phone in the anteroom. Better call somebody to come get you.”

The girl has a point there. It’s late already and arrangements will have to be made about getting to work in the morning. The dog needs walking, the cat feeding. And all these hassles have sapped him to the point where all he wants from life is sleep and forgetfulness. But there’s no one to call, really. Except possibly Dora — Dora Ouzel, the gay divorcee he’s been dating since his wife’s accident.

One of the majorettes yawns. Another blows a puff of detritus from her nail file. “Ho hum,” says the redhead.

B. steps into the anteroom, searches through his pockets for change, and forgets Dora’s number. He paws through the phone book, but the names of the towns seem unfamiliar and he can’t seem to find Dora’s listing. He makes an effort of memory and dials.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Dora?—B. Listen, I hate to disturb you at this hour but—”

“Are you all right?”

“Yes, I’m fine.”

“That’s nice, I’m fine too. But no matter how you slice it my name ain’t Dora.”

“You’re not Dora?”

“No, but you’re B., aren’t you?”

“Yes … but how did you know?”

“You told me. You said: ‘Hello, Dora?—B.’ … and then you tried to come on with some phony excuse for forgetting our date tonight or is it that you’re out hooching it up and you want me — if I was Dora and I bless my stars I’m not — to come out in this hellish weather that isn’t fit for a damn dog for christsake and risk my bones and bladder to drive you home because only one person inhabits your solipsistic universe—You with a capital Y — and You have drunk yourself into a blithering stupor. You know what I got to say to you, buster? Take a flyer. Ha, ha, ha.”

There is a click at the other end of the line. In the movies heroes say “Hello, hello, hello,” in situations like this, but B., dispirited, the greatcoat beginning to reek a bit in the confines of the antechamber, only reaches out to replace the receiver in its cradle.

Back in the office B. is confronted with eight empty chairs. The redhead occupies the ninth, legs crossed, hat in lap, curls flaring round the cover of her magazine like a solar phenomenon. Where five minutes earlier there were enough majorettes to front a battle of the bands, there is now only one. She glances up as the door slams behind him. “Any luck?”

B. is suddenly overwhelmed with exhaustion. He’s just gone fifteen rounds, scaled Everest, staggered out of the Channel at Calais. “No,” he whispers.

“Well that really is too bad. All the other girls go home at ten and I’m sure any one of them would have been happy to give you a lift…. You know it really is a pity the way some of you men handle your affairs. Why if I had as little common sense as you I wouldn’t last ten minutes on this job.”

B. heaves himself down on one of the plastic chairs. Somehow, somewhere along the line, his sense of proportion has begun to erode. He blows his nose lugubriously. Then hides behind his hands and massages his eyes.

“Come on now.” The girl’s voice is soft, conciliatory. She is standing over him, her hand stretched out to his. “I’ll fix you up a place to sleep in the back of the shop.”

The redhead (her name is Rita — B. thought to ask as a sort of quid pro quo for her offer of a place to sleep) leads him through a narrow passageway which gives on to an immense darkened hangar. B. hunches in the greatcoat, flips up his collar and follows her into the echo-haunted reaches. Their footsteps clap up to the rafters, blind birds beating at the roof, echoing and reechoing in the darkness. There is a chill as of open spaces, a stink of raw metal, oil, sludge. Rita is up ahead, her white boots ghostly in the dark. “Watch your step,” she cautions, but B. has already encountered some impenetrable, rock-hard hazard, barked his shin and pitched forward into what seems to be an open grease pit.

“Hurt yourself?”

B. lies there silent — frustrated, childish, perverse.

“B.? Answer me — are you all right?”

He will lie here, dumb as a block, till the Andes are nubs and the moon melts from the sky. But then suddenly the cavern blooms with light (a brown crepuscular light, it’s true, but light just the same) and the game’s up.

“So there you are!” Arms akimbo, a grin on her face. “Now get yourself up out of there and stop your sulking. I can’t play games all night, you know. There’s eleven sets of pumps out there I’m responsible for.”

B. finds himself sprawled all over an engine block, grease-slicked and massive, that must have come out of a Sherman tank. But it’s the hangar, lit like the grainy daguerreotype of a Civil War battlefield, that really interests him. The sheer expanse of the place! And the cars, thousands of them, stretching all the way down to the dark V at the far end of the building. Bugattis, Morrises, La Salles, Daimlers, the back end of a Pierce-Arrow, a Stutz Bearcat. The rounded humps of tops and fenders, tarnished bumpers, hoods thrown open like gaping mouths. Engines swing on cables, blackened grilles and punctured cloth tops gather in the corners, a Duesenberg, its interior gutted, squats over a trench in the concrete.

“Pretty amazing, huh?” Rita says, reaching out a hand to help him up. “This is Geriatrics. Mainly foreign. You should see the Contemp wings.”

“But what do you do with all these—?”

“Oh, we fix them. At least the technicians and mechanics do.”

There is something wrong here, something amiss. B. can feel it nagging at the edges of his consciousness … but then he really is dog-tired. Rita has him by the hand. They amble past a couple hundred cars, dust-embossed, ribs and bones showing, windshields black as ground-out eyes. Now he has it: “But if you fix them, what are they doing here?”

Rita stops dead to look him in the eye, frowning, schoolmarmish. “These things take time, you know.” She sighs. “What do you think: they do it overnight?”

The back room is the size of a storage closet. In fact, it is a storage closet, fitted out with cots. When Rita flicks the light switch B. is shocked to discover three other people occupying the makeshift dormitory: two men in rumpled suits and a middle-aged woman in a rumpled print dress. One of the men sits up and rubs his eyes. His tie is loose, shirt filthy, a patchy beard maculating his cheeks. He mumbles something — B. catches the words “drive shaft”—and then turns his face back to the cot, already sucking in breath for the first stertorous blast: hkk-hkk-hkkkkkkgg.

“What the hell is this?” B. is astonished, scandalized, cranky and tired. Tools and blackened rags lie scattered over the concrete floor, dulled jars of bolts and screws and wing nuts line the shelves. A number of unfolded cots, their fabric stained and grease-spotted, stand in the corner.

“This is where you sleep, silly.”

“But — who?”

“It’s obvious, isn’t it? They’re customers, like yourself, waiting for their cars. The man in brown is the Gremlin, the one with the beard is the Cougar — no, I’m sorry, the woman is the Cougar — he’s the Citroen.”

B. is appalled. “And I’m the Audi, is that it?”

Suddenly Rita is in his arms, the smooth satiny feel of her uniform, the sticky warmth of her breath. “You’re more to me than a machine, B. Do you know that I like you? A lot.” And then he finds himself nuzzling her ear, the downy ridge of her jawbone. She presses against him, he fumbles under the cheerleader’s tutu for the slippery underthings. One of the sleepers groans, but B. is lost, oblivious, tugging and massaging like a horny teenager. Rita reaches behind to unzip her uniform, the long smooth arch of her back, shoulders and arms shedding the opalescent rayon like a holiday on ice when suddenly a buzzer sounds — loud and brash — end of the round, change classes, dive for shelter.

Rita freezes, then bursts into motion. “A customer!” she pants, and then she’s gone. B. watches her callipygian form recede into the gloom of the Geriatrics Section, the sharp projection in his trousers receding with her, until she touches the light switch and vanishes in darkness. B. trundles back into the closet, selects a cot, and falls into an exploratory darkness of his own.

B.’s. breath is a puff of cotton as he wakes to the chill gloom of the storage closet and the sound of tools grating, whining and ratcheting somewhere off in the distance. At first he can’t locate himself — What the? Where? — but the odors of gas and kerosene and motor oil bring him back. He is stranded at Tegeler’s Big Garage, it is a workday, he has been sleeping with strangers, his car is nonfunctional. B. lurches up from the cot with a gasp — only to find that he’s being watched. It is the man with the patchy beard and rancid shirt. He is sitting on the edge of a cot, stirring coffee in a cardboard container, his eyes fixed on B. My checkbook, my wallet, my wristwatch, thinks B.

“Mornin’,” the man says. “My name’s Rusty,” holding out his hand. The others — the man in brown (or was it gray?) and the Cougar woman — are gone.

B. shakes the man’s hand. “Name’s B.,” he says, somewhere between wary and paranoid. “How do I get out of here?”

“Your first day, huh?”

“What do you mean?” B. detects an edge of hysteria slicing through his voice, as if it belonged to someone else in some other situation. A pistol-whipped actress in a TV melodrama, for instance.

“No need to get excited,” Rusty says. “I know how disquieting that first day can be. Why Cougar here — that woman in the print dress slept with us last night? — she sniveled and whimpered the whole time her first night here. Shit. It was like being in a bomb shelter or some frigging thing. Sure, I know how it is. You got a routine — job, wife at home, kids maybe, dog, cat, goldfish — and naturally you’re anxious to get back to it. Well let me give you some advice. I been here six days already and I still haven’t even got an appointment lined up with the Appointments Secretary so’s I can get in to see the Assistant to the Head Diagnostician, Imports Division, and find out what’s wrong with my car. So look: don’t work up no ulcer over the thing. Just make your application and sit tight.”

The man is an escapee, that’s it, an escapee from an institution for the terminally, unconditionally and abysmally insane. B. hangs tough. “You expect me to believe that cock-and-bull story? If you’re so desperate why don’t you call a cab?”

“Taxis don’t run this far out.”

“Bus?”

“No buses in this district.”

“Surely you’ve got friends to call—”

“Tried it, couldn’t get through. Busy signals, recordings, wrong numbers. Finally got through to Theotis Stover two nights ago. Said he’d come out but his car’s broke down.”

“You could hitchhike.”

“Spent six hours out there my first day. Twelve degrees F. Nobody even slowed down. Besides, even if I could get home, what then? Can’t get to work, can’t buy food. No sir. I’m staying right here till I get that car back.”

B. cannot accept it. The whole thing is absurd. He’s on him like F. Lee Bailey grilling a shaky witness. “What about the girls in the main office? They’ll take you — one of them told me so.”

“They take you?”

“No, but—”

“Look: they say that to be accommodating, don’t you see? I mean, we are customers, after all. But they can’t give you a lift — it’s their job if they do.”

“You mean—?”

“That’s right. And wait’ll you see the bill when you finally do get out of here. Word is that cot you’re sitting on goes for twelve bucks a night.”

The bastards. It could be weeks here. He’ll lose his job, the animals’ll tear up the rugs, piss in the bed and finally, starved, the dog will turn on the cat…. B. looks up, a new worry on his lips: “But what do you eat here?”

Rusty rises. “C’mon, I’ll show you the ropes.” B. follows him out into the half-lit and silent hangar, past the ranks of ruined automobiles, the mounds of tires and tools. “Breakfast is out of the machines. They got coffee, hot chocolate, candy bars, cross-ants and cigarettes. Lunch and late-afternoon snack you get down at the Mechanics’ Cafeteria.” Rusty’s voice booms and echoes through the wide open spaces till B. begins to feel surrounded. Overhead, the morning cowers against the grimed skylights. “And eat your fill,” Rusty adds, “—it all goes on the tab.”

The office is bright as a cathedral with a miracle in progress. B. squints into the sunlight and recognizes the swaying ankles of a squad of majorettes. He asks for Rita, finds she’s off till six at night. Outside, the sound of scraping, the putt-putt of snowplow jeeps. B. glances up. Oh, shit. There must be a foot and a half of snow on the ground.

The girls are chewing gum and sipping coffee from personalized mugs: Mary-Alice, Valerie, Beatrice, Lulu. B. hunches in the greatcoat, confused, until Rusty bums a dollar and hands him a cup of coffee. Slurping and blowing, B. stands at the window and watches an old man stoop over an aluminum snow shovel. Jets of fog stream from the old man’s nostrils, ice cakes his mustache.

“Criminal, ain’t it?” says Rusty.

“What?”

“The old man out there. That’s Tegeler’s father, seventy-some-odd years old. Tegeler makes him earn his keep, sweeping up, clearing snow, polishing the pumps.”

“No!” B. is stupefied.

“Yeah, he’s some hardnose, Tegeler. And I’ll tell you something else too — he’s set up better than Onassis and Rockefeller put together. See that lot across the street?”

B. looks. TEGELER’S BIG LOT. How’d he miss that?

“They sell new Tegelers there.”

“Tegelers?”

“Yeah — he’s got his own company: the Tegeler Motor Works. Real lemons from what I hear … But will you look what time it is!” Rusty slaps his forehead. “We got to get down to Appointments or we’ll both grow old in this place.”

The Appointments Office, like the reward chamber in a rat maze, is located at the far end of a complicated network of passageways, crossways and counter-ways. It is a large carpeted room with desks, potted plants and tellers’ windows, not at all unlike a branch bank. The Cougar woman and the man in the brown suit are there, waiting along with a number of others, all of them looking bedraggled and harassed. Rusty enters deferentially and takes a seat beside Brown Suit, but B. strides across the room to where a hopelessly walleyed woman sits at a desk, riffling through a bundle of papers. “Excuse me,” he says.

The woman looks up, her left iris drowning in white.

“I’m here—” B. breaks off, confused as to which eye to address: alternately one and then the other seems to be scrutinizing him. Finally he zeroes in on her nose and continues:”—about my car. I—”

“Do you have an appointment?”

“No, I don’t. But you see I’m a busy man, and I depend entirely on the car for transportation and—”

“Don’t we all?”

“—and I’ve already missed a day of work.” B. gives her a doleful look, a look charged with chagrin for so thwarting the work ethic and weakening the national fiber. “I’ve got to have it seen to as soon as possible. If not sooner.” Ending with a broad grin, the bon mot just the thing to break the ice.

“Yes,” she says, heaving a great wet sigh. “I understand your anxiety and I sympathize with you, I really do. But,” the left pupil working round to glare at him now, “I can’t say I think much of the way you conduct yourself — barging in here and exalting your own selfish concerns above those of the others here. Do you think that there’s no one else in the world but you? No other ailing auto but yours? Does Tegeler’s Big Garage operate for fifty-nine years, employing hundreds of people, constantly expanding, improving, streamlining its operations, only to prepare itself for the eventuality of your breakdown? Tsssss! I’m afraid, my friend, that your arrogant egotism knows no bounds.”

B. hangs his head, shuffles his feet, the greatcoat impossibly warm.

“Now. You’ll have to fill out the application for an appointment and wait your turn with the others. Though you really haven’t shown anything to deserve it, I think you may have a bit of luck today after all. The Secretary left word that he’d be in at three this afternoon.”

B. takes a seat beside the Cougar woman and stares down at the form in his hand as if it were a loaded.44. He is dazed, still tingling from the vehemence of the secretary’s attack. The form is seven pages long. There are questions about employment, annual income, collateral, next of kin. Page 4 is devoted to physical inquiries: Ever had measles? leprosy? irregularity? The next delves deeper: Do you feel that people are out to get you? Why do you hate your father? The form ends up with two pages of IQ stuff: if a farmer has 200 acres and devotes 1/16 of his land to soybeans, 5/8 to corn and 1/3 to sugar beets, how much does he have left for a drive-in movie? B. glances over at the Cougar woman. Her lower lip is thrust forward, a blackened stub of pencil twists in her fingers, an appointment form, scrawled over in pencil with circled red corrections, lies in her lap. Suddenly B. is on his feet and stalking out the door, fragments of paper sifting down in his wake like confetti. Behind him, the sound of collective gasping.

Out in the corridor B. collars a man in spattered blue coveralls and asks him where the Imports Division is. The man, squat, swarthy, mustachioed, looks at him blank as a cow. “No entiendo,” he says.

“The. Imports. Division.”

“No hablo inglés — y no me gustan las preguntas de cabrones tontos.” The man shrugs his shoulder out from under B.’s palm and struts off down the hall like a ruffled rooster. But B. is encouraged: Imports must be close at hand. He hurried off in the direction from which the man came (was he Italian or only a Puerto Rican?), following the corridor around to the left, past connecting hallways clogged with mechanics and white-smocked technicians, following it right on up to a steel fire door with the words NO ADMITTANCE stamped across it in admonitory red. There is a moment of hesitation … then he twists the knob and steps in.

“Was ist das?” A workman looks up at him, screwdriver in hand, expression modulating from surprise to menace. B. finds himself in another hangar, gloomy and expansive as the first, electric tools screeching like an army of mechanical crickets. But what’s this?: he’s surrounded by late-model cars — German cars — Beetles, Foxes, Rabbits, sleek Mercedes sedans! Not only has he stumbled across the Imports Division, but luck or instinct or good looks has guided him right to German Specialties. Well, ha-cha! He’s squinting down the rows of cars, hoping to catch sight of his own, when he feels a pressure on his arm. It is the workman with the screwdriver. “Vot you vant?” he demands.

“Uh — have you got an Audi in here? Powder blue with a black vinyl top?”

The workman is in his early twenties. He is tall and obscenely corpulent. Skin pale as the moon, jowls reddening as if with a rash, white hair cropped across his ears and pinched beneath a preposterously undersized engineer’s cap. He tightens his grip on B.’s arm and calls out into the gloom—“Holger! Friedrich!”—his voice reverberating through the vault like the battle cry of some Mesozoic monster.

Two men, flaxen-haired, in work clothes and caps, step from the shadows. Each grips a crescent wrench big as the jawbone of an ass. “Was gibt es, Klaus?”

“Mein Herr vants to know haff we got und Aw-dee.”

“How do you say it?” The two newcomers are standing over him now, the one in the wire-rimmed spectacles leering into his eyes.

“Audi,” B. says. “A German-made car?”

“Aw-dee? No, never heard of such a car,” the man says. “A cowboy maybe — family name of Murphy?”

Klaus laughs, “Har-har-har,” booming at the ceiling. The other fellow, short, scar on his cheek, joins in with a psychopathic snicker. Wire-rims grins.

Uh-oh.

“Listen,” B. says, a whining edge to his voice, “I know I’m not supposed to be in here but I saw no other way of—”

“Cutting trew der bullshit,” says Wire-rims.

“Yes, and finding out what’s wrong—”

“On a grassroot level,” interjects the snickerer.

“—right, at the grassroot level, by coming directly to you. I’m getting desperate. Really. That car is my life’s breath itself. And I don’t mean to get dramatic or anything, but I just can’t survive without it.”

“Ja,” says Wire-rims, “you haff come to der right men. We haff your car, wery serious. Ja. Der bratwurst assembly broke down and we haff sent out immediately for a brötchen und mustard.” This time all three break into laughter, Klaus booming, the snickerer snickering, Wire-rims pinching his lips and emitting a high-pitched hoo-hoo-hoo.

“No, seriously,” says B.

“You vant to get serious? Okay, we get serious. On your car we do a compression check, we put new solenoids in der U joints und we push der push rods,” says Wire-rims.

“Ja. Und we see you need a new vertical stabilizer, head gasket and PCV valve,” rasps the snickerer.

“Your sump leaks.”

“Bearings knock.”

“Plugs misfire.”

B. has had enough. “Wiseguys!” he shouts. “I’ll report you to your superiors!” But far from daunting them, his outburst has the opposite effect. Viz., Klaus grabs him by the collar and breathes beer and sauerbraten in his face. “We are Chermans,” he hisses, “—we haff no superiors.”

“Und dammit punktum!” bellows the snickerer. “Enough of dis twaddle. We haff no car of yours und furdermore we suspect you of telling to us fibs in order maybe to misappropriate the vehicle of some otter person.”

“For shame,” says Wire-rims.

“Vat shall we do mit him?” the snickerer hisses.

“I’m tinking he maybe needs a little lubrication,” says Wirerims. “No sense of humor, wery dry.” He produces a grease gun from behind his back.

And then, for the first time in his life, B. is decorated — down his collar, up his sleeve, crosshatched over his lapels — in ropy, cake-frosting strings of grease, while Klaus howls like a terminally tickled child and the snickerer’s eyes flash. A moment later he finds himself lofted into the air, strange hands at his armpits and thighs, swinging to and fro before the gaping black mouth of a laundry chute—“Zum ersten! zum andern! zum dritten!”—and then he’s airborne, and things get very dark indeed.

B. is lying facedown in an avalanche of cloth: grimy rags, stiffened chamois, socks and undershorts yellowed with age and sweat and worse, handkerchiefs congealed with sputum, coveralls wet with oil. He is stung with humiliation and outrage. He’s been cozened, humbugged, duped, gulled, spurned, insulted, ignored and now finally assaulted. There’ll be lawsuits, damn them, letters to Congressmen — but for now, if he’s to salvage a scrap of self-respect, he’s got to get out of here. He sits up, peels a sock from his face, and discovers the interior of a tiny room, a room no bigger than a laundry closet. It is warm, hot even.

Two doors open onto the closet. The one to the left is wreathed in steam, pale shoots and tendrils of it curling through the keyhole, under the jamb. B. throws back the door and is enveloped in fog. He is confused. The Minotaur’s labyrinth? Ship at sea? House afire? He can see nothing, the sound of machinery straining at his ears, moisture beading along eyebrows, nostril hairs, cowlick. Then it occurs to him: the carwash! Of course. And the carwash must give onto the parking lot, which in turn gives onto the highway. He’ll simply duck through it and then hitchhike — or, if worse comes to worst, walk — until he either makes it home or perishes in the attempt.

B. steps through the door and is instantly flattened by a mammoth, water-spewing pom-pom. He tries to get to his feet, but the sleeve of his coat seems to be caught in some sort of runner or track — and now the whole apparatus is jerking fprward, gears whirring and clicking somewhere off in the mist. B., struggling to free the coat, finds himself jerking along with it. The mechanism heaves forward, dragging B. through an extended puddle of mud, suds and road salt. A jet of water flushes the right side of his face, a second pom-pom lumbers out of the haze and pins his chest to the floor, something tears the shoe from his right foot. Soap in his ears, down his neck, sudsing and sudsing: and now a giant cylinder, a mill wheel covered with sponges, descends and rakes the length of his body. B. shouts for help, but the machinery grinds on, squeaking and ratcheting, war of the worlds. Look out!: cold rinse. He holds his breath, glacial runoff coursing over his body, a bitter pill. Then there’s a liberal blasting with hot wax, the clouds part, and the machine turns him loose with a jolt in the rear that tumbles him out the bay door and onto the slick permafrost of the parking lot.

He staggers to his feet. There’s a savage pain in his lower back and his right shoulder has got to be dislocated. No matter: he forges on. Round the outbuildings, past the front office and on out to the highway.

It has begun to get dark. B., hair frozen to his scalp, shoeless, the greatcoat stiff as a dried fish, limps along the highway no more than a mile from the garage. All around him, as far as he can see, is wasteland: crop-stubble swallowed in drifts, the stripped branches of the deciduous trees, rusty barbed wire. Not even a farmhouse on the horizon. Nothing. He’d feel like Peary running for the Pole but for the twin beacons of Garage and Lot at his back.

Suddenly a fitful light wavers out over the road — a car coming toward him! (He’s been out here for hours, holding out his thumb, hobbling along. The first ride took him south of Tegeler’s about two miles — a farmer, turning off into nowhere. The second — he didn’t care which direction he went in, just wanted to get out of the cold — took him back north about three miles.)

B. crosses the road and holds out his thumb. He is dancing with cold, clonic, shoulder, arm, wrist and extended thumb jerking like the checkered flag at the finish of the Grand Prix. Stop, he whispers, teeth clicking like dice, stop, please God stop. Light floods his face for an instant, and then it’s gone. But wait — they’re stopping! Snot crusted to his lip, shoe in hand, B. double-times up to the waiting car, throws back the door and leaps in.

“B.! What’s happened?”

It is Rita. Thank God.

“R-r-r-r-ita?” he stammers, body racked with tremors, the seatsprings chattering under him. “The ma-ma-machine.”

“Machine? What are you talking about?”

“I–I need a r-r-r-ride. Wh-where you going?” B. manages, falling into a sneezing jag.

Rita puts the car in gear, the tires grab hold of the pavement. “Why — to work, of course.”

The others smack their lips, sigh, snore, toss on their cots. Rusty, Brown Suit, the Cougar woman. B. lies there listening to them, staring into the darkness. His own breathing comes hard (TB, pleurisy, pneumonia — bronchitis at the very least). Rita — good old Rita — has filled him full of hot coffee and schnapps, given him a brace of cold pills and put him to bed. He is thoroughly miserable of course — the car riding his mind like a bogey, health shot, job lost, pets starved — but the snugness of the blanket and dry mechanic’s uniform Rita has found for him, combined with the country-sunset glow of the schnapps, is seducing him off to sleep. It is very still. The smell of turpentine hangs in the air. He pulls the blanket up to his nose.

Suddenly the light flicks on. It is Rita, all thighs and calves in her majorette’s outfit. But what’s this? There’s a man with her, a stranger. “Is this it?” the man says.

“Well, of course it is, silly.”

“But who are these chibonies?”

“It’s obvious, isn’t it? They’re customers, like yourself, waiting for their cars. The man in brown is the Gremlin, the one with the beard is the Citroen, the woman is the Cougar and the old guy on the end is the Audi.”

“And I’m the Jaguar, is that it?”

“You’re more to me than a machine, Jeff. Do you know that I like you? A lot.”

B. is mortally wounded. Enemy flak, they’ve hit him in the guts. He squeezes his eyes shut, stops his ears, but he can hear them just the same: heavy breathing, a moan soft as fur, the rush of zippers. But then the buzzer sounds and Rita gasps. “A customer!” she squeals, struggling back into her clothes and then hurrying off through the Geriatrics hangar, her footsteps like pinpricks along the spine. “Hey!” the new guy bellows. But she’s gone.

The new guy sighs, then selects a cot and beds down beside B. B. can hear him removing his things, gargling from a bottle, whispering prayers to himself—“Bless Mama, Uncle Ernie, Bear Bryant … “—then the room dashes into darkness and B. can open his eyes.

He fights back a cough. His heart is hammering. He thinks how pleasant it would be to die … but then thinks how pleasant it would be to step through the door of his apartment again, take a hot shower and crawl into bed. It is then that the vision comes to him — a waking dream — shot through with color and movement and depth. He sees Tegeler’s Big Lot, the ranks of cars, new Tegelers, lines of variegated color like beads on a string, windshields glinting in the sun, antennae jabbing at the sky, stiff and erect, like the swords of a conquering army….

In the dark, beneath the blanket, he reaches for his checkbook.

(1977)

ZAPATOS

There is, essentially, one city in our country. It is a city in which everyone wears a hat, works in an office, jogs, and eats simply but elegantly, a city above all, in which everyone covets shoes. Italian shoes, in particular. Oh, you can get by with a pair of domestically made pumps or cordovans of the supplest sheepskin, or even, in the languid days of summer, with huaraches or Chinese slippers made of silk or even nylon. There are those who claim to prefer running shoes — Puma, Nike, Saucony — winter and summer. But the truth is, what everyone wants — for the status, the cachet, the charm and refinement — are the Italian loafers and ankle boots, hand-stitched and with a grain as soft and rich as, well — is this the place to talk of the private parts of girls still in school?

My uncle — call him Dagoberto — imports shoes. From Italy. And yet, until recently, he himself could barely afford a pair. It’s the government, of course. Our country — the longest and leanest in the world — is hemmed in by the ocean on one side, the desert and mountains on the other, and the government has leached and pounded it dry till sometimes I think we live atop a stupendous, three-thousand-mile-long strip of jerky. There are duties — prohibitive duties — on everything. Or, rather, on everything we want. Cocktail napkins, Band-Aids, Tupperware, crescent wrenches, and kimchi come in practically for nothing. But the things we really crave — microwaves, Lean Cuisine, CDs, leisure suits, and above all, Italian shoes — carry a duty of two and sometimes three hundred percent. The government is unfriendly. We are born, we die, it rains, it clears, the government is unfriendly. Facts of life.

Uncle Dagoberto is no revolutionary — none of us are; let’s face it, we manage — but the shoe situation was killing him. He’d bring his shoes in, arrange them seductively in the windows of his three downtown shops, and there they’d languish, despite a markup so small he’d have to sell a hundred pairs just to take his shopgirls out to lunch. It was intolerable. And what made it worse was that the good citizens of our city, vain and covetous as they are, paraded up and down in front of his very windows in shoes identical to those he was selling — shoes for which they’d paid half price or less. And how were these shoes getting through customs and finding their way to the dark little no-name shops in the ill-lit vacancies of waterfront warehouses? Ask the Black Hand, Los Dedos Muertos, the fat and corrupt Minister of Commerce.

For months, poor Uncle Dagoberto brooded over the situation, while his wife (my mother’s sister, Carmen, a merciless woman) and his six daughters screamed for the laser facials, cellular phones, and Fila sweats he could no longer provide for them. He is a heavyset man, my uncle, and balding, and he seemed to grow heavier and balder during those months of commercial despair. But one morning, as he came down to breakfast in the gleaming, tiled expanse of the kitchen our families share in the big venerable old mansion on La Calle Verdad, there was a spring in his step and look on his face that, well — there is a little shark in the waters here, capable of smelling out one part of blood in a million parts of water, and when he does smell out that impossible single molecule of blood, I imagine he must have a look like that of Uncle Dagoberto on that sunstruck morning on La Calle Verdad.

“Tomás,” he said to me, rubbing his hands over his Bran Chex, Metamusil, and decaffeinated coffee, “we’re in business.”

The kitchen was deserted at that hour. My aunts and sisters were off jogging, Dagoberto’s daughters at the beach, my mother busy with aerobics, and my father — my late, lamented father — lying quiet in his grave. I didn’t understand. I looked up at him blankly from my plate of microwave waffles.

His eyes darted round the room. There was a sheen of sweat on his massive, close-shaven jowls. He began to whistle — a tune my mother used to sing me, by Grandmaster Flash — and then he broke off and gave me a gold-capped smile. “The shoe business,” he said. “There’s fifteen hundred in it for you.”

I was at the university at the time, studying semantics, hermeneutics, and the deconstruction of deconstruction. I myself owned two sleek pairs of Italian loafers, in ecru and rust. Still, I wasn’t working, and I could have used the money. “I’m listening,” I said.

What he wanted me to do was simple — simple, but potentially dangerous. He wanted me to spend two days in the north, in El Puerto Libre — Freeport. There are two free ports in our country, separated by nearly twenty-five hundred miles of terrain that looks from the air like the spine of some antediluvian monster. The southern port is called Calidad, or Quality. Both are what I imagine the great bazaars of Northern Africa and the Middle East to have been in the time of Marco Polo or Rommel, percolating cauldrons of sin and plenty, where anything known to man could be had for the price of a haggle. But there was a catch, of course. While you could purchase anything you liked in El Puerto Libre or Calidad, to bring it back to the city you had to pay duty — the same stultifying duty merchants like Uncle Dagoberto were obliged to pay. And why then had the government set up the free ports in the first place? In order to make digital audio tape and microwaves available to themselves, of course, and to set up discreet banking enterprises for foreigners, by way of generating cash flow — and ultimately, I think, to frustrate the citizenry. To keep us in our place. To remind us that government is unfriendly.

At any rate, I was to go north on the afternoon plane, take a room under the name “Chilly Buttons,” and await Uncle Dagoberto’s instructions. Fine. For me, the trip was nothing. I relaxed with a Glenlivet and Derrida, the film was Death Wish VII, and the flight attendants small in front and, well, substantial behind, just the way I like them. On arriving, I checked into the hotel he’d arranged for me — the girl behind the desk had eyes and shoulders like one of the amazons of the North American cinema, but she tittered and showed off her orthodontia when I signed “Chilly Buttons” in the register — and I went straight up to my room to await Uncle Dagoberto’s call. Oh, yes, I nearly forgot: he’d given me an attaché case in which there were five hundred huevos — our national currency — and a thousand black-market dollars. “I don’t anticipate any problems,” he’d told me as he handed me onto the plane, “but you never know, eh?”

I ate veal medallions and a dry spinach salad at a brasserie frequented by British rock stars and North American drug agents, and then sat up late in my room, watching a rerun of the world cockfighting championships. I was just dozing off when the phone rang. “Bueno,” I said, snatching up the receiver.

“Tomás?” It was Uncle Dagoberto.

“Yes,” I said.

His voice was pinched with secrecy, a whisper, a rasp. “I want you to go to the customs warehouse on La Avenida Democracia at ten A.M. sharp.” He was breathing heavily. I could barely hear him. “There are shoes there,” he said “Italian shoes. Thirty thousand shoes, wrapped in tissue paper. No one has claimed them and they’re to be auctioned first thing in the morning.” He paused and I listened to the empty hiss of the land breathing through the wires that separated us. “I want you to bid nothing for them. A hundred huevos. Two. But I want you to buy them. Buy them or die.” And he hung up.

At quarter of ten the next morning, I stood outside the warehouse, the attaché case clutched in my hand. Somewhere a cock crowed. It was cold, but the sun warmed the back of my neck. Half a dozen hastily shaven men in sagging suits and battered domestically made oxfords gathered beside me.

I was puzzled. How did Uncle Dagoberto expect me to buy thirty thousand Italian shoes for two hundred huevos, when a single pair sold for twice that? I understood that the black-market dollars were to be offered as needed, but even so, how could I buy more than a few dozen pairs? I shrugged it off and buried my nose in Derrida.

It was past twelve when an old man in the uniform of the customs police hobbled up the street as if his legs were made of stone, produced a set of keys, and threw open the huge hammered-steel doors of the warehouse. We shuffled in, blinking against the darkness. When my eyes became accustomed to the light, the mounds of unclaimed goods piled up on pallets around me began to take on form. There were crates of crescent wrenches, boxes of Tupperware, a bin of door stoppers. I saw bicycle horns — thousands of them, black and bulbous as the noses of monkeys — and jars of kimchi stacked up to the steel crossbeams of the ceiling. And then I saw the shoes. They were heaped up in a small mountain, individually wrapped in tissue paper. Just as Uncle Dagoberto had said. The others ignored them. They read the description the customs man provided, unwrapped the odd shoe, and went on to the bins of churchkey openers and chutney. I was dazed. It was like stumbling across the treasure of the Incas, the Golden City itself, and yet having no one recognize it.

With trembling fingers, I unwrapped first one shoe, then another. I saw patent leather, suede, the sensuous ripple of alligator; my nostrils filled with the rich and unmistakable bouquet of newly tanned leather. The shoes were perfect, insuperable, the very latest styles, au courant, à la mode, and exciting. Why had the others turned away? It was then that I read the customs declaration: Thirty thousand leather shoes, it read, imported from the Republic of Italy, port of Livorno. Unclaimed after thirty days. To be sold at auction to the highest bidder. Beside the declaration, in a handscrawl that betrayed bureaucratic impatience — disgust, even — of the highest order, was this further notation: Left feet only.

It took me a moment. I bent to the mountain of shoes and began tearing at the tissue paper. I tore through women’s pumps, stiletto heels, tooled boots, wing tips, deck shoes, and patent-leather loafers — and every single one, every one of those thirty thousand shoes, was half a pair. Uncle Dagoberto, I thought, you are a genius.

The auction was nothing. I waited through a dozen lots of number-two pencils, Cabbage Patch Dolls, and soft-white lightbulbs, and then I placed the sole bid on the thirty thousand left-footed shoes. One hundred huevos and they were mine. Later, I took the young amazon up to my room and showed her what a man with a name like Chilly Buttons can do in a sphere that, well — is this the place to gloat? We were sharing a cigarette when Uncle Dagoberto called. “Did you get them?” he shouted over the line.

“One hundred huevos,” I said.

“Good boy,” he crooned, “good boy.” He paused a moment to catch his breath. “And do you know where I’m calling from?” he asked, struggling to keep down the effervescence in his voice.

I reached out to stroke the amazon’s breasts — her name was Linda, by the way, and she was a student of cosmetology. “I think I can guess,” I said. “Calidad?”

“Funny thing,” Uncle Dagoberto said, “there are some shoes here, in the customs warehouse — fine Italian shoes, the finest, thirty thousand in a single lot — and no one has claimed them. Can you imagine that?”

There was such joy in his tone that I couldn’t resist playing out the game with him. “There must be something wrong with them,” I said.

I could picture his grin. “Nothing, nothing at all. If you’re one-legged.”

That was two years ago.

Today, Uncle Dagoberto is the undisputed shoe king of our city. He made such a killing on that one deal that he was able to buy his way into the cartel that “advises” the government. He has a title now — Undersecretary for International Trade — and a vast, brightly lit office in the President’s palace.

I’ve changed too, though I still live with my mother on La Calle Verdad and I still attend the university. My shoes — I have some thirty pairs now, in every style and color those clever Italians have been able to devise — are the envy of all, and no small attraction to the nubile and status-hungry young women of the city. I no longer study semantics, hermeneutics, and the deconstruction of deconstruction, but have instead been pursuing a degree in business. It only makes sense. After all, the government doesn’t seem half so unfriendly these days.

(1988)

RESPECT

When Santo R. stepped into my little office in Partinico last fall, I barely recognized him. He’d been a corpulent boy, one of the few in this dry-as-bones country, and a very heavyset young man. I remembered his parents — peasants, and poor as church mice — and how I’d treated him for the usual childhood ailments — rubella, chicken pox, mumps — and how even then the gentlest pressure of my fingers would leave marks on the distended flesh of his upper arms and legs. But if he’d been heavy then, now, at the age of twenty-nine, he was like a pregnant mule, so big around the middle he hardly fit through the door. He was breathing hard, half-choked on the dust of the streets, and he was wet through to the skin with sweat. “Doctor,” he wheezed, sinking a thumb into the morass of his left pectoral, just above the heart, “it hurts here.” An insuck of breath, a dab at the brow, a wince. I watched his bloated pale hand sink to cradle the great tub of his abdomen. “And here,” he whispered.

Behind him, through the open door, the waiting room full of shopkeepers, widows and hypochondriacs looked on in awe as I motioned Crocifissa, my nurse, to pull the door closed and leave us. My patients might have been impressed — here was a man of respect, who in the company of his two endomorphic bodyguards had waddled up the stairs and through the waiting room without waiting for anyone or anything — but for my part, I was only alarmed at the state he was in. The physician and his patient, after all, have a bond that goes far deeper than the world of getting and keeping, of violence and honor and all the mess that goes with them — and from the patient’s point of view, self-importance can take you only so far when you come face to face with the man who inserts the rectal thermometer.

“Don R.,” I said, getting up from the desk and simultaneously fitting the stethoscope to my ears, “I can see that you’re suffering — but have no fear, you’ve come to the right man. Now, let’s have a look….”

Well, I examined him, and he was as complete and utter a physical wreck as any man under seventy who has ever set foot in my office. The chest pain, extending below the breastbone and down the left arm to the wrist and little finger, was symptomatic of angina, a sign of premature atherosclerosis; his liver and spleen were enlarged; he suffered from hypertension and ulcers; and if he didn’t yet have a full-blown case of emphysema, he was well on his way to developing it. At least, this was my preliminary diagnosis — we would know more when the test results came back from the lab.

Crocifissa returned to inform me that Signora Malatesta seemed to be having some sort of attack in the waiting room, and as the door swung shut behind her, I could see one of Santo’s bodyguards bent over the old woman, gently patting her on the back. “Momento,” I called out, and turned to Santo with my gravest expression. “You are a very unwell man, Don R.,” I told him, “and I can’t help but suspect that your style of living has been a contributing factor. You do smoke, do you not?”

A grunt. The blocky fingers patted down the breast pocket of his jacket and he produced an engraved cigarette case. He offered me a Lucky Strike with a gallant sweep of his arm and, when I refused, lit one up for himself. For a long moment he sat meditating over my question with a lungful of tobacco smoke. Finally, he shrugged his shoulders. “Two or three packs a day,” he rasped, and appended a little cough.

“And alcohol?”

“What is this, Doctor, the confessional?” he growled, fixing me with a pair of dangerous black eyes. But then he subsided, shrugging again. “A liter of Chianti or Valpolicella with my meals — at breakfast, lunch, evening snack and dinner — and maybe two or three fiaschi of brandy a day to keep my throat open.”

“Coffee?”

“A pot or two in the morning. And in the evening, when I can’t sleep. And that’s another problem, Doctor — these pills that Bernardi gave me for sleeping? Well, they have no effect on me, nothing, I might as well be swallowing little blue capsules of cat piss. I toss, I turn. My stomach is on fire. And this at four and five in the morning.”

“I see, yes,” I said, and I pulled at the little Vandyke I’ve worn for nearly forty years now to inspire confidence in my patients. “And do you — how shall I put it? Do you exercise regularly?”

Santo looked away. His swollen features seemed to close in on themselves and in that moment he was the pudgy boy again, ready to burst into tears at some real or imagined slight. When he spoke, his voice had sunk to a whisper. “You mean with the women then, eh?” And before I could answer he went on, his voice so reduced I could barely hear him: “I–I just don’t seem to feel the urge anymore. And not only when it comes to my wife, as you might expect after ten years of marriage, but with the young girls too.”

Somehow, we had steered ourselves into dangerous conversational waters, and I saw that these waters foamed with naked shoals and rocky reefs. “No, no,” I said, and I almost gasped out the words, “I meant physical exercise, jogging, bicycling, a regular twenty-minute walk, perhaps?”

“Ha!” he spat. “Exercise!” And he rose ponderously from the chair, his face as engorged and lopsided as a tomato left out to rot in the sun. “That’s all I do is exercise. My whole frigging life is exercise, morning to night and back to morning again. I can’t sleep, I can’t eat, I can’t ball the girls in the brothel and my cigarettes taste like shit. And do you know why? Do you?”

Suddenly his voice had risen to a roar and the door popped open so that I could see the burnished faces of the two bodyguards as they clutched at their waistbands for the heavy pistols they wore there. “Bastiano!” he bellowed. “Bastiano Frigging C., that’s why. That’s my problem. Not the cigarettes, not the booze, not the heart or the liver or the guts, but that bony pussy-licking son of a bitch Bastiano!”

A week later, in the middle of a consultation with Signora Trombetta over her hot flashes and crying spells, the door to my office burst open and there, looking like death in a dishpan, stood Bastiano C. I hadn’t seen him in over a year, since I’d last treated him for intestinal worms, and, as with Santo R., I was stunned by his visible deterioration. Even as a boy he’d been thin, the sullen elder child of the village schoolmaster, all legs and arms, like a spider, but now it was as if the flesh had been painted on his bones. At five feet, nine inches tall, he must have weighed less than a hundred pounds. His two bodyguards, expressionless men nearly as emaciated as he, flanked him like slats in a fence. He gave a slight jerk of his neck, barely perceptible, and the widow Trombetta, though she was in her sixties and suffering from arthritis in every joint, scurried out the door as if she’d been set afire.

“Don C.,” I said, peering at him through the upper portion of my bifocals, “how good to see you. And how may I help you?”

He said nothing, merely stood there in the doorway looking as if a breeze would blow him away if it weren’t for the pistols, shivs and cartridges that anchored him to the floor. Another minute gesture, so conservative of energy, the merest flick of the neck, and the two henchmen melted away into the waiting room, the door closing softly behind them.

I cleared my throat. “And what seems to be the matter?” I asked in my most mellifluous, comforting tones, the tones I used on the recalcitrant child, the boy who doesn’t like the look of the needle or the girl who won’t stick out her tongue for the depressor.

Nothing.

The silence was unlike him. I’d always known him as a choleric personality, quick to speak his mind, exchange insults, fly into a rage — both in the early days of our acquaintance, when he was a spoiled boy living at home with his parents, and afterward, when he began to make his mark on the world, first as a campiere on the Buschetta estate and later as a man of respect. He wasn’t one to hold anything back.

I rearranged the things on my desk, took off my glasses and wiped them with my handkerchief. Bastiano C. was twenty-six or twenty-seven years old, somewhere in that range, and his medical history had been unremarkable as far as I could recall. Oh, there had been the usual doses of clap, the knife and gun wounds, but nothing that could begin to explain the physical shambles I now saw before me. I listened to the clock in the square toll the hour — it was 4:00 P.M. and hotter than even Dante could have imagined — and then I tried one last time. “So, Don C., you’re not feeling well. Would you like to tell me about it?”

The man’s face was sour, the gift of early handsomeness pressed from it like grappa from the dregs. He scratched his rear casually, then took a seat as if he were stuffed with feathers, and leaned forward. “Pepto-Bismol,” he said in the moist high-pitched tones that made it seem as if he were sucking his words like lozenges. “I live Pepto-Bismol. I breathe it, drink it by the quart, it runs through my veins. I even shit pink.”

“Ah, it’s your stomach, then,” I said, rising now, the stethoscope dangling from my neck, but he gestured for me to remain seated. He wasn’t yet ready to reveal himself, to become intimate with my diagnostic ways.

“I am telling you, Doctor,” he said, “I do not eat, drink, smoke; my taste is gone and my pleasure in things is as dead as the black cat we nailed over Miraglia Sciacca’s door. I take two bites of pasta with a little butter and grated Romano and it’s like they stabbed me in my guts.” He looked miserably at the floor and worked the bones of his left wrist till they clicked like dice thrown against a wall. “And do you know why?” he demanded finally.

I didn’t know, but I certainly had a suspicion.

“Santo R.,” he said, slowing down to inject some real venom into his voice. “The fat-ass bastard.”

That night, over a mutton chop and a bowl of bean soup, I consulted my housekeeper about the situation. Santuzza is an ignorant woman, crammed from her toes to her scalp with the superstitious claptrap that afflicts the Sicilian peasantry like a congenital defect (I once caught her rubbing fox fat on her misshapen feet and saying a Salve Regina backwards in a low moaning singsong voice), but she has an uncanny and all-encompassing knowledge of the spats, feuds and sex scandals not only of Partinico but of the entire Palermo province. The minute I leave for the office, the telephone receiver becomes glued to the side of her head — she cooks with it in place, sweeps, does the wash and changes the sheets, and all the while the pertinacious voice of the telephone buzzes in her ear. All day long it’s gossip, gossip, gossip.

“They had a falling-out,” Santuzza said, putting a loaf in front of me and refilling my glass from the carafe on the sideboard. “They were both asked to be a go-between in the dispute of Gaspare Pantaleo and Miraglia Sciacca.”

“Ah,” I murmured, breaking off a crust and wiping it thoughtfully round the rim of my plate, “I should have known.”

As Santuzza told it, the disaffection between Pantaleo and Sciacca, tenant farmers on the C. and R. estates, respectively, arose over a question of snails. It had been a dry year following hard on the heels of the driest year anyone could remember, and the snails hadn’t appeared in any numbers during the previous fall. But recently we’d had a freak rain, and Gaspare Pantaleo, a poor man who has to do everything in his power to make ends meet, went out to gather snails for a stew to feed his children. He knew a particular spot, high on the riverbank where there was a tumble of stones dumped to prevent erosion, and though it was on private property, the land belonged neither to the C. nor R. family holdings. Miraglia Sciacca discovered him there. Apparently Sciacca knew of this spot also, a good damp protected place where the snails clumped together in bunches in the cracks between the rocks, and he too had gone out to collect snails for a stew. His children — there were eight of them, and each with an identical cast in the right eye — were hungry too, always hungry. Like Pantaleo, he lived close to the bone, hunting snails, frogs, elvers and songbirds, gathering borage and wild asparagus and whatnot to stretch his larder. Well, they had words over the snails, one thing led to another, and when Miraglia Sciacca came to he was lying in the mud with maybe a thousand snails crushed into his groin.

Two days later he marched up to the Pantaleo household with an antiquated carbine and shot the first two dogs he saw. Gaspare Pantaleo’s brother Filippo retaliated by poisoning the Sciacca family’s pig, and then Rosario Bontalde, Miraglia Sciacca’s uncle by marriage, sent a fifteen-pound wheel of cheese to the Pantaleos as an apparent peace offering. But the cheese was hexed — remember, this is Santuzza talking — and within the week Girolama Pantaleo, Gaspare’s eldest daughter and one of the true and astonishing beauties of the province, lost all her hair. Personally, I suspected ringworm or perhaps a dietary deficiency, but I didn’t want to distract Santuzza, so I ate my soup and said nothing.

Things apparently came to a head when Gaspare Pantaleo stormed up the road to the Sciacca place to demand that the hex be lifted — the cheese they’d disposed of, but in such cases the hex, Santuzza assured me, lingers in all who’ve eaten of it. At the time, Miraglia Sciacca was out in the yard, not five paces from the public street, splitting olive wood so he could stack it against the fence for the coming winter. “You’re a fraud and a pederast,” Gaspare Pantaleo accused in a voice the neighbors could hear half a mile away, “and I demand that you take the hex off that cheese.”

Miraglia’s only response was a crude epithet.

“All right then, you son of a bitch, I’ll thrash it out of you,” Gaspare roared, and he set his hand down on the fence post to hoist himself over, and that was when Miraglia Sciacca, without so much as a hitch in his stroke, brought the ax down and took Gaspare Pantaleo’s right hand off at the wrist. That was bad enough, but it wasn’t the worst of it. What really inflamed the entire Pantaleo clan, what drove them to escalate matters by calling in Don Bastiano C. as mediator, was that the Sciaccas wouldn’t return the hand. As Santuzza had it from Rosa Giardini, an intimate of the Sciaccas, Miraglia kept the hand preserved in a jar on the mantelpiece, taking it down at the slightest pretext to show off to his guests and boast of his prowess.

Three weeks passed and the sun held steady in the sky, though by now we should have been well into the rains, and I heard nothing of the feuding parties. I saw Santo R. one evening as I was sitting in the cafe, but we didn’t speak — he was out in the street, along with his two elephantine bodyguards, bending painfully to inspect the underside of his car for explosives before lumbering into the driver’s seat, firing up the ignition and roaring away in a cyclone of leaves and whirling trash. It was ironic to think that snails had been the cause of all this misunderstanding and a further burden to the precarious health of the two men of respect, Don Santo R. and Don Bastiano C., because now you couldn’t find snails for love or money. Not a trattoria, cafe or street vendor offered them for sale, and the unseasonable sun burned like a cinder in the sky.

It was a festering hot day toward the end of November, no rain in sight and the sirocco tearing relentlessly at the withered branches of the trees, when Santo R. next showed up at my office. Business was slow — the season of croup and bronchitis, head colds and flu depended upon the rains as much as the snails did — and I was gazing out the window at a pair of buzzards spiraling over the slaughterhouse when he announced himself with a delicate little cough. “Don R.,” I said, rising to greet him with a smile, but the smile must have frozen on my face — I was shocked at the sight of him. If he’d looked bad a month ago, bloated and pale and on the verge of collapse, now he was so swollen I could think of nothing so much as a sausage ready to burst its skin on the grill.

“Doctor,” he rasped, and his face was like chalk beside the ruddy beef of the bodyguard who supported him, “I don’t feel so good.” Through the open door I could see Crocifissa making the sign of the cross. The second bodyguard was nowhere to be seen.

Alarmed, I hurried out from behind the desk and helped the remaining henchman settle Don R. in the chair. Don R.’s fingers were so puffed up as to be featureless, and I saw that he’d removed the laces of his shoes to ease the swelling of his feet — this was no mere obesity, but a sign that something was desperately wrong. Generalized edema, difficulty breathing, cardiac arrhythmia — the man was a walking time bomb. “Don R.,” I said, bending forward to listen to the fitful thump and wheeze of his heart, “you’ve been taking your medication, haven’t you?” I’d prescribed nitroglycerine for the angina, a diuretic and Aldomet for hypertension, and strictly warned him against salt, alcohol, tobacco and saturated fats.

Santo’s eyes were closed. He opened them with a grunt of command, made eye contact with the bodyguard and ordered him from the room. When the door had closed, he let out a deep, world-weary sigh. “A good man, Francesco,” he said. “He’s about all I have left. I had to send my wife and kids away till this blows over, and Guido, my other man, well”—he lifted his hand and let it drop like a guillotine—“no, one lives forever.”

“Listen to me, Don R.,” I said, stern now, my patience at an end, “you haven’t been taking your medication, have you?”

No reaction. I might as well have been addressing a stump, a post in the ground.

“And the alcohol, the cigarettes, the pastries and all the rest?”

A shrug of the shoulders. “I’m tired, Doctor,” he said.

“Tired?” I was outraged. “I should think you’d be tired. Your system’s depleted. You’re a mess. You’re taking your life in your hands just to mount a flight of stairs. But you didn’t come here for lectures, and I’m not going to give you one — no, I’m going to lift up that telephone receiver on the desk and call the hospital. You’re checking in this afternoon.”

The eyes, which had fallen shut, blinked open again. “No, Doctor,” he rasped, and his words came in a slow steady procession, “you’re not going to touch that telephone. Do you know how long I’d last in a hospital? Were you born yesterday? Bastiano’d have me strung up like a side of beef before the night was out.”

“But your blood pressure is through the roof, you, you—”

“Fuck blood pressure.”

There was a silence. The sirocco, so late for the season, rattled the panes of the window. The overhead fan creaked on its bearings. After a moment he spoke, and his voice was thick with emotion. “Doctor,” he began, “Doctor, you’ve known me all my life — I’m not thirty yet and I feel like I’m a hundred. Do you know what it takes to be a man of respect in this country, do you?” His voice broke. “All the beatings, the muggings, the threats and kidnappings, cutting off the heads of the dogs and horses, nailing the cats to the walls … I tell you, Doctor, I tell you: it takes a toll on a man.”

He was about to go on when a noise from the outer room froze him — it was nothing, barely audible above the wind, the least gurgle in the throat, but it was enough. With a swiftness that astonished me, he was up from the chair, the pistol clenched in his hand. I heard Crocifissa suddenly, a truncated cry, and then the door flew open and there stood Bastiano C., one hand clutching a gleaming silver snub-nosed revolver, the other pinned to his gut.

This was the longest moment of my life. It seemed to play out over the course of an hour, but in reality, the whole thing took no more than a minute or two. Behind Bastiano, I could make out the sad collapsed form of Santo’s bodyguard, stretched out like a sea lion on the beach, a wire garrote sunk into the fleshy folds of his throat. Beneath him, barely visible, lay the expiring sticklike shadow of Bastiano’s remaining bodyguard — Bastiano too, as it turned out, had lost one to the exigencies of war. Crocifissa, wide-eyed and with a fist clamped to her mouth, sat at her desk in shock.

And Bastiano — he stood there in the doorway nearly doubled over with abdominal pain, more wasted even than he’d been three weeks earlier, if that was possible. The pistol was leveled on Santo, who stood rigid at the back of the room, heaving for breath like a cart horse going up the side of Mount Etna. Santo’s pistol, a thing the size of a small cannon, was aimed unflinchingly at his antagonist. “Son of a whore,” Bastiano breathed in his wet slurping tones. There was no flesh to his face, none at all, and his eyes were glittering specks sunk like screws in his head.

“Puttana!” Santo spat, and he changed color twice — from parchment white to royal pomodoro—with the rush of blood surging through his congested arteries.

“Now I am going to kill you,” Bastiano whispered, even as he clutched with his left hand at the place where his ulcers had eaten through the lining of his stomach and the surrounding vessels that were quietly filling his body cavity with blood.

“In a pig’s eye,” Santo growled, and it was the last thing he ever said, because in that moment, even as he wrapped his bloated finger round the trigger and attempted to squeeze, his poor congested fat-clogged heart gave out and he died before my eyes of a massive coronary.

I went to him, of course, my own heart pounding as if it would burst, but even as I bent over him I was distracted by a noise from Bastiano — a delicate little sigh that might have come from a schoolgirl surprised by love — and I glanced up in confusion to see his eyes fall shut as he pitched face-forward onto the linoleum. Though I tried with all my power, I couldn’t revive him, and he died that night in a heavily guarded room at the Ospedale Regionale.

I don’t know what it was, and I don’t like to speculate, being a man of science, but the rains came three days later. Santuzza claimed it was a question of propitiating the gods, of bloodletting, of settling otherworldly accounts, but the hidebound and ignorant will have their say. At any rate, a good portion of the district turned out for the funerals, held on the same day and at the same cemetery, while the rain drove down as if heaven and earth had been reversed. Don Bastiano C.’s family and retainers were careful not to mingle with Don Santo R.’s, and the occasion was somber and without incident. The snails turned out, though, great snaking slippery chains of them, mounting the tombstones in their legions and fearlessly sailing the high seas of the greening grass. The village priest intoned the immortal words, the widows wept, the children huddled beneath their umbrellas and we buried both men, if not with pomp and circumstance, then at least with a great deal of respect.

(1992)

FILTHY WITH THINGS

He dreams, amidst the clutter, of sparseness, purity, the wheeling dark star-haunted reaches beyond the grasp of this constrained little world, where distances are measured in light-years and even the galaxies fall away to nothing. But dreams get you nowhere, and Marsha’s latest purchase, the figured-mahogany highboy with carved likenesses of Jefferson, Washington and Adams in place of pulls, will not fit in the garage. The garage, designed to accommodate three big chromium-hung hunks of metal in the two-ton range, will not hold anything at all, not even a Japanese fan folded like a stiletto and sunk to the hilt in a horizontal crevice. There are no horizontal crevices — nor vertical, either. The mass of interlocked things, the great squared-up block of objects, of totems, of purchases made and accreted, of the precious and unattainable, is packed as tightly as the stones at Machu Picchu.

For a long moment Julian stands there in the blistering heat of the driveway, contemplating the abstract sculpture of the garage while the boy from the Antique Warehouse rolls and unrolls the sleeves of his T-shirt and watches a pair of fourteen-year-old girls saunter up the sidewalk. The sun and heat are not salutary for the colonial hardwood of which the highboy is composed, and the problem of where to put it has begun to reach critical proportions. Julian thinks of the storage shed behind the pool, where the newspapers are stacked a hundred deep and Marsha keeps her collection of Brazilian scythes and harrows, but immediately rejects it — the last time he was back there he couldn’t even get the door open: Over the course of the next ten seconds or so he develops a fantasy of draining the pool and enclosing it as a sort of step-down warehouse, and it’s a rich fantasy, richly rewarding, but he ultimately dismisses it, too. If they were to drain the pool, where would Marsha keep her museum-quality collection of Early American whaling implements, buoys and ship’s furniture, not to mention the two hundred twelve antique oarlocks currently mounted on the pool fence?

The boy’s eyes are vapid. He’s begun to whistle tunelessly and edge back toward the van. “So where’d you decide you want it?” he asks listlessly.

On the moon, Julian wants to say. Saturn. On the bleak blasted ice plains of Pluto. He shrugs. “On the porch, I guess.”

The porch. Yes. The only problem is, the screened-in porch is already stacked to the eaves with sideboards, armoires, butter churns and bentwood rockers. The best they can do, after a fifteen-minute struggle, is to wedge the thing two-thirds of the way in the door. “Well,” says Julian, and he can feel his heart fluttering round his rib cage like some fist-sized insect, “I guess that’ll have to do.” The laugh he appends is curt with embarrassment. “Won’t have to worry about rain till November, anyway.”

The boy isn’t even breathing hard. He’s long-lipped and thin, strung together with wire, and he’s got one of those haircuts that make his head look as if it’s been put on backwards. For a long moment he leans over the hand truck, long fingers dangling, giving Julian a look that makes him feel like he’s from another planet. “Yeah, that’s right,” the boy finally murmurs, and he looks at his feet, then jerks himself up as if to drift back to the van, the freeway, the warehouse, before stopping cold again. He looks at Julian as if he’s forgotten something, and Julian digs into his pocket and gives the boy three dollars for his efforts.

The sun is there, a living presence, as the boy backs the van out of the driveway, and Julian knows he’s going to have to do something about the mahogany highboy — drape a sheet over it or maybe a plastic drop cloth — but somehow he can’t really seem to muster the energy. It’s getting too much for him — all these things, the addition that was filled before it was finished, the prefab storage sheds on the back lawn, the crammed closets, the unlivable living room — and the butt end of the highboy hanging from the porch door seems a tangible expression of all his deepest fears. Seeing it there, the harsh light glancing off its polished flanks, its clawed feet dangling in the air, he wants to cry out against the injustice of it all, his miserable lot, wants to dig out his binoculars and the thin peeling ground cloth he’s had since he was a boy in Iowa and go up to the mountains and let the meteor showers wash him clean, but he can’t. That ancient handcrafted butt end represents guilt, Marsha’s displeasure, a good and valuable thing left to deteriorate. He’s begun to move toward it in a halfhearted shuffle, knowing from experience that he can squeeze it in there somehow, when a horn sounds breathlessly behind him. He turns, condemned like Sisyphus, and watches as Marsha wheels into the drive, the Range Rover packed to the windows and a great dark slab of furniture lashed to the roof like some primitive landing craft. “Julian!” she calls. “Julian! Wait till you see what I found!”

“I’ve seen worse,” the woman says, and Julian can feel the short hairs on the back of his neck begin to stiffen — she’s seen worse, but she’s seen better, too. They’re standing in the living room — or rather on the narrow footpath between the canyons of furniture that obscure the walls, the fireplace, even the ceiling of what was once the living room — and Julian, afraid to look her in the eye, leans back against a curio cabinet crammed with painted porcelain dolls in native costume, nervously turning her card over in his hand. The card is certainly minimalistic—Susan Certaine, it reads in a thin black embossed script, Professional Organizer, and it gives a telephone number, nothing else — and the woman herself is impressive, brisk, imposing, even; but he’s just not sure. Something needs to be done, something radical — and, of course, Marsha, who left to cruise the flea markets an hour ago, will have to agree to it, at least in substance — but for all his misery and sense of oppression, for all the times he’s joked about burning the place down or holding the world’s biggest yard sale, Julian needs to be reassured, needs to be convinced.

“You’ve seen worse?” he prompts.

“Sure I have. Of course I have. What do you take me for, an amateur?”

Julian shrugs, turns up his palms, already on the defensive.

“Listen, in my business, Mr. Laxner, you tend to run across the hard cases, the ones anyone else would give up on — the Liberaces, the Warhols, the Nancy Reagans. You remember Imelda Marcos? That was me. I’m the one they called in to straighten out that mess. Twenty-seven hundred pairs of shoes alone, Mr. Laxner. Think about that.”

She pauses to let her eyes flicker over the room, the smallest coldest flame burning behind the twin slivers of her contact lenses. She’s a tall, pale, hovering presence, a woman stripped to the essentials, the hair torn back from her scalp and strangled in a bun, no cheeks, no lips, no makeup or jewelry, the dress black, the shoes black, the briefcase black as a dead black coal dug out of the bottom of the bag. “There’s trouble here,” she says finally, holding his eyes. “You’re dirty with things, Mr. Laxner, filthy, up to your ears in the muck.”

He is, he admits it, but he can’t help wincing at the harshness of the indictment.

She leans closer, the briefcase clamped like a breastplate across her chest, her breath hot in his face, soap, Sen-Sen, Listerine. “And do you know who I am, Mr. Laxner?” she asks, a hard combative friction in the back of her throat, a rasp, a growl.

Julian tries to sound casual, tries to work the hint of a smile into the corners of his mouth and ignore the fact that his personal space has suddenly shrunk to nothing. “Susan Certaine?”

“I am the purifying stream, Mr. Laxner, that’s who I am. The cleansing torrent, the baptismal font. I’ll make a new man of you.”

This is what she’s here for, he knows it, this is what he needs, discipline, compulsion, the iron promise, but still he can’t help edging away, a little dance of the feet, the condensing of a shoulder. “Well, yes, but”—giving her a sidelong glance, and still she’s there, right there, breathing out her Sen-Sen like a dental hygienist—“it’s a big job, it’s—”

“We inventory everything—everything—right down to the paper clips in your drawers and the lint in your pockets. My people are the best, real professionals. There’s no one like us in the business, believe me — and believe me when I tell you I’ll have this situation under control inside of a week, seven short days. I’ll guarantee it, in fact. All I need is your go-ahead.”

His go-ahead. A sudden vista opens up before him, unbroken beaches, limitless plains, lunar seas and Venusian deserts, the yawning black interstellar wastes. Would it be too much to ask to see the walls of his own house? Just once? Just for an hour? Yes, okay, sure, he wants to say, but the immensity of it stifles him. “I’ll have to ask my wife,” he hears himself saying. “I mean, consult with her, think it over.”

“Pah! That’s what they all say.” Her look is incendiary, bitter, the eyes curdling behind the film of the lenses, the lipless mouth clenched round something rotten. “Tell me something, Mr. Laxner, if you don’t mind my asking — you’re a stargazer, aren’t you?”

“Beg pardon?”

“The upstairs room, the one over the kitchen?” Her eyes are jumping, some mad electric impulse shooting through her like a power surge scorching the lines. “Come on now, come clean. All those charts and telescopes, the books — there must be a thousand of them.”

Now it’s Julian’s turn, the ball in his court, the ground solid under his feet. “I’m an astronomer, if you want to know.”

She says nothing, just watches him out of those burning messianic eyes, waiting.

“Well, actually, it’s more of a hobby really — but I do teach a course Wednesday nights at the community college.”

The eyes leap at him. “I knew it. You intellectuals, you’re the worst, the very worst.”

“But, but”—stammering again despite himself—“it’s not me, it’s Marsha.”

“Yes,” she returns, composing herself like some lean effortless snake coiling to strike, “I’ve heard that one before. It takes two to tango, Mr. Laxner, the pathological aggregator and the enabler. Either way, you’re guilty. Don’t ask your wife, tell her. Take command.” Turning her back on him as if the matter’s been settled, she props her briefcase up against the near bank of stacked ottomans, produces a note pad and begins jotting down figures in a firm microscopic hand. Without looking up, she swings suddenly round on him. “Family money?” she asks.

And he answers before he can think: “Yes. My late mother.”

“All right,” she says, “all right, that’s fine. But before we go any further, perhaps you’d be interested in hearing a little story one of my clients told me, a journalist, a name you’d recognize in a minute….” The eyes twitch again, the eyeballs themselves, pulsing with that electric charge. “Well, a few years ago he was in Ethiopia — in the Eritrean province — during the civil war there? He was looking for some refugees to interview and a contact put him onto a young couple with three children, they’d been grain merchants before the war broke out, upper-middle-class, they even had a car. Well, they agreed to be interviewed, because he was giving them a little something and they hadn’t eaten in a week, but when the time came they hung back. And do you know why?”

He doesn’t know. But the room, the room he passes through twenty times a day like a tourist trapped in a museum, seems to close in on him.

“They were embarrassed, that’s why — they didn’t have any clothes. And I don’t mean as in ‘Oh dear, I don’t have a thing to wear to the Junior League Ball,’ but literally no clothes. Nothing at all, not even a rag. They finally showed up like Adam and Eve, one hand clamped over their privates.” She held his eyes till he had to look away. “And what do you think of that, Mr. Laxner, I’d be interested to know?”

What can he say? He didn’t start the war, he didn’t take the food from their mouths and strip the clothes from their backs, but he feels guilty all the same, bloated with guilt, fat with it, his pores oozing the golden rancid sheen of excess and waste. “That’s terrible,” he murmurs, and still he can’t quite look her in the eye.

“Terrible?” she cries, her voice homing in, “you’re damned right it’s terrible. Awful. The saddest thing in the world. And do you know what? Do you?” She’s even closer now, so close he could be breathing for her. “That’s why I’m charging you a thousand dollars a day.”

The figure seizes him, wrings him dry, paralyzes his vocal apparatus. He can feel something jerking savagely at the cords of his throat. “A thousand—dollars—a day?” he echoes in disbelief. “I knew it wasn’t going to be cheap—”

But she cuts him off, a single insistent finger pressed to his lips. “You’re dirty,” she whispers, and her voice is different now, thrilling, soft as a lover’s, “you’re filthy. And I’m the only one to make you clean again.”

The following evening, with Julian’s collusion, Susan Certaine and her associate, Dr. Doris Hauskopf, appear at the back gate just after supper. It’s a clear searing evening, not a trace of moisture in the sky — the kind of evening that would later lure Julian out under the stars if it weren’t for the light pollution. He and Marsha are enjoying a cup of decaf after a meal of pita, tabbouleh and dolma from the Armenian deli, sitting out on the patio amidst the impenetrable maze of lawn furniture, when Susan Certaine’s crisp penetrating tones break through the muted roar of freeway traffic and sporadic birdsong: “Mr. Laxner? Are you there?”

Marsha, enthroned in wicker and browsing through a collectibles catalogue, gives him a quizzical look, expecting perhaps a delivery boy or a package from the UPS — Marsha, his Marsha, in her pastel shorts and oversized top, the quintessential innocent, so easily pleased. He loves her in that moment, loves her so fiercely he almost wants to call the whole thing off, but Susan Certaine is there, undeniable, and her voice rings out a second time, drilling him with its adamancy: “Mr. Laxner?”

He rises then, ducking ceramic swans and wrought-iron planters, feeling like Judas.

The martial tap of heels on the flagstone walk, the slap of twin briefcases against rigorously conditioned thighs, and there they are, the professional organizer and her colleague the psychologist, hovering over a bewildered Marsha like customs inspectors. There’s a moment of silence, Marsha looking from Julian to the intruders and back again, before he realizes that it’s up to him to make the introductions. “Marsha,” he begins, and he seems to be having trouble finding his voice, “Marsha, this is Ms. Certaine. And her colleague, Dr. Doris Hauskopf — she’s a specialist in aggregation disorders. They run a service for people like us … you remember a few weeks ago, when we—” but Marsha’s look wraps fingers around his throat and he can’t go on.

Blanching, pale to the roots of her hair, Marsha leaps up from the chair and throws a wild hunted look round her. “No,” she gasps, “no,” and for a moment Julian thinks she’s going to bolt, but the psychologist, a compact woman with a hairdo even more severe than Susan Certaine’s, steps forward to take charge of the situation. “Poor Marsha,” she clucks, spreading her arms to embrace her, “poor, poor Marsha.”

The trees bend under the weight of the carved birdhouses from Heidelberg and Zurich, a breeze comes up to play among the Taiwanese wind chimes that fringe the eaves in an unbroken line, and the house — the jam-packed house in which they haven’t been able to prepare a meal or even find a frying pan in over two years — seems to rise up off its foundation and settle back again. Suddenly Marsha is sobbing, clutching Dr. Hauskopf’s squared-up shoulders and sobbing like a child. “I know I’ve been wrong,” she wails, “I know it, but I just can’t, I can’t—”

“Hush now, Marsha, hush,” the doctor croons, and Susan Certaine gives Julian a fierce, tight-lipped look of triumph, “that’s what we’re here for. Don’t you worry about a thing.”

The next morning, at the stroke of seven, Julian is awakened from uneasy dreams by the deep-throated rumble of heavy machinery. In the first startled moment of waking, he thinks it’s the noise of the garbage truck and feels a sudden stab of regret for having failed to put out the cans and reduce his load by its weekly fraction, but gradually he becomes aware that the sound is localized, static, stalled at the curb out front of the house. Throwing off the drift of counterpanes, quilts and granny-square afghans beneath which he and his wife lie entombed each night, he struggles through the precious litter of the floor to the bedroom window. Outside, drawn up to the curb in a sleek dark glittering line, their engines snarling, are three eighteen-wheel moving vans painted in metal-flake black and emblazoned with the Certaine logo. And somewhere, deep in the bowels of the house, the doorbell has begun to ring. Insistently.

Marsha isn’t there to answer it. Marsha isn’t struggling up bewildered from the morass of bedclothes to wonder who could be ringing at this hour. She isn’t in the bathroom trying to locate her toothbrush among the mustache cups and fin-de-siècle Viennese soap dishes or in the kitchen wondering which of the coffee drippers/steamers/percolators to use. She isn’t in the house at all, and the magnitude of that fact hits him now, hard, like fear or hunger.

No, Marsha is twenty-seven miles away, in the Susan Certaine Residential Treatment Center in Simi Valley, separated from him for the first time in their sixteen years of marriage. It was Dr. Hauskopf’s idea. She felt it would be better this way, less traumatic for everyone concerned. After the initial twilit embrace of the preceding evening, the doctor and Susan Certaine had led Marsha out front, away from the house and Julian — her “twin crutches,” as the doctor put it — and conducted an impromptu three-hour therapy session on the lawn. Julian preoccupied himself with his lunar maps and some calculations he’d been wanting to make relating to the total area of the Mare Fecunditatis in the Southeast quadrant, but he couldn’t help glancing out the window now and again. The three women were camped on the grass, sitting in a circle with their legs folded under them, yoga style, while Marsha’s tiki torches blazed over their heads like a forest afire.

Weirdly lit, they dipped their torsos toward one another and their hands flashed white against the shadows while Marsha’s menagerie of lawn ornaments clustered round them in silent witness. There was something vaguely disquieting about the scene, and it made Julian feel like an interloper, already bereft in some deep essential way, and he had to turn away from it. He put down his pencil and made himself a drink. He flicked on the TV. Paced. Finally, at quarter to ten, he heard them coming in the front door. Marsha was subdued, her eyes downcast, and it was clear that she’d been crying. They allowed her one suitcase. No cosmetics, two changes of clothing, underwear, a nightgown. Nothing else. Not a thing. Julian embraced his wife on the front steps while Susan Certaine and Dr. Hauskopf looked on impatiently, and then they were gone.

But now the doorbell is ringing and Julian is shrugging into his pants and looking for his shoes even as Susan Certaine’s whiplash cry reverberates in the stairwell and stings him to action. “Mr. Laxner! Open up! Open up!”

It takes him sixty seconds. He would have liked to comb his hair, brush his teeth, reacquaint himself with the parameters of human life on the planet, but there it is, sixty seconds, and he’s still buttoning his shirt as he throws back the door to admit her. “I thought … I thought you said eight,” he gasps.

Susan Certaine stands rigid on the doorstep, flanked by two men in black jumpsuits with the Certaine logo stitched in gold over their left breast pockets. The men are big-headed, bulky, with great slabs of muscle ladled over their shoulders and upper arms. Behind them, massed like a football team coming to the aid of a fallen comrade, are the uncountable others, all in Certaine black. “I did,” she breathes, stepping past him without a glance. “We like to keep our clients on their toes. Mike!” she cries, “Fernando!” and the two men spring past Julian and into the ranked gloom of the house. “Clear paths here”—pointing toward the back room—“and here”—and then to the kitchen.

The door stands open. Beyond it, the front lawn is a turmoil of purposefully moving bodies, of ramps, ladders, forklifts, flattened boxes in bundles six feet high. Already, half a dozen workers — they’re women, Julian sees now, women cut in the Certaine mold, with their hair shorn or pinned rigidly back — have begun constructing the cardboard containers that will take the measure of his and Marsha’s life together. And now others, five, six, seven of them, speaking in low tones and in a language he doesn’t recognize, file past him with rolls of bar-code tape, while out on the front walk, just beyond the clutter of the porch, three men in mirror sunglasses set up a gauntlet of tables equipped with computers and electric-eye guns. Barefooted, unshaven, unshowered, his teeth unbrushed and his hair uncombed, Julian can only stand and gape — it’s like an invasion. It is an invasion.

When he emerges from the shower ten minutes later, wrapped only in a towel, he finds a small hunched Asian woman squatting on her heels in front of the cabinets under the twin sinks, methodically affixing bar-code stickers to jars of petroleum jelly, rolls of toilet paper and cans of cleanser before stacking them neatly in a box at her side. “What do you think you’re doing?” Julian demands. This is too much, outrageous, in his own bathroom no less, but the woman just grins out of a toothless mouth, gives him the thumbs-up sign and says, “A-OK, Number One Charlie!”

His heart is going, he can feel it, and he tries to stay calm, tries to remind himself that these people are only doing their job, doing what he could never do, liberating him, cleansing him, but before he can get his pants back on two more women materialize in the bedroom, poking through the drawers with their ubiquitous stickers. “Get out!” he roars, “out!” and he makes a rush at them, but it’s as if he doesn’t exist, as if he’s already become an irrelevance in the face of the terrible weight of his possessions. Unconcerned, they silently hold their ground, heads bowed, hands flicking all the while over his handkerchiefs, underwear, socks, over Marsha’s things, her jewelry, brassieres, her ashtray and lacquered-box collections and the glass case that houses her Thimbles of the World set.

“All right,” Julian says, “all right. We’ll just see about this, we’ll just see,” and he dresses right there in front of them, boldly, angrily, hands trembling on button and zipper, before slamming out into the hallway in search of Susan Certaine.

The only problem is, he can’t find her. The house, almost impossible to navigate in the best of times, is like the hold of a sinking ship. All is chaos. A dark mutter of voices rises up to engulf him, shouts, curses, dust hanging in the air, the floorboards crying out, and things, objects of all shapes and sizes, sailing past him in bizarre array. Susan Certaine is not in the kitchen, not on the lawn, not in the garage or the pool area or the guest wing. Finally, in frustration, he stops a worker with a Chinese vase slung over one shoulder and asks if he’s seen her. The man has a hard face, smoldering eyes, a mustache so thick it eliminates his mouth. “And who might you be?” he growls.

“The owner.” Julian feels lightheaded. He could swear he’s never seen the vase before.

“Owner of what?”

“What do you mean, owner of what? All this”—gesturing at the chaotic tumble of carpets, lamps, furniture and bric-a-brac—“the house. The, the—”

“You want Ms. Certaine,” the man says, cutting him off, “I’d advise you best look upstairs, in the den,” and then he’s gone, shouldering his load out the door.

The den. But that’s Julian’s sanctuary, the only room in the house where you can draw a breath, find a book on the shelves, a chair to sit in — his desk is there, his telescopes, his charts. There’s no need for any organizing in his den. What is she thinking? He takes the stairs two at a time, dodging Certaine workers laden with artifacts, and bursts through the door to find Susan Certaine seated at his desk and the room already half-stripped.

“But, but what are you doing?” he cries, snatching at his Velbon tripod as one of the big men in black fends him off with an unconscious elbow. “This room doesn’t need anything, this room is off-limits, this is mine—”

“Mine,” Susan Certaine mimics, leaping suddenly to her feet. “Did you hear that, Fernando? Mike?” The two men pause, grinning wickedly, and the wizened Asian woman, at work now in here, gives a short sharp laugh of derision. Susan Certaine crosses the room in two strides, thrusting her jaw at Julian, forcing him back a step. “Listen to yourself—’mine, mine, mine.’ Don’t you see what you’re saying? Marsha’s only half the problem, as in any codependent relationship. What did you think, that you could solve all your problems by depriving her of her things, making her suffer, while all your precious little star charts and musty books and whatnot remain untouched? Is that it?”

He can feel the eyes of the big men on him. Across the room, at the bookcase, the Asian woman applies stickers to his first edition of Percival Lowell’s Mars and Its Canals, the astrolabe that once belonged to Captain Joshua

Slocum, the Starview scope his mother gave him when he turned twelve. “No, but, but—”

“Would that be fair, Mr. Laxner? Would that be equitable? Would it?” She doesn’t wait for an answer, turning instead to pose the question to her henchmen. “You think it’s fair, Mike? Fernando?”

“No gain without pain,” Mike says.

“Amen,” Fernando chimes in.

“Listen,” Julian blurts, and he’s upset now, as upset as he’s ever been, “I don’t care what you say, I’m the boss here and I say the stuff stays, just as it is. You — now put down that tripod.”

No one moves. Mike looks to Fernando, Fernando looks to Susan Certaine. After a moment, she lays a hand on Julian’s arm. “You’re not the boss here, Julian,” she says, the voice sunk low in her throat, “not anymore. If you have any doubts, just read the contract.” She attempts a smile, though smiles are clearly not her forte. “The question is, do you want to get organized or not? You’re paying me a thousand dollars a day, which breaks down to roughly two dollars a minute. You want to stand here and shoot the breeze at two dollars a minute, or do you want action?”

Julian hangs his head. She’s right, he knows it. “I’m sorry,” he says finally. “It’s just that I can’t … I mean I want to do something, anything—”

“You want to do something? You really want to help?”

Mike and Fernando are gone, already heading down the stairs with their burdens, and the Asian woman, her hands in constant motion, has turned to his science-fiction collection. He shrugs. “Yes, sure. What can I do?”

She glances at her watch, squares her shoulders, fixes him with her dark unreadable gaze. “You can take me to breakfast.”

Susan Certaine orders wheat toast, dry, and coffee, black. Though he’s starving, though he feels cored out from the back of his throat to the last constricted loop of his intestines, he follows suit. He’s always liked a big breakfast, eggs over easy, three strips of bacon, toast, waffles, coffee, orange juice, yogurt with fruit, and never more so than when he’s under stress or feels something coming on, but with Susan Certaine sitting stiffly across from him, her lips pursed in distaste, disapproval, ascetic renunciation of all and everything he stands for, he just doesn’t have the heart to order. Besides which, he’s on unfamiliar ground here. The corner coffee shop, where he and Marsha have breakfasted nearly every day for the past three years, wasn’t good enough for her. She had to drive halfway across the Valley to a place she knew, though for the life of him he can’t see a whole lot of difference between the two places — same menu, same coffee, even the waitresses look the same. But they’re not. And the fact of it throws him off balance.

“You know, I’ve been thinking, Mr. Laxner,” Susan Certaine says, speaking into the void left by the disappearance of the waitress, “you really should come over to us. For the rest of the week, I mean.”

Come over? Julian watches her, wondering what in god’s name she’s talking about, his stomach sinking over the thought of his Heinleins and Asimovs in the hands of strangers, let alone his texts and first editions and all his equipment — if they so much as scratch a lens, he’ll, he’ll … but his thoughts stop right there. Susan Certaine, locked in the grip of her black rigidity, is giving him a look he hasn’t seen before. The liminal smile, the coy arch of the eyebrows. She’s a young woman, younger than Marsha, far younger, and the apprehension hits him with a jolt. Here he is, sharing the most intimate meal of the day with a woman he barely knows, a young woman. He feels a wave of surrender wash over him.

“How can I persuade you?”

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs, fumbling with his cup, “but I don’t think I’m following you. Persuade me of what?”

“The Co-Dependent Hostel. For the spouses. The spoilers. For men like you, Mr. Laxner, who give their wives material things instead of babies, instead of love.”

“But I resent that. Marsha’s physically incapable of bearing children — and I do love her, very much so.”

“Whatever.” She waves her hand in dismissal. “But don’t get the impression that it’s a men’s club or anything — you’d be surprised how many women are the enablers in these relationships. You’re going to need a place to stay until Sunday anyway.”

“You mean you want me to, to move out? Of my own house?”

She lays a hand on his. “Don’t you think it would be fairer to Marsha? She moved out, didn’t she? And by the way, Dr. Hauskopf tells me she passed a very restful night. Very restful.” A sigh. A glance out the window. “Well, what do you say?”

Julian pictures a big gray featureless building lost in a vacancy of smog, men in robes and pajamas staring dully at newspapers, the intercom crackling. “But my things—”

“Things are what we’re disburdening you of, Mr. Laxner. Things are crushing you, stealing your space, polluting your soul. That’s what you hired me for, remember?” She pushes her cup aside and leans forward, and the old look is back, truculent, disdainful. He finds himself gazing into the shimmering nullity of her eyes. “We’ll take care of all that,” she says, her voice pitched low again, subtle and entrancing, “right on down to your toothbrush, hemorrhoid cream and carpet slippers.” As if by legerdemain, a contract has appeared between the creamer and the twin plates of dry unadulterated toast. “Just sign here, Mr. Laxner, right at the bottom.”

Julian hesitates, patting down his pockets for his reading glasses. The original contract, the one that spelled out the responsibilities of Certaine Enterprises with respect to his things — and his and Marsha’s obligations to Certaine Enterprises — had run to 327 pages, a document he barely had time to skim before signing, and now this. Without his reading glasses he can barely make out the letterhead. “But how much is it, per day, I mean? Marsha’s, uh, treatment was four hundred a day, correct? This wouldn’t be anywhere in that ballpark, would it?”

“Think of it as a vacation, Mr. Laxner. You’re going away on a little trip, that’s all. And on Sunday, when you get home, you’ll have your space back. Permanently.” She looks into his eyes. “Can you put a price on that?”

The Susan Certaine Co-Dependent Hostel is located off a shady street in Sherman Oaks, on the grounds of a defunct private boys’ school, and it costs about twice as much as a good hotel in midtown Manhattan. Julian had protested — it was Marsha, Marsha was the problem, she was the one who needed treatment, not him — but Susan Certaine, over two slices of dry wheat toast, had worn him down. He’d given her control over his life, and she was exercising it. That’s what he’d paid for, that’s what he’d wanted. He asked only to go home and pack a small suitcase, an overnight bag, anything, but she refused him even that — and refused him the use of his own car on top of it. “Withdrawal has got to be total,” she says, easing up to the curb out front of the sprawling complex of earth-toned buildings even as a black-clad attendant hustles up to the car to pull open the door, “for both partners. I’m sure you’ll be very happy here, Mr. Laxner.”

“You’re not coming in?” he says, a flutter of panic seizing him as he shoots a look from her to the doorman and back again.

The black Mercedes hums beneath them. A bird folds its wings and dips across the lawn. “Oh, no, no, not at all. You’re on your own here, Mr. Laxner, I’m afraid — but in the best of hands, I assure you. No, my job is to go back to that black hole of a house and make it livable, to catalogue your things, organize. Organize, Mr. Laxner, that’s my middle name.”

Ten minutes later Julian finds himself sitting on the rock-hard upper bunk in the room he is to share with a lugubrious man named Fred, contemplating the appointments. The place is certainly Essene, but then, he supposes that’s the idea. Aside from the bunk bed, the room contains two built-in chests of drawers, two mirrors, two desks and two identical posters revealing an eye-level view of the Bonneville Salt Flats. The communal bathroom/shower is down the checked linoleum hallway to the right. Fred, a big pouchy sack of a man who owns a BMW dealership in Encino, stares gloomily out the window and says only, “Kind of reminds you of college, doesn’t it?”

In the evening, there’s a meal in the cafeteria — instant mashed potatoes with gravy, some sort of overcooked unidentifiable meatlike substance, Jell-O — and Julian is surprised at the number of his fellow sufferers, slump-shouldered men and women, some of them quite young, who shuffle in and out of the big room like souls in purgatory. After dinner, there’s a private get-acquainted chat with Dr. Heiko Hauskopf, Dr. Doris’s husband, and then an informational film about acquisitive disorders, followed by a showing of The Snake Pit in the auditorium Fred, as it turns out, is a belcher, tooth grinder and nocturnal mutterer of the first degree, and Julian spends the night awake, staring into the dark corner above him and imagining tiny solar systems there, hanging in the abyss, other worlds radiant with being.

Next morning, after a breakfast of desiccated eggs and corrosive coffee, he goes AWOL. Strides out the door without a glance, calls a taxi from the phone booth on the corner and checks into the nearest motel. From there he attempts to call Marsha, though both Susan Certaine and Dr. Doris had felt it would be better not to “establish contact” during therapy. He can’t get through. She’s unavailable, indisposed, undergoing counseling, having her nails done, and who is this calling, please?

For two days Julian holes up in his motel room like an escaped convict, feeling dangerous, feeling like a lowlife, a malingerer, a bum, letting the stubble sprout on his face, reveling in the funk of his unwashed clothes. He could walk up the street and buy himself a change of underwear and socks at least — he’s still got his credit cards, after all — but something in him resists. Lying there in the sedative glow of the TV, surrounded by the detritus of the local fast-food outlets, belching softly to himself and pulling meditatively at the pint of bourbon balanced on his chest, he begins to see the point of the exercise. He misses Marsha desperately, misses his home, his bed, his things. But this is the Certaine way — to know deprivation, to know the hollowness of the manufactured image and the slow death of the unquenchable Tube, to purify oneself through renunciation. These are his thirty days and thirty nights, this is his trial, his penance. He lies there, prostrate, and when the hour of his class at the community college rolls round he gives no account of himself, not even a phone call.

On the third night, the telephone rings. Absorbed in a dramedy about a group of young musician/actor/models struggling to make ends meet in a rented beach house in Malibu, and well into his second pint of bourbon, he stupidly answers it. “Mr. Laxner?” Susan Certaine’s hard flat voice drives at him through the wires.

“But, how—?” he gasps, before she cuts him off.

“Don’t ask questions, just listen. You understand, of course, that as per the terms of your agreement, you owe Certaine Enterprises for six days’ room and board at the Co-Dependent Hostel whether you make use of the facilities or not—”

He understands.

“Good,” she snaps. “Fine. Now that that little matter has been resolved, let me tell you that your wife is responding beautifully to treatment and that she, unlike you, Mr. Laxner, is making the most of her stay in a nonacquisitive environment — and by the way, I should caution you against trying to contact her again; it could be terribly detrimental, traumatic, a real setback—”

Whipped, humbled, pried out of his cranny with a sure sharp stick, Julian can only murmur an apology.

There’s a pause on the other end of the line — Julian can hear the hiss of gathering breath, the harsh whistle of the air rushing past Susan Certaine’s fleshless lips, down her ascetic throat and into the repository of her disciplined lungs. “The good news,” she says finally, drawing it out, “is that you’re clean. Clean, Mr. Laxner. As pure as a babe sprung from the womb.”

Julian is having difficulty putting it all together. His own breathing is quick and shallow. He rubs at his stubble, sits up and sets the pint of bourbon aside. “You mean—?”

“I mean twelve o’clock noon, Mr. Laxner, Sunday the twenty-seventh. Your place. You be there.”

On Sunday morning, Julian is up at six. Eschewing the religious programming in favor of the newspaper, he pores methodically over each of the twenty-two sections — including the obituaries, the personals and the recondite details of the weather in Rio, Yakutsk and Rangoon — and manages to kill an hour and a half. His things have been washed — twice now, in the bathroom sink, with a bar of Ivory soap standing in for detergent — and before he slips into them he shaves with a disposable razor that gouges his face in half a dozen places and makes him yearn for the reliable purr and gentle embrace of his Braun Flex Control. He breakfasts on a stale cruller and coffee that tastes of bile while flicking through the channels. Then he shaves a second time and combs his hair. It is 9:05. The room stinks of stir-fry, pepperoni, garlic, the sad reek of his take-out life. He can wait no longer.

Unfortunately, the cab is forty-five minutes late, and it’s nearly ten-thirty by the time they reach the freeway. On top of that, there’s a delay — roadwork, they always wait till Sunday for roadwork — and the cab sits inert in an endless field of gleaming metal until finally the cabbie jerks savagely at the wheel and bolts forward, muttering to himself as he rockets along the shoulder and down the nearest off-ramp. Julian hangs on, feeling curiously detached as they weave in and out of traffic and the streets become increasingly familiar. And then the cab swings into his block and he’s there. Home. His heart begins to pound in his chest.

He doesn’t know what he’s been expecting — banners, brass bands, Marsha embracing him joyously on the front steps of an immaculate house — but as he climbs out of the cab to survey his domain, he can’t help feeling a tug of disappointment: the place looks pretty much the same, gray flanks, white trim, a thin sorry plume of bougainvillea clutching at the trellis over the door. But then it hits him: the lawn ornaments are gone. The tiki torches, the plaster pickaninnies and flag holders and all the rest of the outdoor claptrap have vanished as if into the maw of some brooding tropical storm, and for that he’s thankful. Deeply thankful. He stands there a moment, amazed at the expanse of the lawn, plain simple grass, each blade a revelation — he never dreamed he had this much grass. The place looks the way it did when they bought it, wondering naively if it would be too big for just the two of them.

He saunters up the walk like a prospective buyer, admiring the house, truly admiring it, for the first time in years. How crisp it looks, how spare and uncluttered! She’s a genius, he’s thinking, she really is, as he mounts the front steps fingering his keys and humming, actually humming. But then, standing there in the quickening sun, he glances through the window and sees that the porch is empty — swept clean, not a thing left behind — and the tune goes sour in his throat. That’s a surprise. A real surprise. He would have thought she’d leave something — the wicker set, the planters, a lamp or two — but even the curtains are gone. In fact, he realizes with a shock, none, of the windows seem to have curtains — or blinds, either. What is she thinking? Is she crazy?

Cursing under his breath, he jabs the key in the lock and twists, but nothing happens. He jerks it back out, angry now, impatient, and examines the flat shining indented surface: no, it’s the right key, the same key he’s been using for sixteen years. Once again. Nothing. It won’t even turn. The truth, ugly, frightening, has begun to dawn on him, even as he swings round on his heels and finds himself staring into the black unblinking gaze of Susan Certaine.

“You, you changed the locks,” he accuses, and his hands are trembling.

Susan Certaine merely stands there, the briefcase at her feet, two mammoth softbound books clutched under her arms, books the size of unabridged dictionaries. She’s in black, as usual, a no-nonsense business suit growing out of sensible heels, her cheeks brushed ever so faintly with blusher. “A little early, aren’t we?” she says.

“You changed the locks.”

She waits a beat, unhurried, in control. “What did you expect? We really can’t have people interfering with our cataloguing, can we? You’d be surprised how desperate some people get, Mr. Laxner. And when you ran out on your therapy … well, we just couldn’t take the chance.” A thin pinched smile. “Not to worry: I’ve got your new keys right here — two sets, one for you and one for Marsha.”

Her heels click on the pavement, three businesslike strides, and she’s standing right beside him on the steps, crowding him. “Here, will you take these, please?” she says, dumping the books in his arms and digging into her briefcase for the keys.

The books are like dumbbells, scrap iron, so heavy he can feel the pull in his shoulders. “God, they’re heavy,” Julian mutters. “What are they?”

She fits the key in the lock and pauses, her face inches from his. “Your life, Mr. Laxner. The biography of your things. Did you know that you owned five hundred and fifty-two wire hangers, sixty-seven wooden ones and one hundred and sixty-nine plastic? Over two hundred flowerpots? Six hundred doilies? Potholders, Mr. Laxner. You logged in over one hundred twenty — can you imagine that? Can you imagine anyone needing a hundred and twenty potholders? Excess, Mr. Laxner,” and he watches her lip curl. “Filthy excess.”

The key takes, the tumblers turn, the door swings open. “Here you are, Mr. Laxner, organization,” she cries, throwing her arms out. “Welcome to your new life.”

Staggering under the burden of his catalogues, Julian moves across the barren porch and into the house, and here he has a second shock: the place is empty. Denuded. There’s nothing left, not even a chair to sit in. Bewildered, he turns to her, but she’s already moving past him, whirling round the room, her arms spread wide. He’s begun to sweat. The scent of Sen-Sen hangs heavy in the air. “But, but there’s nothing here,” he stammers, bending down to set the catalogues on the stripped floorboards. “I thought … well, I thought you’d pare it down, organize things so we could live here more comfortably, adjust, I mean—”

“Halfway measures, Mr. Laxner?” she says, skating up to him on the newly waxed floors. “Are halfway measures going to save a man — and woman — who own three hundred and nine bookends, forty-seven rocking chairs, over two thousand plates, cups and saucers? This is tabula rasa, Mr. Laxner, square one. Did you know you owned a hundred and thirty-seven dead penlight batteries? Do you really need a hundred and thirty-seven dead penlight batteries, Mr. Laxner? Do you?”

“No, but”—backing off now, distraught, his den, his den—“but we need the basics, at least. Furniture. A TV. My, my textbooks. My scopes.”

The light through the unshaded windows is harsh, unforgiving. Every corner is left naked to scrutiny, every board, every nail. “All taken care of, Mr. Laxner, no problem.” Susan Certaine stands there in the glare of the window, hands on her hips. “Each couple is allowed to reclaim one item per day from the warehouse — anything you like — for a period of sixty days. Depending on how you exercise your options, that could be as many as sixty items. Most couples request a bed first, and to accommodate them, we consider a bed one item — mattress, box spring, headboard and all.”

Julian is stunned. “Sixty items? You’re joking.”

“I never joke, Mr. Laxner. Never.”

“And what about the rest — the furniture, the stereo, our clothes?”

“Read your contract, Mr. Laxner.”

He can feel himself slipping. “I don’t want to read the contract, damn it. I asked you a question.”

“Page two hundred and seventy-eight, paragraph two. I quote: ‘After expiration of the sixty-day grace period, all items to be sold at auction, the proceeds going to Certaine Enterprises, Inc., for charitable distribution, charities to be chosen at the sole discretion of the above-named corporation.’” Her eyes are on him, severe, hateful, bright with triumph. This is what it’s all about, this — cutting people down to size, squashing them. “You’d be surprised how many couples never recall a thing, not a single item.”

“No,” Julian says, stalking across the room, “no, I won’t stand for it. I won’t. I’ll sue.”

She shrugs. “I won’t even bother to remind you to listen to yourself. You’re like the brat on the playground — you don’t like the way the game goes, you take your bat and ball and go home, right? Go ahead, sue. You’ll find it won’t be so easy. You signed the contract, Mr. Laxner. Both of you.”

There’s a movement in the open doorway. Shadow and light. Marsha. Marsha and Dr. Hauskopf, frozen there on the doorstep, watching. “Julian,” Marsha cries, and then she’s in his arms, clinging to him as if he were the last thing in the world, the only thing left her.

Dr. Doris and Susan Certaine exchange a look. “Be happy,” Susan Certaine says after a moment. “Think of that couple in Ethiopia.” And then they’re gone.

Julian doesn’t know how long he stands there, in the middle of that barren room in the silence of that big empty house, holding Marsha, holding his wife, but when he shuts his eyes he sees only the sterile deeps of space, the remotest regions beyond even the reach of light. And he knows this: it is cold out there, inhospitable, alien. There’s nothing there, nothing contained in nothing. Nothing at all.

(1992)