The Magic Kingdom

1

the end of the third day they’d been to all six of the lands in the Magic Kingdom. They’d been to Main Street, U.S.A. They’d been to Liberty Square, Adventureland, and Fantasyland. They’d been to Tomorrowland and to Frontierland and by now were tired of Benny’s dark joke. “‘From whose bourne no traveler returns,’” he would say whenever the last two sections of the theme park were mentioned.By

Moorhead permitted them to go on the tame rides only — the aerial tram, the little one-eighth-scale railroad, the trolleys, jitneys, and double-deck buses, the Jungle Cruise and Cinderella’s Carousel, the paddle-wheelers and WEDway People- Mover. The Grand Prix Raceway, Big Thunder Mountain, Starjets, and Space Mountain were off-limits to them. So were the Mad Tea Party, Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, Mission to Mars, and Peter Pan’s Flight. “Thrills and chills,” Benny would warn the others, sizing up a ride from its description in his guidebook and shaking his head, anticipating Moorhead’s decision. Thus a good part of their days was taken up in being shuttled from one part of the park to the other, simple sightseers. Even at that, four of the children — Lydia, Charles, and Tony Word were exceptions — had balked at riding the double-deckers. Again, Maxine had been their spokesman. “We’re Brits,” he called up to the driver and argued with Bale, “and didn’t cross the sea to the New World to ride no double-deck bus, which besides what it ain’t authentic in the first place it don’t even have no wog for a conductor in the second!”

They spent a lot of their time watching shows and riding in cars that ran along tracks past special effects of one sort or another. It was all rather like being in a kind of passive museum. Only Colin still seemed fascinated by the audio- animatronics, and when some of the children (by this time a little embarrassed at being always moved to the head of the line — as a precaution Moorhead had ordered Tony Word and Janet Order into wheelchairs — but unable to stand for more than fifteen or twenty minutes at a time) objected to the queues, it was Bible who volunteered to stand in for them. Mudd-Gaddis, Lydia Conscience, and Noah waited on benches or on chairs under awnings at outdoor cafés — usually at these times Moorhead went off to scout other attractions for them while Eddy Bale and Mary Cottle pushed Tony and Janet in the wheelchairs and Benny and Rena, still eager to take advantage of their invalid status, accompanied them — and Nedra Carp shuffled back and forth between Colin and the children, alerting them to the status of the queue.

“How was it, Benny?” Noah asked when Maxine and the others came out of It’s A Small World.

“Thrills and chills,” Benny Maxine said.

“Was it, Benny? Was it?”

“Nah,” Benny said. “I guess it were all right, mate. There was all these little dolls from the U.N. singin’ an’ dancin’.”

“Fascinating,” Colin said.

“Cor,” Benny said, pointing to Janet and Tony in their chairs. “If we got to keep looking at this stuff it won’t be wheelchairs we’ll need, it’ll be glasses.”

They went to Tropical Serenade; they went to Country Bear Jamboree. They spent time in theaters watching movies — something called Circle-Vision 360 wrapped them in the spanking, startling imagery of the world: Tivoli, New York, the Alps and Rome and the Valley of the Nile, Jerusalem’s old stones and India and more — and looking at the exhibits of big corporate sponsors: Kodak, Eastern Airlines, RCA, McDonnell-Douglas.

And they were getting edgy.

“Don’t you wish you had a wheelchair?” Lydia teased Noah.

“Yeah, I wish I had one to roll you about in.”

“Bitch!” Lydia Conscience hissed at him under her breath.

“Pimp!” he breathed back.

“Mister Moorhead,” said Lydia Conscience one afternoon, “may I have a new buddy for the buddy system? I don’t think Benny remembers my symptoms. I mean I think I’d feel better if I switched with Janet.”

“If you switched with Janet it would throw everything off,” Moorhead objected.

“What if I have an attack? I don’t think he’s responsible,” she whispered.

“Those assignments were made with great care,” Moorhead said.

“There ought to be a drill then,” she said, and, to calm her, Moorhead reluctantly agreed. He called Benny over to explain the situation.

“Lydia’s upset,” he said. “She doesn’t think you’d know what to do in an emergency.”

Lydia feigned an exacerbation and Benny Maxine moved to her side. He undid the buttons at her collar. He moistened a handkerchief and applied it to her forehead, her temples.

“He hurt my stomach.”

“I didn’t even touch it.”

“He hurt my stomach, Mister Moorhead.”

Because they were not only edgy but fragmented now as well. Some in wheelchairs, others out, the rides forbidden them, their staggered attendance at performances, the snacks they took at different times, and the separate memories of the world they’d seen projected, thrown up around them like a wall.

Only Lydia still suffering an aftertaste of the dream; Charles, who’d shared it, musing only that life was a lot more interesting to him asleep than awake; and Tony Word recalling with not a little pride that he’d not come off badly at all, that in fact he’d acquitted himself pretty well, considering. (The others, who not only had not been in the dream but who hadn’t even been sleeping at the time, nevertheless went about for upwards of a day, a day and a half, with the queer conviction that someone — a person or persons unknown — had been talking about them behind their backs.)

Because Eddy Bale had been right. Kids do love to explore hotels. They are in ecstasy in elevators, they do fancy pushing buttons.

And it had begun just that innocently, Benny Maxine choosing Rena Morgan for no better reason than that she seemed game — a jolly good sort, a damned decent chap. (And, of all the children, quite frankly seemed the strongest, maybe the only one who could keep up with him.)

And even suggested that she bring her passport along. Just in case.

“Just in case what, Benny?”

“Better safe than sorry, luv.” And showed her his, tapping the dark blue document as if it were a letter of credit, some official carte-blanche ace-in-the-hole talisman.

He was a fifteen-year-old boy, still a child, still a kid, and for all his bluster, for all the pains he took to sound street-wise—“Street-wise and city-foolish” he would admit later, sheepishly — he had never done any of the things he had wanted to do. Only his sickness had ever happened to him, and he lived the realest of lives in a condition of hope and fantasy.

For the first five or ten minutes they really did push buttons, taking turns, Rena up and Benny down, and politely asking “Floor, please?” in their most distinguished British accents of everyone who came into the elevator.

“Oh, aren’t you kind?” a woman said. “Are you enjoying our country?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Benny said, “but we’re not tourists.”

“You’re not?”

“My partner and I”—here he indicated Rena, who had all she could do to keep a straight face and was desperately trying to suppress laughter and the vast reservoirs of mucus that she held in check by sheer will (because a giggle could trigger horrors)—“are with the Disney organization, actually.”

“You are?”

“We were the two little children in the film version of Mary Poppins. Did you happen to see that particular film? Would you like our autographs?”

“But that was years back,” the woman said. “You’d have to be close to thirty.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Benny said, “we’re small for our age. The Disney organization is giving us a chance to make a comeback on the lift.”

“This is my floor,” the woman said.

“Yes, ma’am, they’re good people. They take care of their own.”

“Oh, Benny,” Rena said when the woman got off, “what a thing to say! She never believed you.”

“She did.”

“No.”

“Absolutely. On the Queen’s life. I swear it.”

“Would you swear on your own?”

“Sure,” Benny said, “I swear on my life.”

“Oh, your life,” Rena said.

And on the way up — Rena was working the elevator — Benny deliberately cut a great noisy fart. The crowd — there were perhaps a half dozen people on board — pretended to ignore it.

“I say,” Benny said, “bad gas.”

Which they also ignored.

“P.U.!” Benny said. “Jolly stinko bad gas, that. Jolly bad!”

That innocent. Still amused by the jokes hiding in smells and by all the body’s punch lines.

And explorers. Finding the banquet and meeting rooms and special hospitality suites, bumping through the great maze of the hotel, through its guts, taking service elevators whenever they could, penetrating its laundry and maintenance plant, where they were shooed away by a guard to whom Benny insisted on showing his U.K. passport.

“We get ’em from all over,” the guard said. “We get ’em from Tulsa, we get ’em from Indiana.”

Through its restaurants and cocktail bars — outside one of which Benny invited Rena to dance — its swimming pools, looking in on the game room, the caricaturist there offering to do them together—“Please, Benny? Just to keep us honest,” Rena had said, and Benny, air in his cheeks, all his lumpish, lopsided, potholed face puckering, “Yeah, too right,” he said — and then returning to one of the restaurants, where Benny told the hostess that friends were waiting and, taking Rena’s arm, strode businesslike — they were that innocent, innocent enough to believe they had to carry themselves in some special way — past her and on into the kitchen.

“Our compliments to the chef!” Benny announced grandly.

Three men in tall hats looked up.

“To all of you,” he said.

“Yes, everything was delicious,” Rena said.

“Except the ice,” Benny said.

They stared at the two children.

“The ice was tasteless. Tasteless ice. Didn’t you think so, my darling?”

“Get outa here,” one of the men said.

And stopped outside the Spa, the health club where at that very moment the chap from the Haunted Mansion was ambling up to Colin Bible.

“It’s not open to the ladies at this hour,” Benny said, reading the notice on the door.

“You go, Benny, I’ll wait. You can tell me about it.”

“What, go into a health spa? Me? Not bloody likely. I could be sued.”

“Oh, Benny,” Rena Morgan said.

It wasn’t until they’d been gone nearly an hour that he remembered Mary Cottle. Even then, even as he introduced the idea to Rena, even then he was playing.

He said he thought he’d seen her that very afternoon at the hotel’s monorail station.

“Crouching behind the automatic doors, she was.”

He hadn’t said anything. Not because Colin and the boys — not Mudd-Gaddis; Mudd-Gaddis was still out of it, lost in whatever private nightmare had set him off — hadn’t noticed her absence or expressed concern, but because, even if it wasn’t calculated on his part, information was information, fed edge, and gave a punter like Benny — and this wasn’t calculated either, merely that same combination of hope, fantasy, and the real which drove his life — the whip hand should anyone go the gamble with him. Besides, he wasn’t sure it was she. And he’d had to pee, was moving along full lick at the time.

And he didn’t say anything now, only that bit about the doors. (Because he was that innocent as well, on his best behavior with his new pal, striding past his own misgivings as he’d stridden past the hostess in the restaurant. He had to be wrong not to have mentioned a thing like that. And that calculating. Even though he never suspected it. He wasn’t giving anything away.)

Indeed, he wouldn’t have brought it up at all except that suddenly he added two and two together.

Because Bale had split them up that afternoon and because of what happened at the Haunted Mansion, they had had to return to the hotel early.

They had lost Mary Cottle. Moorhead and the Carp woman had not come back yet with the girls. Colin Bible had no key to Tony’s room, and the children hadn’t been entrusted with one. They’d come all the way up to their floor before anyone realized there was a problem. When Colin told them they had to go back down again, they groaned. “Can’t be helped,” Colin said. “You’re going to have to shower, then I want you all in bed. You can’t stay by yourselves. We’ll have to go back and get a key to Miss Cottle’s room.”

“That’s the adjoining room,” Benny said. “I bet it’s unlocked.”

“You’re on, sport. I’ll give you odds.”

“What’s the odds then?” He hadn’t even peed yet.

“You say.”

Benny considered. “No bet, Colin,” he said. “It’s that Miss Carp’s room too.”

“You’re learning.”

“But I can watch them,” Benny said. “There’s nothing to it.”

“Where am I?” Mudd-Gaddis asked.

“Ta, mate,” Benny said, and went off to the W.C. to relieve himself.

Which was just as well, because while Colin was explaining the situation to the room clerk at one end of the long counter, Benny thought he spotted Mary Cottle accepting a key from one of the registration clerks at the other.

He couldn’t be sure. A bus had discharged a load of holiday makers who were just now registering and who literally surrounded her. If it was her.

“Come on, then,” Colin had said, “we can go up now. I’ve got it.” He never got a second look, but twenty minutes later she still hadn’t come back.

“Let’s find out what she’s up to,” he said now to Rena, making a mystery where even he wouldn’t have taken the heaviest odds there was one.

“Miss Mary Cottle’s room, please?” he asked the room clerk.

“You’ll have to use a house phone.”

“Benny,” Rena Morgan said.

“A house phone?”

The clerk told him where to find one.

“Benny?”

“I have to use a house phone,” Benny Maxine explained.

“May I please have Miss Mary Cottle’s room number?” he asked the operator.

“Benny.”

“Just a minute,” he said, “she’s getting it for me.”

“Benny, look at the time. I was supposed to be back half an hour ago.”

“No, not six twenty-nine, the other one,” he said.

“I’m going back,” she said.

He covered the mouthpiece. “Wait, will you!” he almost hissed.

Because he was beginning to believe now. In the mystery, the adventure.

Rena Morgan was crying.

“Oh, Jesus,” Benny said. “All right! Oh, Jesus!” he said, and replaced the telephone.

And was still trying to calm her down when Lamar Kenny spotted them.

“Is something wrong?” he asked with a concern that was almost soothing and put his suitcase down before the open elevator door. “Is there anything I can do?”

“No,” Benny said, “my friend just has this truly disastrous allergy is all there’s to it. That’s why her eyes is all funny. She’ll be fine once she gets back to her room and can take her pill.”

“I’ll be fine,” Rena managed, sobbing and already pulling lengths of rolled handkerchief from her rigged magician’s person. She was all over herself, tapping and pulling and patting, conducting herself like an orchestra, playing herself like a shell game. If her left hand shot forward, a handkerchief might suddenly appear in her right. If her right hand moved, her left might already have disposed of the handkerchief Lamar Kenny had not yet even seen there. Her fingers, quick as a pickpocket’s, moved across her body like a loom. She made lightning passes across her face and seemed to dab, to pluck at the corners of her eyes, drawing the juices away from her nose as one might tap a tree. One couldn’t tell what she did with her hankies, whether they went into the big purse she carried or back up her sleeves.

And she’s working me close up, Lamar Kenny thought.

It was only because he was trained as an actor and accustomed to quick bursts of sudden but misleading dexterity that he could tell not how she did it (or even what she did) but that she was doing anything out of the ordinary at all. To someone else she might simply have seemed nervous, fidgety, even flighty. But he was in the business. (And understood he had a name like a lounge act. It was no news to him. Few people believed it, but Lamar Kenny was his real name. Even his agent had tried to get him to change it. “It’s my name,” Lamar told him, “I won’t change it. Maybe I’ll switch it around, call myself Kenny Lamar. Then you can get me gigs introducing strippers, make me an M.C. at industrial shows.” But he wouldn’t have done that either. It was the name, he felt, which pointed him toward show business in the first place, the glamorous name which had become his fate.)

“You’re pretty good,” he told the girl.

“That’s right,” she said. “I’m fine.”

“No, no. That stuff you do.”

“I get this way,” she told him. “I’m fluidal.”

“Fluidal. Christ, yes. Fluidal,” he said. “Like the burning Ganges, like old man river, like Victoria Falls. Christ, yes, fluidal.”

“Hey,” Benny Maxine said, stepping forward, almost tripping over the man’s suitcase. They did not understand each other.

Kenny was referring to her moves with the handkerchiefs and didn’t know about her fluids, could tell only that she was upset: her tears, her puffy red eyes.

“Please, Benny,” she said and started around Lamar Kenny toward the elevator.

“I’m coming,” he said.

The moves were from his old sheep-dog routine and, like the girl’s, were based upon principles of misdirection and distraction. Soon the wise-guy kid was stumbling all over himself as Lamar imperceptibly shifted the suitcase with the merest touch of his shoe or by seeming to brush against it with a trouser leg or by picking it up and, with the aid of his body’s exact compensatory movements, apparently replacing it again in its original and identical position — caviar for the general, thought the trained actor — although it was actually in an entirely new relation to the wise-guy kid or, conversely, though it seemed to have been set down inches or even feet from where he’d picked it up, was really in the same spot. (He didn’t even need the suitcase. It was an impediment, circus, athletics, mere footwork, and added nothing to the routine, maybe even detracted from it, necessary only as a sort of grace note or drum roll, as superfluous and minor, finally, as the inspection of an escape artist’s locks and chains. Even Lamar Kenny’s extended helping hand an exquisite mockery, as blind and stammered as a fall, a plunge to balance. Even his bitten, embittered “Sorry”s and “Excuse me”s.)

Lamar Kenny’s flexible face — all this would have been beyond any Kenny Lamar — mirrored Benny’s own. “Timing” was too simple a term; what Lamar did was a sort of reverse ventriloquy, carefully monitoring Benny Maxine’s face and body, picking up signals the boy was not even aware he was sending (almost literally putting himself in the other’s place). It demanded incredible concentration. It was high and subtle art, but go tell that to the yahoos who thought they were seeing only the familiar clumsy choreography of two people stuck in each other’s way, slapstick, ordinary doorway-and-sidewalk contretemps, when what it actually was was one man dueling for two, parrying all the wise-guy kid’s progressively embarrassed, astonished, and finally terrified smiles. Mimicry so high and subtle it was no longer mimicry but an actual act of possession.

They might have stayed there forever, feinting and lunging and parrying, in eternal stand-off and locked as stars in each other’s gravity and orbit. Because Lamar Kenny knew that the only way the victim/volunteer from his audiences could ever get away was actually to turn and flee. Indeed, it was that that he watched and waited for, not just for the moment when an adversary would do it but, looking in his eyes, watching and concentrating, thinking ahead — thinking ahead, that was the secret — examining him until the precise moment not when he would do it but when it first occurred to him that he would do it, when Lamar Kenny would break it off himself, when he would turn and flee, running the five or six steps to the side of the small stages where he used to work, to turn and bow to the stunned and generally silent audience.

“Come on, Robin,” Lamar Kenny said, “see can you get past Friar Tuck.”

Could Kenny Lamar do this stuff? Lamar Kenny wondered, and gave the suitcase a violent, peremptory kick, clearing the ground between them, himself and the wise-guy kid, as if defying him, upping the ante of his mockery now, as if to say, “There. That’s gone. You won’t have to worry about that anymore, about tripping or stumbling over it. Now all you’ve got to worry about is me.” And looked up at the wise-guy kid to resume their impositioned parity and stalemate, dead-heat dance. Only he was staring at the grip, the wise-guy kid, seeing it for the first time perhaps, noticing its smooth unscathed leather, its unused, untagged, oddly mileless condition.

“Come on,” Lamar Kenny said. “Come on, let’s go.”

But Kenny was distracted too. Something had broken his concentration. It wasn’t the banging of the elevator door, its timed attempts to close, its short mechanical temper as the grace periods when it retracted itself once its long rubber safety plate had been touched became shorter and shorter until it literally whined and ground itself against the resisting arm or thigh of whoever pressed the plate — he’d allowed for that, he’d picked the spot for his performance and allowed for that — nor even the strident, outright claims of the little girl, her insistent, importunate, and even terrified “Benny! Benny!”—he’d allowed for that too — but the sight he had of her out of the corner of his eye. She had stopped the business with the handkerchiefs and was staring at him, her face enormous, enlarged, magnified to him behind the clear mask of her mucus.

“Is she all right?”

Benny rushed the door.

“Hey, listen,” Lamar Kenny said, leaning all his weight against the elevator door, “we were only fooling around, right? Hey,” he said, “listen.”

Benny Maxine plunged his hands past the wet and crumpled handkerchiefs in her bag and found Kleenex. He wiped her face, grooming her, picking away long strands of the jellied flow, bruising her, doing clumsily all the delicate currycomb frictions for the penalized child.

They never talked about it. He didn’t even know what cystic fibrosis was. Noah Cloth was her buddy, the osteosarcoma.

“What am I supposed to do?” Benny said.

“I’m so embarrassed,” she wheezed.

“Rena, what should I do?”

“What’s wrong? What’s she got?” Kenny asked.

Her breathing was labored, rasped, catching and coming out of her like the cry of stripped gears, like a knock in an engine.

“We’re broken,” Benny cried.

“Please,” she whispered, “can we go up now?”

“We have to go up,” Benny Maxine said.

“Hey,” the actor said, “I’m off,” and left the elevator and picked up the unmarked bag, the light luggage with his Pluto suit in it.

Moorhead said her system hadn’t sustained a real “insult.” That it hadn’t been an “event.” Only, he’d said, a minor “episode.” Doctors always said stuff like that, using words about what happened to their bodies that could almost have been dispatches from the front.

Benny was relieved, of course. He didn’t want anything bad to happen to any of them, particularly not on his watch. Dying kids don’t need any more responsibility than they already had. Which was why Benny had misgivings about this buddy-system business. He hadn’t signed on as anybody’s nurse. And, for his part, he hoped it wouldn’t be Lydia Conscience’s eyes he looked into when his time came. Hoped, that is, he wouldn’t be caught short by death, amongst amateurs; that ambulances would be standing by, doctors and nurses and all the close relations shaved and dressed and saying their farewells on full stomachs; that his emergency would come during proper business hours, after lunch, say, the weather and the day auspicious. That he’d have time to make a few phone calls.

Though he didn’t really believe in the possibility of a terribly premature death. Not really. Benny was a gambler, wise to the ways — at least he thought so — of house odds. Certainly fifteen-year-olds died. They died in car and plane wrecks, they were picked off by snipers, battered about by crazies in the streets, and some of them, he supposed, succumbed to Gauch- er’s disease. Ashkenazi Jews. But what even was an Ashkenazi Jew? Other than somebody who came from central or eastern Europe, he wasn’t sure. His family had been in the U.K. for almost two hundred years. Benny wasn’t even bar mitzvah. Whatever Ashkenazi acts, whatever Ashkenazi practices, whatever indigenous Ashkenazi dyes in the clothing and prayer shawls or Ashkenazi nutrients hung about in the Ashkenazi diet ought surely to have bleached out by now. Which was, Benny figured, where the house odds came in. Because after almost two hundred years surely it would have boiled down to half-life. What, hoist by some already rare, already attenuated and degraded and deflated gene? Snagged on some pathetic scrag of theological, geographical one? Not, for all his symptoms, for all his great liver and burgeoning spleen, not, for all the high sugar content in his cells, the sweet deposits there lining his blood like dessert, not, for all his bruised and brittle bones, bloody likely!

Benny was a true gambler. He lived with hope.

So when Moorhead said no damage had been done, that was good enough for Benny Maxine. He had his plan. The following morning it was a simple thing to ditch the tour, return to his room, and complete the call that Rena with her troubles and scruples had interrupted the night before.

He told a hotel operator that it was Mr. Maxine calling from 627 and said that though he’d written it down when she gave it to him he’d somehow managed to misplace Mary Cottle’s room number. Putting a low wink in his voice, he impressed the fact upon her that it wasn’t the 629 registration he was interested in but the other one. He’d hold while she looked it up. When she came back on the line and said she wasn’t permitted to give that one out, Benny chuckled. “What,” he said, taking his voice as deep as it would go, “an unpublished hotel room? What the devil, eh?” He said he thought he might just possibly have left it in his pants pocket and let it go out with the dry cleaning. Or, the more fool he, in the pocket of his pajama top, perhaps, and hinted at the great frantic pressures of dishevelment and abandon. “You know how it is, eh? You know how it is, I’ll be bound.”

“I can connect you with laundry service,” the telephone operator told him coolly.

Benny said that was damned decent but that now it seemed to him that that’s not what had happened at all. He rather remembered having scribbled it down on the financial pages of yesterday’s paper. Perhaps the girl who made the room up…?

“I’m sorry,” she said. “When a guest says that we can’t give a number out, we can’t give the number out.”

“Oh, absolutely,” Benny Maxine said. “I quite understand; it goes back to the English common law,” and took the operator into the conspiracy. “Miss Cottle and I are engaged, actually. I wanted to surprise her with this great bouquet of flowers just. I’m holding them now. They should be popped into water at once, but without my fiancée’s room number, of course…”

“Just pop over to six twenty-nine, why don’t you just?” she said.

“Well, the thing of it is,” Benny explained, “she’s staying there with her great brute old Aunt Nedra, who doesn’t know about our engagement yet, and—” The line went dead.

I’m smart, Benny thought, but I have to admit, there’s a lot I don’t know. He went over and over what he’d said to the woman, remembering his gaffes like a good dealer recalling every card already played.

Still, he knew now he was on to something, and before they left the hotel that morning he turned gumshoe and, at a discreet distance, tailed Mary Cottle everywhere she went. She went window shopping on the big concourse. She went to get sunglasses. She went to the newsstand for a paper.

If he hadn’t gotten on an up elevator he thought was going down, he might not have found it. The car was crowded. And when Benny looked at the panel above the elevator doors he saw that it would be stopping at every floor. It was very crowded. People pressed against his enlarged liver, his vulnerable bones. “Sorry,” he said, “sorry,” and got off on eight. Maids were making the rooms up, their big carts unguarded in the wide corridors. He went up and was about to take some extra soaps and shoe cloths from one when the housekeeper suddenly emerged from 822. She was emptying trash: gray and black cigarette butts, yellow tobacco the color of sick dog shit loose in the bottoms of the ashtrays, even the ashes odd, not entirely consumed by fire, balled, thick as slag, the crumpled packet of those cheap, stinking second- and third-world cigarettes she smoked only the final proof.

Bingo! thought the good and lucky gambler, Benny Maxine. I’ve found it! I’ve found her hidey-hole!

2

When the rash appeared on his arm, an even circle about two inches high that wrapped around his biceps like a red and gaudy garter, Eddy Bale removed the mourner’s band — to spare its sight from the children, he’d been wearing it under his left shirt sleeve like a blood pressure cuff — and, folding the cloth, put it into the pocket of his trousers. It was the third time he’d repositioned it, taking it in an inch or so when he’d transferred it that first time from his mackintosh to his suit coat on the day after the funeral, and taking it in again to place directly against his flesh. His shifting, meandering grief like an old river, his deferential hideout sorrow on the lam in his pants.

The rash still hadn’t gone away even after he had begun to carry the carefully folded brassard about with him in his pockets. (Moving it about even then, each day relocating the dark cloth, positioning it first in this pocket, then in that, carrying it in his back pocket, in the pockets where he carried his handkerchief, his room key, his change.) The rash didn’t itch. It was adiabatíc, neutral to the touch as the circle of cloth itself. It didn’t bother him at all, really, and each morning when he shaved, when he showered, it always came to him as a surprise to see that it was still there at all. The rash itself was of a piece — no tiny blossoms erupted there; the skin neither bubbled with texture nor tingled with impression the way a head sometimes recalls a hat one has already removed — smooth as the hairless space it occupied on his upper arm, the discoloration of the lingering wide red ring like some healed graft of complexion. He would have asked Colin Bible to take a look except that he assumed the nurse assumed they were on the outs. He might have asked Moorhead, but mere was usually something or other to take care of when they were together and he forgot. Or had second thoughts, at the last minute more protective than otherwise of his ruby garter of grief, insensitive as idle genitals, undisturbed private parts. (Knowing that the other one, the black, already frayed and fraying mourner’s band, of which the bloodshot rash was only the raddled ghost, would dissolve, decompose, return as broken fiber, a ball of dark fragmented lint, the uncremated ash of Liam’s memory that would stick to his pants and shirt pockets, lining his clothes like a stain that would not come out.)

He missed him. He missed the Liam of those last and awful weeks when he and Ginny knew it was all up with their dying and now plainly suffering child, when they could hear his medication on his tongue, smell it on his breath, the drying, parched relief of his only mitigated pain. He missed that Liam because he had almost forgotten the other. (Because what you remember, Eddy Bale thought, what sticks to the ribs and drives everything else out, as the tune you’re hearing drives out all other tunes or the taste of your food all other taste, is neither pleasure nor pain but only the heavy saliency of things. Liam’s condition had come upon him and been diagnosed when the boy was eight years old. He died when he was twelve. Two thirds of his boy’s life was lived in the remission of ordinary childhood, yet Bale found it almost impossible to remember those things. They must have happened, they had to have happened; Liam himself, recalling his own happy salience, had reminded him, dozens of times, of occasions they had gone on outings, of movies they’d seen together, trips to museums, treats they had taken in restaurants, picture books they’d read to him when he was small, stories Eddy told him at bedtime, the afternoon which, oddly, Bale has no memory of at all, when Liam claims Eddy had taught him to fly a kite on Hampstead Heath — total recall for the father/son sports — and, at this remove, can’t even be sure what, when healthy, his kid’s character had been like.) Knowing only — it’s certainly not memory, it isn’t actually knowledge, perhaps it isn’t even love but only some shadow in the blood, or maybe the bones of his weighted, sunken heart — Liam’s negative presence.

Indeed, it may have been for grief of Liam that Eddy felt the dream holiday was not going as it should. The children hadn’t complained, none of the adults had said anything, but Bale had the feeling he’d made mistakes, that decorum had broken down, that something militated against honor here. Ginny wouldn’t have approved, but that wasn’t it. (And wasn’t it odd that Eddy gave almost no thought at all to Ginny’s own negative presence?) Perhaps, by splitting them into two groups that first day, it had been possible for Bale to think of Liam as being with the other group, the children who’d gone off with Colin and Mary Cottle to the Haunted Mansion. It was even possible to think of him as being in one of the other rooms, assigned, say, to Moorhead’s contingent or to Mary and Nedra’s. (It wasn’t as if he wished to be reminded. He’d deliberately left Liam’s scrapbook at home. Or perhaps Ginny had taken it with her when she left him. He hadn’t looked for it. The photos were chiefly of the ill Liam, clipped from newspapers, most of them. He well enough remembered the ill Liam. That was the head- bandaged boy he vaguely thought of as being in those other rooms, the negative presence, as available to him as his rash.

Idle minds, he thought, devil’s workshop.

He has to think about, then alter, whatever it is that’s amiss — that busted decorum which was maybe only the weals, flaws, blots, and smears of their maculate, tarnished lives. The riot that festered in all despair. That flourished in Bale’s manipulative, arranged fun. Because already order has broken down. He has caught reports — not even reports, hints and high signs, the excited, febrile signals of their encoded deceits. There have been goings-on in the lifts, scenes and sprees. He is embarrassed for his dying charges. The children are uninhibited in the restaurants, flaunting their illnesses, boasting their extremis. (And now a sort of rivalry has sprung up. Disney World has become a sort of Mecca for such children, a kind of reverse Lourdes. Each day Eddy, the kids, see other damaged children: Americans, of course, but there is a family from Spain, a contingent from South America. There are African kids with devastating tropical diseases. He’s heard that a leper or two is in the park. It’s a sort of Death’s Invitational here. Eddy isn’t the only one to have had the idea. Organizations have sprung up. The new style is to grant the wishes of terminally ill children, to deal reality the blows of fantasy.) Nedra Carp thinks Benny Maxine may be spying on the girls. At fifteen he’s the oldest of the children — unless Mudd- Gaddis is — and annoys her with his needs. She wants the door connecting their adjoining rooms kept locked.

“We can’t do that. Suppose Colin Bible has to get in there?”

“He’s beastly. He’s a nasty, beastly boy. He tells them smutty stories.”

“He’s a pubescent kid. He’s showing off. What’s the harm? He probably has a crush on them.”

“His conversation is all double entendre. He teases my girls. He milks his zits and tells them there’s sperm in his pores. That they could become pregnant if he touched them.”

“He’s flirting. Don’t you think they need someone to flirt with them?”

“Those little girls are dying, Mister Bale.”

“What would you like me to do, Miss Carp?”

“We’re responsible for these children. Surely you could speak to him.”

“And tell him what? That he not only has to accept his death but his virginity too?”

(And remembers that Liam had begun to masturbate two months before he died.)

“You think I’m an old maid.”

“No. Of course not.”

“You do. Yes. You think I’m picturesque. You think I’m this quaint, picturesque spinster. That’s why you invited me.”

“Not at all.”

“Not at all? You believe you smell cedar chest on me. Sachet, laundry soap, and an old hygiene.”

“I’ll say something to Benny.”

“I know about bodies,” Nedra Carp said.

“About bodies.”

“I know about bodies!” she said.

He did say something to Benny. It was embarrassing for him, but it was hardly a man-to-man talk. He didn’t give him the birds and the bees. Benny would already have the birds and the bees. He didn’t make Nedra Carp’s crisp case for the unseemliness of the boy’s position. He didn’t even warn Benny off, lay down the law, or try to appeal to the kid’s sense of the special vulnerability of doomed girls. What he did in effect was to tell Benny what he hadn’t dared to tell Liam. What he did in effect, to forestall anxiety and allay fear, and out of neither makeshift bonhomie nor Dutch-uncle, scout-master love, was to apologize to Benny Maxine on behalf of everyone who would be surviving him.

“You’ll be missing out.”

“So it’s all it’s cracked up to be, is it?”

“I’m afraid so,” Eddy Bale admitted.

“I thought it might be,” Benny Maxine said. “Where there’s smoke there’s fire.”

“Five-alarm.”

“Fantastic,” Benny Maxine said.

When the child tried to draw him out about which parts of a woman’s anatomy Eddy preferred, the breasts, the behind, or the quim, Bale blushed and said he supposed it was a matter of individual taste.

Benny smiled and nudged Bale in the side with his elbow.

“You know what gets me?” he said.

“Perhaps I oughtn’t to be talking to you like this.”

“Their pelt.”

“Perhaps these things might more properly be discussed in the home environme—”

“Their pelt, their fleece, their fell, their fur,” Benny went on happily. “Their miniver, their feathers.”

“Yes, well,” Eddy said.

“Ask you a question?”

Bale stared at the boy.

“It’s personal, but you’re the one brung it up.”

“In for a penny, in for a pound,” Bale said ruefully.

“Well,” Benny Maxine said, “what it is then is…it’s just only it’s a bit awkward, me putting it, like.”

“Look,” Eddy said, “not on my account. I mean, if you’re at all uncomfortable about this, you don’t have to—”

“In for a penny, in for a pound,” the child reminded him.

“Right,” said Eddy.

“I’m still pretty much virgo intacta and all,” Benny told him. “Well,” he said, “you must know that or we wouldn’t be having this conversation, would we?”

“Hey,” Eddy reassured him, “at your age I was pretty virgo intacta myself. You make too much of it.”

“Of virginity?”

He recalled Benny’s list. The miniver, the feathers. “Of birds,” Bale said.

“Well, it ain’t the birds exactly.”

“Maybe you should talk to Mister Moorhead,” Eddy said quickly. “He’s the physician on board. He could advise you on these things better than I. If this is anything at all to do with the effects of self-abuse on your condition, I’m sure he can fill you in on what’s what.”

“Nah, if I die, I die,” Benny said and glared at Bale, accusing him with the full force of his doom. “Are you in for a pound?” he asked at last. “Are you even in for a penny even?”

“Sure,” Eddy said. “I told you.”

“Why won’t you let me get it out then?”

“What is it?” Eddy asked.

“You sure it’s okay?”

“Yes,” he said, “certainly.”

“All right,” Benny said, “so so far I’m this yid vestal, this kid monk. I’m this fifteen-year-old virgin with this fifteen-year- old virgin maidenhead. Fifteen years, and it ain’t any sure-thing, lead-pipe, dead-cert cinch I’ll ever make sweet sixteen. So what I need to know is how long.”

“How long?”

“It lasts. How long it lasts. That the chemicals work. That a chap can do it. That given the clean bill of health, the normal drives, and what the actuaries say, how long a party can keep his pecker up, Mister Bale.”

Eddy was confused. “Sustain an orgasm?”

“Sustain an orgasm?” Benny said. “No, of course not. I know how long a chap can come off. It’s the other I’m not sure of. How long the power’s there for, I mean. How long he has till his knackers go off on him.”

“How long? How old he is?”

“Yeah,” Benny said. “How old he is.”

“Oh, well,” Bale said, “that all depends, I should think. They say we’re sexual until the day we die.”

“Right,” Benny said.

“Oh, Benny,” Eddy said.

“What? Oh,” he said, “is that what you’re thinking? Forget it,” he said, “that ain’t in it. I mean I can subtract fifteen or sixteen from three score and ten and get the difference. I can take away the subtrahend from the whoosihend well enough. That’s not what bothers me. So I miss out on whatever it is, the fifty- four or fifty-five years of what you haul me in here to tell me the shouting’s all about. No big deal, no Commonwealth case. Nah,” Benny Maxine said, “that don’t bother Benny Maxine.”

“What does bother you?”

“That slyboots. That old son of a bitch,” Benny says, almost to himself.

“What?”

“The crafty old bastard.”

“I don’t—”

“Mudd-Gaddis. Here I schlepp him from room to room giving him gazes, giving him ganders, and at his age the little geezer has probably nineteen dozen times my own experience. Pushed his wheelchair, I did. Took him for a ride. Showed him the sights. And him under his shawls and lap robes with his hand in the heather. Ooh, he’s the sly one!”

“Benny,” Eddy Bale says quietly, “it’s not what the shouting’s all about. Benny, it isn’t.”

“Yeah, well,” Benny Maxine says, “thanks for the grand bloke-to-bloke chat.”

And, when Maxine has gone, Eddy Bale wondering aloud, and not for the first time, “Am I mad? Am I mad?”

(Because he was bursting with it: his discovery. Because, if his hunch was right, he figured he’d found the real Magic Kingdom. And, should they be caught, the ancient kid making such a good front and all. And because he thought the old boy was past it anyway. Wouldn’t remember. Certainly not where he’d taken him. Not where they’d been.

(And his hunch had been right.

(And Benny blessing his god-given, gambler’s gifts: his luck, his attention to detail, all his boon instincts.

(So the unlikely pair, the one, dying from some Old Testament curse which, since he wasn’t bar mitzvah, he couldn’t even begin to understand, pushing the chair down the hotel corridor, and the other, riding in it, dying of all his squeezed and heaped natural causes, nattering away from the depths of his old-age-pensioner’s, unpredictable, golden-aged, senior citizen’s cumulative heart. “Ahh,” Mudd-Gaddis had said from his congested chest, taking the air, “I do love a stroll about the decks of a morning. Thank you so very much for inviting me, Maxine.

(“What’s a shipmate for?” Benny had said.

(“The stabilizers these days, you’d hardly suspect there’s a sea under you.”

(“Steady as she goes.”

(Mudd-Gaddis had chuckled. “Quite good, that. ‘Steady as she goes.’ Not like the old days,” he added wistfully.

(“No,” Benny had said.

(“No. Not at all like the old days.”

(“No.”

(“Not like any HMS I ever sailed aboard.”

(“I’ll be bound,” Benny had said.

(“Not like the East India Company days. Not like the tubs H.M. sent us out in to encounter the Spanish Armada.”

(“Really.”

(“’Rule Britannia, Britannia rule the waves,‘” Charles Mudd- Gaddis had sung in his high, reedy voice.

(“You could probably have used stabilizers like these on the Titanic,” Benny had said, “or when you went off with Captain Cook to discover the Hawaiian Islands.”

(Mudd-Gaddis gave Benny Maxine a sharp look. “I never sailed with Jim Cook,” he told him quietly.

(“No, of course not. After your time,” Benny mumbled, wondering if the little petrified man was having him on.

(“Still,” Mudd-Gaddis said, “it’s not all progress. The sea air, for example. The sea air doesn’t seem quite as bracing as it used to.” Through his thick glasses Mudd-Gaddis stared at the corridor’s blue walls. “Indeed, it seems rather close out here. Even a little stuffy, in fact.”

(“Not like the old days.”

(“No. Not at all.”

(“It is stuffy,” Benny Maxine said suddenly. “Say, why don’t we duck into this lounge for a bit? It’s probably air-conditioned.” They had come to room 822. Benny knocked forcefully on the door and, hearing no answer, folded Mudd-Gaddis’s chair and hid it beyond the fire doors at the end of the corridor. Returning to 822 and working with one of the cunning tools on his Swiss Army knife, Benny had made short, clever work of jimmying the door.

(“Quick,” he said, “in back of the drapes.”

(“Behind the arras?”

(Benny glanced at his little wizened buddy. “Ri-i-ight,” he said.

(“It’s stuffy here too,” his old friend complained.

(Though, as it turned out, they didn’t have long to wait. Hardly any time at all. But something as outside the range of ordinary luck — though Benny recognized a roll when he saw one — as the two boys were beyond the range of ordinary children. His gambler’s gift for pattern, design. His feel for all the low and high tides of special circumstance, his adaptive, compensatory fortune. All opportune juncture’s auspicious luck levers, its favorable, propitious, sweet nick-of- and all-due-time sweepstakes: its bust-the-bank, godsend mercies and jackpot bonanza obligations. No fluke, Benny had thought, only what’s coming, only what’s owed. And Benny blessing his money-where- his-mouth-was heart.

(And when Benny Maxine heard Mary Cottle at the door he didn’t even have to shush Mudd-Gaddis. Who’d evidently been, to judge from his transformed eyes, beyond an arras or two himself in his time.

(She came into her hotel room — she seemed nervous, she seemed irritable — shut the door behind her, and dropped her purse on a chair.

(It wasn’t stripping. It wasn’t even undressing. It was divestment, divestiture. Orderly and compelled as the speeded- up toilet of some fireman in reverse, or the practiced discipline of sailors whistled to battle stations, say. There was nothing of panic in it, nothing even of haste, just that same compelled, rehearsed efficiency of all mastered routine, just that workmanlike, functional competency, know-how, tact, skill, grace, and craft of adroit forte. Just that same shipshape, green-thumbed, known- rope knack and aptitude of all veteran prowess. She might have been pouring her morning tea or buttering her morning toast or returning home along a route she’d taken years.

(And Benny, both children, amazed who’d only meant to spy on her, astonished who at the outside could only have hoped to trap her in — again, at the outside — some only stiff and formal tryst, some only stilted, silly dalliance with Colin Bible or Eddy Bale or Mr. Moorhead; or, more like it, to catch her smoking what she oughtn’t, in privacy; phoning a boyfriend in England or ordering liquor from room service or bingeing on ice cream, on sweets, and on biscuits; stunned who all along could have hoped only to gather the familiar gossip of their imaginations or, behind the closed bathroom door, to have heard her tinkle, heard her poop. Who hadn’t expected, who, counting only on the auspicious and favorable, the opportune and propitious, even could have expected, this gusher of bonanza, this ship-come- in, sweet-sweep-staked, bank-broke, jackpot boon. They were flies on the very walls of mystery, and this went beyond what was coming, beyond what was owed. This was out-and-out hallmark fluke!

(Later Benny wouldn’t even remember the order in which her clothes had come off. Only that blur of no-nonsense, businesslike efficiency. One moment she had dropped her purse on a chair, the next her clothes were hanging neatly in the closet — and when had she removed her panties or, folding them, laid them carefully on the chair beside her purse? and when had she kicked off her shoes? rolled down her hose and set them across the back of the chair? — and she was completely stripped, uncovered, bare, naked, nude, starkers. She stood before them without a stitch, in the buff, the raw — it was, Benny thought, an apt word; she looked in her nakedness nude as meat in a butcher shop — and he was struck by the rare, pink baldness of her body, by its unsuspected curves and fullnesses — and, oddly, oddly because he would never actually remember seeing her like this, she would become a paradigm for all women, up to her thighs in silk stocking, sitting on underwear, a buried treasure of lace and garter belt, all the lovely, invisible bondages of flesh, her pubic hair bulging her panties like a dark triangle of reinforced silk, her sex like a box of unoffered candy, hoarded fruit — and they see her breasts, they see her cunt. She lies down nude on top of the still made bed. She raises her long legs, spreads them.

(Then she rolls over on her side, turning away from them. They can’t see what she’s doing but they see her ass. Her left arm goes down, over and across her body, and it looks from their angle as if she’s clutching a second pillow to her, getting ready for a nap. They watch her behind as it pumps back and forth on top of the bedspread. She’s nestling in all comfy for her bye-byes, thinks Benny Maxine. She’s ’aving a bit of a lie- down. The two boys stare at her ass, study its dark vertical, the two discrete, hollow, brown shadows within her cheeks like halved darning eggs, like healed burns, like hairy stains.

(She is quickly done, shivers all along her body, and bounds from the bed. In the bathroom — she leaves the door open; they can see part of her reflection in the full-length mirror — she sits to pee, pulls a few sheets of toilet paper from the roll, and wipes herself. She washes her hands, slaps water on her face, and, when she returns to the room, she seems completely restored. Even her eyes seem restored too, returned to some neutral condition of peace.

(“I’ve heard of this,” Benny Maxine mouths to Charles Mudd-Gaddis, explaining. “World-class, champion speed sleep.”

(The old gnome frowns at him. The entire time they watch her dress she is still businesslike, still efficient, but now, putting on her clothes, it is almost as if she is posing. As she is, though Benny doesn’t realize this. She is posing for the clothes themselves, moving her body into perfect alignment with her apparel, adjusting straps and cups, seams and undergarments to all those unsuspected boluses of flesh. They get an eyeful. They see her from the side, from the rear, from the front. As she rests a leg on the bed and leans forward to leverage a stocking up along her thigh, they get a brief, unobstructed view of her sex, of her bunched and weighted breasts. But she moves too rapidly.

(Benny doesn’t know where to look first and, worried about any telltale arthritic creaks, glances at Mudd-Gaddis, meaning to steady him, to forestall the chirping of his old companion’s joints, the snap and crackle of his burned bones. But even Mudd- Gaddis’s eyes barely move, his fierce old countenance as absolved of desire and edge as Mary Cottle’s own.

(Which was when he first thought slyboots, crafty bastard! And when he first formulated the questions he did not even know yet he would ever get to ask. Not only the one about how long it lasted, when he might reasonably expect surcease, relief, to be disburdened of what he already knew and recognized was to be just one more additional symptom of his life, but the one about preference too, especially the one about preference, offering pelt as he might ante a chip in a game of chance and despising Mudd-Gaddis, the old roué lech and sated boulevardier, who did not even have to trouble to crane his neck or even to move his eyes about, who’d already seen and presumably done it all in his time, who’d had only to wait there in ambush for something wondrous and delicious to come into view, the old bastard sedate and smug as an assassin behind his cross-hairs, settled in his sexual nostalgia — not having to choose, maybe not even having a preference, because the old fart knew that choice was a mug’s game — as that woman in her own arms on the bed, and only poor fifteen-year-old virgin Benny burdened forever by his fifteen-year-old turned-stone maidenhead, not knowing the odds but having to place his bet down anyway, the red or the black, declaring for quim, declaring for tush, declaring for boobs or pelt, and hoping, though he knew better, that tush or boobs would come up winners because, let’s face it, if he was ever going to get in the game it could only be by copping a feel. When he knew all along. When he by God knew all along where he had to be, where — for him — the real action was, but until this morning hadn’t even known the geography existed: the darning eggs, those elliptical hollows, those two discrete dark shadows, the twin burns, those stinking stains inside the fold of each buttock!

(She is dressed and out, not looking toward the drapes once, not looking anywhere, not even checking — as everyone does, as even Benny does, as even Mudd-Gaddis must do, tapping their pockets or looking into their purses, for gum, for keys or comb or handkerchief or change — the hotel room she is about to leave. Is gone. Totally collected and moving through the room and out of it, as through with and out of any indifferent space, as assured and confident and possessed as she might be passing from one room to another in her flat.

(And though in many ways it has been a great morning for him, a real eye-opener, the things he’s seen trapped in his head as on a photographic plate, Benny is nervous, jealous and convinced as he is — he’d looked at Mudd-Gaddis from time to time, even during her performance, glancing at him as much for confirmation that this was all happening as for the respect he felt was owed him for actually finding the place — that this, so new and exciting to him, was just old familiar stuff to his wise and jaded comrade.

(Who could at least — thank God for small favors — share the discovery Benny was busting with, temper that burden, at least, his spilled, cup-run-over excitement, but who wouldn’t remember, who couldn’t remember lunch and thus wouldn’t be able, the forgetful good front and past-it boulevardier, kid-ancient old boy, to ruin a good thing for him, something he would almost certainly want to look in on again and again, or to give him away.)

“Yes,” Charles Mudd-Gaddis said to Tony Word and Lydia Conscience on one occasion, and to Janet Order, Rena Morgan, and Noah Cloth on three others, “Mary Cottle. She’s taken a room in the hotel just for herself. Room eight twenty-two. Somewhat smaller than any of ours but quite well furnished. A deep, oblong affair with a dark olive-colored dresser, Danish modern, I think, with three long, faintly louvered drawers. A circular table of similar shade about one and a third meters in diameter stands in the southeast corner with two matching generic Scandinavian armchairs. There’s a somewhat larger chair off to the side of her Trimline Sylvania TV. The drapes are a patternless brown about the color of damp bark, and the rug is a soft acrylic and wool shag, treated with a somewhat glossy fire retardant. There are four ashtrays rather than the customary three: one on each bedstand and the others on the dresser and table. I suppose she may have taken the one on the dresser from the W.C., though my guess — you know how she smokes — is she probably asked Housekeeping for the extra. There were seven fag-ends in only two of the trays, two in the one on the dresser, and five in the one on the bedstand by the beige telephone to the right of the queen-sized bed. I liked her bedspread, incidentally, a sort of burnt sienna. Instead of the usual stylized map of Disney World that hangs in these rooms, there’s a quite nice portrait of the old Mickey Mouse. Black and white and from the early days when he was still Steamboat Willy.

“On my way out I happened to notice that the Orlando telephone directory on the dresser was turned to page forty-three.”

“Did you mention any of this to Benny?” Rena Morgan asked.

“Benny?” the little gerontological case said uncertainly.

Because everything has a reasonable explanation.

It was Janet Order who reported to Nedra Carp that Mary Cottle had taken room 822. She was still sore because Mary had been thoughtless enough to light that cigarette and caused her to cough and choke and wake from her dream the evening of their airplane ride to Florida. She still remembered the circumstances, the difficulty she’d had falling asleep in the first place — the little blue girl who welcomed sleep if only for the dreams, the disguises she found there, and who, forget special circumstances, forget need, had to wait right along with everyone else for the hour or so to pass before REM sleep came with its marvelously cunning camouflage solutions — and the even greater difficulty she had falling back asleep after she was awake, though she remembered dozing, fitful naps, and recalled, too, her lively suspicions, thinking, She’s seen my file, she knows my case, how it is with me. She did that on purpose. And thinking too, Now even if I do get to sleep again I’ll probably have to go to the bathroom. In any case I’ll have to be out just getting my rest a whole other hour or so, or hour and a half or so, before I ever get to dream again. And even if she didn’t do it on purpose, even if she just needed a cigarette, I know how smokers are. They’re addicted as alcoholics. She’ll wait an hour — isn’t that just what she did in the first place? — or an hour and a half or so, and then, when she thinks I’m sleeping deeply, just go ahead and light up again!

So that’s why Janet told on her.

And why she’d asked to be put in with Mr. Moorhead and the boys, even though she’d have preferred to stay with Rena and even with Lydia, so standoffish in the dream, and whose presence there, despite her neatness, picking and cleaning up after herself as she had, wiping away all she could find of her dead-giveaway spoor and all the traces of her prior tenancy, Janet had somehow suspected anyway. (All the dead-giveaway spoor she could find!) And why, of all the adults along on the holiday, it was to Nedra Carp she chose to spill the beans. Because the child, with her heightened awareness of other people’s aversion to her, could sense all aversion a mile off, had this gift the way certain animals were said to have an olfactory knowledge of fear. And why shouldn’t she? Wasn’t she blue? Wasn’t she the blue girl? (No wonder I knew she’d been there, she thought — in the dream. It was my doggy instincts.) And chose Nedra out of some still higher sense of the squeamish, not just the ordinary vibes of simple blue racism this time but even her peculiar sense of caste. Not only had she sensed that Nedra had no use for her, she sensed the reason too. It was simply because she inhabited a different room. It was simply because she was not officially her charge. Not because she was blue and disgusting but because she was not one of Nedra’s girls. As soon as she realized this she felt her heart buckle, the strange new symptom of love. So she chose Nedra, almost shy, almost nervous, bringing her the news — first checking the information by attempting to put a call through to 822 (if Miss Cottle answered she’d have hung up), only to be told by the hotel operator that the guest in 822 had instructed the hotel that she would accept no calls (“She,” Janet said, “she?” “The guest,” the operator replied coolly) — like a suitor. Sucking up, Janet thought, I’m sucking up. And didn’t mind at all, who wouldn’t have minded even if she hadn’t picked up all those other vibes as well, the sixth, seventh, and maybe even eighth senses that told her of Nedra’s antipathy to the other woman before she so much as mentioned her name. Or the other thing. That the woman she’d chosen to love did not love her back. And not only didn’t love her back but probably had an aversion to her greater even than the one she had for Mary Cottle, but whose aversion, whose squeamishness even, was not based on Janet Order’s blueness but only on that simple stupid business — her beloved nanny was stupid — that she lived across the hall with Mr. Moorhead and Noah Cloth and Tony Word and so was an affront to her.

“Oh, what a lovely room,” she began. “I do so wish I lived here with you and the other girls, Nanny,” Janet Order said.

Nedra Carp, knowing it would get back to her employer without her being the one to trouble the dear and troubled man, told Colin Bible.

Who was encouraged, almost buoyed, by the promising ease with which the fellow — Matthew Gale; his name was Matthew Gale — had been able to obtain the key. Turf, Colin Bible thought. The perks of turf. On mine, had I wished to, I could have witnessed the historic operations, met the famous sick, seen their charts and x-rays, the sheiks’ and prime ministers’ and movie stars’ who were always popping into the clinic with their secret under-the-table diseases. I could have had second helpings in the restaurant, access to the drug larders even.

Encouraged, but only almost buoyed. Too nervous still. And guilty, who still felt the humiliation of being so easily spotted and who recalled Gale’s knowing wink as forcefully as if it had been a slap. Who’d never flaunted it (and daunted by this vulgar man who did), who didn’t in even these compromised circumstances flaunt it now, and who might, so neutrally had they — the two Colins — behaved with each other in public, in the pubs they frequented, the theaters and concert halls they attended, have been taken for second cousins or businessmen or two distant acquaintances thrown together for the evening by the simple innocent agency of one or the other of them’s being in possession of an extra ticket. And even more humiliated by the memory of his own outrageous behavior at the health club, by his decoy ambush at the urinals, his skulking camouflage by the toilet stalls, by all his bad play-actor’s raving, put-on nonchalance: his prowled, clandestine presence near the equipment, covered in layers of stealth and insinuation as in a raincoat. So amusing to Matthew. Who’d called him “toots” and asked if he’d been waiting long.

He’d had second thoughts, but they’d been as much for poor old obsolescent Colin as for himself, and even after their encounter at the Spa he’d stalled Gale for two days now.

“You know what I think?” Matthew had said. “I think you’re a cock-tease.”

“No, I’m not,” Colin said. “That’s an awful thing to say.”

“What is it then, dearie, your time of month?”

“Please,” Colin said, “don’t be common.”

“Am I wasting my time with you, sailor? What sort of crap is this?”

“Can’t we get to know each other?” Colin said. “Can’t we just get to be friends first?”

“I know enough people. I’ve friends up the wazoo.”

“I told you,” Colin said, “I’m no light o’ love.”

“You sure ain’t. You’re the Blue Balls Kid.”

“I told you,” Colin mumbled, “I’ve this very special friend back in England.”

“Yeah, you told me. I just want you to know something, sister. I’m getting a little bit tired of these damned Coke dates of ours. I’m a certified faggot, I don’t believe in long courtships.” Matthew was off duty. They were sitting together at a table outside a café waiting for the fireworks to begin.

“You have to give me more time.” He sounded like a foolish girl. Even to himself.

“You know something? You’re one naive bimbo. What, you think you’re the only married man ever to have gone out of town? The only bespoke hubby at the convention? One-night stands are great. Foxy old grampas do it leaning against the rusted porcelain in tearooms.”

“I’m not a foxy old grandpa.”

“You’re telling me.” Matthew smiled, appraising him. “ You’re one bitch chick.”

“Please,” Colin said. “Don’t talk like that.”

“How do you expect me to talk, Miss Priss? I’m coming on. I’m paying you compliments. I’m no Lord What’shisname. I see a skirt I go for, I have to interrupt the programs. It’s just my way.” An umbrella of fireworks opened up over the Magic Kingdom, the red, blue, and green reflections running down their faces like greasepaint. “Ooh, ahh, eh, Doris?” Matthew Gale said.

Colin wouldn’t look at him.

“All right,” Gale had said, “all right, I’ll respect you in the morning. Anything. All I want is to get you in bed. You’re driving me nuts, you know that?”

“Poofs,” Colin said.

“I’m not so bad,” Matthew Gale said.

“Oh, no,” Colin Bible said, “you’re terrible.”

“I’m not terrible,” Matthew Gale said. “You want vulnerability? I’m vulnerable. Gentle sensitivity? I’m sensitive as dick. I’m telling you the truth, old girl. What do you think, I draw graffiti on the walls? I don’t even have a pencil.”

“Some recommendation that is,” Colin said.

“Oh, boy,” he said, “she talks dirty.”

“How old are you?” Colin asked.

“Twenty-six. Why?”

“You don’t look it.”

“A fag’s fate,” Matthew said, “his baby-face genes. Why?”

“You look like a teenager.”

“Oh,” Matthew said, “I get it. You’re afraid you might be contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Forget it. Be easy on that score. Thousands have given at the office.”

“You’re really twenty-six?”

“I’m fucking thirty, man,” Matthew said.

Because it was a test. Because he knew about the room now. “Listen,” he said, “I won’t leave the park. I shouldn’t even be out here with you.”

Under the table Matthew covered Colin’s crotch with his hand. “You’ll never believe what you’ve been missing,” he said. “You haven’t been blown till you’ve been blown by a Gale.”

Colin pushed his hand away. “I won’t do it in automobiles,” he said. “I won’t do it in holes and corners.”

“You limeys have class.”

“I mean it,” Colin warned.

“You want to get a room?”

“No,” he said. (Because it was still the test.)

“You want me to?” Matthew asked. “I mean I will if you want, though that could be risky. I mean I don’t mind about the money. It’s just that you say you won’t leave the park. And they know me at the Contemporary; they know me at the Polynesian and the Walt Disney World Village. I mean if you want me to sign in and then leave a note for you in a bottle, okay, I’ll do it, but this is a company town and if it ever gets back I’ll never haunt another mansion.”

“No,” he’d said, “you wouldn’t have to register.”

And Colin Bible told Matthew Gale about room 822.

So it was the ease with which Matthew passed the test and was able to produce a key to Mary Cottle’s room that enabled Colin to go through with it finally.

He waited until they were both naked until he asked him.

“What are you,” Matthew Gale said, “some kind of industrial spy?”

“Never mind about that,” Colin said, “can you do it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know what I’m supposed to do.”

“You know what you’re supposed to do. I just told you.”

“Manuals,” Matthew Gale said.

“That’s right.”

“Repair manuals.”

“And anything else you can get.”

“What do you think, I’m a mechanical engineer? I’m this good-looking fag with a charming manner and a winning smile. I couldn’t recognize blueprints. Animatronics! Jesus!”

“Just the repair manuals then. He’s very clever, Colin is. He could work backward from them.”

“God!” Matthew Gale said. “If you weren’t so well built…boy, oh, boy. What I did for love!”

“What we all did,” Colin said.

“I don’t even work at the Hall of Presidents!”

“I’ve no doubt you’ve your friends,” Colin said sweetly.

And then, without so much as even threatening him with exposure if he failed, Colin Bible, who was confident he wouldn’t, who believed in and accepted on trust the existence of a sort of spirit of freemasonry among them, a given, never-to-be-abused loyalty that was not only understood but actually available, actually advocated and depended upon between all the kinds and conditions of homohood, admitted Matthew Gale into Mary Cottle’s bed.

3

The acronym in Epcot Center stood for “experimental prototype community of tomorrow,” and the place itself was divided into two parts: Future World and World Showcase. Eddy Bale, who’d scouted it, didn’t think it was going to be much fun for the dying kids.

Something to do with that emphasis on the future, of course, but not entirely, not even chiefly.

He had, after all, some experience in these matters. Liam was eight when his disease was diagnosed and, while he was nervous about his long-term prospects from the first, it wasn’t until he was ten that he suspected he was going to die, and not until he was eleven that he knew he was. And not until those last awful months, Bale remembered, that he actually looked forward to it. His mostly not-forward-looking son.

And that’s the point, isn’t it, Bale thought. That not once in all the four years of his child’s awful disease, or the one or two or of his terrible knowledge, had the boy openly expressed or — or so Bale, who knew the kid, believed — secretly harbored opinions about either the world’s or his own future. At six he’d wanted to be a fireman, a pilot, a singer, a cop. At seven his imagination had briefly entertained the notion of becoming a film star. And at nine he wanted, to the extent that he extrapolated a life at all, simply to grow up. After he knew how ill he was he never mentioned it. As closed to the idea of a future as it to him.

They would go, of course. There had been too much hype about the Magic Kingdom’s new wing for them not to. So they would go. And have twinges, privately or distanced by their bad public jokes. Some fleeting regrets, some reverse nostalgia for the yet-to-be, but not all that stronger, finally, than his own. Bale wasn’t forty yet and, although he expected to live another thirty or thirty-five years, he didn’t believe that even in his lifetime (for the moment forgetting the sixty or sixty-five years his dream- holiday kids would probably have lived had they not become ill) the world’s cities would blossom into those tall, slim, futuristic forms projected by the park’s planners and engineers: cityscapes, Bale thought, like nothing so much as the special effects in science fiction movies, the smooth, permeate Lego acrylics of starships or the capital cities of distant planets, glowing on some night in the future blue as runway lights or the color of water on maps.

But they would go. They’d go — this was hard for Eddy to admit — because there wasn’t that much left for them to do. He supposed they had enjoyed their time at Disney World. He had misgivings — his unclear notion of a busted decorum — but on the whole Bale felt it had been a good visit. What they had for health — Moorhead had chosen wisely — had so far held up, and they all seemed to get along better than anyone had probably had a right to expect. Colin’s hostility had marred the ointment, but that was personal. Otherwise the fellow performed his job conscientiously, as they all did — Eddy had chosen wisely too — and had made no stir in front of the children.

So as far as Eddy was concerned, it wasn’t any abstract anxiety at not being around when the time came for the world to change and put on its new hi-tech face. Posterity did not much trouble them. As much mourn not being on the scene when history happened. As much mourn the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, all the glorious red-letter days one had missed out on, the hour before one was born and time began. Posterity would have its hands full too, even, he suspected, its own incurables. So it wasn’t envy. Envy didn’t stand much chance when the object of the envy was still thirty or thirty-five — he still hadn’t remembered the children’s if-all-had-gone-well sixty or sixty- five — years down the road.

It was the other part about which Bale had his doubts. The World Showcase which made him nervous.

For one, he didn’t think they’d be entertained. With its boutiques and expensive restaurants it was more like some shopping mall than the stage on which one acted out last flings. For another, the pavilions (points-of-interest, highlights like the obligatory views on postal cards — in the Paris street scene Bale spotted, reduced for perspective, the tapered, graceful top of the Eiffel Tower blooming from the roof of the building on which it had been set up like a potted plant — stage set, tableaux, backdrop like a sort of world vaudeville) of the nine represented countries (Canada, the U.K., France, Japan, the U.S., Italy, Germany, China, Mexico) had been built around the shore of a man-made lagoon, and the effect, at least for Eddy, was disconcerting, surreal. Indeed, it was rather like moving in a dream. China was sandwiched in between Mexico and Germany, America between Italy and Japan. Canada just down the road from the U.K. It was, finally, like Heaven. Convenient, about the same size, without obstacle or climate, and laid out like the aisles in a department store. It was like Heaven and it scared him. It would scare the kids too. They would see that there really was a China, that there really was a France. That Germany was not made up. That Italy was no invention, improbable Mexico, unlikely Japan. (All, all real, the scale, toy, gussied-up lands as genuine — wasn’t the evidence of the U.K. pavilion with its High Street and pub, its Tudor and Georgian and Victorian styles, its chimneys and timbers and thatch, or even its costers with their pearly plate like a soft, obsolete armor, proof enough? — as the great engines their tiny models merely stood for. All, all real, alas.) It could put them off. Such knowledge. Reminding them of the simple symbolism of their arrangements, that what they did now had to last them, forcing their hands who should have spent their lives like drunken sailors, like there was no tomorrow. (And speaking of history, Eddy Bale thought, of red-letter days and death at time’s other end like a counterweight, hadn’t Liam himself had a rough go on his birthdays, on Christmas? All holidays, really, those on which no gifts were exchanged as well as those on which they were? Anniversary sodden as bad air. Hadn’t Ginny? Hadn’t Eddy? The presents coming in his boy’s last years not only cardless and unwrapped but unpackaged too, out of their boxes, and, at last, as if they’d been fetched from home in paper bags along with his clean pajamas and his fresh tube of toothpaste. Which would probably outlast him. And queer, he thought, that Liam’s voice had begun to change just a couple of months before he died. Queer. An additional blow. “This is what I would’ve sounded like, ain’t it, Dad?” his son had asked. And Bale had lied. “You’ve a frog in your throat,” he said. “If it’s all right with the doctor, Colin can bring you lozenges for that.” And, terrified, broached the subject of Liam’s puberty with the man. “You’re being silly,” the physician said. “No,” Bale said, “he’s too weak. A wet dream could kill him,” Bale said. And tried to keep up the pretense even after he’d found out that Liam had begun masturbating. Liam dutifully sucking the lozenges Bale brought. Their conversations coated by the vapors of eucalyptus, of cherry and honey and lemon. So that, for Eddy, the effect was that the boy might have come down with nothing more bothersome than a bad sore throat, a seriously stuffed nose. That he slept in a room with a vaporizer, with camphor-coated cloths about his neck. Till the doctor brought Eddy up sharp. “What’s that in his mouth?” “A Hall’s,” Liam said. “Take it out. Don’t you know that menthol could upset your stomach?” But a few weeks had passed. Liam’s voice was changed now. And, Bale hoped, he might have forgotten he ever sounded any different. Till Liam brought him up sharp. “I’ll never have another sore throat, will I?” he said. The anniversaries and special occasions coming thick and fast now. “It’s the full moon tonight. I hope I remember to look at it when they wake me for my medication,” he said. One day, a week or so before he died, he and Ginny, having stepped out into the corridor for a cigarette, returned to the room. Their son was crying. “What is it, Liam? What is it, dear?” “The shipyards are shut down,” he told them. “I heard on the news that the builders have gone out on strike.” They were in a country where no more ships would be built while he lived, he meant. And it was another anniversary of sorts — Liam’s milestone yardage. Because the centennials and jubilees, the birthdays and holidays and seasons were closing in, becoming the monthly and fortnightly and weekly, becoming the daily, all periodicity and fixed interval shrinking through the wide, rotational tidal toward some ever-diminished, diminishing now. Which was about when Colin began to come in to take him to look at the cars down on Devonshire Place. And every day red-letter. Speaking of history.)

But the children weren’t put off. That didn’t happen, at least. Bale’s fears, his theme-park notions of Heaven, his awry orientation and sense of the surreal didn’t send them into decline. And if they shared his misgivings about the place’s skewed geography, if it offended their sense of the orderly that Italy was a stone’s throw from Asia or that China shared a border with Mexico, they never let on. The mutualized climate didn’t bother them. That they didn’t have to deal with mountains or cross seas seemed not to trouble them. Nothing seemed to trouble them. They were not upset, or even perhaps aware, of the simple symbolism of their arrangements. They spent their lives like sober sailors.

And if they seemed less excited than they’d been, Eddy put it down not to boredom — they weren’t bored — but to something like the mildest loss of innocence, becoming acclimated perhaps to being in a new country, their jet lag smoothed over, their travelers’ up-front awe cleared up.

The fact was that they were concerned about getting to, or getting back to, Mary Cottle’s room.

Except for Eddy, who didn’t know about it, they were on their best behavior, the adults as well as the children, at the peak of their conscientiousness. Working, though not all of them knew this — Eddy, of course; Mary Cottle herself — as a group without even knowing it.

For the first time, buddy aligned with buddy without being reminded. Janet Order and Tony Word, Rena Morgan and Noah Cloth, Benny Maxine and Lydia Conscience formed into pairs. On line, they held each other’s hands tight as tickets. And Eddy Bale, touched, wondered what he’d been worrying about. They seemed sweet, totally without airs, like school children on field trips, their diseases oddly muffled by their patience and courtesy, something faintly disadvantaged about them still, long- suffering but not fatal, reduced to a sort of poverty, perhaps, some vaguely respectful, intimidated sense of the out-of-their- element clinging to them. They might have been on queue at the water fountain or waiting to board a bus. Whatever, they seemed subdued, serious as beggars making their manners. They didn’t so much as whisper among themselves, let alone bray out the loud public jokes Bale had half expected. That they were physically mismatched — Janet and Rena towered over their tiny charges — only managed to make them seem even more settled, almost married, as if the difference in their ages and heights signified some acute mutual acceptance, the way a wife guiding a blind husband seems somehow even more intimately connected to her partner than if the man were sighted. It was the same with Lydia Conscience and Benny Maxine. The underage, gorbelly girl, pregnant-seeming behind her great tumor, and the teenage boy looked like joined, hand-in-hand lovers, overwhelmed, perhaps, and certainly too young for their circumstances, but as bonded and content as youthful, dangerous killers on a spree.

Behind the children, watching over them, Nedra Carp and Colin stood beside each other while Mr. Moorhead went bustling from pair to pair, checking, but decorous and proper as a maître d’.

And, looking all of them over as they waited to be handed into the cars that would carry them up the seventeen stories of Spaceship Earth (Future World’s great landmark, a huge sphere, pocked as an immense golf ball), Eddy Bale felt a strange pride in the odd group. It’s because they’re taking it so well, he thought.

Careful not to become separated — they recalled the fuss when they had — the children instinctively gave way, voluntarily allowing others to precede them even if it was not their turn.

My, Eddy thought, watching in the theatrical gloom, his congratulatory pride incremented by the dark, by expectation and a suffusion of love. My, Eddy thought, flooded with his curious content, his madness peaking now, spiking like a fever, how good they all are!

He was pleased even by the serendipitous symmetry of the arrangements. One adult to each pair of buddies — Nedra sat between Janet Order and Tony Word while Colin Bible took his place in the cars with Rena and Noah, and Benny and Lydia Conscience were with Mr. Moorhead — the partners seemed less disadvantaged now, neither ill nor poor nor out of place. It was the adults, he thought, that lent them force, a scant air of there being something premeditated about their quiet good manners, not long-suffering as he had thought but placid, vaguely exhibitionist. And then he had it. Why, he thought, they might be Saturday’s children, here by court order, official decree, sentenced by a judge and their own mixed loyalties, perfecting their expressions, balancing them like books, all the smoky nonchalance of the indifferently loved, rehearsing the customs of visitation and doing God knows what secret sums of custody in their heads, sneaking glances at their watches, timing what was left of the morning, the long afternoon, and wondering if it was time yet to go to the restaurant, how long the line would be at the movies.

Eddy Bale, comforted by his imagination — divorce was a better doom than doom — moved beside Mary Cottle, who’d taken charge of Charles Mudd-Gaddis in his wheelchair, pushing it along the platform like a child’s stroller each time the line inched forward and new people climbed into the cars. In the dim light he accidentally brushed her hip and asked if he could take the tour with them. Mary shrugged and he got into the tram with Mudd-Gaddis and Miss Cottle. Snug, he felt snug. The two grown-ups, the little boy, made a cozy family.

The tram pulled away from the platform, began its long climb, while Eddy speculated about their collective calm, their take-what-came inscrutability.

He didn’t know, couldn’t have known, that they were disinterested, being pulled past the highlights in this palace of highlights, being drawn up the mammoth geosphere as up a well, the history of civilization illuminated on either side like river views from an open boat, like Paris shoreline gliding across the vision in a bateau mouche.

He did not know, could not know, their indifference, absolute now — only Mudd-Gaddis pointed, only Mudd-Gaddis, alternately delighted and fearful, squealed — to humanity’s transitionless breakthrough breakthroughs, detached, drifting through time as across the panels of a comic strip, seeming to slow down for each milestone as if they were pulling into a familiar train station along their route home, sliding past the cave paintings, beasts stylized as jewelry, primitives squatting over their Neanderthal fire like low gamblers at dice. They moved alongside Egyptians chiseling hieroglyphs like great strange keys and, farther up, caught glimpses of ancient Greece’s legitimate theater, its antique declamated tragedies. They traveled Rome’s blocky old roads and saw the great libraries of ruined empires. They saw monasteries where medieval monks, like secretaries taking painstaking dictation, copied out gospel. They passed Gutenberg’s print shop — and didn’t know, couldn’t know, Colin Bible’s held-tongue, bite-bullet pangs at each special effect: the movable type on Gutenberg’s press — and pressed on into the glories of the Renaissance. And were plunged into the twentieth century as into din. A telegraph clicked like a castanet. They saw the stop-press banner hieroglyphs of newspapers. Radio was in it now, TV, computers. And, still climbing, rose into space, the comfortable room temperature of the heavens, galactic swamps swirling above them like fingerprints of starlight, space platforms like futuristic chandeliers.

At Journey Into Imagination they watched a sort of electronic puppet show — to him, they seemed riveted; how could he know? — and saw rainbows stripped as you’d strip paint, and led electronic orchestras, and walked across a floor that turned their footsteps into music, and stared, his distorted kids, into distorting mirrors. He watched a 3-D movie with them and saw them draw back as objects leaped out at them from the screen.

So how could he, how could he know whose uncompromised oohs and ahhs, like someone watching birthday candles being blown out, came from the heart? Or that Colin Bible stifled his injury-nursed gasps and carefully suppressed sighs and whimpers as he stared down from Epcot Computer Central’s glassed-in balcony at the massive and complicated control boards that handled it all?

Or that Nedra Carp, seated between Janet Order and Tony Word, wondered why Mr. Moorhead hadn’t assigned her to a car with children who were her official responsibility rather than hustling her in with strangers? (Did she know the contents of their pockets, what awful contraband candy they might have brought with them? Had they had a B.M. today? Who’d made sure they’d tinkled before permitting them to come out?) And a bit angry with the children, too, or put off — she was not the sort to lose her temper with children, not like that woman Mary Cottle, who used to run off to the bathroom for a sulk whenever things didn’t go entirely spit-spot and now disappeared altogether whenever the poor dears fussed or grew cranky (and now she knew where, didn’t she, and maybe it was something more than a bit of a sulk, and perhaps, if she’d wanted Mr. Bale to find out, it had been something of a mistake to have entrusted Colin Bible, who’d probably known it anyway, with the information, birds of a feather and all that) — because they hadn’t protested, and had abandoned her without so much as a by-your-leave to finicky Tony Word with his peculiar tastes and foul vegetable breath, a boy, she suspected, who, had it been left to him, would actually have gotten down on the ground and rooted for potatoes, carrots, onions, the level radish and asparagus and pumpkin, the foreign zucchini and eggplant and broccoli, eating them from the soil, the earth itself; and that disgusting Janet Order, whose blue dreadfulness, even in the dark, was palpable to her, awful as vein, livid as beetle or basilisk. Or that she could not stop thinking about the woman?

Or that Benny Maxine couldn’t either, or of the two discrete and darkened hollows in her ass, larger, sweeter than dimples?

Or that Mr. Moorhead, having removed his watch and put it in the pocket of his jacket and, out of earshot of the others, inquired of semitic-looking tourists for the one hundred and sixty-eighth time the time of day — he was a scientist, trial-and- error was part of his training, watching their wrists as they raised their arms to within inches of their eyes — and, hypothesis too, they would have at least to be in their late middle age (the youngest among them would have been almost fifty by now) or, more likely, elderly, in their sixties, or, most probable of all, old, in their seventies, nearsighted, waited — patient observation was — and watched for the bookkeeping to appear on their skin, the fadeless, telltale numbers, the careful tattoo audit, and listened also — there could have been shame; they might have been wearing their watches on the opposite arm or worn a timepiece about their neck — auscultating their accents, and had found his Jew?

Or that Lydia Conscience no longer believed she was fooling anyone with her cheap rings and big belly? (That was made quite clear in that dream she’d shared with Mudd-Gaddis and Tony Word. They’d only been patronizing her. Mudd-Gaddis pretending Tony Word was the father! Tony Word! The remarks about morning sickness, her own bitter comments about the buddy system when all she meant, she supposed, was that she didn’t want anyone to know her details. Better to be known for a loose under-age slut than for a terminal! And people stared when they were with her. Mr. Bible sometimes wearing that white nurse’s jacket! Outrageous! Might as well take out an advert. As if Mudd-Gaddis weren’t advert enough. Or Rena Morgan, thinking she fooled anyone with her dumb hidden hankies. Didn’t the twit realize that the wet spots showed when she slipped them up her sleeve again? Or bald Tony Word, who didn’t even have the decency to wear a wig! Or blue-skinned Janet Order, who invaded her dream on the plane. “I dream of Janet with the light blue skin,” she sang to herself in her head. Or bloated Benny with his puffy face, and stupid Noah who couldn’t read and, now he was losing his fingers, couldn’t even count right!) And that was why she still wore the rings even though she knew they didn’t fool anyone anymore and, twice removed — once to make people think she was preggers and now to keep them from knowing just what the hell she was — merely masked the details she couldn’t bear anyone to know? Or that ever since she’d heard about Mary Cottle’s private room she’d been trying to work up the nerve to tell her she hadn’t spent any of her money and to ask her that, if she paid her fair share, could she use it just to get away once in a while?

Or that Noah Cloth, remembering the lady who’d visited him at home that time and recalling what she’d told him about denial, rage, bargaining, and acceptance — hadn’t the compulsive shopping been, at least partly, a kind of bargaining? if that were so, then even if he couldn’t recollect the denial and rage parts, he was almost gone — wondered whether, if she’d let him, maybe he could use Miss Cottle’s room as a sort of hospice?

Or that Janet Order had grown tired of her camouflage, the permutations of all those blue dreamed force fields that had shielded her, hidden her like so much dun-colored predator, dun-colored prey, like birds indistinguishable from the trees they perch in, or soldiers in the always-too-flat Indian summer drabs of battle dress? Because the fact was that blue, quite apart from the cyanotics of her illness, was her favorite color. And hadn’t she, in the ocean depths and sky heights of those blue dreams, at the balls and celebrations, the coronations, inaugurals, and masques, all the dress-blue ceremonials, lost against the royal- and midnight- and navy-blue buntings, against the sleep-wrought hyacinthine drapes and wall hangings, or hovering over the peacock- and robin’s-egg-blue napery, all the blue arrangements, all the deep cobalts of sparkling, spanking accessory, the sapphire studs, the violet eyeshadow, clothed in all the forget- me-not hues of her blue-jeweled skin, loved, even admired, above all else, herself? And now wants, actually needs, suddenly, quite simply, privacy — the bathroom’s too small (Tony’s and Noah’s medications, her own, Mr. Moorhead’s digestives and shaving equipment, all their toothbrushes, toothpastes, shampoos, and special soaps clutter the sink, its deep, wide counter); the children are suspicious of her in the toilet; if she runs the shower to cover the sounds of her inspections, the mirror clouds over — and longs to sneak into 822, wants, needs, to examine herself, at leisure to pry her blue behind, her budding cornflower breasts, her Prussian blue nipples?

Or that leukemic Tony Word, fearful because he’s not been eating properly, suspicious of the scraped strained vegetables he’s served, of the mashed, crushed potatoes, the creamed carrots and pea purées, the smashed beets and thrice-diced watery cauliflower, the brothy fruits and minced greens, beneath their staring, the kids’ and adults’ and waiters’, yields, discards what is not even the menu but only some rote-recalled menu of the head and asks what baby food they have, orders it, and feels anyway this sinful dietary guilt, vaguely religious, aware that he chews (and knowing that he needn’t, it’s like chewing soup), thoughtful and careful as any Jew or Muslim, profane food, as if, if he’s careful enough, he might be able to trap and spit out lumps of preservative and additive like bits of pork? Or that he is worn out by their curiosity (baby food? a kid his age?), dreads their attention at meals, and wishes to go back to the old regime, doing for himself (which would have been impossible of course until Mudd-Gaddis told him and he’d had the idea, now his dream), and thinks that if he can only get their permission he can use his food allowance, make up from cash whatever the difference comes to, and, specifying exactly the ingredients he needs, instructing the kitchen how long each must be boiled, what wood tools, what pots he requires, he could use Mary Cottle’s telephone and order his dinner from room service?

Or that Charles Mudd-Gaddis, snagged on some shard of memory — is it personal or just more ancient history? — vague as the scattered fragments of a dream (how terrible to grow so old, infirm and invalid, to feel summer like a chill, trapped not only in skeleton — brittle as archaeology — and flesh — brittle as skeleton — but hobbled by crochet, got up like furniture, all the doily cerements of the old, the caps and shawls and lap robes — and a thousand years ago, it seems, worked out his answer, waits only for the question to be asked, the secret formula of his geologic life, will tell the smart-ass kid whose assignment he will be, will tell, if he can still remember his own remarks, will tell, will say, “Masochism. You’ve got to love pain and worship humiliation”—to be permitted such a long, forced-march lifetime), tries, as if he were trying, working about the obstacles of pain, all the pangs, nips, cramps, and bruises of his land-mined steeplechase being, to draw a very deep breath, to grasp and hold it? Pleasure was in it. He’d been a sort of witness. Shared the witness. With. A baby? How could that be? Since the baby had spoken. He distinctly remembered. Well, distinctly. But they were all babies to him, to a man of his years. The nurses and attendants. So not literally a baby. And there was something illicit. A display or performance. All right, some secret display or performance which had given him, them, himself and the child, pleasure. They’d gone to see some show. On an outing. But without the others in the Home and not to some museum of ancient history like this one today, where all there’d been to look at were some old-fashioned space platforms and obsolete computers like faded daguerreotypes. His nurse. Of course. His nurse. The one who smelled of that foreign tobacco. Whom he sat next to. He’d, they’d — himself and the other old-timer — spied on his nurse. Or that he had the memory now, only couldn’t make sense of that comment afterward, the ancient mariner’s, who’d asked him, “How about them hidey-holes in her hidey- hole, Charley?”

Or that Rena Morgan was exhausted?

Or that Mary Cottle, out of the starting gate serene, her laundered nerve endings smooth as fresh sheets, has begun to feel not the oppression again (which hadn’t been there even in that tunnel-of-love rideup time or even under the circumstances of their imposed coze — the kids calm, sedate, almost contemplative, their attentions absorbed, whatever preoccupied them releasing them for once from whatever had preoccupied them, their pull of obsession, the steady-state tensions of their defective bodies, because, face it, these children, why she bothered with them, who was, after all, the improbable party here, less probable than Nedra Carp, less probable than Bale, were, for her, projections not of the two stillborn fetuses which she did not have or even of the two aborted amniocentesisized fetuses which she did, the two wounded full-term babes themselves, damaged goods, those little suffering citizens whose sealed, suspected tantrums and soft exacerbated lives triggered, probably in inverse ratio, her own violent encounters with herself, her furious fixes) but still an itch, pastel, softer than she’s accustomed to, even tender, locked in the wavelengths and frequencies of something like courtship—nothing alien is alien to her — some strange and lovely magnetism of skin, the compulsive yearning of the centrifugals along the tumbling, degraded orbit of her life, her interests focused for once on the conventional forks, playing catch-up who’d been hung up on fastidy and reserve but who knew her G-spot like the back of her hand, what the fuss was all about; this woman, lusty as a sailor, a fleet, a navy, bringing the spilled beans of her fevers and kindling points like all the pressed and faded roses of love, not barbarians at her gates now but blander, more unsuspected things, not the wired protocols of flesh or her body’s steamy skirmishes and star wars so much as the politics of etiquette and love, all the gossip of the heart and head, of some brand-new flower style like those dumb sexual displays in nature, the bright bandings on birds, say, who do not even know that what they’re wearing is instinct and evolution; that innocent, that naive, up to her ass in guilt and underwear and outraged as someone trying to clear her name, wanting, needing frill and circumstance, some all-the-trimmings life she hadn’t ever lived and hadn’t even known she’d longed to live, her lust diffused, broad and scattered as cloud cover? Or that the old gaffer seated between them, Mudd-Gaddis, could just as easily be patriarch as child, is patriarch, some ancient totem of relation who monitored behavior and whom they had to impress to please, wanting, she who had never wanted anything from men, some soft service, the honorable, ancient courtesies of pleasure: flowers and candy boxes in Romance’s turnstile, toll-booth doorways, vino, gypsy violins, and, later, the more inventive stuff: pet names and pretty speeches, billet-doux, the rose beneath the windscreen wiper, a star of one’s own, sonnets initialed as handkerchiefs, gems in the picnic hamper, cars sent, orchestras bribed, baths drawn — all Soft Soap’s pretty handouts, all Love’s free lunch? Or that wholesome, afferent affections shot from the juiced peripheries of her heart to collect and gather like pooled blood beneath the little old gaffer, child-totem-patriarch’s and Cupid-kid’s dim scrutinies?

So how could Eddy, who could not sort his own, have made anything at all of the jumble of mixed motives and crossed purposes, ordinary and routine as heavy traffic, or seen design in their snarl of wills, feelings, and intentions, asynchronous and asyndeton as timber soaking in a logjam?

4

Well, Colin Bible had seen enough. He’d a feeling he’d disgraced himself. He’d been had. But was in no position to cast aspersions. The guy was as good as his word (though, just as well, not that great in bed). The repair manuals were waiting for him in an outsized manila envelope when he checked his and Bale’s box the next day. There were even some blueprints Matthew had been able to lay his hands on, even a few diagrams of what Colin supposed — he was no mechanical illiterate, after all; he was a nurse, could make a certain sense of x-rays and cardiograms, plug in I.V.’s and administer shots, and just generally knew his way around the human body (oh, yes, he thought, remembering and flushing), which was as complicated as any piece of just machinery — were schemata for wiring, for fire alarm systems, burglar.

But, he saw, the Empire was finished, over, dead. The future, certainly the present, was with the superpowers and the go-getter Nips. They had the nuclears and lasers, they had the highest tech and the microchips and the animatronics. One day soon there wouldn’t be an up-to-date, decent, self-respecting tourist attraction left anywhere between America and the U.S.S.R. Everything else was just scenery — yes, and they had the wilderness areas, the deepest canyons and longest rivers; they had the sunsets; they had the climates — and thrill rides. There’d be nowhere else a dying kid could go.

But his real gloom, his real patriotism, he reserved for Colin back in Blighty in his obsolete waxworks. (We have the wax.) Poor Colin, Colin thought, and could not have said which one of them he had in mind.

No, by disgrace he meant he’d allowed his desperation to show and knew that, in his position, Mary Cottle would not have permitted herself the luxury. He admired the woman, and if he tried to snitch on her that time she’d become separated from the group, that had only been duty. The desperation was something else. Everyone’s desperate, he knew, Mary Cottle included. It was giving oneself permission to reveal it that was off. Like the poet said, most blokes lead lives of quiet desperation, but the poet was wrong. Most blokes shouted it from the rooftops, they shouted and shouted it till the rafters rang. He yearned for the days of his former silence, for the old-time, stiff-upper-lip qualities that made him British and had kept him in the closet. He wanted his quiet desperation back. (It was too late, of course. If they hadn’t maintained such a sterile field in this place — you could practically operate here — his name would be spray-painted all over the lavs by now.) It had been Mary Cottle’s room they’d used, Mary Cottle’s bed — his nursing skills had come in handy when he remade it; Matthew marveled at his hospital corners — and the least he owed her was his silence. He hadn’t told Gale it was not his room. He didn’t know what she was up to in hiring a hall — he’d cut Nedra off when she offered her theories after telling him of its existence — but desperation was bound to be in it. He’d leave her to Heaven. She could be one of the blokes to lead the quiet desperation life. While he, now he was in it, would have to continue to make his unseemly noises.

So the first chance he had he took his manuals and sought Gale out.

“What do you mean?” Gale said. “You’ve got William Henry Harrison there. You’ve got Dwight Eisenhower and Martin Van Buren. Warren Harding, James Knox Polk. You’ve got Republicans and Democrats. I gave you a Whig! I made up a nice assortment.”

“A lovely assortment.”

“I picked it out myself,” Matthew said.

Fags, Colin thought, and had a vagrant image of Matthew Gale’s toes curled in his shoes, smitten, shy and sly beneath the shoelace line. The penny-loafer line, he corrected, and realized Gale was in love, and wondered again if he were holding out on him.

“Matthew?” Colin said.

“What?”

“Are you holding out on me?”

“Holding out? Did I last night?”

“I’m not talking about last night.”

“Whatever are you talking about?”

Fags, he thought. High-minded fag-aristocrat syntax-flourish. “I’m talking about the manuals. Really, Matthew! ‘The Lowdown on Central Heating in the Magic Kingdom!’ ‘Secrets of Mickey Mouse’s Loo Revealed!‘”

“Do you know what would happen if they found out I was giving this stuff away?”

“Trading it,” Colin Bible said.

“Oh,” Matthew Gale said, “we’re KGB, are we? We’re CIA, we’re MI-Five.”

“No, Matthew,” he said, “we’re only a nurse in love.”

“You going to turn state’s evidence?” Matthew wondered gloomily.

“Who, me? What believes in all that allegiance and loyalty? No fear.”

“What are you talking about now?”

“The brotherhood. That old spirit of freemasonry among all the kinds and conditions of homohood,” he said wearily, deciding, Nah, he doesn’t have the goods. “Hey, Matthew?”

“What?”

“You were right. I’d never been blown till I’d been blown by a Gale,” Colin told him kindly as he moved off.

Because everything has a reasonable explanation. Because Colin Bible had seen enough and was ready to try a different tack.

“Come, children,” Colin said.

“We already seen that parade,” said Benny Maxine.

“I want you to see it again.”

“Where are you taking them?” Nedra Carp asked.

“You needn’t come, Miss Carp, if you don’t wish to.”

“Oh, I couldn’t let you go by yourself. Who’d push the girl’s wheelchair?”

“I’ll push it. Benny can handle Mudd-Gaddis’s.”

Maxine looked at the nurse.

“Anyway, I don’t see what the rush is. The parade don’t start for nearly an hour yet,” he said.

There were frequent parades in the Magic Kingdom. Mr. Moorhead had given them permission to stay up one night to watch the Main Street Electrical Parade, a procession of floats outlined in lights like the lights strung along the cables, piers, spans, and towers of suspension bridges. There were daily “character” parades in which the heroes and heroines of various Disney films posed on floats, Alice perched on her mushroom like the stem on fruit; Pinocchio in his avatar as a boy, his strings fallen away, absent as shed cocoon; Snow White flanked by her dwarfs; Donald Duck, his sailor-suited, nautical nephews. They’d seen this one, too. There’d been high school marching bands, drum majors, majorettes, pom-pom girls, drill teams like a Swiss Guard. Tall, rube-looking bears worked the crowd like advance men, parade marshals. Some carried balloons in the form of Mickey Mouse’s trefoil-shaped head, vaguely like the club on a playing card. (Pluto marched by, a Mickey Mouse pennant over his right shoulder like a rifle. “Dog soldier!” Benny Maxine had shouted through his cupped hands. The mutt turned its head and, in spite of its look of pleased, wide-eyed, and fixed astonishment, had seemed to glare at him.) Everywhere there were Mickey Mouse banners, guidons, pennants, flags, color pikes, devices, and standards, the flash heraldics of all blazoned envoy livery. Music blared from the floats, from the high-stepping tootlers: Disney’s greatest hits, bouncy and martial as anthems. It could almost have been a triumph, the bears, ducks, dogs, and dwarfs like slaves, like already convert captives from exotic far-flung lands and battlefields. The Mouse stood like a Caesar in raised and isolate imperiality on a bandbox like a decorated cake. He was got up like a bandmaster in his bright red jacket with its thick gold braid, his white, red-striped trousers. His white gloves were held stiff and high as a downbeat against his tall, white-and-red shako. His subjects cheered as he passed. (You wouldn’t have guessed that Minnie was his concubine. In her polka-dot dress that looked almost like homespun, and riding along on a lower level of a lesser float, she could have been another pom-pom girl.)

It was toward this parade they thought they were headed.

But Main Street was practically deserted.

“What was the rush?” Nedra Carp asked.

“Yeah, where’s the fire?” said Benny Maxine.

“Hang on,” Colin Bible told them. “You’ll see.”

“It’s another half hour yet,” Lydia Conscience said.

“Are we just going to stand around?” Janet Order asked from her wheelchair.

“We could be back in our rooms resting,” Rena Morgan said.

“We can sit over there,” Colin said. He pointed across Main Street to the tiny commons. Old-fashioned wood benches were placed outside a low iron railing that ran about a fenced green.

“We sit here we won’t see a thing once it starts,” Noah Cloth said.

“He’s right,” Tony Word said. “People will line up along the curb and block out just everything.”

“Hang on,” Colin Bible said. “You’ll see.”

About twenty minutes before the parade was scheduled to start, a few people began to take up positions along the parade route.

“Look there,” Colin said.

“Where, Colin?” Janet said.

“There,” he said, “the young berk crossing the street, coming toward us.” He was pointing to an odd-looking man with a wide thin mustache, macho and curved along his lip like a ring around a bathtub. His dark thick sideburns came down to a level just below his mouth. “They’re dyed, you know,” Colin whispered. “They’re polished with bootblack.”

“How would you know that, Colin?” Noah asked.

“Well, not to blind you with science, I’m a nurse, aren’t I? And ’aven’t a nurse eyes, ’aven’t a nurse ’air? When you seen stuff so inky? There ain’t such darkness collected together in all the dark holes.”

“All the dark holes,” Benny Maxine repeated, pretending to swoon.

“Look alive, mate,” Colin scolded, “we’re on a field trip, a scientifìcal investigation.”

“We’re only waiting for the parade to begin,” Lydia said.

“A parade we already seen.”

“Two times.”

“By day and by night.”

“M-I–C K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E.”

“Can’t we give the parade a pass?”

“This,” Colin hissed, “this is the parade! This is the parade and you’ve never seen it! All you seen is the cuddlies, all you seen is the front runner, excellent dolls, happy as Larry and streets ahead of life.”

“Really, Mister Bible,” Nedra Carp said, “such slangy language!”

“Lie doggo, dearie, please. Keep your breath to cool your porridge, Miss Carp.”

“I don’t think this is distinguished, Mister Bible,” Miss Carp said.

“Jack it in,” he told her sharply. “Distinguished? Distinguished? I’m showing them the popsies, I’m showing them the poppets. I’m displaying the nits and flourishing the nut cases. The bleeders and bloods, the yobbos and stooges. I’m furnishing them mokes and bringing them muggins. All the mutton dressed as lamb. No one has yet, God knows, so old Joe Soap will must.”

“Why?”

“Ask me another,” he said.

“Why?”

“They’ve got to find out how many beans make five, don’t they? It’s only your ordinary level pegging, merely keeping abreast. There’s a ton of niff in this world, you know. There’s just lashings and lashings of death. Hark!” He broke off. “Watch what you think you’re going to miss. Hush! Squint!” The man with the mustache and sideburns was passing in front of them.

And now you couldn’t have dragged them away. You couldn’t have rolled Janet Order’s or Mudd-Gaddis’s wheelchair downhill.

“Uh-oh,” Colin Bible said, “we’ve been sold a pup.”

“Snookered!” said one of the children.

“Skinned!” said another.

“Socked!”

“Some mothers have ’em,” Benny Maxine said.

Because they saw that Colin had been wrong.

The man was not young, after all. He could have been in his fifties. He wore cowboy boots, the cheap imitation leather not so much worn as peeling, chipped as paint and mealy and rotten as spoiled fruit. His high raised heels were of a cloudy translucent plastic. Flecks of gold-colored foil were embedded in them like sparks painted on a loud tie. Up close he had the queer, pale, lone, and fragile look of men who cut themselves shaving. Of short-order cooks, of men wakened in drunk tanks or beaten in fights. A bolo tie, like undone laces, hung about a bright pink rayon shirt that fit over a discrete paunch tight and heavy as muscle. A chain that ran through a wallet in the back pocket of his pants was attached to his belt.

Nor were his broad sideburns dyed. They were tattooed along his ears and down his cheeks. His mustache was tattooed. The actual gloss and sheen tattooed too — like highlights in a landscape. Everything only indelible, deep driven inks among the raised scars of his illustrated whiskers.

They were gathering, coming together quickly now, lining up along the curbs, building a crowd, rapidly taking up the best vantage points like people filling a theater. “See ’em? They look like fans at the all-in wrestling,” Colin said wickedly. And they did. Something not so much supportive as impatient and partisan about them. Apple Annies of style, Typhoid Marys of spirit, the men as well as the women, they could have been carriers, not of disease but of vague, pandemic strains on the psyche, on tastes not depleted but somehow made accommodate to the surrender terms of their lives and conditions. As though they’d survived their dreams, even their lives, only to find a need to be at a parade of cartoon characters at Disney World.

It was different with the children, their parents. Oddly in the minority, Colin barely made mention of them, as though most lives came with a grace period, thirty or thirty-five years, say, some fifty-thousand-mile guarantee of the agreeable and routine. It was the widows traveling together he pointed out, the senior citizens up from Miami or down from such places as Detroit or Cleveland on package tours. It was the retirees, the couples unescorted by kids. They were casually dressed, the women in pants suits or sometimes in shorts — it was a mild fall day — the men in Bermudas, in slacks the color of artificial fruit flavors, in white shoes, in billed caps with fishermen’s patches. (Cinderella Castle, towering above them in the background, made them seem more like subjects than ever, reasonably content, well- off, even, but with a whiff of the indentured about them, of an obligated loyalty.)

“Look there!” Colin Bible said. “And there. Look at those over there!”

There was a couple with the lined, bloated, and satisfied heads of midgets. Wens were sprinkled across their faces like a kind of loose change of flesh.

There was a potbellied, slack-breasted man, his wife with bad skin, wrinkled, scarred, pitted as scrotum. They had smooth, fat fingers, and their hands were balled into the ineffectual, hairless fists of babies.

“Look, look there, how ugly!” Colin said.

An angry woman with long dark hair, her back to the street, stood near the couple with the wens. Her hair, tied beneath her chin, looked like a babushka. She stared back at Colin and the children, her black, thick eyebrows exactly the color and shape of leeches above eyes set so deep in her skull they seemed separated from her face, hidden as eyes behind a mask or holes cut from portraits in horror films. A set of tiny lips, Kewpie- doll, bow-shaped, red and glossy as wet paint, and superimposed, grafted onto her real lips like a botched bookkeeping or clumsy work in a child’s coloring book, tinted an additional ferocity into her scrutiny.

“It breaks your heart,” Colin said. “Imperfection everywhere, everywhere. Not like in nature. What, you think stars show their age? Oceans, the sky? No fear! Only in man, only in woman. Trees never look a day older. The mountains are better off for each million years. Everywhere, everywhere. Bodies mismanaged, malfeasanced, gone off. Like styles, like fashions gone off. It’s this piecemeal surrender to time, kids. You can’t hold on to your baby teeth. Scissors cut paper, paper covers rock, rock smashes scissors. A bite of candy causes tooth decay, and jawlines that were once firm slip off like shoreline lost to the sea. Noses balloon, amok as a cancer. Bellies swell up and muscles go down. Hips and thighs widen like jodhpurs. My God, children, we look like we’re dressed for the horseback! (And everywhere, everywhere, there’s this clumsy imbalance. You see these old, sluggish bodies on thin-looking legs, like folk carrying packages piled too high. Or like birds puffed out, skewed, out of sorts with their foundations.) And hair. Hair thins, recedes, is gone. Bodies fall away from true. I don’t know. It’s as if we’ve been nickel-and-dimed by the elements: by erosion, by wind and water, by the pull of gravity and the oxidation of the very air. Look! Look there!”

A middle-aged woman in a print dress waited in house slippers for the parade to begin. She was crying. Tears pushed over the ledges of her eyes. A clear mucus filled a corner of one nostril.

A dowager’s hump draped a pretty young woman’s shoulders and back like a shawl.

They saw the details of a man’s face, the stubble, lines, cleft, dimples, and pores, sharp and clarified as closeups in black-and- white photographs.

Sunglasses in the form of swans, masks, butterflies, or random as the forms of costume jewelry. Odd-shaped wigs and hairdos sat on people’s heads like a queer gardening, a strange botany. And, everywhere, penciled eyebrows, painted lips, like so many prostheses of the cosmetic.

It had begun now, the parade. A well-dressed man in a business suit stood at attention as the floats passed by. He held his hat over his heart. (And sanity, sanity too, marred, scuffed as a shoe, wrinkled as laundry.) It had begun now, but the children weren’t watching. They couldn’t take their eyes off the crowd. (“This, this is the parade!”) They stared at the special area the park had provided for guests in wheelchairs, at the old men and women who sat in them, bundled against some internal chill on even this warm day, wrapped in blankets that tucked over their feet, in sweaters, in scarves, in wool gloves and mittens, covered by hats, by caps, Mickey Mouse’s eared beanies, dark as yarmulkes, on top of their other headgear; at, among them, an ancient woman in a rubber Frankenstein mask for warmth; at her nurse, feeding her cigarettes, venting her smoke through a gap in the monster’s wired jaws. At other women, depleted, tired, who sat on benches, their dresses hiked well above their knees, their legs (in heavy stockings the color of miscegenetic, coffee-creamed flesh) not so much spread as forgotten, separated, guided by the collapsing, melted lines of their thighs. At their husbands (or maybe just the men they lived with, for convenience, for company, for making the welfare checks go farther), their hands in their laps, incurious as people who have just folded in poker. (And everywhere those dark glasses. “It ain’t for the glare,” Colin told them, “it’s for the warmth!”) At grown men and women wearing the souvenirs of the Magic Kingdom: sweat shirts, T-shirts, with Eeyore, with Mickey Mouse, with Jiminy Cricket, Alice-in-Wonderland pinafores, Minnie Mouse dresses, carryalls with Dumbo and Tigger and Tramp. At a woman in her sixties, inexplicably wearing a boa, a turban, a veil of wide, loose black mesh; at hands and arms and shoulders blotched by liver spots; at a man in baggy pants suspiciously, unscrupulously bulging. At a man in shorts, the enlarged veins on his legs like wax dripping down Chianti bottles in Italian restaurants.

At a woman with oily skin and pores like a sort of gooseflesh, visible as the apertures of chickens where their pinfeathers have been plucked. At a still handsome woman with bare, shapely, but hairy legs (hair even on the tops of her feet), but carefully trimmed as sideburns or rolled as stockings two inches below her knees; at a powerfully built man in his sixties whose chest hair, visible through his sheer tank top, had been as lovingly, patiently groomed as a high school boy’s. (Everywhere, everywhere hair — the strange feeling they had that they were among birds, the wigs, the boa, the babushka of hair beneath the woman’s chin, the piled hairdos, the thinning hair, the penciled eyebrows, the tattooed mustache and sideburns of the strange Westerner. Mudd-Gaddis’s own baldness and the chemotherapeutic fuzz of several of the children. Because everything has a reasonable explanation, and almost all had heard that hair didn’t stop growing after you died. Because everything has a reasonable explanation and hair was the gnawed, tenuous rope by which they hung on to immortality.)

Everywhere there were peculiar couples. A boy and a girl who couldn’t have been more than twelve but looked in their runt intimacy as if they could have been married. The boy held his arm protectively about the girl’s shoulder, his free hand in the pocket of his three-quarter-length trench coat as though he fondled a gun. He wore a jacket, a shirt, and a tie. His floods, honed as a knife along their permanent crease, rose above sharp, snazzy shoes. The girl, shorter than her small boyfriend, in a decent wool coat that looked as if it had been bought at a back- to-school sale, smiled wanly. Her black full hair showed signs of gray and she seemed a little nervous, wary, even long-suffering, beneath the arm of her protector, as if she knew his faults, perhaps, his diseases — which weren’t diseases in her book — his excessive drinking, his compulsive gambling, his quick fists and rude abuse.

And stared openly at the mismatched couples: at the big, powerful girls next to undersized men and the men large as football players beside bloodless, scrawny women, at the couples widely discrepant in age in open attitudes of love and regard, handholding or clutching butts, the men’s fingers casually resting along breasts as if they lolled in water. Or their arms thrown abruptly across each other’s shoulders. Sending the smug signals of secret satisfactions, like the wealthy, perhaps, like people in drag.

And at a closely supervised group of the retarded, oddly ageless, the males in overalls, the females in loose, shapeless dresses and rolled stockings, clutching one another with their short fat fingers, their strange, pleased eyes fixed in their happy Smile Faces like raisins in cakes, beaming above their neglected teeth, beaming, beaming beneath their close-cropped hair on their broad, short skulls.

(Yet most were not defective, merely aging or old, or anyway beyond that thirty- or thirty-five-year grace period that seemed to come with most lives.)

Not even needing Colin now to direct their attention, to point things out. In it themselves now, raising their voices, like people outbidding each other in some hot contest, not even listening; or, if listening, then listening for the break in the other’s discourse, for that opportune moment when they could have their say, get in their licks; or, if listening, then listening not just for the other to finish but for some generalized cue, some more or less specific tag on which they could build, add, like players of dominoes, say, or card games that followed strict suit. But generally too excited even for that. Only half listening, really, less, fractionally, marginally, seeing how it was with them and concentrating only on the essence, pith, and gist of what they would say, thinking in a sort of deliberate and polite headlines but settling finally into a kind of conversation and still using the language of that other kingdom, the one they’d come from to get to this one.

“Lord love a duck!” said Janet Order. “Just clap eyes on these gaffers.”

“My word, Janet! They’re for it, I’d say so,” Rena Morgan agreed.

“Lamb turning to mutton.” Janet sighed.

“Fright fish.”

“Blood puddles.”

“Lawks!” said Benny Maxine. “Look at the bint with the healthy arse. I’m gone dead nuts on that fanny.”

“Ooh, it’s walloping big, ain’t it?” Tony Word said.

“If it ever let off it wouldn’t ’alf make a pongy pooh,” Benny asserted.

“Like Billy-O!” Tony said.

“Good gracious me!” said Lydia Conscience. “Say what you will, my heart goes out to the old biddy what looks like someone put her in the pudding club.”

“Yar, ain’t she dishy? There’s one in every village.”

Tony Word considered. “No,” he said. “She’s just put on the nose bag. It’s simply a case of your lumping, right grotty greedguts.”

“Only loads of grub then, you think?” Lydia asked.

“Oh, yes,” said Tony. “Oodles of inner man. Tub and tuck.”

“Jesus weeps!” said illiterate Noah Cloth, looking about, his gaze settling on the little group of the retarded. “He weeps for all the potty, pig-ignorant prats off their chumps, for all the slowcoach clots and dead-from-the-neck-up dimbos, and wonky, puddled coots and gits, goofs and goons, for all his chuckleheaded, loopy muggins and passengers past praying for.”

“Put a sock in it, old man,” Benny Maxine said softly.

“For all the nanas,” Noah said, crying now. “For all the bright specimens.”

“Many’s the nosh-up gone down that cake hole,” Tony Word said, his eye fixed on the fat woman Lydia Conscience had thought pregnant. “Many’s the porky pots of tram-stopper scoff and thundering stodge through that podge’s gob,” he said without appetite.

“She’s chesty,” Rena Morgan said, weeping, of a woman who coughed. “She should put by the gaspers.”

“She’s had her day,” said Janet Order.

“Coo! Who ain’t?” Rena, sobbing, wanted to know. “Which of us, hey? Which of them?”

“Are they all on the dream holiday then?” Charles Mudd- Gaddis asked.

“All, old son, and no mistake,” Lydia Conscience said wearily.

“A shame,” he said. “Letting themselves go like that. And them with their whole lives in front of them.”

And, at last, just rudely pointing. (They could have been mutes waving at entrées, aiming at desserts in a cafeteria line.) Whirling, indiscriminate, flailing about in some random “J’accuse” of the spontaneous. Whining, wailing, whimpering, weeping.

Because everything has a reasonable explanation. They lived in England’s cold climate. They came from a place where clothes made their men and their women. They were unaccustomed to sportswear, to shorts and the casual lightweights and washables of the near tropics. They were unaccustomed, that is, to the actual shapes of people and simply did not know that what they saw was just the ordinary let-hung-out wear and tear of years, of meals, of good times and comforts and all the body’s thoughtless kindnesses to itself. So that when Colin said what he said they believed him.

“I tell you,” he told them, “that’s you in a few years, never mind those three-score-and-ten you thought was your birthright. All that soured flesh, all those bitched and bollixed bodies. You see? You see what you thought you were missing?”

“Bodies,” Nedra Carp said. “Don’t tell me about bodies. I know about bodies.”

“I’ve got them!” Colin Bible shouted, bursting into the room he shared with Bale, with Mudd-Gaddis and Benny. “I’ve got their consents in my pocket!”

5

So Nedra Carp knew about bodies.

If nothing else, her duties as a nanny had given her expertise in that department. (Hadn’t she bathed and toweled dozens of children? Hadn’t she helped bathe and actually dress all those step- and less-than-step—“stair relation,” she called them — brothers and sisters of her early years?) And if her expertise was largely limited to the bodies of children, why, weren’t the bodies of children bodies in their purest form? Didn’t children wear the sharp, original shape of form itself? Hairless, without extrusion or eyesore, the blemish of sex? (She was no prude. She did not mean blemish. She only meant the body distracted from itself, allowed to drift from its intentions, from the air-and skin-tight condition of bone in its bearings: the baroque scroll and ornament of palimpsest flesh.) She had rub-a-dub-dubbed girls and boys for almost as long as she could remember and, seated on stools and chairs for leverage, drawn their bodies to her within the open V of her legs (and as little pederast as prude), vigorously scrubbing, rubbing, grooming them — for bed, for parties — as if they’d been poodles in shows, the texture of their skins and every inch and hollow of their bodies known to her even beneath the thick, rough nap of the towels and soft, slippery film and feel of the soap, discounting the misleading temperature of the water. Practicing on all that devolutionary line, her mitigated steps and halves (the two stepchildren, the stepbrother and stepsister, the half sister, the half brother, the three — what? — cousin sisters and her half brother’s sister, half brother and half sister and two stepsisters by the double widower, so that for the rest of her life she feels she stands — she doesn’t know where she stands — as much in sororal parentis as loco), the way some other little girl might play with dolls.

So, without ever having had any very particular interest in them, she knew about bodies. At least was accustomed to them, the little boys and girls just so much neutral doll stuff to her. Knew, that is, their surfaces, their skins, polishing them, buffing their luster like firearms for inspection. As long ago, or for the child long ago (when she was five, when she was six, when she was seven and eight and nine), she had once buffed her own, slipping out of her bed when Nanny had read her her book, when, the child feigning sleep, the woman had leaned over her and made one last adjustment of the bedclothes, the little girl’s hair, and tiptoed out of the room, Nedra listening for her steps to fade before leaving the bed to go to the wardrobe, where, if it was during the warm months, she looked inside the sleeve of her thick winter coat or, during the cold, the sleeve of her lightweight summer one for the carefully rolled towel she hid there, returning not to the bed but to the full-length mirror that stood, out of sight of the window, in the corner of her room, there to remove the pretty nightdress and to examine her chest where she could not remember when she did not know one day breasts would grow, to see if the small, discrete port-wine stain, no larger and not unlike the partial ring that might be made by a damp glass set down on a wooden surface, was still there.

Which it always was, of course.

Using the towel, but only in those warm months first lubricating its edge with her spittle or with water from the glass on her night table (because a little wetness would not leave a mark on the grand, thick winter wool, whereas the light summer one easily spotted), at first patiently rubbing at it for as long as ten minutes, as if she wished to make it shine perhaps rather than disappear (and only in the cold months applying the elbow grease, using the material like an eraser rubber, scratching at it with the dry towel, abrading, scouring, swiping at it as one would strike a match against a strip of friction, actually scraping it until it bled — although never with her nails, though she longed to tear at it and was held back only by scruple, some prohibition she’d heard of against self-mutilation — raising welts, raising galls, bruising her bruise), only then switching from damp end to dry, going at it for ten more minutes or so but still gently — it was summer, it was close in the room, effort raised perspiration, and Nedra could not tolerate the smell of her own sweat, as she could not tolerate any of her imperfections — still with that same craftsman’s restrained and delicate patience. (So maybe it was the warm months that saved her, that kept her from raising a cancer too, that reprieved her from the English climate with its three-to-one ratio of cool to warm like a recipe for a pitcher of martinis.)

Though her nanny could see the results when she bathed her.

“Are you still playing with that thing on your chest?”

“I don’t play with it.”

“You do. One day you’re going to develop a nice case of blood poisoning from that nasty tic.”

But the nanny was wrong. It wasn’t a tic. What she did wasn’t unconscious, in no way like biting her nails or fooling with her hair, although she had neither of these habits. All she wanted was to be rid of the thing, to have it whitewashed away by her furious frictions. (And, sometimes — this would have been during the warm months, past her bedtime, the pale sunlight coming into her bedroom window, mixing with the light from the ceiling fixture, the lamp on her night table, or during the cold months, the night slamming against the window glass, the room’s only light coming off the dim wattage of the fixture on the ceiling and the lamp on the night table — she believed that the thing was actually fading.)

The doctor saw it when she went for examinations.

“Does it hurt?”

“No.”

“Does it itch?”

“No.”

“Then why fool with it? You’re just irritating it, you know. You’re going to end up with a bad infection. I’ll give her a salve for that thing. I want this put on the area every night after her bath for five days. Now, Nedra,” the doctor said, “this medicine is very strong. It’s a steroid ointment and you mustn’t scrape at it. You have to let the ointment do its work.”

Which Nanny applied and which Nedra, misunderstanding, and seeing that so far the salve had merely helped to take down the rawness without doing anything to the stain itself, and believing that the doctor was afraid of dispensing it in too strong a dose — she’d lost a mum; she knew about dosages, strong drugs, the reluctance doctors had to let a patient have them even when they were clearly helping; her mum’s morphine, for example, which the doctor told her mum she could take every four hours but which she needed again after two — continued to apply herself for another week, until, in fact, there was no more left in the tube and she had developed an ugly rash all over her body. The doctor told her she was allergic to steroids and no longer prescribed them. The rash cleared up in a while but the stain was still there.

Which she knew the name for now — stigma — and looked up in her father’s dictionary. Learning that the purplish, iridescent flaw she wore like a piece of costume jewelry branded into her skin was, variously, “a mark burned into the skin of a criminal or slave; a mark or token of infamy, disgrace, or reproach”; and, under Medicine, “a mark on the skin that bleeds as a symptom of hysteria; a mark indicative of a history of a disease or abnormality”; and, far down, at the end of the list, past its biological definitions—“the respiratory spiracle of an insect or an eyespot in algae”—and botanical ones, she read that stigmata were “sores corresponding to and resembling the crucifixion wounds of Jesus”—not hers, which more closely resembled a crescent moon stamped by that hypothetical glass of beer, say, left to dry on that hypothetical bar—“and sometimes impressed on certain persons in a state of religious ecstasy or hysteria.”

Not, she felt, a lot to choose from: the sores of hysterics; the tokens of infamy, disgrace, reproach; the marks of the abnormal; the brands on criminals and slaves. (She was marked. She was a marked little girl. She would become a marked woman.) She settled for slave and turned to the nannies.

A mother’s helper’s helper. Apprenticed herself to the nannies.

Who by this time, her mother’s house almost completely populated now — she was ten, her mum had died when Nedra was four, her dad when she was nine, her stepmother had remarried the widower and would within two years be dead herself, leaving the double widower free to marry, to bring his bride, herself a widow with two children, into their little club — as solidly booked as a reputable bed-and-breakfast, not only welcomed her but probably would actively have enlisted her if she hadn’t asked first. Transferring her old reflexive rub-a-dub- dub — she’d ceased swiping at the thing on her chest, the stigma — to the babies, all those doll substitutes whom she bathed and toweled almost as roughly as she’d done herself. The nannies attempting to make her ease off, to lighten up. “Nedra, don’t flay them so.” Taking the washcloth from her, the soap, giving her lessons in the soft, trying to. “You’re not whittling wood, Nedra dear. You must be more gentle with them.” And who would probably have given up on her altogether if it hadn’t been for all those deaths, the possibilities they continued to create for the marriages of the survivors to more widows, more widowers, with their own complement of kids. (They were shortsighted — she thought of the succession of nannies that came into her mother’s home as “they,” thought there probably was never more than one nanny in the place at any one time — and didn’t understand what was really happening. It’s only the deaths of the adults, Nedra thought, that keeps things manageable here at all.) And who at last, seeing that she would never learn, did not have the touch with babies, sent her on to the toddlers. Who — if only because they were bigger, stronger, had larger lung capacities, if only because they’d been around longer, had developed a frame of reference against which they could measure their treatment in Nedra’s hands against what they had received in the less dockwalloper ones of the real nannies, if only because they had begun to develop at least the inklings of a sense of indignation — made even more fuss than the babies.

So she was off toddlers now too and (because they saw that there was nothing actually mean about her and that her fury was without rancor and was probably only a sort of dedication, and something more, perhaps, something they recognized from their own old apprenticeships, just the helpless and maybe even just wanton sign of her accession and assent to her vocation, her nanny calling) promoted (who hadn’t properly graduated either infants or toddlers) to out-and-out children.

She would have been about eleven, she would have been about twelve. There would have been, not counting herself, around eight kids in her mother’s house by now. Nine when the double widower and the new stepmother once removed had a child of their own.

This was the pool from which the nannies had to choose. And if Nedra were twelve now and had already gone through all the infants and toddlers with whom they dared entrust her, then the only out-and-out children around — the stepsister and stepbrother were just a year or two younger — were her half sister and half brother, the only other Carps in the house.

They tried her out on the half sister, but the little girl was frail and could not stand up to Nedra’s furious drubbings.

They gave her one last chance. They sent her into the bathroom to eight-year-old Gregory.

She saw him through the steam. He saw her as she moved toward him through the vaporish idiom of the damp tiles, the slippery marble. He was startled and, up to his chin in a lather of bubble bath, at a disadvantage.

“Hoicks! Yoicks and hoicks! What are you doing here?”

“I’m supposed to help bath you.”

“What, help bath me?”

“Come on, Gregory, give me the washcloth, please.”

“What for?”

“Hand it over, Gregory. I haven’t all day.”

“What are you, daft? You think I’m going to let some girl? No hope!”

“Don’t be silly, Gregory. Nanny’s bathed you for years.”

“Yeah, well, that’s Nanny, i’n’ it? You’re different pickles, ain’t you?”

“I’m your sister.” Her response to his offended modesty was obvious, even logical, but it was lame. Both knew that. There’d been little casual intimacy in this house. For all that the various issue of the strange, relay-race relationships and liaisons between their various parents lived and played together, took meals on the same schedules, had more or less the same bedtimes, shared the same clothes, lived behind the same unlocked doors, and, as they grew into it, were even at the same liberty to move at will about the same rooms and halls — her mother’s rooms, her mother’s halls — they hadn’t often, and Nedra never, run into each other in even only ordinary familial propinquity’s catch- as-catch-can dishabille. She didn’t know why, or how it had happened, but it was a little like being guests living in the same hotel. The occasional compromised glimpse of another was simply not in the cards. There were, simply, no embarrassing moments. Nedra’s forays into child management had permitted her certain privileged “views,” even a kind of hands-on experience, but she was so busily engaged at these times — so furiously, some would have said — that she barely regarded the sex of whomever it was she was bathing.

“Go on,” Gregory Carp said. “Get out of here. G’wan!”

“Not till I’ve done you.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve heard you like that sort of thing. Sorry,” he said and, partially raising himself, tried to pull the shower curtain around the tub. Nedra grabbed it away — he was her last chance, the nannies had told her so — and folded the curtain high up over the shower rod. Gregory looked at her. “Oh, yes,” he said, “a regular bruiser’s what I hear. Jack the Ripper, they call you in nursery. Scrub the spots off a leopard. You’re queen of the queer-o’s, you are, Nedra.”

“You’re wasting time, young man.” She was on her knees, her sleeves rolled. She reached into the bathtub, searching with her hands for the washcloth. She pulled it from under his thigh.

“Go on, get away from me! Stop that! You better stop that!”

“You want them to hear you scream?”

“Too right I do!”

She rubbed his arms with the soapy cloth. He suddenly lay back in the water. “Sit up,” she told him and he raised up a bit, the bubbles clinging to his chest like a soft chain mail. She scrubbed under his arm. He was ticklish. He began to giggle. “Don’t be silly, Gregory. Gregory, don’t be so silly.” Her half brother was laughing uncontrollably now. He grabbed a handful of bubbles and threw them at her. Something about their weightless trajectory amused her. She smiled and scooped up some of the bubbles herself. It was a little like trying to throw feathers. Indeed, all of this was like some weightless, glorious pillow fight. They slapped at each other with thousand-faceted airy boluses of bubble bath. The stuff was on her clothes, on her face, in her hair. Then her brother pushed himself all the way up in the water and began splashing her. He shoved sheets of it at her, pushing the water away from his chest with his palms.

Which was when she first noticed it, saw it.

It was, of course, the thing, the port-wine stain, the partial ring, the costume-jewelry crescent, the iridescent purple flaw brand bruise stigma, the hysterical abnormal infamy skin token. He had one too. He was marked too. And now she saw what it really looked like. It looked like a lip.

It was right there on her half brother’s chest, exactly, though reversed, where it was on her own, placed just so, where she could not remember when she had not known that one day breasts would grow.

It was at this time that Nedra began to work on their alliance, bringing into it, too, because she thought it was what Gregory would have wanted, Gregory’s sister, offering the little girl special relationship, favored-nation status; not suspecting that, except for their own, there were no special relationships in that house, that blood didn’t matter, neither full brotherhood, the fractured, fractioned fellowship of the descending halves and steps, nor any of the shadowy stair relation there: that nothing counted, not even normal friendship; not knowing that everything was exactly as her metaphor had it, that the others were no closer than guests staying in the same hotel (soon enough dropping the sister, when her half brother lightly mentioned his indifference to the child, feeling worse about it than he did), sitting on her own appetites to feed his, bringing him treats, saving him her desserts, reserving part of her allowance and, when they had gotten rid of the sister, the frail little girl who couldn’t stand up to her drubbings, adding to it that part of the tithe — it amounted to a tithe, the little girl’s portion — which Nedra (because she still believed in his goodwill, his generosity, sometimes actually chastising the boy for being too free with his — that is to say, Nedra’s — money, spending too much on the cheap toys bought with coins held back from her own reserves and which otherwise would have been added to what she held back, still from her own reserves, to spend on Gregory) had withheld from Gregory’s — she thought of it as Gregory’s — money.

Because all she wanted to do was look at it, study it (not even touch it, actually ceasing to bathe him, not because he was too big, which he was, but because she did not want to fall again into her old patterns, did not wish ever again to inflict pain, even helplessly, even unconsciously, did not wish to administer — she had thrown the towel away — any of those at once thoughtless and obsessive rub-downs with which she had once raised welts on her own body and brought tears to the eyes of her clear- skinned halves, steps, and stairs), not even mentioning to him, though she wanted to, that she had one too.

They played. She was four years his senior. They played his games.

They played Fish, they played Old Maid. They pinned the tail on the donkey and fought wars with lead soldiers. She pushed him on the swing, she pulled him on the roundabout. She gave him piggyback rides. (She thought she could feel its heat through his jacket, through his shirt and undershirt, through her blouse and sweater and her own undershirt, the hot indelibles of his skin radiating through the half-dozen layers of fabric that separated them and warming her somewhere behind her heart at the contact point where he jounced against her.)

“You know, Nedra,” he said one day, “I’ve almost gone ten. I’m big for my age, as big as you are. It looks daft, your hauling me about.”

“You’re light as a feather,” she said.

“No,” he said. “I feel quite silly.” She had been about to carry him across the common, where quite recently she had begun to teach him to play rounders, where they leaned into each other in clumsy two-man rugby scrimmages, where they played a sort of hockey together, where they kicked the football about that Nedra had bought for him. They would have headed toward the small playground, where she still pushed him on the swing, where she still pulled him on the roundabout.

“All right then,” she said. “You carry me.”

Because she still hadn’t shown him, hadn’t told him. Not because it was a secret but because she was saving it, squirreling it away against the time when she would need it — perhaps the time had come, perhaps his misgivings about the piggyback rides was its presage — to bond him to her as she had been bonded to him for almost two years now. Her pretexts had begun to seem threadbare even to Nedra; the rough games they played and which had been her idea, the girl’s, who knew nothing about boys’ sports, not really, who had neither taste nor aptitude for them and had forced herself to bone up, to learn them from the rule books, and who practiced by herself in what spare time she had the fundamentals of football, of rugby and rounders and hockey, whose only game prior to the time she needed to know them had been washing children, playing nursemaid, and who had actually become quite competent at them, the rough games, if only so she could show them to him, keep him with her, keep him entertained. And who hadn’t known at the time that the pretext of teaching him sports would develop subsequent pretexts, that the sweat he worked up would become a pretext to get him to take off his shirt, to wipe him down. So that she could stare at it, study it, see if it was still there.

So his misgivings about the piggyback rides weren’t entirely unwelcome. She could see the advantages, all her served purposes. Which was why she didn’t put up a fight, why she was so quick to suggest that they trade places and the boy carry her. Because she hadn’t told him yet, and because she really didn’t know how to tell him even if the time was right.

“I won’t be too heavy for you, will I?” the fourteen-year-old girl asked the almost ten-year-old boy.

“No,” he said as she climbed on his back.

Because perhaps he’ll feel it, she thought. Because perhaps he’ll feel it and know from the heat and I won’t have to tell him.

But he said nothing when he put her down.

He’s shy, she thought. He’s just like me.

“Did you feel anything strange?” she asked him.

“You’ve got sharp tits,” he said. “You’ve got tits like tenpenny nails.”

What could I expect? she thought. He’s too shy. I should never have asked him that.

So she waited until they got home. She didn’t point out that he was perspiring, that he was overheated. She took him directly to her room and closed the door.

“You can’t expect to go down to the table looking like that,” she said. “Take your shirt off.”

“Nedra,” he said.

“I’m not fooling, young man. Take it off.”

And because he perfectly well understood that blood didn’t matter in that house, special relationships, friendship, and knew where his treats were coming from, the desserts and the gifts and the extra money and his lessons in games, he agreed. He took his shirt and undershirt off and dutifully extended them to his queen of the queer-o’s bonkers half sister. Who took them from him and let them drop to the floor.

“Don’t you want to wipe me off? What are you doing? Hey,” he said, “what’s going on?”

“Look,” she said. “See?”

“Jesus, sis,” he said, “this is the best treat of all!”

And stood perfectly still as she came toward him and touched what at that moment Nedra didn’t even realize were the breasts which she could not remember when she had not known one day would grow, to the iridescent purple flaw on his chest, locking their matching jigsaw stigmata, pressing her costume jewelry nether lip to his pouting, port-wine-stained, crescent upper one.

He was full ten when he came to her. She remembered because he was wearing the handsome tweed touring cap she had given him on his birthday.

He cleared his throat, making it seem that he’d come upon her unaware and, out of honor, was not only signaling her attention but giving her an opportunity to collect herself, pretending not his invisibility but hers.

“Gregory,” she said.

“I find,” her half brother said, “I may no longer in good conscience honor our special relationship.”

“Oh?”

“Though I shall always half love you.”

Janet Order, Nedra Carp suddenly finds herself thinking, Janet Order, Janet Order. Livid Janet Order, Little Girl Blue, she thinks, who seems to defy Nedra’s longtime policies of bought-and-paid-for hired-hand love — it was, she acknowledged, a flaw — and old propinquitous patriotics and aversives, her dependence, for example, on the authorized and her slavish regard for her charges, the affront, for example, she took at just plain pure otherness, shared toilets and someone else’s hair in the comb, boxes of other women’s tampons and all the mnemonics of alternative being — it was a flaw, it was a flaw — her queasy antipatheticals and squeamish inimicals flaws (who would have resented Mary Cottle, for example, for no other reason than that she carried the Poppins baptismal name), her xenophobics and the coin’s other side, her played favorites flaws, flaws, her old pagan Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down determinations flaws, flaws, flaws.

But forgiving herself by the light and shine of her turned new leaf, Nedra feels sympathy for the girl who went both of them one better. Janet Order, she thinks, quite simply, quite suddenly awed. Janet Order. Janet Order. Who was herself a bruise, her entire body one brute blue stigma.

While in Mary Cottle’s room, Mr. Moorhead examined his Jew.

Because he was enough of a social animal never to volunteer at parties and gatherings that he was a pediatrician, or even an ex-casualty-ward physician. (But not courageous enough an egoist to proclaim himself, though he believed himself to be — and may in fact have been — one of the best diagnosticians in the world. And never mentioned what he absolutely knew to be the case: that what he really was was the finest prognostician ever to have lived. And though he may have wanted, at one of the Queen’s garden parties, say, to blurt this out to those stuffy O.B.E.’s, he knew well enough what the upshot would be — they would put him down as demented — and held his tongue. But give him credit, Mr. Moorhead thought. It was out of neither modesty nor fear that he failed to offer his strong suit. It was good, honest prudence. The fact was, his gift was a curse. He knew outcomes. He knew when people would die. He handicapped death. And while he might have been no master of the social graces, he knew enough about human nature to realize that unless a person was a pretty good sport, reeling off his mortality table might be too off-putting. They’d mark him down, he giggled, as a wet blanket at Her Majesty’s garden parties!

(Once he had. It was the first time he’d been asked to one, and he was a little squiffed. He’d boasted his forte to an eminent philanthropist. The man had been fascinated, telling the physician his medical history, leading him on to that point in the conversation where he was about to ask the awful question. Moorhead saw it coming — he was, after all, a prognostician — but there was no way to stop him. “I’ve told you,” he said at last, “more than a little bit about myself. So what do you think? What do you think, eh?” Sometimes knowing that a thing will happen provides the opportunity to deal with it when it does — he was, after all, a doctor — and he was ready for him. “Sir,” Moorhead told him indignantly, “I’m neither spiritualist, fortuneteller, nor flim-flam man. I’m a scientist. I will not perform parlor tricks for you!” And nervously awaited the millionaire’s reaction, which even to Moorhead’s half-slewed mind was a beat too long in coming. The fellow looked round slowly, taking in Buckingham Palace’s lush grounds, the ceremonial costumes of the guards, the fringed extravagant tents standing like Camelot. “Some parlor,” he said as Moorhead moved off. He was a pediatrician and knew a thing or two about childishness as well as about children and wasn’t surprised to see the man looking after him, Moorhead trying to lose himself among the other guests when the old boy came up to him again and actually ignoring him when he — he was a full-fledged Sir, one of the wealthiest men in England, and, in Mr. Moorhead’s best professional judgment, would not last two years — tried to intrude on the pediatrician and his new companions.) So when they asked, he simply told them “physician,” letting it go at that, knowing human nature well enough to understand that everyone wanted to learn about his symptoms, offering up their bodies like patriots, volunteers, recruits of their own raw mortality.

He didn’t mind these intrusions. He didn’t mind people picking his brains. In fact, he welcomed it. But he needed data. These weren’t data. They were anecdotal evidence, loose, quick- draw evaluations made at parties and never followed up by examinations and tests, the obituaries he sometimes spotted in the papers the only corroboration of his findings.

So when he asked the woman the time — he’d been hanging about the fringes of the queue looking impatient, as if he’d been stood up — and saw the bracelet of tattooed numbers on her arm, he shrugged his disgust at other people’s unreliability and drifted into line beside her. He offered small talk about the queue’s progress — he said “queue,” hoping she’d pick up on the foreign-sounding word — about the park’s attractions, his accommodations, about, finally, what he was doing in Florida. An international medical convention in Miami, he said.

“You’re a doctor?”

“Yes,” he said, “a physician. Yes. I am. From England.”

“From England,” she said. “I lived in England. In Liverpool.”

“Did you?” he said. “I had a surgery in Liverpool after I came down from university. This would have been around ’57. There were still refugees about. From the camps.”

He had to raise his voice over the ruckus of the Country Bear Jamboree. After the show his colleague had still not shown up, and he asked if she cared to join him for lunch at the Liberty Tree Tavern. They could have a schnaps, he said.

The woman — he judged her to be about the same age he was, perhaps a year or two older; she would have been eighteen or nineteen after the war — declined and said she was tired and thought she would return to her room for a nap.

He walked along beside her for a while in silence.

“Look,” he said at last, “I don’t mean to pry, but has anyone ever triangulated those cysts on your face?”

So now, two days later, she is lying on Mary Cottle’s bed in her slip. She has complaints but Moorhead has shushed her, explaining that too much has been made lately of patient feedback, that a diagnosis independently arrived at is more likely to be sound than one in which the patient leads her doctor around by the nose.

He finishes his examination and is returning his instruments to the black leather bag.

“You may put your clothes on,” he says and hands the woman her dress. He goes into Mary Cottle’s bathroom and washes his hands in Mary Cottle’s sink.

“So what’s the story?” she asks when he’s back in the room. “Will I live?”

Mr. Moorhead frowns. “Obviously”—he indicates the room—“the facilities in here — Tell me, Mama, have you any family pictures?”

“Pictures.”

“Family pictures.”

“To tell you the truth, Doc, I don’t make a move without my snaps, but no one ever asked before.”

“I’m looking for possible genetic pathologies.”

“Oh,” she says, “genetic pathologies,” and hunts about in her big purse. She digs out a large blue plastic holder like an oversized wallet. It is held together by rubber bands and is stuffed with photographs.

Mr. Moorhead takes a ballpoint pen from Mary Cottle’s desk drawer, some hotel stationery, seats himself at the desk, turns on the three-way lamp to its highest position, pulls a chair over for the woman, and inserts the jeweler’s loupe in his eye.

“Hand them to me one at a time and tell me their relation to you.”

“That’s Danny, my grandson,” she says and shows him a color photograph of a spoiled-looking little boy playing a computer game in a finished basement in Shaker Heights, Ohio. “The little girl is Debbie, Danny’s sister.”

“I meant—” he says.

She shoves another photograph under his loupe. “That’s my son Ben. That’s his wife, Susan.” They are sitting in an open Chrysler convertible.

“Those are Ben and Susan’s twins, Sheila and Sharon. Ben and Susan can’t have children. They’re adopted.”

She shows him dozens of photos. They are all in color and have a matte finish. They are of birthday parties in paneled rec rooms. They are of affairs in hotels — weddings, bar mitzvahs — with great flower centerpieces on the tables. She identifies all the guests.

“There’s my other son, Ron. Danny and Debbie’s father.”

“I don’t see any resemblance,” Mr. Moorhead says.

“Any resemblance.”

“Between you and your grandkids. Between you and your sons.”

“They favor my husband.”

“Who resembles you?”

“Sharon does. Sheila.”

“But they’re adopted.”

She shrugs.

“Was there some medical reason — is it Ben? Ben. Ben and your daughter-in-law couldn’t have kids?”

“Ben had a vasectomy.”

“Oh,” says the physician.

“He says it’s wrong to bring your own children into this kind of world.”

She points to a photo of another son, Donald, a draper in California. Donald is also childless. “He says to me, ‘Ma, you want your grandchildren to grow up under the Shadow?’ This is what he calls it — the Shadow.”

“He means the Bomb?”

“He lives in Mill Valley. He means the San Andreas fault.”

He sees a picture wrapped in cellophane. It’s of Mack, her dead husband.

“Was it his second stroke that killed him?”

She looks frightened. “How did you know?”

“His grin doesn’t cross to the left side of his face.”

“Boy,” she said, “you know your onions.” She fingered the small, light-colored cysts on her face.

“I’d like to get your family history,” Mr. Moorhead told her. “Your parents, your grandparents, your brothers and sisters. Blood aunts and blood uncles, their children.”

She nodded.

“Are we talking about a large family?”

“Yes,” she said.

“And you people are from—?”

“Poland.”

“Much history of cancer?”

“No C-A-N-C-E-R,” she said.

“Heart disease? Stroke?”

“Counting Mack?”

“Mack was your husband,” Moorhead said. “He’s not related.”

“No,” she said.

“Diabetes?”

“No,” she said.

“There’s a high incidence of diabetes among Polish Jews.”

“Not by us,” she said.

There was no abdominal pain; there had been no cirrhosis, no anemia, no arthritis, no asthma, no back pain.

“Gallbladder? Gallstones?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Convulsions? Colon difficulties?”

“Feh!”

There’d been no pulmonary history, no pleurisy, no pneumonia.

“What about depression?”

“All in your head.”

“How about gonorrhea, how about syphilis?”

“Say,” she said, “who do you think you’re talking to?”

“Diverticulitis.”

“Knock on wood, no.”

He asked about edema. She shook her head. He asked her about gastroenteritis. She shook her head.

“Microcephaly? Hyperplasia? Hypocolemia? Hemoptysis? Syncope? Ischemia or transient ischemic attack syndrome?”

“Bite your tongue.”

Mr. Moorhead put down his pencil. “We are talking about a large family, you said.”

“Oh,” she said, “enormous.”

He picked his pencil up again. “Vascular dysfunction?”

She shook her head. As she did when he asked her if anyone in her family had ever had hemorrhoids or palpitations or varicose veins or vertigo or an infection of the urinary tract. As she did when he asked about scabies or hepatitis or lupus or Parkinson’s disease.

“Tuberculosis, poison ivy?”

“Out of the question.”

As, it turned out, it was all out of the question: hernia and obesity and rectal bleeding and hyperthyroid and blisters and osteoporosis and renal failure and senile dementia and paresis and paresthesia and effusions of the pleurae and vaginitis and thyroid. Disease itself was out of the question, and all pathologies.

But still she has her complaints. Which Moorhead, dispirited and out of touch with his own theories, who can’t even summarize them now, who can’t say why he needed photographs, the old gemütlich formal sepia poses and black-and-white candids, only halfheartedly hears.

“Well,” she says, “you’re English. Socialized medicine, the National Health. Didn’t I live after the war two years there? When my papers came through in five months? And I could have gone anywhere? The whole world to choose from? But stayed on to finish my pronunciation studies, my enunciation lessons? And don’t forget, I already knew a little English. Enough to get by. But how can a Jew get by with an accent? A yid, a mockie, a hymie, a kike. So this is my fear, doctor. What’s upsetting me so. It could come back. The accent. Sometimes I hear it. So vut if dere’s trouble? Vut den? Vut vill be? Vut den vut vill be?”

“Please,” he says. Moorhead presses her again. “Please, I beg you.”

“Nu,” she says, “he begs me. He begs me, de docteh.”

And, on the waters behind the Contemporary, Colin Bible, his spirits revitalized by prospects he has brought about himself — it’s neither immoral nor a particularly big deal for someone who negotiates with the sick, up to here in other people’s pain and disease, to seem to take on an aspect of exceptional health, this bonus of well-being, this juxtaposed by-contrast aura of splendid, shining, booming energy, his scale immortality a perk, like loose change snapped up after the show by ushers, say — toodles about Bay Lake looking for a port of call. Mary Cottle waits with the children at the marina. She gazes out as if to sea, her eyes peeled for Colin’s tiny speedboat.

“’Scuse me, if a poor death-blemished lad might ’ave a word wif da nice healfy lady.”

“I’m sorry, Benny, are you talking to me?”

“Well, only tryin’, you might say. Only makin’ the odd modest effort.” He winks at Mudd-Gaddis. He winks at Rena.

“What is it, Benny? If something’s on your mind, be good enough to say what it is, please. I’m a bit browned with your indirection. Goodness, boy, you talk just like an informer lately. You do. You really do. Like a copper’s nark. All these light kicks and promptings. I only speak like this,” she adds, “because I love you.”

“Oh, aye,” says Benny, snorting, “browned.”

“Are you out to ruin what may turn out to be the loveliest day we’ve had here?” Mary Cottle asks, almost as if she knows what he’s talking about.

“It puts me in mind of a song, all this,” Benny says. “‘It does, Benny?’” he says. “Yar, it really do,” he answers himself. “‘Go on,’” he says, “‘sing it. Sing away, Ben boy.’” “I’ve no voice.” “‘Go on,’” he insists. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” “‘We want Ben-ny, we want Ben-ny,’” he chants. He cups his hands. “‘Were that the song then?’” he calls through them. “Nah,” he says, “that were just the softening him up.” “‘The song, the song,’” he demands. “Right, then,” he says, “which it goes something like this.” He looks toward Mary Cottle. “‘Ί cover the waterfront,’” he sings.

Mary Cottle is right about the day. At least about the weather. It’s 80 degrees. The humidity can’t be a quarter that. There is the breeze of dreams. Slapping confidence like balm on their skins. The sky’s a perfect blue. The clouds are like topping.

“Ahoy, ahoy,” Colin says conversationally up at them from the Water Sprite.

“What’d you find out?” calls Benny Maxine.

“Mate,” Colin tells Benny softly, glancing toward the chap in the rental booth, “would you be so kind as to avast your voice there? Would you have the good manners to dim the running lights on your mouth?”

“What do you think?” Noah asks. “Do you think we’ll be able to do it?”

“Oh, will we, Colin?” Lydia asks. “Will we?”

“Well,” Colin says, “if you’ll give me a minute to discuss with the admiral there”—he indicates the young man at the boat rental—“I’ll get back to you.” He hops out of the little speedboat and wriggles out of his life jacket.

“Listen,” he tells the guy, “I don’t want the tykes to hear me.”

“Yes, sir?”

“That’s why I’m talking low like this.”

“Yes, sir?”

“You read about these little’uns?” he asks. “The Seven Dwarfs with Snow White over there.”

The fellow — he’s still in his teens, Colin judges, and a looker — glances in the kids’ direction. “Read about them?” he says.

“Don’t stare, man!”

“Was I staring?”

“People do, you know. That or look away. One or the other. Well, we don’t know how to deal with celebrity, do we? We’re not that much at home in fame.”

“Are they on television?”

“They’re on the news.”

“Really? The news?”

“Not so loud.”

“What did they do?”

“They haven’t quite managed to do it yet.”

“When they do,” the boat-rental kid says, “what will it be?”

Colin lowers his voice still further. “Well,” he says, “they’re going to die.”

The young man nods. “Yes,” he says sadly, “we get a lot of that here.”

“Not at this concession! Not in these numbers!”

“No, I guess not here so much.”

“There you go,” Colin says.

“What have they got?”

“The little blue babe?” He moves his eyes in Janet Order’s direction.

“Yes?”

“That’s our Janet. You play a musical instrument?”

“Sax a little.”

“The reeds in her heart are shot. Her valves and stops are queered.”

“And the heavy girl?”

“Forty pounds of tumor.”

“Gee.”

“This”—he indicates Bay Lake, he indicates the sunshine, he indicates the blue sky and the lovely day—“would be unusual? Even for around here, even for Florida, am I right?”

“A little unusual.”

“I’ll be bound, ‘a little.’ Well,” Colin says, “and the lump- faced kid is Benny Maxine. Benny’s dying of his baggy great liver and his sizey spleen. And little Tony Word and wee Noah Cloth of leukemia and osteosarcoma. Those are your nagging cancers of the blood and the big bad bones.”

“Oh, wow.”

“That’s how it is,” Colin says.

“Awful.”

“The other little girl is Rena Morgan. Rena is our cystic fibrosis.”

“And the old-looking guy?”

“Charles Mudd-Gaddis. Charles can’t tell you whether it’s Tuesday morning or 1066. Not enough oxygen to his brain and belly button, to his organs and toenails.”

“Really?”

“The Bible tells you so.” The concessionaire looks at the children and shakes his head. “Don’t stare,” Colin says.

“Sorry.”

“So I promised them this treat,” he says, taking his voice so low the young man has to strain to hear him. “Well, to tell you the truth — they never said this, they’re too polite — I think they’re a little burned out on all the rides and exhibits, on the hi tech and brass bands. I thought a little time on the water, a little fun in the sun, you see what I mean?”

“Sure.”

“Right. We’ll take two of the Sprites. We’ll take the Sunfish and one of those motorized pontoon boats.”

“We don’t rent to anyone under twelve. Even with an accompanying adult they’re not allowed to drive. I’m sorry.”

“Your passport please, Benny,” Colin called. “Rena, yours? Benny’s fifteen. Rena’s a teenager.”

“But these kids are dying,” the boy objected.

“They’ll wear life jackets.”

“Really, mister,” the young man said. “I mean, I don’t see how I can do this. I mean it’s irresponsible. Suppose something should happen? I mean, it could. Something could. They start up with each other, things get out of hand and they capsize. I mean, something awful could happen.”

“You’re right. It would be better if you closed the shop while we’re out. Not lease your other boats. I mean, the heavier the traffic, the more likely something bad could happen.”

“Not lease my boats?”

“Well, that’s part of the treat too, you see. To let the kids have the lake to themselves, to fix it so that for once — look,” he said, “you’re a native, right?”

“A native?”

“A native, a local. You’re from around here.”

“From Orlando.”

“All right. You’re this local native Orlando boy. Tell me, how many days do you remember out of your whole life when the weather’s been like this? Did I say weather? This isn’t weather. This is Nature. How many? A dozen? Less? Could you count them on two hands? On one? I’m twice your age and don’t recall any. All right, I’m not from Orlando or even from Florida, but I’m no stranger to the planet. I go on holiday to the sun coasts. I’ve been to Mediterranea. I’ve come back tan. But this, this is a special dispensation. This is God’s odds.” And now his voice is not lowered. The children can hear him chatting freely about their deaths, about the great disappointment their lives have been to them, about what he calls the day’s miraculous reprieve — time’s and temperature’s deliverance. (Because he’s flirting. He doesn’t have to speak to him like this, doesn’t have to mention their deaths or speak their names, doesn’t have to bring up the day’s rarity or say anything about not renting the other boats. Because — there’s nothing in it for him; he wants nothing from this looker but his attention — he’s flirting, waving his fine and fetching fettle like a braggart’s flag. Because he’s in high humor, has what he hadn’t known he’d come for. Because he is flirting, floating the raised, willful waftage of his spirit. Flirting with the boat-rental boy, with Mary, even with his doomed and helpless charges.)

In minutes they are arranged in the boats. Colin is in a Sunfish with Tony Word, Benny in a Sprite with Lydia, and Mary Cottle and Noah Cloth are in a second Sprite. Rena Morgan is to drive Janet Order and Charles Mudd-Gaddis in the pontoon boat. The young fellow at the boat rental has agreed to close his booth and rent no more boats.

Colin, who looks like a good sailor, is. Somehow he maneuvers the sailboat between the two small speedboats and steers beside Rena’s blocky, raftlike launch. He keeps them all in line with his high spirits, towing them with his extraordinary cheer.

“Men,” he calls to Rena and Lydia, to Charles and to Tony, to Benny and Noah and Mary Cottle and Janet Order, “it’s dear old Dunkerque all over again! Hail Britannia, how about it?” he roars. “Hail Britannia.”

(It’s like having money to spend. Like being a customer. Yes, like having an advantage over the clerk who serves him; and his decisions and his whims, still in reserve, are like having the clerk’s commission in his pocket. Alternately yielding and withholding at will, this is his flirtatiousness, his playboy’s devil-may- care airs on him like perfume.)

And leads his strange armada to Discovery Island. Surveillant. The expert here. Signaling their distance, instructing them to cut their engines while he, working with nothing but air — it isn’t strong or concentrated enough to offer itself as wind — seems to take on their stalled and idling energies, to play the Sunfish like a surfboard, his arms and his shoulders, his body and head shifting and busy as a boxer’s.

“Over there,” Benny Maxine says, turning the key in the little boat’s ignition and looking toward the dock.

“Use your head, Ben,” Colin says. “We can’t berth there.”

“Why not?”

“That’s where the boats come in to drop off the tourists. It won’t do. It’s bespoke.”

“Ooh,” Benny says, “which way then?”

“To the other island.”

Ignoring the macaws and cockatoos, the ibis and rheas, ignoring the trumpeter swans, the cranes and white peacocks, ignoring the flamingos and pelicans, ignoring the eagles, they are towed by his chatter and cheer and make land in a cove like the underedge of a key where Colin Bible supervises their disembarkation, still pitching his mood at them as he helps them out of the boats. “And ain’t it?” he asks again. “Ain’t it old Dunkerque? Ain’t it in a way? What was the dear old Dunker anyway if not just about the grandest last stand and evacuation of all time? Talk about your quality time, talk about your finest hours. Am I right? You know it.”

“Where are we, Colin?”

“Shipwreck Marsh, Janet, it’s called on the map.”

“I wonder if there’s snakes,” Noah says.

“Snakes don’t bother you,” Benny says, “if you don’t bother them.”

“They say that about everything. Sharks and tigers and rabid dogs.”

“It’s true. That’s why they say it.”

“How would you know?”

“I been on outings. Before I was sick. I went to just dozens of rambles.”

“‘Before I was sick.’ That’s rich. ‘Before I was sick.’ When would that have been?”

“You don’t think I ever was healthy? You want to bet me? You want to?”

“Congenital. You’re congenital.”

“Oh, I’m congenital? I am?”

“Congenital and chronic.”

“Did you hear that, Colin? She says I’m congenital.”

“And chronic.”

“Did you hear that, Miss Cottle?”

Mary Cottle, downwind of Janet and Rena, takes a smoke from a fresh pack of East African cigarettes and lights it.

“You suppose I could have one of those?” Benny asks.

“Strictly speaking, Ben boy, you oughtn’t to smoke.”

“The nerve,” Lydia Conscience says. “After the way he spoke to her before.”

“May I please?”

“Certainly not,” Mary Cottle says.

“Shipwreck Marsh,” Rena Morgan says. “It’s not very pretty.”

“It’s quite suitable,” Colin Bible says.

“I think it should do,” Janet Order says.

“For our purposes.”

“But it’s not very pretty.”

“Unspoiled,” Colin Bible says, “it’s unspoiled.”

“Just what does that mean, Colin?”

“That the landscapers haven’t been by yet. To put the macaws and cockatoos into the trees. The ibis and rheas. The trumpeter swans.”

“Well?” Mary Cottle says.

“Well what?”

“I was thinking of our famous purposes.”

“What’s the hurry?”

“Where’s the fire?”

“If I’m old enough to die,” Benny sulks, “I’m old enough to smoke.”

“It looks like a marsh.”

“It looks like a shipwreck.”

“That stuff isn’t sand. Is that stuff sand?”

“It’s some kind of cement, I think.”

“The basic building blocks of life.”

“This place must be crawling with poison ivy.”

“Poison sumac.”

“Deadly nightshade.”

“Bloody pokeweed.”

“Leaves of rhubarb.”

“Seeds of castor.”

“Whoever ain’t game let him go back to the boats.”

“Charles?”

“Ask the ladies.”

“Janet?”

“Ask the blokes.”

“Blokes?”

“All right then,” Colin says. “You’ve a grand day for it.”

So they split up. So they paired off. Charles, Tony, Noah, and Ben with Colin. Lydia and Janet and Rena Morgan with Mary. Not even thinking about swimming. Swimming not only out of the question but never even in it, as boating had never been in it either. Making their way in opposite directions across the spare, low, man-made island in the wide, blue man-made lake, stepping through the stunted thickets of mangrove and out into a sort of twin clearing, each group, perhaps not even consciously, seeking purchase, the advantaged, leveraged high ground, running silent as salmon all the traps and steeps (and this not only in opposite directions but with their backs to each other, and not only with their backs to each other but in actual stride-for-stride company with their tall leaders) of inconvenience.

They could have been duelists pacing off their combat like a piece of property.

“I guess this is as good a place as any,” Colin Bible hears Mary Cottle settle.

“Right here’s all right,” Mary Cottle hears Colin Bible approve.

“Okay?”

“All right?”

The boys and girls scramble out of their clothes and lie down to their sun baths in the negligible humidity, in the balmy breeze across the perfect blue sky with its clouds like topping.

“Won’t you be joining us, Miss Cottle?”

“I’m fine. I’m smoking my cigarettes.”

“Colin? This is lovely. It’s really super, Colin. It really is.”

“That’s all right. You go ahead. I’ll keep an eye peeled in case the kid at the marina goes back on his word.”

Separated by perhaps a hundred feet, the two groups lie about on hummocks of earth and rock at skewed, awry angles. Tony Word and Lydia Conscience lie in nests of their own clothes. It is really too great a distance to distinguish features, to make out the still only incipient shapes and chevrons of genitalia. They stare across the distance that separates them and have, each and collectively, a gorgeous impression of flesh. They are skinny-dipping in the air and leer across space in wonder and agape.

“That’s enough, Rena. Put your clothes on. You don’t want to burn.”

“Five more minutes. Please, Miss Cottle? Just five more minutes. Please?”

“All right,” she says and the boys get five more minutes to study her indistinct pinkness, the girls to note the fragile pallor of the boys.

And it was wondrous in the negligible humidity how they gawked across the perfect air, how, stunned by the helices and all the parabolas of grace, they gasped, they sighed, these short-timers who even at their young age could not buy insurance at any price, not even if the premiums were paid in the rare rich elements, in pearls clustered as grapes, in buckets of bullion, in trellises of diamonds, how, glad to be alive, they stared at each other and caught their breath.

6

Oh,” said Matthew Gale when Mary Cottle, thinking it would be the housekeeper with her towels, answered his knock and opened the door to the hidey-hole, “excuse me. I must have the wrong room. I was looking for eight twenty-two. Oh,” he said, “this is eight twenty-two.”

“May I help you?”

“No, no. No problem. My friend used to have this room, but he’s obviously checked out and gone back to England. Sorry to have bothered you.”

“To England?”

“Gee,” Matthew Gale said, “you’re British too. Just like Colin. Well,” he said, “enjoy your stay.”

“Like Colin?” Mary Cottle said. “You were here with Colin?”

“Uh-oh,” Matthew Gale said. “I’ve gone and put my foot in it, haven’t I?”

“Colin brought you here.” Because now she recognizes him. He’s the young man who had helped them that time at the Haunted Mansion and whose exchange of winks with Colin she’d intercepted back in those now-dead live-and-let-live days of their arrival. It hadn’t been he, of course, but the boiling circumstances of which he’d been a part that had turned her nerves into so many fuses waiting to be ignited and had caused her — who hated all arrangements in the first place — to — in the first place — take the room at all.

“Listen,” he said, who, being no dummy and having a feel for the strange displacements of the ordinary and sizing up the situation, its unspeakable ramifications, and wondering, for example, just what Mrs. Bible was herself doing on the night in question, sought to give comfort where comfort may or may not have been due, “who knows what goes on in another person’s marriage? In another person’s life? May I come in?”

“You may not.”

“I have no problem with that. I can say my piece right out here in the hall and let the neighbors think whatever they want to. I’m not going to tell you we’re two consenting adults and there’s the end of it. Because I’m beginning to suspect that in these particular circumstances two consenting adults wouldn’t even begin to get the job done. No, ma’am. I’m beginning to suspect that to be fair to all the parties we’re dealing with here would require a general goddamn election, a whole entire plebiscite. Well, there’s you, of course, and that other one, the master industrial spy, the London, England Colin, and Lord knows who else, the man, woman, or child with whom you yourself may have been disporting on the fateful evening.…Look, if I’m the least bit out of line, blow the whistle on me, please. Promise now.

“He’s really quite charming, your Colin. He even made me come up with the key to this place. I’m certain it was a test. Well, you know the sort of thing I mean. The little negotiations we do with the fates.…If such-and-so is meant to be, let a purple chicken come around that corner pulling a red wagon. Religion! — No, thank you, I’m perfectly fine, thank you very much; it’s not a bit drafty out here — But, well, frankly, though it’s not my business, it’s just I like your Colin so. He has his faults, of course. Who’s perfect? Certainly not me. Well, I’m sure you know that. Colin probably told you all about it. Well, why not? say I. What’s an open marriage for if the party of the first part ain’t free to lay it all out for the party of the second? However disgusting, degrading, and humiliating it may turn out to be for the poor hick son-bitch party of the third, fourth, fifth, or sixth! Am I getting warm?”

“I haven’t a clue regarding whatever it is you’re talking about,” Mary Cottle said.

“No,” Matthew Gale said, smiling prettily, “of course not.”

She started to close the door in his face. Gale resisted at first, then stepped suddenly back, drawing her off balance, sending her stumbling to the door, her left cheek awkwardly pressed against it.

“I don’t know,” Matthew Gale said loudly from the other side of the door, “just what it is, what nasty sting operation you people are up to, but under the circumstances I feel obliged to warn you that what we’ve been funning with here isn’t your standard, ordinary point-of-interest or your regular, everyday, five-star, not-to-be-missed, absolute Must, so much as the almighty God’s almighty own country itself! Can I get an Amen, somebody?”

“Amen,” said somebody.

“And why not,” Gale said (and she had the impression he was whispering now, that whatever he said he might have been saying into the grain of the wooden door), “why? This is Disney World! This is the basic universal G-for-good, G-for-goodness, main attraction and main event. You’re fucking with Disney World! Lady, lady, do you appreciate what that means? That means, if it came right down to it, they could do you legal as apple pie if they wanted. They not only got the guns, the Bomb, and the animatronics, but the Ten Commandments and the Onward Christian Soldiers too! They’re connected high up with important principles: with Safety First and Handicap Access. With double sinks and orthopedic mattresses. With convenience, clean accommodations, and fair value understood. With public temperance and a Lost and Found like the secret fucking service! With clever mice and friendly bears, with reluctant dragons and horticultural bulls. With Nature in sweet tooth and claw, as it were. With—Are you listening to me?” he demanded.

“Yes,” she said. Her hand was in her pants.

“With family, I mean! With grampas that fish and fathers that golf. With moms who drive car pools and look great in jeans. With brothers and sisses who’d be lost if they left each other’s corner for even a minute. With pets who’d lay down their lives for any of them. This is the picture. Are you getting the picture?”

“Yes,” she said. Was separating her pubic mat like a curtain and pushing a finger up into her cleft.

“I’m talking about a tone. Judgmental calls. Because it really is a small world after all. The high energy of high righteousness and fervency. All the us/them dichotomies. Not just capitalism, not just free enterprise. Not even just morality, finally, but something larger, grander, more important. Efficiency! That’s it. That’s all. Efficiency. More bang for the buck. It’s simple as that. Efficiency. Everything else is moral turpitude. Everything else. This is still the picture. This is still the picture. Who ain’t in it?”

“Who?”

“Colin ain’t in it.”

“Colin,” she said.

“And you,” he said. “You ain’t in it.”

“Are you in it?”

“I’m a different story,” he said. “I’m behind the scenes.”

“I know who you are,” she said calmly. For she was herself again. Because she’d come now. Was restored to herself, in control, her nerves’ temperature normal, like fever broken in a crisis.

“What?”

“I know who you are.”

“Sure, sure,” he said. “Colin let on. That’s just the way of it with wise, experienced, double-dealing old fags.”

“I saw you at the Haunted Mansion.”

“Housekeeping,” a woman said. “I’ve brought you your towels.”

And when Mary opened the door he was gone.

Careful to let any guest, even a child, pass through first, he left the elevator and got off on the lobby floor. Gale high-signed his fellow cast members — we’re tight, he thought, we’re tight as skycaps passing in airports — and called out their names. He must have known almost everyone who worked at the Contemporary. Well, he hung out at the Spa so much. Which wasn’t, he thought, in the least suspicious. He was just using the facilities. As he’d seen bellboys and desk clerks at the Haunted Mansion during their lunch breaks. Only part of the perks.

What was suspicious, of course, was his use of the elevators. Being caught on the guest floors, coming down into the lobby at midnight, at one in the morning. What was suspicious was the flimsy cover story he put out that he was a gambler, that he went up to their rooms to take their money in poker and crap games. They thought they knew better, his bellboy and desk clerk cronies. So he grinned and aw-shucks’d them, and toed awkward circles in the pile carpets and marble floors, as if he were barefoot or wore straws in his mouth.

“Better give it a rest, Gale, or you’re going to lose it for certain.”

“Let it come up for air once in a while.”

“That’s right, Matthew. It’s going to burn out on you. It’s going to disappear like a wick.”

“Who was it this time?”

“Ten thirty-three?”

“Seven-oh-four?”

“The blonde? The one with the humongous mammaritos and the sweetheart great ass?”

“A fellow don’t kiss and tell.”

“You kissed them?”

“Man, you know what’ll happen to you if the manager finds out?”

“Yeah, you better off if her daddy finds out.”

“You’d believe all those workouts in the health club might slow him down a bit.”

“They do! You think any of them gals would still be alive otherwise?”

So they kidded him, joshed into heroic farmboy studship the familiar creature from the tearooms of central Florida.

“Some lover,” the bell captain said. “I saw you step into that elevator not fifteen minutes ago.”

“Maybe it stopped on the fifth floor,” he said. “Maybe that’s where a certain redheaded Cuban spitfire got on board. Maybe she threatened to dance all over me with her spike heels if I didn’t lock it from the inside. Maybe I serviced her right there in the box. Maybe that’s all the time we needed. How you doin’, Andy?”

“Pretty fair, Matthew. Yourself?”

“Be an ungrateful liar if I complained.”

“Be seeing you, Matt.”

“Be seeing you, Andrew.”

And spotted the dog, Pluto, surrounded by kids and holding the brace of Mickey Mouse balloons he always carried but so sparingly gave out.

(“Jesus, Lamar, you’d think you paid for them yourself,” he’d said.

(“No, but I have to fill them with helium. Do you know I have to blow up Goofy’s as well as my own?”

(“Really?”

(“He outranks me.”

(“No shit?”

(“Sure, and I’ll tell you something else. That son-of-a-bitch dog is one hard taskmaster.”

(“You know something? You had me going. You break me up, Lamar.”

(“Well, shit, I’m a pro.”)

Who owed him one. Probably more than one. For sometimes spelling Kenny whenever he drove over to Orlando or Winter Park or Daytona Beach or Kissimmee for an audition. (“Jesus, kid,” he’d said, after returning from one of these auditions and coming up dry, “you’ve given away every fucking balloon I had. I’ll be a year blowing the mothers up again. Show business!”)

So then and there Matthew Gale decided to call in his marker. He ambled over to the besieged pup and gave what always before had been Lamar Kenny’s overture, their secret silent signal. (Silent because as one of the characters he’d been forbidden all speech, not permitted even a growl. “Kid,” he’d say afterward, “they’ve muzzled old Pluto.”) He made the gesture with his hand. Kenny saw him but shook his head like a pitcher declining a sign. Matthew did the thing with his left hand again. The dog looked at him quizzically. (So comical, Gale thought. Damn, he’s good! Matthew had no idea why Lamar never landed those jobs. He was a wonderful actor.) So Matthew stepped up to him and did it again. Again the pooch shook it off and again Matthew repeated the signal. Pluto shrugged and released the balloons he held in his paw. They floated up out of the reach of the children, who jumped to grab at their strings. In the confusion Matthew Gale sidled up to his friend. “Meet me,” he said. “It’s important!”

Pluto looked up sadly after the balloons. He didn’t break character by so much as a whimper, but Gale could tell that anyone looking at him, every kid in the place, could read his mind, the expression written plain as day across his doggy jowls. Fuck damn, he was thinking, now I’ll have to blow up twenty more of these mouseshit balloons!

They were standing by his locker. Not until he’d removed the last of his Pluto suit and hung it neatly away did Lamar Kenny say anything at all. He pointed to the locker. “Is that the dressing room of a star or is that the dressing room of a star?”

“What do you think, Lamar?”

“I think it’s the dressing room of some assembly-line guy, a U.S. Steel worker, an A. F. of L.”

“About the gig.”

“Leave them to Heaven.”

“Come on, Lamar, what do you say?”

“I say it’s nuts. I say if you’re looking to get us fired you’ve struck pay dirt.”

Gale rubbed his finger across the locker’s dusty metal shelves. “I think it’s the dressing room of some assembly-line guy too.”

“That’s the way,” Kenny said. “Play up to the trouper in me.”

“I am. I want to. Didn’t I come to you with my proposal?”

“Some proposal.”

“Admit it, Lamar. It’s a great gig. Admit that much.”

“Don’t say ‘gig.’ You’ve got no right to say ‘gig.’”

“Sorry.”

“Do I say ‘rough trade’? Do I say ‘butch’?”

“I didn’t mean to offend, Lamar.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know why I’m so touchy. I’m in a profession; we live, we let live. You’re right,” he said, “it’s a hell of a part. Nah,” he said, “they’d turn us in. They’d call Security. We’d be lucky if all that happened was we lost our jobs.”

“They won’t turn us in. The guy, Colin, is in too deep. Forget about the bed part. The bed part’s the least of it. He has sensitive manuals in his possession.”

“You gave him sensitive manuals?”

“You think I know what I gave him? I don’t know what I gave him. I threw some stuff together. He played it down. He made out like it was nothing. Naturally I’m suspicious.”

“And the wife?”

“There’s something strange there.”

“Strange.”

“She’s got this attitude.”

“You,” Mary Cottle commanded Colin Bible, “stay out of my room!” And reminded him of her good name and demanded to know how he’d found out.

It was astonishing, really. How the bottom of things lay at the bottom of things like the lowest rung on a ladder. But how, beneath that, there was a still lower level, that open area of the air, some apron of the underneath, mysterious, inexplicable. Colin sent her to Nedra Carp. Who put her on to Janet Order. Who implicated Mudd-Gaddis.

She went to him.

“Charles?” she said.

“Yes, lady?”

“Do you know who I am?”

“The Angel of Death?”

“No,” she said.

“Do I get another turn?”

She stared at him.

“Are you living?”

“Of course I’m living!”

“Are you bigger than a breadbasket?”

“Mudd-Gaddis!”

“How many is that?”

“Mudd-Gaddis!”

“Do you reside in eastern Europe west of the Odra?”

“I’m Mary Cottle!” she said.

“That was my next question.” He looked at her. “Yes, Miss Cottle?”

“Nothing,” she said.

Because everything has a reasonable explanation.

She didn’t really care about getting to the bottom of things. She didn’t care about the mystery. She wasn’t even protecting her good name. She was protecting that room.

“She’s proper pissed,” Mudd-Gaddis said.

“I’ve never even seen the room,” Lydia Conscience said.

“Neither have I,” said Rena Morgan.

Noah and Tony hadn’t. Nor had Janet Order. Benny, of course, couldn’t wait to get back there but knew there would be little point if anyone else came along.

They turned to Benny. He was the oldest. He had the Swiss Army knife that could get them in.

“It’d be breaking and entering,” Benny said.

“But not for the first time,” Rena Morgan said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means,” Rena said, “that by now you’re so practiced all the risk is removed. It isn’t as if it were anything stealthy.”

“Anything furtive,” Lydia Conscience said.

“Clandestine,” said Janet Order.

“Anything hugger-mugger.”

“Hole-and-corner.”

Benny Maxine looked from one girl to the other. “What’s going on?” he asked. If they had told him “sorority” he wouldn’t have known what they meant. They wouldn’t themselves. They were friends now, close as they’d been that day on the island, closer than their mortality could take them. (Closer than Tony and Noah, who slept in the intensive care ward together and made sure they sat next to each other at every meal and on all the rides. Who regarded each other as best friends. Closer than that.)

“What could be in there?” Lydia Conscience said.

“Something important,” Janet Order said.

“Do you think she has a lover?” asked Rena Morgan.

“A lover? Why would she have a lover?” Benny said angrily. “What do you mean do you think she has a lover?”

“That maybe she’s in love,” Rena said.

“She’s not in love,” Benny said.

“How would you know what people are?” Rena said.

“Come on,” Benny said. “She’s not in love.”

“What’s in that room?”

“Take us. Please? Do let’s go see.”

“Come on, Benny.”

“Please.”

“It’s crazy,” he said.

“We’ve been on all the other rides.”

“There’s nothing there.”

“She’s proper pissed, Ben.”

“There’s nothing there,” he said again.

Though of course there was. Her human geography. At least his memory of it. The sexual topography of those elliptical hollows, the two dark shadows, those twin stained darning eggs in her ass. At least there’d be the bedspread on which she’d lain.

So if he agreed to take them it was to honor the memory of those delicious relics.

7

They went at night.

They didn’t tell anyone where they were going and didn’t take the trouble to work out elaborate alibis. What happened was they simply managed to peel off individually from their respective groups. They’d handled themselves, Noah suggested, rather like flying aces in an aerobatic squadron. When one of them left, the ones who remained took up the slack and made just that much more noise, that much more fuss, neither adding nor detracting one whit from the general collective level of demand that any seven terminally ill children might put up under a similar set of dream holiday conditions. And really, when you came to think of it, it was quite a performance, one of the best-yet illusions in the magical kingdom. They weren’t missed until after they were missing.

Any one of them could have told you straight off about 822’s appeal. As soon as they saw it, it became for them what it was supposed to have been for Miss Cottle: a hidey-hole, a sort of clubhouse. Perhaps this was one of the reasons they were so neat. They managed to lie about the room, to fill its three chairs — four if you counted Mudd-Gaddis’s wheelchair — and queen-sized bed — at once the girls had taken it for their own — and even — the boys — put their feet up on the wide round table, to use, in fact, all the long, deep olive oblong room with its dark modern furniture without sullying the least of its pristine from-the-hands- of-housekeeping appearance. There were tricks. Rena Morgan directed the fellows to shut flush each drawer in the bed tables, each louvered drawer in the dresser. Lydia Conscience told them they must keep the sound off if they turned on the TV. And Janet Order, their third expert in camouflage, suggested that all the advertising cards be removed from the top of the trimline TV and hidden away, that they untangle the cord on the telephone and draw the patternless brown drapes.

So they sat, lay about in this curious rowdy tidiness — well, they were dying — and trim, discounted cleanliness and order. Very much at home. Very much at ease. They might have been snug and dry in a treehouse in rain. They watched the soundless images on TV as if they were logs on a hearth.

Each felt restored, returned to some precious condition of privacy they’d almost forgotten.

“When do you think they’ll think to look for us here?” one of them asked at last.

“They’ve already thought it,” Janet Order said.

“Too right,” said Benny.

“Oh,” said Rena Morgan, “then why haven’t they caught us?”

“Because they’re embarrassed,” Lydia said.

“Embarrassed.”

“Well, they are,” Benny Maxine said.

“Sure,” Rena said. “I suppose they’re afraid they’ll bust in and catch us out in some big orgy.”

“That’s not what they think,” Tony Word said.

“You know a lot about it.”

“Rena, it’s not.”

“No,” Noah Cloth said, “they’re embarrassed for Miss Cottle.”

“Or scared of her,” Benny said.

“Because she lowered the boom on them.”

“The room boom.”

“Probably they’ll call first.”

“No,” Rena said, “they’ll never be able to get the number out of the hotel switchboard. Isn’t that right, Benny? They don’t give out unpublished numbers? Isn’t that what you said?”

“For God’s sake, Rena,” Janet Order said, “once they have the room number they have the phone number too.”

“Little old daftie me,” Rena Morgan said.

“They won’t expect us to answer,” Benny said, “but probably they will call first. Give us time to clear out.”

“Of course we mustn’t answer,” Rena said, glaring at Janet. “What, and tangle the phone cord?”

“Ladies!” Charles Mudd-Gaddis said.

Rena patted the bedspread beside her. “Want to come up here, Noah, and rest by my side? There’s acres of room. Noah? Noey?”

“I’m fine.”

“What about you, Tony? Tonah?”

“Of course maybe they won’t realize most of us have figured it out and they’ll expect us to answer,” Lydia Conscience said. “I mean, maybe our friends haven’t figured it out themselves. Or maybe they’re just not the ladies and gentlemen you give them credit for, Ben.”

“Maybe,” Benny said. “I don’t think we can take the chance. If the phone rings we scarper.”

“I agree with Benny,” Rena Morgan said. She looked around the clubhouse. “Shall we put it to a vote? Who’ll make a motion?”

“Rena, for Christ’s sake,” Janet Order said.

“What is this, Rena?” Lydia asked.

“Well what?” Rena shot back. “Isn’t this our all-purpose, syndicalist, council-in-the-treehouse synod and social club? Aren’t we supposed to make motions? How do we occupy ourselves when we’re finished with old business? Or is the only thing on our plate what to do if the phone rings?”

“Rena’s got a bug up her ass.”

“Ladies!”

Benny Maxine punched off the television. “Who’s up for a ghost story?”

“A ghost story?”

“You got a better idea?”

“I love a good ghost story.”

“So do I.”

“Lots of gore.”

“Gobs of guts hanging about, decorating the room like strings of popcorn.”

“Moans. Howls of pain.”

“I love a good ghost story.”

“Takes me mind off things.”

“Who’ll go first?”

“Benny.”

“It was his idea.”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“You go first, Ben?”

“How do I know you won’t cry?”

“I won’t.”

“Suppose it’s so terrible you can’t help yourself?”

“I won’t cry.”

“You give me a forfeit if you do?”

“What forfeit?”

“Your money?”

“Benny!”

“You know what money means to Noah.”

“I’m only trying to make it interesting. I’m trying to make it interesting for us all. You bet too. Bet me my ghost story can’t make him cry.”

“Wait a minute,” Noah said. “What do I get if it doesn’t? What do you forfeit?”

Maxine considered. “Forty dollars,” he said. “And I’ll lay you two-to-one odds.”

“Noah?”

“Go ahead,” Noah said, “he can’t do it.”

“They laid their bets down and Benny began.

“Once upon a time,” he said, “there was this lad name of Noah Cloth—”

“Benny!”

“—lad name of Noah Cloth. Now Noah was a fine little fellow in all respects save one. He was even quite properly named, Noah was, for he had a disease and ripped real easy. Easy as cloth! The disease was called osteosarcoma, a deadly cancer, and it was the single most common bone tumor in children. There was only one way to deal with it, and that was to amputate. Wherever it showed up, that’s where Noah’s doctors had to cut. If it showed up in a finger they would chop off the finger; if it showed up in a leg the leg would come off.”

“No fair.”

“No fair?”

“No, no fair. You said a ghost story.”

“What’s no fair? He dies,” Benny argued reasonably. “I kill him, he dies. The bone cancer gets him. He dies. He dies and comes back. He appears to his poor grieving parents, his sorrowful mum, his heartbusted dad.” He glanced over at Noah to gauge the boy’s reaction. The kid was chewing his lips, but Benny couldn’t tell whether he was on the verge of tears or laughter. “It’s not too late to back out,” he said. “You want to back out?” The boy shook his head. Benny continued his tale.

“Though the cancer took a long time to tear through Cloth, Noah wasn’t even into his teens when he passed. When he finally died there almost wasn’t enough left of him to put in the ground. I mean, he was that cut up. All they could put together for his little casket — from its size you’d think they were burying a small dog — were the pieces of his face and head they hadn’t had to saw on yet: some of his jawbone, the long bone that supports his nose, the bony socket of his left eye like the mounting for a missing jewel, pieces of skull like bits of pottery. And the remains of his diseased frame all wired up like the dinosaur in the museum. There was an elbow like a patch on a jacket. There was some shin, a fragment of ankle, maybe a sixth of his spine. There was his pelvis all eaten away and looking like a hive and, curiously, most of the toes on his right foot.”

Benny Maxine looked sharply at Noah Cloth. It wasn’t pleasant what he had to do next, but his honor as a gambler was at stake. Still, if the kid had shown him only the merest sign of submission he would have called it off. He stared at Noah. It wasn’t laughter or tears that struggled for supremacy. Terror sat in his face like a tic.

Benny took a deep breath, rose from the chair in which he’d been sitting, and slowly paced along the wall as he spoke.

“Noah Cloth died on an operating table in a hospital in Surrey on the Tuesday following his twelfth birthday.”

The children gasped and Benny Maxine went on.

“The undertakers had to work on him harder than ever the surgeons did just to make him acceptable for Christian burial. They did him with wax and with wire, working from the photographs of infants as their model. They wrapped him in a shroud and, obedient to the wishes of Mr. and Mrs. Cloth, buried him at midnight in an unmarked grave away from the sight of men. No one was permitted to come to the funeral. Even the Cloths stayed away.

“His cerements decayed in the damp grave. The wax that held him together dissolved and returned to the earth. The wires that ran through what was left of his bones rusted and became a part of the generalized tetanus of the world, and Noah Cloth was reduced, shrunken, boiled down, distilled into a sort of pointless dice. He was no longer, if he ever had been, a part of the respectable dead. Terminally ill from the day he was born, chipped away at and chipped away at by disease, nickel-and- dimed by the scalpels and hacksaws of his doctors, he was as unfit for the grave as he was for the world, and his spirit, caged now in that scant handful of spared, untouched bone like the undiscarded remnant marble of the sculptor’s intention, rose up from the vast lake of the dead and returned one night to his parents’ flat, there to bury itself in the bed he’d slept in as a boy, in the small room which, when he’d not been in hospital, had been his grave in life!

“It was Mrs. Cloth who first heard the macabre rattle of his bones. She was in bed and very frightened and tried to rouse her husband, for the queer click sounds that Noah made in death were not unlike the sounds her boy had made in life. She shook him and shook him but he would not rouse. ‘Husband,’ she hissed in his ear, ‘husband, wake up! There are noises coming from Noah’s room!’ But his son’s life and his son’s death had taken so much from the poor man that he slept as one dead himself. So Mrs. Cloth got out of bed and followed the queer chattering sounds like the frozen blood-barren noises of men exposed to the cold.

“She reached her son’s room and snapped on the light.”

Benny paused, his back against the wall, studying Noah. Noah watched him, not daring to breathe. “Noah?” Benny called in a perfect rendition of a ruined mother’s cracked old voice. “Noah, is that you?” And seemed in very fright and weakness to swoon, his back and neck buckling, in that precise instant catching the master switch that controlled the electricity in the room and with one smart swift convulsion plunged 822 into total darkness.

Here is what happened.

Janet Order and Lydia Conscience screamed.

Benny Maxine got his cry out of Noah Cloth.

Tony Word bit his tongue and wondered if he’d infected himself.

Charles Mudd-Gaddis thought for a moment that he had fallen asleep.

Rena Morgan caught her breath and marveled at Benny Maxine’s timing.

Mickey Mouse materialized on the ceiling in full color.

Pluto stood behind the Mouse’s shoulder staring down at the children.

Because everything has a reasonable explanation.

In complete darkness — the tightly drawn drapes, the lightproof rubberized curtains behind them, the room’s somber-toned, dark-olive furniture, the plastic cards removed from the top of the television, the very thickness and density of the children themselves — the hidey-hole functioned exactly like a sort of camera obscura.

Because everything has a reasonable explanation.

The protective peephole in the door through which guests could observe their callers before admitting them had, in 822, been inadvertently reversed, installed in concave rather than convex relation to a guest’s eye (not only a reasonable explanation, but a positively scientific one), the glazed, grommetlike eyepiece turned into a sort of light-collecting lens.

Everything.

In a normal camera obscura the image would have been projected onto a facing surface, the patternless brown drapes. That’s what should have happened in 822. So why the ceiling? Because it was a room in a major hotel catering to guests not only from all over the country but from all over the world, to guests of different social, ethnic, and religious backgrounds, to smokers and nonsmokers, to people who lit votive candles, to romantics on their first honeymoons or even on their second or third, to men and women not on honeymoons at all but quite as romantic as the just-marrieds, who took their meals from room-service carts by the light of flickering candles, to adolescents and a range of the mystic-inclined who would not live in an unmediated environment and burned incense at the altar of their senses. So, in a way, Mickey and Pluto were on the ceiling rather than on the drapes because of the fire regulations and the insurance premiums, the thin layer of slightly glossy fire retardant on the drapes, which, just out of plumb from vertical true, canted their images down onto the retardant-soaked rug, which bounced the light off the floor and refracted it onto the ceiling. That’s why.

All this happening too quickly to account for. Everything happening too quickly to account for. The children squealing, the girls and the boys, scurrying for cover, almost knocking Mudd-Gaddis out of his wheelchair in the ensuing melee. Holding their hands over their heads for protection, the way, one imagines, their remote ancestors might have responded to comets in the sky, portents.

“Jesus!” they screamed.

“Oh, my God!”

“Help!”

Benny Maxine, no less frightened than the others (indeed, if anything, more so; in their wild, blind wake, brushed by their dark stampede, his tender, battered organs touched, rubbed, pushed, and pained by the adiabatic conflagrancies of their blacked-out skirmishes), wheeled about, found the wall switch, and fumbled light into the room.

Mickey and Pluto disappeared at once and, seconds later, there was a loud knock on the door.

“It’s them,” Lydia said. “They didn’t call after all.”

“Hah!” Rena Morgan said.

“Well, we’d best get it over with,” Benny said, and opened the door.

The Mouse and the Dog were standing there.

“Hi, kids,” said Mickey Mouse in his high clear voice like a reed instrument, like music toward the top of a clarinet. “We’re the good guys. We’re”—he raised his strange hand, like a fielder’s mitt with its four stump digits, against the side of his fixed grin—“these Moonies, sort of. But wholesome. Really, kids. Wholesome. I think so, anyway. Forty-eight highway, thirty-two city. Your mileage may vary. It probably does.”

He started to tell them more or less what Matthew Gale had told Mary Cottle. And was warming to his theme when he was interrupted by the dog pulling on his master’s arm, pumping it up and down as if he were raising bridges or flagging trains.

“I don’t see the lady of the house anywhere about,” Pluto said.

“It’s all right,” Mickey said, retrieving his arm, watching Rena and Benny and recognizing the girl magician and the wise-guy kid, rubbing both fielders’ mitts together. “These are nice girls and boys. Just our meat. Or mine, anyway. Mickey meat, you might say. Let’s stay on a bit, Plute.”

“Or the master neither,” said the dog.

“He thinks too much on masters and mistresses,” Mickey explained. “That’s his nature, of course, but sometimes you can overdo.”

“You can overdo your nature?” Mudd-Gaddis asked.

The Mouse looked him over. Terrific, he thought. A roomful of wise-guy kids. “Well, certainly, old man,” he said. “Ain’t that what makes tragedy? When we haven’t sense enough to get out of the way of our characters?”

Lydia Conscience and Tony Word were whispering together.

“What?” Mickey demanded. Tony Word looked down at his feet. “No, what?” repeated the Mouse. “Come on,” he said, “won’t you share with the rest of us? No? Don’t you know it’s rude to have secrets? No more whispering campaigns,” he scolded. “Is that understood?”

“He wants to know how you got on the ceiling,” Lydia said.

So part of it at least was a misunderstanding, a garble, a gloss. A little, that is, was farce, all the knockabout calisthenics of cross-purpose. Just so much was misconstrued, lost in translation. The children, the Dog and the Mouse, misunderstood each other. (Sure, they could be smeared across the ceiling like a slide show but they couldn’t see through walls, could they?) And then there was Kenny’s theatrical orientation. He was an actor. He’d had the floor. Of course he was angry. Boiling mad, actually.

Already boiling mad when the shill opened the door and Lamar recognized him, as well as the girl on the bed, the snot- nosed charmer from the elevator, so fast — better than the Vegas mechanics he’d seen, so fast, a little quick-draw artist — with her hands, which (he was a fair man) he didn’t begrudge her in the least. Only wondering whether Matthew Gale, sweating, he trusted — anyway, hoped — in Lamar’s Pluto suit there was in on it too. Some cast member, he thought ungenerously. (He hoped sweating. He hoped fucking melting, f’chrissake. Because it really was an art, being in that suit was, a question of breathing, like the difference between the singers who played the lounges and the ones who played Vegas’s biggest, most important rooms: only a matter of breathing, of phrasing. What separated the men from the boys, the sheep from the goats. So if Matt was in on it, if all this was happening in any way, shape, or form to set him up, he hoped to God the lousy faggot was turning to tiger butter inside the Pluto suit.) So he really didn’t begrudge her. He respected her, if you wanted to know. Or her skills, anyway. The ends she put them to was something else. The ends she put them to was another story altogether. Scaring the shit out of people was. What kind of a way was that? This was entertainment? Thanks but no thanks.

So, already angry when he walked in the door and saw them. Snappish and primed.

Not realizing, of course, or anyway realizing the wrong things because the nature of misunderstanding, of farce (without which there would be no ball game), is that you don’t know that that’s what it is. If someone had been there who could see all sides, it would have been a different story, but there was no one. Matthew Gale didn’t remember them from the Haunted Mansion. (The girls hadn’t been there anyway, and only Mudd- Gaddis, so excited then, now so sedate, would have made any impression at all.) He saw so many tantrums during the course of a day it’s doubtful he could have remembered anything. Oddly, Mudd-Gaddis might have if Gale hadn’t been hidden by Lamar’s Pluto suit, warm and moist now as a greenhouse, incidentally, and growing gamier by the minute. Or Benny Maxine, who’d had a run-in with Goofy and Pluto in the restaurant, who’d squeezed Goofy’s nose and pulled the bristles in his jowls and messed with his hat and, on behalf of his comrades, even bet the pooches that none of them would die. (Talk, he might have thought, about your Mississippi riverboat gamblers! I’m a bleeding sport!) But who’d either forgotten the incident or didn’t recognize in the whipped and cringing mutt right there in front of him — from itself cringing, from its close and closing circumstances — anything of the aloof, valorous pup of that first encounter. So there was no one. Lydia’s remark about the ceiling gobbledygook to the general, Lamar Kenny’s rage not only inexplicable but not even picked up. (The whispering, of course — he was an actor, he had the floor; you don’t whisper when an actor has the floor; why, that’s worse than heckling him — Mudd- Gaddis’s remark, which he took to be a sly dig about his acting; the little girl on the bed — Of the three girls, only Rena had failed to get up when the Mouse and Dog appeared on the ceiling.)

And spotting the wise-guy kid straight off, that was a treat. Who’d heckled hell out of his breakfast show that time, who’d made a scene at the fried eggs and balloons.

(Which was what was so great about being a human being, thought Mickey Mouse and the girls, Mickey Mouse and the boys — the reasons, the fine tracery of the reasons. The swirl of motive. Like snowflakes we are, thought Benny Maxine, like fingerprint and tooth record.)

But chiefly scaring the shit out of people, the difference in their artistic temperaments. (Artistic differences, they had artistic differences. Gee, thought Lamar Kenny, still comparatively new in the business and already I got artistic differences!) Yet, however impressed, even flattered, he may have been that they existed, it was their artistic differences that ticked him off most. For openers, he thought, he didn’t have a handle on just what he was dealing with here. The kids were a new wrinkle. That was clear enough. But fad or trend? Flash in the pan or wave of the future? He didn’t really know what was going on. From the time the original wise-guy kid had first given him the business, he’d been asking around. No one seemed to know if anything was up or not, though all had remarked the influx of terminally ill kiddies. He supposed the park was involved in some sort of market research and imagined that this group had something to do with it. He’d heard, for example, that someone fitting the description of the odd little lame duck over there in the wheelchair had made a fuss at the Haunted Mansion the other day. (Though not from Matthew, you may be sure, who was almost certainly in on it, whatever it was, and who he hoped had not only turned to tiger butter but was rancid as well, gone off inside the pup tent like a bomb.)

Because he didn’t need the aggravation. Your death acts — here today and gone tomorrow — his hunch was, would never catch on, though he couldn’t deny the outrageousness of the concept. Only where was the art? What did it take, after all, to display the dying? If you asked him, it was a little like public hangings. Sure, the poet was right on the money and there was nothing new under the sun. As a matter of fact, if you asked him it wasn’t even in very good taste. Though he certainly saw the point, what they were getting at. The old triumph-of-the- human-spirit bit. Folks showing their lesions and cancers, exposing their stumps, sniffing their gangrene. There really was no business like show business. Well.

The first thing, he supposed, was to check them out, find out if they were for real. (Because didn’t it stink, at least a little, of fraud and freak show?) He knew what the girl could do, of course, the one on the bed, but now he’d find out about the rest of them too, what the shouting was all about.

He turned to Janet Order.

“All right,” he said, “let’s just see if that shit comes off!” He tossed her a damp washcloth. “Oh, please,” Mickey Mouse said, “you couldn’t get chalk off a blackboard with such halfhearted efforts.”

“I’m halfhearted,” said the hole-hearted child.

“Here, let me,” said the Mouse, taking the cloth back from the kid, vigorously rubbing her blue skin with it.

“You’d lay hands on a customer?” Pluto growled. “On a customer?”

“And how about you?” the Mouse shot back. “How about you, Mister Magic Fingers? You hypocritical dog, you!” Who was steamed anyway, who knew he’d been had the minute he walked into the room. Calling in his marker, Gale had said. For the times he’d pulled guard duty for him when Lamar had gone off to talk to the clubs. Calling in his marker. Calling in his mark was more like it! Telling him it was just to get his own back, furious because Colin had set him up, because, or so he’d said, the woman was in on it too. To get his own back, and maybe those manuals. Merely to devil them with implication and outrage, to bear down on the two of them with the full moral authority of Mickey Mouse and his faithful friend. (Faithful friend was a good touch. Faithful friend had a bit of genius to it, what, he supposed, had ultimately sold him.) Though why hadn’t he thought to ask him what he hadn’t thought to ask him? Why hadn’t he thought to ask him, “Then why not bring Minnie?” Because maybe Gale was no dummy. Because maybe he would probably have come right out and said what was on all their minds anyway: that Mickey and Minnie weren’t married, that there was something a touch suspicious if not outright unsavory about that relationship. That if they slept together — and after a fifty-year engagement who could doubt it? a Mouse wasn’t made of steel — without benefit of clergy, how could they hope to have any sort of moral edge over Colin and the woman? Anyway, he hadn’t even thought to bring it up. And understood he’d been had as soon as the wise-guy kid opened the door for them, as soon as he’d taken in — or been taken in by — all the wise-guy kid’s wise- guy cohorts, that little league of the year-to-live.

So what was he doing here? That still unfigured. (Which was what was so great about being a human being! Oh, how he thrived on it! Reason and motive. — Not unlike his act, really, the thinking ahead, one man dueling for two. — Life like the crossword. Nine down, fourteen across, and the unpuzzled life not worth living. So what? Above all, was this an opportunity or not? Was Matthew his friend after all, or was he one of the company men he knew thrived in these parts? Running his abscams, baiting his entrapments and setting them? What if he was only posing as a faygeleh? To sucker his trust? If so, it might be an opportunity. Maybe 822 was his very own Schwab’s Drugstore; maybe Matthew Gale was that secret talent scout he’d always been on the lookout for. If not…well, if not, it was all up with him anyway. He was impersonating a Mickey Mouse. Dressed up in the Mouse’s own official Mickey Mouse clothes, the vaguely impresarial tuxedo Mickey frequently wore these days. How many years could you get for that? Perhaps life, maybe the chair. (God, what it said for the star system, for perks and privilege! He’d heard, and would have suspected even if he hadn’t — the cast was pretty tight-mouthed about their salaries — that the matinee rodent made tons more money than he did, or the other characters either, of course, and knew for a fact that the Mouse didn’t, unless he was in a good mood, always speak to the rest of them, sometimes not even giving Min herself the time of day, arbitrary and temperamental as a soprano, which he was. So why hadn’t they gone all out? Why didn’t they provide Mickey with a separate dressing room? Was this management’s way of keeping their star attraction in line? Why else would they make it so easy for Lamar to get into the Mouse’s locker, with its rinky-dink high-school-gym-locker lock? Why, of course, Lamar thought: not to keep him in line but to impose that same moral authority that seemed to emanate from the Kingdom’s every pore. Mousketeers didn’t steal. Not from each other. Not from anyone. They were clean, reverent, helpful, loyal, and brave. Mousketeers were the cat’s pajamas morality-wise. It was what lent them their terrible authority. Not only why they didn’t speak but why, except for the younger children, most of the guests seemed to clam up in their presence.)

So what was expected? What? If he wasn’t being set up? (Which, increasingly, beginning to feel at home in 822, he felt he wasn’t.) What was expected? Ah, thought the trained actor, recalling Pluto’s words. “You’d lay hands on a customer? On a customer?” Was this an admonishment? Some secret cautionary? (And he wasn’t rank, hadn’t turned into tiger butter; nor, now he thought of it, had the Pluto suit ever stunk on any of those occasions when Matthew had worn it to cover one of Lamar’s absences. He knew for a fact Matthew admired him as an actor. And he wasn’t rank! Maybe he knew how to breathe, too.) “You’d lay hands on a customer? On a customer?” If that wasn’t a paraphrase of the ghost’s warning to Hamlet to spare Gertrude, why then he’d never heard one! So what? What? Something to do with death, he bet. (Because something of what they did here was always a little slanted toward death. The Haunted Mansion where Matthew worked, for example. All the nostalgia: Main Street, U.S.A., with its gas lamps and hitching posts, its nickelodions and penny arcades and horse-drawn trolleys. Liberty Square with its colonial modes. Frontierland with its stockade and squirrel-cap ones. Most of it fucking Yesteryearland, if you asked him. Even Tomorrowland. The past and the hereafter. And what about Snow White herself? Old buried-alive Snow White in her glass casket like those hatbox-shaped containers that keep pies fresh, doughnuts and sweet rolls, on counters in restaurants? And how about those Seven Dwarfs? Yeah, how about them? Sneezy, Dopey, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, Bashful, and Doc. Cholers and pathologies. Wasn’t there an analogue to be discovered between the dwarfs and these wise-guy kids? He’d seen what she could do with a handkerchief, what, out of the corner of his eye, he could see she was doing now. The girl on the bed was a shoo-in for Sneezy. And the kids who’d been whispering together, the girl with the belly and the boy who’d stared at his shoes when they’d been caught out, who’d let the belly speak up for him. The guy was a clear Bashful. Lamar couldn’t quite figure the little shaver in the wheelchair. His question about overdoing one’s nature had clearly been hostile. On the other hand, despite the commotion, he seemed to have dozed off. A sure Sleepy! And it seemed to Lamar there was something a bit vacant about the stare of the kid with the amputated fingers. A probable Dopey. The original wise-guy kid, the officious creep who’d mouthed off in the restaurant and with whom he’d had the run-in at the elevator: a distinct and definite Doc. The little girl who looked like she’d gotten herself knocked up? Happy? Which left the blue kid, who’d given him that sullen, halfhearted response and who, more importantly, was the very color of choler. Grumpy to the life!) So something to do with death.

Only he must be careful to follow old Plute’s cryptic warnings, his tricky, understated guidelines. If not, he could kiss his opportunities good-bye. If not he’d be out on the street without even the mangy old doggy suit to cover him. Remember, then, it was strictly hands off the customers. It was absolutely gentle as she goes.

He glanced from Matthew in the Pluto suit to the Kingdom’s sickly new clientele, then moved smoothly into his audition in his soaring countertenor.

“You guys are something else,” said Mickey Mouse. “‘The Fated Follies.’ I love it!” He pointed to Tony Word. “How long they give you to live?”

Tony shrugged.

“Hey,” said Benny Maxine.

“An hour? A day?” Mickey insisted.

Tony shrugged.

“Hey!”

“Because if it’s less than a day you can forget about Rome. Know why?”

“Hey,” Benny said, “you!”

Tony Word shrugged.

“Because Rome wasn’t built in a day!” roared the Mouse.

“Is he crazy? Why’s he saying these things?”

“Why’s he bullying sick children?”

“The Mouse is a rat.”

“All right,” Mickey Mouse said, “let’s see a show of hands. Who wants to be cremated? What, nobody? All right, who’s for being planted? Hands? Not anyone? Buried at sea then? Recycled? We’re running out of options here. Boy, you’re some tough kids to please.”

Pluto seemed to have slipped away. Mickey hadn’t heard him leave. Perhaps he was listening in the bathroom.

“Alone at last,” said the Mouse. “Let’s see, where were we? Right, we were discussing what’s to become of you. Or I was. You all seem a little shy about the subject. Oh, I know why, of course. This particular mouse wasn’t born yesterday. He’s been around the block a time or two. I’ll tell you the truth, though. I was never really into tragedy. Control was always my thing, my gift. My special talent, you might say. Well, I never had any enemies to speak of. Popeye has enemies; Road Runner, Bugs Bunny, Tom and Jerry, Tweetie-Pie. Heckel and Jeckel have enemies. The Pink Panther. But not old Mickey the Mouse. I never had enemies. And neither do the people I hang with. My duckies and doggies. Life’s too short. Hey, no offense.” He looked around at the unsmiling children. “All right, all right,” he said, “enough about me. What would you have wanted to be if you’d lived?” Doc, Dopey, Sleepy, Grumpy, Bashful, Happy, and Sneezy stared at him, their ancient humors clogged, choked, stymied as ice, their deflected phlegms and cholers, their thickened bloods and biles subsumed in stupefied wonder. “Tch tch tch,” said the Mouse, “you kids, you poor kids. I don’t think I ever saw such losers. Where’d you grow up — on Fuck Street?”

Pluto tittered in the toilet. “On Fuck Street. Fuck Street! That’s some mouse!”

“This is terrific for the nervous system,” Lydia Conscience said.

“Oh?” said Janet.

“It makes it nervous.”

“Because really,” Mickey Mouse said, “I mean, it’s a raw deal. What, are you kidding? I mean, all the King’s horses, all the King’s men?” He stared directly at Benny. “Those are some odds. Still,” he said, “I suppose there’s advantages, silver linings in the shit. Sure. Of course. Why not? Run amok. Break a law. Pillage and plunder. Smoke if you got ’em. I mean, what’s to worry? Today is the first day of the rest of your life! You may never see Fuck Street again.”

“They may never see Fuck Street again,” echoed Pluto, laughing.

“You know, it’s strange,” the Mouse said philosophically. “It is. It really is. What goes on, I mean. I mean, people really do die. Your age. I mean there you are, you’re going along taking pretty good care of yourself. You look both ways before crossing, you don’t accept rides from strangers, you brush after each meal, then whammo! Whammo and blammo! Whammo and blammo and pow and zap! Kerboom and kerflooey, I mean. Mayday, I mean! But who’s going to hear you? And what good would it do if they could? No one can help. All right, maybe they take up a collection, maybe you get to be guests of honor at the watering place of your choice. Lourdes, the Magic Kingdom.

“But what’s strange, what’s really strange, is that after the melodrama, after all the best efforts and good offices of the go- betweens, the mediators, the maids of honor, the honest brokers, and best men, after the prayers and after the sacrifices, after the candles and after the offerings, worse comes to worse anyway. The unthinkable happens, the out-of-the-question occurs, all the unabashed, unvarnished unwarranted, all the unjustifiable unhappy, all the unwieldy unbearable. The unbelievable, the uncivil, the uncharitable, the uncalled-for. The undivided, undignified uncouth. The unkempt, unkind unendurable. The uncontrollably uncomfortable. All that unethical, unbridled, unconditional undoing. All the ungodly unhinged, all the unfriendly unnatural. The unpleasant, the unimaginable, the unprincipled. The unfit, the unsavory, the unforeseen. The unsurpassed, unsightly unruly. The untimely unsuitable, the unwelcome unutterable. The undertaker, I mean.”

“Untrue,” Mudd-Gaddis objected. (Because everything has a reasonable explanation, and Charles felt so old, time like some plummeting second-per-second weight in free fall, time like the incremental, famous dragged-out absences of love, the seconds minutes, the minutes hours, the hours days, weeks, that he no longer believed in even the possibility of death.)

“But unusual,” said Benny Maxine.

“I have to admit,” Mudd-Gaddis said.

Which is when the uprising started, the commotion. (Though it still wasn’t too late. All that was needed was someone who could have seen all sides.) Because most of them were filling the room now with their “Heys!” and their outrage. They’d been in Florida almost a week. Bombarded with special effects, with lasers, with 3-D like a geometry of the literal and a rounded stereophonics that sought the projections and deeps of the ear like a sort of liquid, they had seen science and engineering enlisted in passive play, at the service of the lesser wonders and mocking, it sometimes seemed to them, the priorities. By now they were accustomed to the little miracles as, two hours or so into their overseas flight, they had already adjusted to the idea of great speed, to eating in the sky, to pissing in it, to flying itself, and were offended — they needed someone to see round their corners — that the Mouse would betray them, that he had not come with a message of hope for them — they hadn’t expected him, after all, hadn’t even asked for him — showering dispensation, strewing reprieve. And offended by Pluto. Madder at the mutt, perhaps, than at the Mouse. Who’d failed to stand up for them, who’d slunk off to the bathroom when Mickey’s monologue had turned embarrassing. He had — there’d been no opportunity to speak of this; to a certain extent at least they were thinking collectively, were in touch with the protocols and instincts of death — betrayed the dumb goodwill of his lampoon loyalty.

Now Pluto, drawn perhaps by their racket, by their promising clamor, was back. He had shambled into the room and was glancing from one to the other with his fixed and serviceable expression, universal, one-size-fits-all.

“Where’ve you been?” Mickey Mouse asked.

“Been in the washroom,” said the Dog.

“Made a mess, have you?” the Mouse said, thinking they were into a different routine now, hoping they were, knowing as he did that he’d bombed with the first one. “Well, have you?”

“Have I what?”

“Made puppy poop.”

“Made puppy poop? Me?”

“What about it, kids? Think the ka-ka maker here has done doo-doo?”

“Why not?” Lydia Conscience asked levelly. “England expects every man to do his doo-doo.”

“Ohh,” groaned Rena Morgan.

“Pretty good,” Mickey acknowledged. First Sneezy, the speedy little magicianess sprawled out on the bed, then the original wise-guy kid, then Sleepy, then Happy Belly making with the puns. They’re ringers, he thought. They ain’t even sick. They’re just these healthy all-pro ringers. Them little dwarfs is show-biz giants. I’m a goner, I’m done for. The Fated Follies. I love it. Yeah yeah yeah.

The heart gone out of him now. Not in the mood any longer to take up the challenge. Unresponsive, depleted. (Or not even someone who could look through walls, see all sides. Maybe just someone who could see straight. Maybe just anyone who wasn’t depleted, who still had some of his wits about him. Though in the long run it probably wouldn’t have mattered. Or even in the short one. Just enough run for all of them to get out with their honor intact, cover their ass, make it home free, not have to apologize for anything, not go buy trouble.) Figuring he’d lost out, blown this gig too, his big break, his chance of a lifetime, his opportunity to play what he now understood would probably have been a series of command performances, limited engagements to kids who were themselves limitedly engaged, showing his stuff, special death material — and didn’t he have to hand it to the market research boys, though? they didn’t miss a trick — as if the dying-children trade were only another sort of convention, another sort of industrial show, using his falsetto still, but as protective coloration pure and simple, as once, he remembered, he’d refused to come out of its rear end when he and a partner had played a rag horse in a class play. Some career, thought the depleted actor. Horses, dogs, mice.

Because the commotion, the uproar, was not only still going on but gathering momentum.

Noah Cloth, hurt and frightened by the Mouse’s dark prophesies, had begun to cry. “Unbearable,” he sobbed. “Unkind. Uncomfortable. Unendurable. Unpleasant. How true, how true.”

“Get Cloth’s buddy,” Lydia Conscience said. “Who’s his buddy? The kid’s throwing a tantrum. Get his buddy over here. Janet?”

“I’ve nothing to do with it. I’m Tony’s buddy,” Janet Order said.

“Well, I’m not his buddy. I’m Benny’s buddy,” Lydia said.

“I’m telling,” Tony Word said darkly.

“Well, who is his damn buddy? He’s falling apart. He’ll wake the whole hotel.”

“Maybe Mudd-Gaddis.”

“Mudd-Gaddis wasn’t assigned a buddy. You think they’d assign Mudd-Gaddis a buddy? My God, he practically doesn’t even come with a shadow practically.”

“I’m telling.”

“Maybe Tony’s his buddy,” Benny suggested.

“How can Tony be his buddy?” Janet asked. “What’s wrong with you, don’t you listen? I already said Tony’s my buddy.”

“Who are you, saying, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ Who? Just who in hell are you, saying, ‘Don’t you listen?’”

“Big man!”

“I never had any complaints.”

“Big man!”

“I am, I’m telling.”

Noah was howling now.

“You bet, big man!”

Practically screaming.

“What, what are you telling?” Lydia shouted.

“That’s what’s wrong with our system,” Mudd-Gaddis observed to Pluto. “We can’t always remember who our buddies are when we need them.”

“Does this have something to do with my religion?”

“What does your religion have to do with anything, Christ- killer?”

“This is what you think they want,” Mickey said, appealing to the Dog, “din and squabble?”

“Rena Morgan!” Mudd-Gaddis said suddenly.

“Rena Morgan what?”

“Rena Morgan is Noah’s buddy.”

Lydia Conscience was all over Noah Cloth like a mother hen. Janet joined her, cajoling, consoling, the two girls’ attentions vaguely suggestive.

“I’m telling that no one can help,” Tony Word said, and burst into tears.

“Well, yeah, I see it,” the Mouse said. “Really. I do. It has this certain — how shall one put it? — this certain…oh, Grand Guignol charm.”

They led Noah to the bed and laid him down gently.

“There you go,” Lydia said. “That’s right. Right beside Rena. He’s a little upset, Reenie,” she said. “See if you can quiet him down. Are you going to be all right, Noah? Are you going to stop getting on everyone’s N-E-R-V-E-S?”

“As a concept it’s brilliant,” Mickey Mouse said. “Right up there with, oh, say, signing Shakespeare for the deaf.”

“You mustn’t mind what Janet says,” Lydia Conscience whispered to her buddy, Benny. “She’s a bitch and a ball- breaker.” And turned to the blue girl. “In case you haven’t noticed,” she said, “Tony’s acting up.”

“Take care of it yourself,” she said. “Can’t you see I’ve my hands full?”

Mickey Mouse could. On the bed Sneezy was flailing about, her windmill hands going like crazy, missing the probable Dopey lying next to her, who’d covered his ears but didn’t seem inclined to roll out of her way. Together they managed to give the impression of a helpless, ignorant piglet and a vicious sow inside a farrowing house. Blue Grumpy had all she could do to try to guide the dangerous Sneezer’s flying hands back down to her sides.

It’s part of the show, was the Mouse’s professional opinion. He looked over at the talent scout in his Pluto suit to gauge his reaction. The Dog seemed worried behind his one-size-fits-all permanent stare. Clearly such niceties were either over his head or he was building the tip with his phony rim-shot concern. Probably the former and, if anyone cared to ask him, it would be over the heads, too, of most of her potential audiences. If they noticed anything going on at all, chances were it would just be a jumble of meaningless tics to them. Would they understand, or even see, for that matter, that she was shifting rolled handkerchiefs from one place on her person to another? If they did, would they notice that she sacrificed the advantage of leverage and not only worked them close up but lying down? Would they appreciate the Grumpess’s subtle contribution or at all take in that by laying hands on her, or attempting to, the result was the equivalent of working blindfold without a net, defying all ringmaster convention and actually inviting impedance rather than appealing for silence before a particularly difficult turn? Dulled, dying kids? It had to be lost on them. God, she was good. He had to admit it, suddenly as generous as one stand-up comic scrutinizing the performance of another. If it was lost it was lost. The children in her audiences had about twelve minutes to live. They deserved the best.

Then he saw that something had changed. She’d run out of props, the long furl of handkerchiefs she’d managed to conceal — so that what she did passed beyond the realm of entertainment and entered art — hiding this one here, that one there, all the while making discreet, even delicate, passes at her nose—because she actually used them, the Mouse saw — had all been filled and returned to their hiding places, all the while continuing to maintain by misdirection and the feints of her grand and flighty fidget the complicated illusion that nothing was there. (Which by now, of course, nothing was.) What she did took the trained actor’s breath away, and he looked again in the direction of the faggot Dog. Who seemed, talent scout or no, more than a little bored. Mickey Mouse shook his head in disgust at even this appearance of indifference and turned back to the girl on the bed. Who had gone into her labored breathing, the hacksaw rasps of her sawn and strangled weather. It was, essentially, the same big, terrifying finish she’d used on him in the elevator.

Her arms dropped to her sides and she flailed across the entire width of the bed, using all her body now, her torso, her arms, and her legs, digging into the bedspread with her face, trying to bite it away from the sheets with her teeth, very nearly smothering Noah before Lydia and one or two of the others thought to pull him away.

I’m wrong, thought the Mouse, it’s an even bigger finish, and burst into applause. “Bravo, bravo!” Mickey Mouse cried. “Most bravissimo bravo!”

She’d worked the bedspread free. Great dollops of black congestion dropped from her nose, from her mouth.

“Ring our rooms!” Benny Maxine shouted. “Get Colin, get Moorhead!”

“What, actually go near her, you mean? Isn’t that the buddy’s job?” said Janet Order.

“The buddy’s indisposed,” Benny said. “Shit,” he said, and picked the phone up, just inches from Rena’s head, himself.

There was no answer in 627. He dialed the other rooms.

“Why haven’t they called? I thought they were going to call.”

(But everything has a reasonable explanation.

(It hadn’t occurred to the adults that the kids would be in the hidey-hole. They’d looked for them throughout the hotel, in the shops, in the game room and restaurants. High and low. Recalling their splendid afternoon on Shipwreck Marsh, Mary and Colin believed they might have gone there. The marina closed in the late afternoon, but the more they thought about it, the more Colin and Mary were convinced that they’d taken a boat out, perhaps even stolen one. The marina man (who lived in Orlando and had to be called at home and told to drive the twenty or so miles back to the park) said that while he didn’t think any boats were missing he couldn’t be sure because at any given time there were always a few in the shop for maintenance. He’d a record of these in his notebook, of course, but hadn’t thought to bring it with him when he’d driven in. He was sorry. Rather than return to Orlando and lose precious time, he took a Water Sprite and suggested Colin follow in a big slow canopy boat, the only craft large enough to carry them all back together should they be found. They looked for them on Shipwreck Marsh and, failing to find them there, went on to Discovery Island.

(Meanwhile, Eddy Bale and Nedra Carp went with the search party — Security had been called in — through the half- dozen lands of the Magic Kingdom, and Moorhead and Mary, attaching themselves to some of the park’s policemen, trailed along with them through Epcot Center. Security, taking the disappearance seriously, alerted the transportation system: the buses and riverboats and monorails.

(So they never thought of the room. Because everything, everything, has a reasonable explanation and none of the adults ever understood why seven kids would want to coop themselves up in a stuffy hotel room.)

“You think we should go down?”

“I don’t know. Ought we to move her?”

“Maybe one or two of us could go down and wait in the room in case they return.”

“Take the kids then,” Lydia Conscience said.

“Not you, Benny,” Rena pleaded through her choking. “Please not you.”

“Maybe we all ought to stay put.”

“Get Tony out of here, at least.”

Now that Noah had calmed a bit, relieved to be out of harm’s way perhaps, Tony had taken up his friend’s war cries. He bellowed like one at the stake.

“Tony, darling,” Janet said, “I’m your buddy and you’re my buddy. We’re each other’s buddies and have got to make sure that nothing happens to either of us. Clearly it isn’t a one-for- all, all-for-one situation we have here. You wouldn’t want something to happen to me, would you? I know you wouldn’t. Yet all your screaming is giving me the heebie-jeebies. Do you know what the heebie-jeebies are, Tony darling?”

“The Hebrew jeebies?” he pouted.

“That’s right, sweetheart,” she said, ignoring Maxine’s glare. “The Hebrew jeebies are these dangerous palpitations, this shortness of breath and angina. They’re my symptoms. You don’t want your buddy to die on you, do you, Tony?”

“No.”

“Then please shut up,” Janet Order said.

Rena reached out for Benny Maxine’s hand.

“I beg your pardon,” Pluto said timidly. “Just who is it you were expecting to call?”

There was so much talent in the world, Mickey Mouse thought. Even Matthew. His friend’s panic couldn’t entirely have been an attribute of the cunning mask. He had to admit: The Dog got a lot more out of the Pluto suit than he ever did. Gee, he thought sadly, remembering other auditions he’d blown up and down central Florida, maybe I’m not nearly the theatrical champ I’m cracked up to be.

“Benny?”

“Righty-o,” Maxine said, “hit’s our Benjamin ’ere.”

“Please, Benny,” she said, her voice crackling in her heavy phlegm like a sort of static, “could you give me your hand?”

Inside his mask, Mickey Mouse began to cry.

“Me ’and? Give you me ’and? Why, wot an idear! I don’ fink dat’s a bolt from da blue.”

Because many of them were seeing straight now. And had begun to drift toward the door. Lydia Conscience pushed Mudd- Gaddis’s wheelchair. Pluto tugged at Mickey Mouse’s arm and whispered something in his big ear the foolish but ultimately not unkindly Mouse couldn’t quite make out, though he believed he caught the Dog’s gist — which he hadn’t at all — and, nodding, reluctantly joined him in the exodus, all the while looking back over his shoulder, rubbing his big white gloves against what he’d forgotten were only one-way black glass buttons and not eyes, and thinking, the not-so-standoffish softy Lydia Conscience had been told about in her dream, that perhaps it made better art not to be in on the very end of their performance, that perhaps there were some things best left unstated in theater, following, nodding, glancing back over his shoulders and rubbing his eyes, perhaps the only one to get out of there with his honor intact.

Because despite the fact that the children were dying themselves, they had gone and bought trouble anyway. Getting home free had been denied them, not having to apologize had. All they could hope for now was to cover their ass.

“Hey,” Benny called, “where you off to then? Lydia? Charley? Hey, Noah,” he called.

“Let them,” Rena said. “Benny?”

“Yeah,” he said, “sure,” watching them leave.

The buddy system had broken down completely. Noah had thrown his arm about Tony Word’s shoulder. Janet Order fell into step between Pluto and Mickey and dared them to speak once they’d left the confines of the room and were in the hall again. Pluto kept his own counsel, but Mickey Mouse, grown into his part, said he thought all of them had done a wonderful job.

“Do you think you could hold me?” Rena asked.

“Hold you?”

“I shouldn’t ask. I know I’m a mess.”

“Listen,” he said, “are you going to be all right?”

“After that night,” she said, breathing brokenly, “we explored the hotel, when we had all that fun…”

“What?” Benny said. He could hardly hear her. “What?”

“Oh,” said the fastidious girl, “look at this bed. What I’ve done to the sheets.” Some of her handkerchiefs, wadded, stained, had shaken loose from the sleeves of her dress, from her collar and waistband, from the hem of her skirt. They lay about her like ruined flowers, exploded ordnance. “Please,” she said, “hold me. Just till they find us.”

He held her, and it hurt where even her frail weight pressed against his chest, his belly, his heart. He held her, and she told him she’d never taken her eyes off him that day they’d all undressed on the island. He held her, and she told him she loved him.

“Oh, Benny, the good die young,” Rena Morgan said, and died.

He was with her when Mary Cottle and the others found them.

“She said she loved me,” Benny told them when they walked in.

“Oh,” Mr. Moorhead said. “Oh, God. Oh,” he said, as if suddenly it was all quite clear to him.

Which it was.

Because everything has a reasonable explanation. The physician had determined to bring no one along who he was not certain could survive the trip. It was her respiration, her terrible heavy breathing that had caused her spasms and loosed the poisons in her chest, the mucus and biles, the clots of congestion hanging together and preserving her life by the strings of the ordinary. The great prognostician had simply failed to factor her desire into the equation. He had missed his prognosis because he hadn’t taken her sighs into account, the squalls, blasts, and aerodynamics of passion, all the high winds and gale- force bluster of love.

8

Bale wasn’t the sort who necessarily saved the best for last, who felt, that is, he must earn his rewards. As a kid he hadn’t dutifully done his vegetables in order to get to the meat, or eaten all his meat up in order to tuck away dessert. He wasn’t anal enough for rigmarole and would occasionally, though he was never particularly fond of greens, use the spoon he’d just dipped into his trifle to take up his salad. “Eating around” was his term for the habit. Though this wasn’t a habit either. He had no habits and noticed that Liam had inherited the tendency. (It delighted him, even when his boy was in hospital, to watch the child — the hospital trays with the meal’s portions isolated and set in the tray’s hollows and pockets like paints spread out on a palette made this easy to keep track of — and know that this piece of business came from him, from Eddy, or at least from his, the Bales’, side of the family.) It wasn’t exactly a blockbuster heritage and he made no great claims for it, but it was amusing nevertheless to be able to identify and claim — though he didn’t do this either — the trait as strictly his own contribution. Because Ginny, he’d noticed, ate in accordance with secret and, within terms of the discipline, totally arbitrary principles of her own, or at least of her side of the family. He’d made no study, of course — he wasn’t compulsive — but had observed that, though it was unknown to him and perhaps even to her, she had a sort of game plan, changed as often as good code. Sometimes it was as elementary as eating everything on her plate from left to right. Sometimes he didn’t realize until days afterward — he wasn’t compulsive, he wasn’t compulsive and he wasn’t anal; he had a good head for menus is all — that she had eaten her food alphabetically, or along the points of the compass.

So why had he waited almost a year to open that letter she’d left for him the day she’d gone off in the taxi, the letter he had assumed, assumed now, assumed at the time, would explain everything? Because he already knew why she’d left. Indeed, if Ginny hadn’t left him it could only have been a matter of time till he’d left Ginny. Liam had been a remarkable child. In health remarkable: bright, good, cheerful, pleasant, thoughtful, generous, obliging, and kind. And in sickness remarkable too: all he’d been in health plus a saint of suffering. In sickness and in health. A self-contained marriage of true mind. (He might have taken vows, though he was better than that, better than vows.) To have remained together after Liam died would have been a constant reminder that they were not as good as Liam, that they’d been brought low. If time was to do its job and heal all things, then first the wound had to be taken off, covered over, removed. Liam must die and the Bales must separate.

So he knew why Ginny had left and why, it could even be, she’d taken up with Tony the Tobacconist. At the time he hadn’t known that she had. Otherwise he’d probably have ripped open the letter at once, skipping over all the stuff that was sure to be there (“…and the short of it, Eddy, is that Liam was simply too good. We should never have been able to recover from his loss. Even if we never mentioned his name again, darling, we should be reminded every time we called each other’s. We’re both young and don’t deserve to live in the shadow of his loss another thirty…”) to get to the juicy parts.

So why? Who’d deliberately left his son’s scrapbook at home, photos from the papers of the ill head-bandaged boy, and which, according to the very letter of his own topsy-turvy laws of reasoning, eschewing the good memories, preserving the bad, he could easily have afforded to bring along with him, but who’d left it instead unlooked-for in Putney, or for Ginny to take with her, her dead dowry, to her tobacconist, and who carried on his person only the black, dissolving shards of the memorial brassard, little more now than a kind of officially sanctioned death dust? So why? Why the letter? Who by inclination, and all the sugarotropism of those familial, historic, biologic, Balean, sweet- seeking genes, took dessert with his soup, appetizer with his coffee?

Because while he wasn’t the sort who necessarily saved the best for last, wasn’t dutiful about his veggies or anal enough for rigmarole, he had, in fact, a sense of the last, a knowledge and feel, that is, real as his pride in his own continuity in good Liam’s eating patterns, for the conclusionary ripeness — an instinct, that is, for when worse came to worst.

So maybe he was anal, or at least retentive, squirreling away the best if not for last then for when it was most needed.

Though he thought he pretty much knew what would be in it. (They weren’t enemies, after all, they loved each other, had been married almost fourteen years.) There’d be solace in it. Solace most needed.

And what else was there to do while Rena Morgan was being prepped in the Orlando funeral parlor?

They’d taken their terrified charges to the chapel off I-4 which Nedra Carp had discovered on their first morning in Florida. The nanny had organized a hasty, last-minute service for the little group of mourners, and it struck Bale that what Nedra had told him — could it have only been a week ago? — about the chapel was probably true. It had the altar and pews, the stained glass and track lighting, and even a dried-out font sort of thing, vaguely baptismal, vaguely birdbath, but there was a real question in his mind about whether the place had ever been consecrated. Notices were everywhere in the pew racks that “a priest came on Sunday.” What that left to be made of the young man in charge on the day of Rena’s memorial service was also a question. Clearly, however, the child’s death was probably the most important religious event in the history of the chapel. The pastor, if that’s what he was — he wore a sort of gray modified cassock — seemed more affected than any of them. He could hardly get through a psalm without crying, and his brief eulogy stressed over and over again the pity of the little girl’s having come all the way from England to Florida to die. He couldn’t seem to get past the sheer mileage of the thing.

There were official representatives from the Magic Kingdom in attendance. Also, Matthew Gale and Lamar Kenny had shown up. They sat quietly in one of the rear pews. Benny recognized Kenny from their encounter at the elevator and pointed him out to Eddy. Mary Cottle recognized Gale as the young man who’d winked at Colin Bible at the Haunted Mansion and said nothing. Though by now, of course, the adults had pretty much pieced together a general idea of what had gone on that night. The Disney people were on to the false Pluto and had fired him. They’d fired Kenny, too, on suspicion of being the false Mickey Mouse, but Lamar, fearing he’d never work again and still believing he’d been duped into his phony audition, would admit nothing. Nor would Matthew Gale tell them otherwise.

“I got you into this,” Gale told him.

“You bet,” Lamar said.

“I won’t let you down.”

“He won’t let me down,” Lamar said. “Big deal. Top Disney dicks crawling all over the place watching us, and he won’t let me down. Loyalty! Follows me everywhere as if he really was Pluto!”

Back at the hotel, Nedra had taken the children to the game room.

Colin, off to see what could be done about changing their tickets, called to say that they didn’t have to be changed, that Rena would be ready in time for their flight the following day.

“What are they doing to her, do you think?” Eddy asked Moorhead.

They were sitting in the Coconino Cove, a bar just outside the Pueblo Room.

“They’re embalming her. It’s not generally done in Europe, but it seems to be mandatory in this country.”

“Embalming her,” Bale said. “What is that actually?”

“Well,” Mr. Moorhead said, “it’s pretty much what you’d think. They treat the corpse to prevent decay and putrefaction.”

“Putrefaction,” Bale said. “She was barely thirteen years old, for God’s sake.”

“She was old enough to fall in love,” Moorhead said. He finished his gin and ordered another. “It’s what killed her.”

“Yeah, you said.”

“It was the unforeseen complication.”

“How do they do that?”

“Do what?”

“Prevent decay, prevent putrefaction.”

“With preservatives.”

“What, like in the rashers and bangers, you mean?”

“The Egyptians soaked their dead in brine and filled the body cavities with spices and aromatic substances.”

“That’s nice,” Bale said. “A little attar of roses, a splash of Nuits de Paris.”

“Then they drain the blood from her veins with a hollow needle called a trocar, which they use in conjunction with a tube called a cannula.”

“Secrets of the ancients revealed,” Bale said.

“To prevent the body from shriveling and turning brown—”

“Like an apple,” Bale said.

“—they pump formaldehyde into the cavities in combination with alcohol.”

Eddy set his drink down.

“They apply cosmetics. They apply masking pastes.”

“Hey,” Bale said, “I just remembered, there’s something I have to do back in the room,” and left the bar, returned to the room, and took Ginny’s letter out of his suitcase.

I was his mother, Eddy [Bale read], I was his mum. I’m the one carried him those nine months, who lost her figure and still wear stretch marks like chevrons — my corporal, as it were, punishment, as it were.

Have the decency. Spare me your shock and outrage. Keep to yourself your reservations about my taste and sensibilities. Four years like these down one’s craw and anyone’s taste would have soured, SHOULD, have soured, if, that is, any sensibility is still there to function at all. I don’t need any crap just now.

It ain’t all been dainties and plum puddings, has it, Eddy, our crusade? Passing the hat, doing our buskers’ shuffle up and down the kingdom’s avenues? For press and for public passing the hat, passing the hankie, touching it to the collective eye, the collective nose. God, Eddy, how we Hyde Park-cornered them with our despair, with our need and our noise. Our cause! Cause and affect! Anyway, our hats in our hands, our hearts on our sleeves, and our knees on the ground. Beggars! Beggars, Ed! Always for Liam, of course, never ourselves, of if for ourselves, then for the abstract motherhood and fatherhood in us, or if for Liam, then for some soiled and abstract childhood in him, some sentimental fiction of good order, natural birthright, the ought-to-be.

“Well of course,” you’ll be saying, “Well of course, you silly git, of course we’d a right to expect better than we got, of course Liam did. Of course it’s good order, birthright, and proper dispensation for kids to grow up! Nothing sentimental there. No fiction about it. Childhood diseases are one thing — mumps and measles, chicken pox, croup. Maybe a broken bone or a tooth to be pulled. Rashes in summer from lessons botched in leaf identification. The coughs and sniffles and low-grade fevers. All the rocking-chair temps. The mustard plaster and the asafetida. Oils of clove and the hanging garlics. All the cuddle comforts — Epsom salts, vaporizers, and the Vicks reliefs. Your only scaled suffering, what the traffic can bear.

“But car crash and brain damage,” you’ll be saying, “paralysis? Your tumors and cancers and drowning accidents in surf?”

Don’t get me wrong, Eddy. I think so too. I was his mother, I was his mum. And lived nine months longer than ever you did with superstition and fear, the 4 a.m. credulities, all the toxic heterodoxies of lying-in, all pregnancy’s benighted, illiterate dread. Guilty for fried foods I’d eaten years before, the shadow of sugar incriminating me, of butter and egg yolk and marble in meat, all that candy, all those fish ’n’ chips.

Even signs of life startling. “My God,” I thought when he kicked, “he’s got only one leg!” And “Christ!”—when I puked—“I’m upchucking bits and pieces of my kid!”

Doing bargains with God, you see: “If he’s missing a finger, take it from his left hand, Lord,” “Make him deaf rather than blind, blind rather than simple.” “If he has to be ugly, don’t give him bad teeth.”

Jesus, the stuff I thought! “I’d rather he be homosexual than nearsighted.” “If he’s fat I hope he’s tall.” “I prefer he be bad at games than not have a sense of humor; I’d rather he didn’t get the point of jokes than be stingy.” “It would be better if he were a poor Tory than a wealthy Red.”

That’s not the half of it, of course. The half of it was another bargain, the half of it was this: “Let him have one leg, Lord. Take the fingers from his right hand and make him this deaf, blind, simple, rich, fat, Red. Rot his teeth, God, and let him be short, this clumsy, mean and ugly, humorless, nearsighted fag. Just let him be born alive!”

Not just let him live, Eddy. Let him be born alive. Because if he was born alive I took it for granted he’d live. It never occurred to me it could be otherwise. What did I know about vicissitude who could strike such bargains? Who assumed you paid the price of admission up front and were never bothered again; who suspected, perhaps even expected that at the outside there might even be trouble, hard times, say, but to whom it just never occurred that she’d still be alive herself and have to witness out-and-out tragedy?

But he was perfect, our Liam. From the beginning one of those rare, good-looking babies, alert and cheerful, sturdy, well. So even-tempered that if you didn’t know better you might believe him actually thoughtful, actually circumspect. And wasn’t his gaze clear? And wasn’t his grip strong? As if he was trying to chin on the world with those perfect, tiny hands? Pull himself up, have a look round?

I was his mother, Eddy. I was his mum. And counted his limbs and totaled his toes, his fingers and features, doing the sums of my baby son like some holy arithmetic, as if I were a religious telling her beads, say, or as if I were counting my blessings.

But nervous…no, stunned, in the presence of such glory. The postpartum depression you hear about — I was his mother, I was his mum — is only a sort of stress, only a kind of strain, just the ordinary and decent apprehension of responsibility. His soft spot, for example, his fontanel, that dangerously malleable skullcap of infant membrane which I couldn’t help but think of as a kind of quicksand, some treacherous maelstrom of the vulnerable it half scared me to death to clean, to go near with water, a washcloth and soap.

Or any crankiness that couldn’t be accounted for within the limited infant parameters of shit or hunger or sleep, the explosive, inexplicable tantrum cholerics of incommunicado grief like a sort of willful madness, which was…well, maddening, mysterious to me because it seemed so arbitrary and implacable, like…oh, a cow howling, or the panic neighing of a horse, or any other inarticulate anguish of the beasts. “What? What is it, Liam?” I’d lean over his crib and ask. “What, child, what?” Or pick him up, rock him, spoil him, try to bribe his anger with my comfort, my still swollen maternals, the boneless, angleless fillets of my soft shoulders, my tender breasts, my featherbed lap, my mother-meat. Crooning, cooing, ah-ah-ahhing a promised protection I had no more faith in than he did, the distraught, crazed, wailing Liam.

Because that’s what I thought, Eddy, that he’d actually gone mad, as out of control as a demon. Dry, rested, fed (spitting my tit out like an orthodox offered interdicted fruit) and outraged. No longer even bothering to reason with him through reason (my new mum’s version of it anyway — love, a hug, a kiss, a squeeze), but cutting through all that and going directly to the recognized, time-honored lingua franca of all infants everywhere: that universal, gold-standard, pound-sterling, cosmic greenback, the comprehensive baby currency of distracting bauble. Shaking keys at him, offering my change purse, setting a ticking watch at his ear (which he wouldn’t have heard anyway above that racket he made), giving him a shiny spoon to look at, a rattle to bang, textures to feel: crumpled paper, a penny, a string of beads, an orange peel, grapes, bread, the flesh of an apple. Concerned, Eddy — well, I was his mother, I was his mum — that there might be something intractable and unyielding and malicious at the core.

Which there was, wasn’t there, Ed, only not what we expected, or anyway expected back in those days when we were both new to the game and didn’t know the score.

Because you learn. Sooner or later you do. I did. Because standing over their cribs to see if they’re still breathing doesn’t keep them alive. Hard work does.

Though I’ll spare you this part lest you take it into your head I’m complaining, which I’m not. Because things even out, they really do, and there’s a certain clean democracy about everything. I’m thinking of those nine months of ungovernable dread, the seven I knew I was pregnant plus the two retroactive ones when I feared I might have done Baby some thoughtless injury just because I didn’t know he existed yet. Because if those nine months were unbearable to me, and if it’s true that you can never really share them, never really catch up, I ought to tell you that you can’t share or catch up either with the times of greatest joy, those seven or eight or nine months when I knew he was out of the woods, or I was, that I was past my postpartum funk, that his soft spot wasn’t going to sink in on itself and the crankiness was no cry of madness or doom but only some inexplicable inner teething, say, maybe just ordinary run-of-the- mill boredom, and we lay, infant Liam and I, gurgle to gurgle and coo to coo and skin to skin.

I was his mother, Eddy, I was his mum. I saw him raise his head, turn over, crawl, pull himself up, stand without holding on, take a step, walk. I heard him say “biscuit,” I heard him say “mum.” I pushed him in his pram. I was with him on the pleasure-ground, on the commons, on the heath. I took him to the Bingo, I took him to the high street. I took him to the kiosk, I took him to the caff. Oh, Eddy, we went everywhere, everywhere, Liam and his mum. We went to the tinsmith, to the coster and chandler. We rode in estate cars that the salesman would drive. I showed him the fishmonger, the chapman and publican, the chemist and cutler, the cooper and smith. We browsed at the stationer’s. Estate agents opened houses for us. We had the builders in. And took the air at the poulterer’s. Haberdashers and milliners set out their wares for our inspection. Everyone did, showing their goods, pitching their hope at us in the lively open market that’s the world.

All for Liam’s baby benefit, Ed, to train his urge and craving to their cheer. So that we went everywhere and did it all not just with whomsoever but with whatsoever the greengrocer and tradesmen equivalencies are for arcade and for bourse. Ever so much better than playing House it was, our sprightly little game of playing Planet, playing Life.

He wasn’t a baby now. He was a little boy. And had seen enough, I think, of what was only merchandise.

For perhaps a month we’d been going to the parks, Liam rough and tumble with the kids, for when they showed him a toy, at least at first, I think he thought they meant to sell it to him, for him to buy it from them, and so he’d act standoffish, reluctant, disinclined, and ask with almost inattention, nonchalance, just what they thought they wanted for that thing, shaking his head whatever they told him, whatever they said, as I hadn’t even known I’d been teaching him to. “Too dear, too dear,” he’d say, driving his hard bargains like nails in the very air.

“No, darling, no sweetheart,” I had to explain, “they only want to play with you.”

I was his mother, Ed, ever so much longer than you were his dad. No, wait, I was. Because everything has a reasonable explanation, Eddy. No, wait, it does. It has to. Those dreadful nine months he was in my belly like rotten cheese, say, or something you eat that gives you bad dreams. And the four or five months it took his soft spot to heal, the two or three I couldn’t get used to his crankiness, couldn’t get used to him — because motherhood’s not natural, Eddy, it’s not, whatever they say; how could anything that dangerous, difficult, and strange be natural? How can spending all that time with something, all right, someone, but someone who doesn’t speak your language yet and who doesn’t have enough of his own to tell you his name or say his address, be natural? And how can it be natural to be at the constant beck and call of anything, all right, anyone, anyone who lives within those barbarous parameters of shit and hunger and sleep and all the rest of the time, all the rest of the time, on bliss and on grief like a dancer up on point? Natural? How can it even be good for you? And then our years on the town; then — well, everything, the time I put in on call even when he napped.

You were at business. I had possession, enjoyment, holding in fee simple and fee tail, in freehold and seisin, in dubious privilege and precedence, my mum’s natural seniority, my tenure: all motherhood’s time-serviced squatter’s rights.

Jesus, Eddy, he’d have had to live another dozen years for you to catch up with me.

Which he couldn’t, didn’t. It being hard enough for him to make it through that first dozen. Which he barely could, barely did.

Though you certainly tried to catch up, I’ll give you that Seizing, it turned out, on his illness. Making his disease your cause. Like an entertainer on the telethon, almost, so frenzied you were. La! La, luv, it couldn’t have been easy for you — my frame of reference isn’t even his sickness, you know; it’s that pregnancy, those seven lean months when I got so fat, my wary wait-and-see ways afterward — I know. It couldn’t have been easy. Or shouldn’t, shouldn’t have been. Taking poor Liam’s case, your case, over all their heads.

Over the heads of the doctors, of the interns and specialists, over the heads of the experts and scientists and the National Health, over the heads of the odds-makers, over the heads of the nobs and the honorables, of the chairmen of boards, of the media, of the movers and shakers, over the heads of the very public that pitched in with its pounds and its pennies to stretch out his life, at last taking it over the head of God and — what I can’t forget and will never forgive — over the head finally of Liam himself. Who wanted to die.

Then, before he could, you had your idea about all those other poor kids and had already begun your inquiries, and I knew I’d have to leave you once Liam was gone. I can’t live like this, darling. I can’t live like this, Ed.

So. Well. That’s about it.

Anyway, I shall have to stop now. I’ve called the taxi and expect it will be here quite soon. Although it’s funny. To tell you the truth, I haven’t the foggiest what I’m going to tell the driver. I’ve known for years, since Liam was first diagnosed, that we couldn’t live together once he was dead. But I don’t know where to go. I’m out of cigarettes. I shall have to get some. I’ll ask him to stop at the tobacconist on the Upper Richmond Road.

Oh, and don’t you know yet, Eddy, that grown-ups are more interesting than kids?

9

On the strength of all this, Bale left 627 and drifted down to the Fiesta Fun Center, the hotel’s big game room, where Nedra Carp had been joined now by Colin Bible and Mr. Moorhead. The physician had left the Coconino Cove and was, or so it seemed to Bale, a bit unsteady on his feet. Colin, his duties as liaison completed between the Dream Holiday People, as they’d come to be known in the local press, the Orlando undertakers, and the travel agency making the arrangements with the two airlines that would be taking them first to Miami and then back to England, was recounting some of his difficulties. He’d had to pick out the coffin, a rather more ornate and expensive box than necessary, but one which could be paid for out of their contingency fund.

The travel agent, he said, couldn’t have been more helpful. She’d handled nearly everything and been most sympathetic. “Really,” Colin said. “I quite felt sorry for her.”

Bale looked about the game room at their half-dozen surviving charges.

It was late in the afternoon. The children still wore the dressy clothes they’d worn to the service in the chapel. Except for Noah’s tie, which the child had undone, and the collar he’d unbuttoned and the shirttails that had come out of his pants, and the pants themselves, partially unzipped and hanging from his waist at an askew angle, and the unhealthy, excited flush on his face, the children seemed calm, almost staid.

“Is that one going to be all right?” Eddy asked. “His eyes, his eyes seem too bright to me.” Except for himself and the hotel’s caricaturist, no one seemed interested.

Colin was still recounting the exploits of the afternoon.

It seems the woman had broken down in tears when she’d had to explain the carriers’ policies regarding the shipment of Rena’s body. The domestic carrier had agreed to accept Rena’s passenger ticket as payment in full for her shipment as freight to Miami. They didn’t have to, they said, but it was an unwritten rule and they would. On the other hand, the overseas airline required an additional $2.63 a pound overage. The casket was 220 pounds. Rena was 95 pounds. It would come to $828.45. “But the unwritten rule,” Colin objected. Overseas airlines were bound by international agreements, the travel agent had said. There were no unwritten rules.

“He seems awfully excited,” Bale said.

“She was still on the phone when I took it from her,” Colin told them. “‘What about her baggage allowance?’ I demanded of the agent on the other end of the line.”

The man told him that the first 62 pounds were free but that they must pay an additional $2.63 for each pound above that.

“‘It never does,’ I said. The fellow didn’t know what I was talking about. ‘Her luggage,’ I said. ‘It can’t weigh more than thirty or thirty-five pounds at the outside. We’ll be wanting a credit on the difference, mate, or we’re going to fucking sue you all over the goddamn sky!’ He still hadn’t a clue what I was on about. ‘I told you,’ I said. ‘The kid’s bags weigh maybe thirty- five pounds, the kid ninety-five pounds. You’re charging her for a seat, so according to the international agreements she’s entitled to her full baggage allowance. She’s got twenty-seven pounds coming to her. At two sixty-three a pound that’s seventy-one dollars and a penny. From eight twenty-eight forty-five. That’s seven fifty-seven forty-four. The name’s Bible,’ I told him. ‘Colin B-I-B-L-E. I’ll see you tomorrow at the weigh-in! Oh, and mister,’ I says. ‘What’s that?’ he asks me. ‘They’ll always be an England!’ I tell him and hang up.”

“Now you know how I feel,” Moorhead said, when Colin had told them all this under his breath.

“What?” Colin Bible asked the physician.

“I said now you know how I feel.”

“How’s that?”

“The son of a bitch,” Moorhead said. “‘Well, at least she’ll get a Florida death certificate out of it.’ Imagine the son of a bitch saying a thing like that to me. ‘At least she’ll get a Florida death certificate out of it.’ The son of a bitch.” He was talking about the doctor who’d signed Rena’s death certificate. Moorhead, who wasn’t licensed to practice in Florida, hadn’t been permitted to sign the document.

Bale was watching Noah, who’d been rarely to shops and who didn’t know where he would get money for the big-ticket items, who couldn’t read well or do his maths. He was watching Noah, who would not live to make money.

When Rena died, the little boy demanded that Moorhead turn over the rest of the hundred dollars he’d been holding for him. The doctor had heard about the incident in the shops but had given him his eighty dollars without a fuss.

Now all of them were watching Noah, who’d been changing five dollars at a time and taking his quarters to play each game, to play skee ball and air hockey, to play Asteroids and Space Invaders, Pac-Man and Donkey Kong. He did not seem even to be conscious of his scores but cared only about how many games he could play. But it was taking too long. Now he was depositing his money in as many machines as he could, pressing whichever button activated the first ball or the first sorties of invading terror craft, the initial extraterrestrial overflights, but without waiting long enough to use his joy stick before going on to whatever machine happened to be unoccupied. Soon children who were not even part of their group were watching him. Nedra Carp watched with her arm lightly about Janet Order’s shoulders. The caricaturist made rapid charcoal sketches on sheet after sheet of paper. Noah turned to the spectators and indicated with a gesture that they come forward and play on his quarters. He put money in the soda machines but didn’t bother to retrieve his drinks, in the gum and candy machines but, seeing he’d run out of change, went to get more before returning to the vending machines, and only then after making another deliberate sweep of the room. He pumped quarters into machines that were still activated and invited kids to come up and take the soda and candy and gum, as he’d invited them to play out his time on the arcade games.

“Noah,” Nedra Carp called. “Noah? Noah, dear.”

“Don’t you think we ought to stop him?” Eddy asked Mr. Moorhead.

“No,” the doctor said, “I shouldn’t think so.”

Bale looked at Colin.

“He’s on a roll, mate,” Colin said softly.

“Now that was a shopping spree!” Benny Maxine told the little boy when he was all out of money.

“Wasn’t it just?” Noah said, beaming.

“You’re de bloke wot broke de bank at Monte Carlo.”

“Aren’t I just?”

Bale left the arcade and stepped into an elevator. A guest turned to him.

“Floor?”

“Eight, please,” Bale said.

He thought he could smell her strange, strong cigarettes in the hallway. “May I come in?” he asked.

Mary Cottle shrugged and stepped aside to let him pass.

He sat down on a chair by the table.

“They cleaned this place up.”

“They offered me a different room,” she said. “I didn’t want it.”

“No.”

“Too many swell memories.”

“Yeah.”

She sat on the edge of the bed, facing him.

“So?” she said.

He repeated what Colin had told them about the casket, about the $2.63 a pound overage the airline was charging.

“He made them apply twenty-seven pounds of her own body weight toward the cost of the overage? Jesus!”

He told her about Noah and the machines, about the sketches the caricaturist had made.

“The kid hired someone to draw him spending money?”

“No,” Eddy said, “Colin commissioned them,” and explained Bible’s scheme for getting effigies of the children into Madame Tussaud’s.

“What I don’t know doesn’t hurt me,” Mary said.

“Sure it does.”

She shrugged. “Maybe,” she said. “I guess.”

“Could I have one of those?”

“You said you thought they were too harsh.”

“Not by half.”

“No,” she said.

“I can’t have one?”

“Sure,” she said. “I mean, you’re right. They’re not too harsh. Not by half. Not by two thirds. Five eighths, nine tenths.”

He leaned forward to take a light off Mary Cottle’s cigarette. “Cheers,” he said.

“Cheers,” she said. They touched the tips of their cigarettes.

“This time tomorrow,” he said.

“We’ll be on our way home.”

“We’ll be standing in a queue. We’ll be showing our passports and explaining about Rena and mopping our brows. We’ll be extricating our underwear from the cheeks of our ass.”

“Look,” she said, “is that snow? Is it snowing?” She pointed her cigarette past his head but Bale didn’t turn around.

“You’re not so tough.”

“It’s that same freak weather.”

“Funny,” he said. “I don’t feel the least bit purified.”

“Me neither,” she said. “Not the least bit. Purified.”

“Why are you crying?”

“I’m not so tough.”

“What’s the matter?” he said.

“Oh, Bale,” she said, “we lost one.”

“It’s not as if she had a life expectancy,” he comforted.

“My God,” she said, “we were gone a week. We lost one.”

“I’m making my move,” he said, and left his chair and got up to sit beside her on the bed. He stroked her face.

“Do you have anything with you?”

“What, a condom, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“No,” he said. “What about you? Aren’t you on the pill?”

“No,” she said.

“An IUD?”

“No,” she said.

“A diaphragm? Foam?”

“Nothing,” she said.

“Oh,” he said, and started to move away.

She pulled him toward her. She undid his shirt, his belt, the button on his trousers. She raised her dress, she lowered her underpants.

“Will it be all right? Neither of us is protected.”

“We lost one,” she repeated, and Eddy helped her the rest of the way out of her dress. He undid her bra and held her breasts. He sucked her nipples. She placed a hand in his shorts and withdrew his penis. She held it between her palms and rubbed. “This is how you start a fire without matches,” she whispered. Bale growled softly. “Easy,” she said, “take it easy.” She wanted him huge, immense, colossal. She wet her little finger and slipped it into his anus.

“Oh,” he gasped.

“Easy,” she said.

“Oh.”

“Has it been long?”

“Yes,” he said, “yes.”

“Yes,” she said, “take it easy.”

She wanted him prodigious, vast, whopping, stupendous. She wanted his cock engorged, his balls filled with come. She wanted her tubes to dilate, her pudendum to run with grease. “Take it easy,” she murmured, “ease off, take it easy, take it easy.”

Then, at what instinctively she felt was exactly the propitious biological moment, she reached out and seized him, she reached out and brought him to her. She raised him on top of her and guided him into her body. She wrapped her legs about his buttocks and alternately squeezed, released, and squeezed, pressing his body deeper inside her own with each contraction, rocking him, inching him along her clitoris, easing him through the zones of her flesh and up the boneless scaffold of her sex, thinking, who’d not lain with men in years, who’d held them off with their activating poisons, the white agency of her soiled, provoked chemistry, all the radical synergistics of their deadly, complice, conspired force, who’d used mechanics, gadgets, gravity, vibrators, even her moistened fingers like so many machines, who’d explored her own almost articulated nerve endings till she knew them like the strings that raised and lowered the joints of puppets, thinking Now! Now! Now! Thinking of monstrosities, freaks, ogres, and demons, conjuring werewolves, vampires, harpies, and hellhounds, conjecturing maneaters, eyesores, humpbacks, and clubfoots. Thinking Now now now now now and inviting all cock-eyed, crook-backed, tortuous bandy deformity out of the bottle, calling forth fiends, calling forth bogies, rabid, raw-head bloody-bones. Now, she thinks, now! And positions herself to take Bale’s semen, to mix it with her own ruined and injured eggs and juices to make a troll, a goblin, broken imps and lurching oafs, felons of a nightmare blood, fallen pediatric angels, lemures, gorgons, cyclopes, Calibans, God’s ugly, punished customers, his obscene and frail and lubberly, his gargoyle, flyblown hideosities and blemished, poky mutants, all his throwbacks, all his scurf, his doomed, disfigured invalids, his human slums and eldritch seconds, the poor relation and the second-best, watered, bungled being, flied ointment, weak link, chipped rift, crack and fault and snag and flaw, his maimed, his handicapped, his disabled, his crippled, his afflicted, delicate cachexies with their provisional, fragile, makeshift tolerances. Invoking the sapped, the unsound, the impaired, the unfit. Invoking the milksop, the doormat, the played-out and burnt-out, the used-up, the null and the void. Adjuring their spirits in the names of Mudd-Gaddis, of Tony Word and Lydia Conscience, of Janet Order and Benny Maxine, of Noah Cloth, spending his money like a drunken sailor, and Rena Morgan, spent. On behalf of dead Liam and her own unnamed stillborn kids. Thinking, Not gone a week and we’ve lost one. Thinking, Now, now, goddamn it, now! And accepting infection from him, contagion, the septic climate of their noxious genes. Dreaming of complications down the road, of bad bouts and thick medical histories, of wasting neurological diseases, of blood and pulmonary scourges, of blows to the glands and organs, of pathogens climbing the digestive tract, invading the heart and bone marrow, erupting the skin and clouding the cough.

Now, now, now, now, now, now, now, she thinks, and calls upon the famous misfits, upon centaurs and satyrs and chimeras, upon dragons and griffins and hydras and wyverns. Upon the basilisk, the salamander, and the infrequent unicorn.

And upon, at last, a lame and tainted Mickey Mouse.