The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

1981

Within a week his subject, Marla Baker, had moved away. English’s duties as a private eye were nil, but his boss, Ray Sands, found more work for him at WPRD.

Essentially, on the production end of things, at WPRD he did just what he’d been doing in the cold midnights outside Marla Baker’s windows: he taped other people’s conversations. But now he was right in the room with them, they saw him, he was no spy. After they went away he edited out embarrassing slips of the tongue and overlong silences, dubbed themes and intros and outros onto either end, and tossed down the reels in the Special Programs in-basket. English found it all pretty dull stuff — half-hour chats between WPRD’s big-yawn personalities and their baldly uninteresting guests, who happened to be goofball artists, authors of books about birds and clams, or has-beens the listener would be surprised to learn were not yet dead. Sometimes English helped train new staff arrivals. These had to be frequent in order to keep up with the departures.

One new arrival English worked with was a Portuguese man named Smith, not an unusual name among Portuguese fishing families, it turned out, because many of them had adopted the names of their British captains when they’d first jumped ship on the Cape and taken up their lives here, far from home. All these name changes had happened in the murky past, but to English this gentleman sounded as if he’d just stepped onto the pier. Maybe he’d come here two days ago and only then adopted the name his American relatives had used for generations; English really couldn’t guess, and there was no finding out, either, because Smith had his own way of trying to communicate, and it didn’t work. Over the air this wasn’t a problem, as he broadcast in his native language.

Around the records and equipment the new man had a hunched, respectful deliberateness of which English approved. Smith was portly. But he had a blubbery quality, too. English imagined they still called him by his childhood nickname around the house. English sympathized when sometimes Smith forgot and left the switch for the announcer’s mike in the wrong position — it was supposed to be On when he was talking and Off when he wasn’t, and it sounded simple enough, but everybody got it wrong sometimes at first, trying to do two or three things at once and very aware the whole time that people were out there listening and possibly considering you some kind of a geek, or worse. When Smith made this little error he invariably looked as if he was about to surrender all control. “Oh! I’m making, iss — diss wrong! Too wrong!” He had a bald head, doctorly reading glasses he was always donning out of nowhere, a fringe of hair more literally a fringe than English would have hoped to see anywhere outside a cartoon, and a checked golfing cap that he deeply cherished. “I’m wear a het on my had,” he told English, “because I’m don’t”—he rubbed his smooth head—“you see? Iss bowled.” He displayed his checked cap. “You see?” He wore his wristwatch on the outside of his sweater sleeve, set off like fireworks against the orange knit. “Issa new — brain you,” he liked to tell everyone. There was a digital clock on the announcer’s board and a wall clock on the wall, but when he wanted the correct time, Smith always went into a huddle with his watch.

On his first delirious night at the controls, he opened his program with a 45 rpm recording of a Portuguese orchestra doing their country’s national anthem, after which they played the American national anthem, managing to make them both sound exactly the same. Next Smith read the intro to his show from a little yellow card he held before his face with a trembling hand, but his mike was still switched to Off. When he was done reading he turned it to On and desperately asked English a few incomprehensible questions that went out over the air.

While Smith read his introduction to each song from one of his yellow cards, pushed the button that set it spinning, and then cued up the next record on the other turntable with the sweating vertigo of a person under fire, one of the newsmen — for English’s money there were too many newspeople around the place — taped a phone interview in the hall closet with a Vietnam veteran about Agent Orange. Acoustically the closet was the only place, because the phone company had refused to wire the production studio as long as the station was in arrears. “And why did they do that!” the newsman was saying. He felt he had to shout. “What was it exactly that they told you!” Smith liked to keep the speakers in the studio turned up high. The music of his homeland carried him away. He was moved to tears by a ballad, a typical one of tootly violins and a passion-wrung male voice begging violently in Portuguese, except when every now and then it sobbed in English, “Hoppy birthday — to you — my dolling …” “It sounds like you were getting the runaround here, am I right?” the newsman cried. Smith looked at his watch, at the wall clock, at the digital clock. He was getting alarmed. The timing on his play list must not have been working out. Time was his conqueror. When the song was done he talked in a choked, halting fashion to the audience, holding no yellow cards now, clutching the microphone by its neck. English sensed he was confessing his incompetence and apologizing for his whole life.

Before too long, the interview in the closet was over. Berryman, the reporter, was leaning against the glass window of the announcer’s studio looking drained of blood. English motioned to him to come on into the studio, though there was hardly any room, if only to stop him breathing on the glass like a kid who needed a nickel. Berryman was tall and pale, with the look, to English’s eye, of a real juicer, just the kind of washout you’d expect to locate in one of the closets around here. Everyone at WPRD was either just starting out in the radio business or completely finished. There was nobody in between. “I just got fired,” Berryman said.

“Bullshit.”

“No. No. Ray Sands was just in here, and he fired me.”

“You must’ve misheard him. He must’ve not recognized you and he must’ve said, ‘You’re hired.’”

Smith turned and asked a question, but now he couldn’t say anything intelligible because his bald head was tuned to Portuguese. He might have been requesting permission to explode the station. English nodded and smiled, rather than make him feel misunderstood.

“What’d he fire you for?” English asked Berryman.

“He was standing in the fucking hallway,” the reporter said. “He was waiting for me when I came out of the fucking closet. He said the fucking interview was hogwash. He pronounced my fucking fate.”

“Hogwash? What has he got against hogwash? I mean, hey”—English pointed at the day’s small stack of Special Programs tapes—“Baba Ram Dass. Check this out, Berryman—‘The Nicest People on Cape Cod.’ And anyway, when did Sands even get a chance to hear the tape?”

“He didn’t hear this tape,” Berryman said. “This is part two. He heard part one. He heard it last week, on the air.” Berryman held out the tape, a cassette. “This is part two. He doesn’t want to hear part two.”

Smith, trying to get one record stopped and another started, now developed the notion that he was being asked to play this tape. “No, no, no. I’m play music en rahdio — very”—he went through a bunch of gestures that got nothing across, picked up his play list, and ran his finger down along the titles—“I’m make diss, to will be — very nice.”

“I don’t believe anybody ever got fired before at WPRD,” English told Berryman.

“He said the whole report was hogwash. I mean, as if he actually gives two shits.”

English was hardly paying this chat any mind — mainly he kept his eye on Smith, communicating wordlessly with the new arrival through nods of the head and the way he held his body, letting Smith know he was still there, still helping. And yet what passed between him and Berryman turned out to be important. Things were coming swiftly into his mind along various paths, like spears. But — Fired, tough luck for the unlucky, was all he thought at the time. “Well, Berryman, I’ll buy you a drink,” he told the ex-reporter.

“I happen to be drunk already,” Berryman said, “but something like that might be arranged.”

“Right when this shift is over. How about a cup of coffee?”

“Fuck you,” Berryman said. “Hogwash.”

They were sitting in a basement place on the East End, Berryman’s idea of a bar. English preferred a spot about a half block away that had brighter lights and a little chromium. But tonight it was Berryman’s party.

Smith was with them and seemed to grasp that he and English were consoling Berryman for the negligible loss of his job. Smith’s face was expressive. English had never seen anybody before who actually “furrowed” his brow. Smith pushed his lips toward the rim of his glass like the bell of a honeysuckle, and what he did was, he quaffed.

“So tell me about this tape,” English said, he hoped sympathetically, to Berryman.

“But the point of it is that there’s nothing to tell, English. ’Nam vets, Agent Orange, it’s last year’s stuff. But a phone interview has a certain immediacy, so you do a phone interview. What does Sands want, a big scoop? We can’t even make a long-distance call, man, because his credit’s trashed.”

English was ready to get going. It was a bar with dim lights and a faint stink, where the big mistake was a rug that harbored the damp. The customers drank resolutely. It wasn’t eleven yet, but he saw men and women already forming tender alliances of the kind that had to be hurried through before they rotted — his kind, as a matter of fact. After a while he couldn’t stop himself. “Let me tell you about this woman I got the hots for.” “Are you buying?” Berryman said.

“Who’s been buying so far?”

“Mr. English. One of the gainfully employed.”

“Smith.” English waggled his empty glass.

Smith caught the bartender’s eye with a raised finger, then stirred the finger around among the three of them.

“Her name is Leanna Sousa,” English said. “Leanna Sousa, Leanna Sousa, Leanna Sousa.” He’d never been able to drink — two was his limit, maybe one.

“I didn’t get the young lady’s name,” Berryman said.

“Leanna Sousa?” Smith said. “Sousa?”

“Right. Yeah. Sousa — Portuguese.”

“Diss a lady that she have one hotel? Sousa Hotel?”

“We didn’t get around to what she owns.”

“You guys are so close. You go so deep,” Berryman said.

“It wasn’t that kind of conversation.”

“‘It?’ Are we talking about one fucking conversation with the dyke owner of a dykes-only hotel in one of the homosexual capitals of the world? What religion are you?”

“Catholic.”

“You’re about to suffer worse than a Jew.”

“I’m crazy about her. Her hair is pure black.”

“Oh,” Berryman said, “oh. Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”

“If I could get you to see what I see in her, then I wouldn’t feel so alone.”

“You’re not alone, English. I’m right here. Buy me a drink.”

“You’re right there with the snotty remarks. You’re above it all. But you know what they say? Empty people float upward.”

“My glass is almost empty,” Berryman pointed out.

“Diss woman,” Smith said. “Because she — the family feel terrible.”

“Yeah, I can dig it,” English said. “She’s non-traditional.”

“She’s a dyke,” Berryman said. “That’s okay for her, that’s okay for me, but it’s not okay for you. I’ve seen these reclamation projects. I’ve seen them fail.” He crossed his eyes, trying to look at an ice cube while he drained his glass of bourbon. “Big deal.”

“Reclamation? I wasn’t talking about reclamation. Hey, I would never ask a woman to change herself for me.”

“For Christ’s sake, English. You don’t have to snow me. We’re none of us gentlemen here.”

“I wasn’t snowing you.” But he was. This fact soured his view of those around him.

Smith put his hand on English’s arm as English got up to leave.

“You’re not taking off?” Berryman said.

“I am. I think I’ll go listen to your farewell tape. Part one.”

“It turns my stomach to see people have two drinks and then just … leave,” Berryman said.

Smith made a point of shaking English’s hand, taking it in both of his, European-style.

It was only that English was curious about Ray Sands. Because English worked two jobs for him, to English he was actually two bosses. English would have admitted that, around WPRD, he himself had a voice in the universal shock and disgust at the avarice, cowardice, and stupidity of the boss. But as Sands’s only assistant in the detective trade, English had seen his house, eaten his roast beef, talked with his prematurely senile old wife, and played with his toy electric train; and the underground of Ray Sands, the lightless shafts — how deep did they go? Even on a sunny afternoon, standing outside his home in a blue parka and one of those hats that dads wear fishing, trimming his hedges with electric clippers, as English had found him doing one day, Sands seemed very mysterious and almost invisible. Maybe it was just that he was one of those people who’d been grownups when English was a child — shrouded, and heavy-laden with matters English hoped would go away before he had to learn about them. Anyway, why shouldn’t he be interested? — as when once he’d looked through his father’s bureau drawer and found more silver change there than a child knew existed. Looking at it he’d wondered so hard what it must be like to own so much shiny money that he’d stolen it all. Not that he meant to steal anything from Ray Sands. But he wanted to spy on the person he was spying for.

There were signs on the second floor indicating a radio station was housed here, but the linty rooming-house atmosphere of burned-out naked light bulbs and eerie trash in the hallway would get anybody thinking that these placards — WPRD 103 FM and SHHH BROADCAST IN PROGRESS! — were holdouts from some unrecollected age, like the one on the stairs that said CAUTION — FRESH PAINT! a claim that was, by his reckoning, more than one hundred percent false. In the hallway there were two doors to WPRD, and he took the first into the station’s front office. That was one-third of the place, and the rest was the production studio and the announcer’s studio and the bathroom. No janitor had ever been at work here. They looked like the premises of an outfit that was almost ready to be inaugurated or one that had very recently closed.

He was a little surprised to find Berryman’s phone interview right where it should have been in the tape library, which was really a closet in the front office of WPRD. Part of him had expected it to be missing.

He listened to it through headphones in the production studio. It was just your average interview, nothing remarkable about it that English could see, aside from the awful peaks-and-valleys volume — Berryman shouted in his ear, while the replies from Wilkinson, the head of ’Nam Vets for Cape Cod, sounded like a small bee in a jar. Side effects of Agent Orange, Wilkinson said, were turning up in the veterans who’d used this herbicide in Vietnam. Wilkinson spied a conspiracy to resist all the evidence that this chemical was dangerous. Everybody was in on it, the American Legion, the Vets Administration, the President, Congress, the John Birch Society, other right-wing outfits. “Dow Chemical and those guys,” he said. “Any chemical company, whether they manufacture it or not. Insurance companies don’t want this information passed around. People are still using it right here, there’s chemically related stuff being used along the roadside, right out here on Route 6. The right-wingers, these poor suckers the Truth Infantry — you better edit that out,” he said.

“Edit what out?” Berryman asked him loudly.

“Don’t you know who you’re working for?” Wilkinson asked. “Edit that out, too.” But Berryman had edited nothing out.

Ray Sands was flat on his back. “Today you’re the investigator,” he told English, who was feeling, for reasons he couldn’t put a finger on, proud to be admitted to the sick man’s bedroom. The room didn’t smell of medicine or a stale convalescence. Sands was dressed for business in a shirt and tie, but instead of a suit coat and street shoes, he wore a quilted blue robe and bright yellow slippers. He lay propped up by pillows on the perfectly made bed in a sunny atmosphere, while English got the idea that any taint of illness here emanated from himself.

He neglected to take the white envelope Sands was holding out to him. “I don’t know the first thing about missing persons.”

“You’ve done it before,” Sands said. “You did a fine job of work on the Charlie Hendler thing.”

“But really all I did was drive to the Hyannis bus station. I mean, it was just a case of staying between the lines on Route 6.”

“This is the address,” Sands said, giving the white envelope a shake. “Go there, talk to Mr. and Mrs. Twinbrook, and get anything he left behind with numbers on it — address book, bills, letters if they’ll let you take them, diaries, appointment books, any such material. Bring it to me, and we’ll go over it together.”

“But what do I ask these people? What kind of information is supposed to help? See, I don’t know that stuff.”

“There’s really nothing to it, Lenny. Ask them what you’d ask if they were the parents of a friend, an old friend you were trying to track down. Who does he know? What does he do? Where does he go, what places did he frequent, where would you find some friend of his or some acquaintance who might have further information? A good deal of the time, you’ll find they know just where the person went, but they don’t want to make certain of it themselves. The daughter’s run off with the gardener, and so on. In this case, the son.”

“I’m not ready for this.”

“I’m here to assist you. I’m your assistant now. Just talk to the Twinbrooks and just keep bringing them around to the subject of their son. If they mention people, places, or numbers, write those down.” He wiped his lips with the back of his hand — it wasn’t like him. “Names and numbers. Names and numbers. Make of car, year of manufacture, license plate, passport number, age, height, weight. Recent photos. What we’re going to do is compile a list of facts about this man, and a list of people for you to contact, and a list of places for you to visit …”

Now his boss seemed to be at rest, or in thought. English was sitting in a stuffed chair by the bed and didn’t mind waiting forever, except that he wanted a cigarette. He hoped Sands didn’t have cancer or something like that. What if it was cancer? And the guy didn’t even smoke.

“There’s a trick to all this,” Sands resumed, “that’s what I want to say. When you’re talking with people, especially the strangers you’ll be interviewing later, your attitude has to be that you just don’t care. Your only interest in life is to gather information that will locate. You’re blind to anything that might compromise the people you’re talking to. Anything that’s illegal or strange. Nothing matters to you — that’s what gets people to open up. You want names and numbers, not stories. Take the same attitude you did when you were working for the police in Kansas. You don’t care, you don’t judge.”

“Couldn’t you just phone them? The Twinbrooks, I mean? Couldn’t you just give them a call?”

“I intend to do that, if it becomes necessary.” Sands melted back into himself visibly. Now he really did appear ill — holding a precious motionlessness on the bed, he looked out at English as if from a cage. “I’ve got to take care of this respiratory condition.”

English accepted the envelope bearing the penciled address of the couple who couldn’t find their son.

What do you mean, he wanted to ask, by respiratory condition? But Sands was old. It might be serious. English decided he didn’t want the details.

On his way out, he paused at the bottom of the stairs and stood at the door to Sands’s office and photography studio and looked in. The stool stood before the dark backdrop curtain, a tripod without a camera on it stood before the stool, Sands’s desk stacked neatly with the paper of commerce waited before the window where the curtains lay wide open, admitting daylight and fearing no examination. Of course, he told himself. What would I be looking for anyway? A swivel chair addressed the desk and was occupied only by a pale green tennis ball. He left, avoiding Grace Sands, whom he heard around the corner of the opposite door, puttering in her living room.

Mrs. Twinbrook turned out to be small, and she didn’t look quite right in a turtleneck sweater. “I hadn’t expected such a — youthful detective.” Her face was heavily powdered and looked frozen. It had been the business of the years to make her features heavy and changeless, but her voice was kind.

More than once, on TV, English had seen just such a woman in just such a crisis, and the TV woman had always worked something around in her hands, a pen, a scarf, her own blue-veined fingers, but Mrs. Twinbrook only gestured, maybe a little weakly, with hers. “This is the dayroom, that’s the parlor,” she said, moving past these rooms too swiftly to let them be anything but names in his ears.

“Let me show you the lower level, Mr. Sands.” She led English beyond the dayroom and down some stairs into what constituted a whole extra house. They skirted a row of rooms like compartments on a train — a study, some sort of sewing room, a bedroom — each with a picture window looking out on a garden filled with sculptures in the snow. It was thawing, and a big rock and a birdbath, and the stands for delicate metal works of art, were edged around with the black wet of the winter lawn.

“Actually, I’m not Mr. Sands. I’m Leonard English, I’m just the assistant. I’m the one you talked to on the phone yesterday.”

“Oh. I thought you looked awfully young. I’d understood Mr. Sands was retired, and I — naturally—” At the door of the last room, she held him off. “And where is Mr. Sands?”

“Taken ill. He’ll be going over the information and planning my moves.”

“Good.”

“I stopped by the address you gave Mr. Sands,” he told her. “The lady next door hasn’t seen him lately. But she says somebody’s come by once or twice — a man, she said. And there’s no mail in his mailbox.”

“I have his mail,” Mrs. Twinbrook said. “Gerald’s been picking it up — Gerald Senior, my husband. There’s not much.”

“If you don’t mind, I’d like to take a look at it. I don’t know, return addresses might tell us something.”

“Of course. Remind me before you go.”

Now was the time to start asking questions, but he couldn’t bring the words out.

“This is my son’s studio. He works here a couple of days each week.”

It was small and looked more a place of storage than a place of work. Paintings, most of them no larger than dinner trays, were stacked against the walls, and above them hung more paintings. Cardboard boxes filled with rags and paper, and paint-smeared glass jars, each with a shock of brushes, cluttered the floor. There was hardly anywhere to stand or walk. The big window gave it all a sense of light and space that was false — an element of dust, a museum quality, lay on the air. By the window stood a large collapsible table with drawings and pencils all over it.

“Does he actually paint here?” English was sidestepping objects to get to the table, but he was distracted by the paintings hanging on the walls on either side of him. Now that he was in the room, a tincture of oils took hold of his breath. “Did he do these pictures in this room?” One of the paintings suggested Miami Beach, as English imagined that place, with tall buildings overlooking a shoreline blotched with umbrellas.

With every further statement, he felt his next one would be a confession of his complete inability to know where to begin.

“Jerry paints outdoors,” Mrs. Twinbrook said. “I believe he sketches in here, or rethinks portions of his canvases. He’s very, very meticulous. He believes in the absolute power of detail. I want you to look at this man’s elbow.” She laid a coral fingernail against the brown flesh of a sunbather in the scene he’d been studying. All the figures were simply rendered. To English the elbow looked like the joint of a stove pipe. There were no faces on this beach. The half-dozen bathers in the foreground were all looking away. “That elbow is leaned on, wouldn’t you have to agree?” The man reclined in an oval of umbrella shade, his maroon bathing suit slashed by the sunshine.

English was at a loss when it came to elbows, but he had no trouble recognizing, in some of these paintings, the eerie Cape light. On overcast days the sun might be just a brighter patch in a grey sky, but its effect would smolder anyway on the hills and occasional white buildings of the countryside and on the water, so that the world seemed to lie straight under a blowtorch; and yet things cast no shadows. English had guessed that the light collected somehow on the waters and made a brightness in the air, even under clouds — just in the air, a brightness not otherwise locatable. Jerry Twinbrook had caught that light and let it fall through these paintings. “I’ve been to this place.” English pointed at the two landscapes flanking the one of Miami Beach. “Herring Cove, right? Just outside P-town.”

“You see,” she said.

English could only nod. See what? He was supposed to be asking questions, but she expected him to pay attention to this stuff first. He felt sorry for Mrs. Twinbrook, because she looked, by her clenched interest in this room, like bricked-over despair. She herself had the same black-and-white quality as her walled back yard. Her turtleneck sweater was thick and snowy, but her hair was a shining, artificial black and her skin was dark — as a matter of fact, it came to English, she was suntanned.

“I’m just taking all this in.” He tried to sound like an expert, a genius of the faintest trails. “Now, these look like they were painted indoors.” At the level of his knees, various interior scenes leaned against the walls. He saw what she’d meant about elbows — the people in these somber pictures were mysterious, seated around tables or standing in doorways, and they had no faces, only blank ovals, but in the way they held their bodies the people were alive.

English looked at the drawings on the table, carefully moving each one from on top of the others so as not to smear them or disturb something — evidence maybe. He wasn’t a judge of art, but these seemed to be only doodles, geometrical shapes scratched on rough heavy paper, studies of chairs and torsos, practice at the cast of a shadow or the angle of a view. None of it was information. He was wasting her money as he handled these sketches. And yet he felt a prickly discomfort, as if he were learning more than he wanted to know about this lost person.

“You see,” Mrs. Twinbrook said, as if English would grasp what eluded her husband, “my son has a gift.”

Her husband had been driving away just as English had arrived, and he’d paused only long enough to give English an impression of a pink, shaven face as he’d rolled down the window of his Lincoln to say, “Are you the detective?” English had gotten out of his Volkswagen and started across the gravel driveway toward him, but already Mr. Twinbrook was rolling up his window. “He can’t paint and he’s probably good for nothing, but we love him. Find him.”

“I will,” English had said. I can’t, he had thought.

Once back in Provincetown, English parked his Volkswagen behind his building and walked along Commercial, toward his bank, before he returned to Ray Sands. On the darkening street, where lamps were starting to take over the business of making things visible but where a little daylight clung to the air, English watched two boys going home late from school. It was almost Valentine’s Day, but Halloween was what they were talking about, and one of them suddenly tossed down his books and raised his arms to demonstrate, for the other, how big a pumpkin had been. This pantomime had a curious effect on English — he was amused and heartbroken, watching this kid posing like a ballerina, making a circle the size of a lonely vegetable with his empty arms. The wind blew out to sea, and the air was cold and fresh and so vacant that every object, even the pumpkin that wasn’t really there, stood out boldly and seemed to mean something. You are here, he said to God, and then from nowhere came the hope that he was wrong, that the grain of wooden phone poles and the rough stones of the courthouse were taking place on their own, and that nothing would ever be asked of him.

“English! Leonard English!”

It was Berryman hailing him, hanging out the door of a café. “Let me treat you to a coffee and pie! I’m a working man!” The voices of chilly patrons behind him called, “Close the door! Shut the door!”

English was happy for Berryman. “Who made the mistake of hiring you?”

“The archrival — our weekly newspaper.” Berryman, for once, looked more alive than dead. He guided English along a path through crowded tables to a booth in the rear. “It’s all different nowadays. I load the copy into a word processor. I’m setting the type as I write the story.” His eyes were clear; on top of being cheerful, he was sober. “I’m a technologically advanced human being,” he said without irony. It was as if his cynicism had crumbled to powder and drifted out of his nature.

“I’m also doing great,” English said. “I have a date tomorrow night with Leanna.”

Now a little puff of the shed self clouded Berryman’s eyes. “Wonderful.”

“She asked me. I stopped by her place, her big hotel there. She’s got her own apartment in the back. She sleeps on a water bed.”

“I don’t want you to confide in me, English. Pardon me,” he called to a waitress. “Apple pie and coffee for this pitiful person.”

“Nobody’s confiding in you. I didn’t get in the water bed.”

“Ask me about my new job, would you?”

“Okay,” English said. “What was your biggest story so far?”

“‘Tree Falls in Road.’”

“Far out,” English said. “Do go on.”

“Never mind,” Berryman said. He told the waitress as she set down English’s pie and coffee: “My friend here is paying for himself.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about Leanna? Has she got it made, or what? Stereo, big color TV, water bed—”

“I’m of a generation that doesn’t talk about these things.”

“Listen—”

“It’s unbecoming. How old are you?”

“Listen—”

“It makes my skin crawl. You’re too old—”

“Listen: she’s got a hot tub. A sixteen-room hotel with a hot tub out back, and no guests. It’s the off-season.”

“How old are you, English?”

“Old enough. I’m not a virgin. But I think Leanna is.”

In Berryman’s face the attentiveness, which had been draining away, stopped dead. “You’re unbelievable,” he told English. “You’re crazy.” He laughed, a rare thing.

“Point me out somebody who’s sane around here.”

“You’ve got no brakes, the cliffs are waiting—”

“This is just how I commonly do it. I just go ahead. It won’t kill me.”

“Not every time,” Berryman said.

English was angered by this voice of reason, but the feeling quickly failed and a damp gloom came down around him in this buzzing restaurant where he felt himself among Germans, strangers, grownups. “It’s on you, because I’m broke,” he told the reporter, and got up to leave. Struck by a thought, he leaned over the table. “I was wondering,” he said. “What’s this Truth Infantry thing all about?”

“The who, now?”

“The Truth Infantry. You know.”

“I never heard of it.” Berryman’s face changed and brightened, and he hoisted his chin to greet some new arrivals.

“You lush,” English said.

“Only on weekends.” Berryman’s attention was elsewhere. English shouldered past customers waiting for seats and got to the street.

English was on his way to the bank because he needed cash for his date with Leanna. It was all her idea, she’d been the one to do the asking, and it wasn’t right, somehow.

Everything seemed to be reversing itself like that, a woman asking him out, most others ignoring him while the men seemed to look him over, this strange hush at evening, as if it were dawn, and even the buildings seemed to be going in the wrong direction, this small old bank on a shop-lined and window-crowded street by the sea, for instance: every building around here seemed to be receding into the historic past. The wooden floorboards English crossed as he entered the bank must have been two centuries old, but the ceiling was given over to the idea of a contemporary St. Valentine, with glittering silhouette hearts strung across the air and tinsel drooling down. There were candy hearts in plastic cups by the tellers’ windows. “Can I have a heart?” English asked, and at the same time the young lady asked him, “Is it cold out?” “What?” they asked each other. “What?”

“You talk first,” he said.

“What can I do for you today?” she said.

“I’d like a candy heart, and I’d like one of those counter check things, because I lost my checkbook.”

“Oh, you lost it. Have you reported it lost?”

“It isn’t really lost,” English said. “It’s just missing. It has to be in my room someplace.”

“Well,” she said, kidding around, “then it isn’t missing, is it?”

“It must be, if I can’t find it,” English said.

She laughed, and started punching out a check on her machine. “What’s the name on the account?”

“Don’t trust this man. Would you sit beside this man on a bus?”

He turned around toward the voice. “Leanna.”

“I saw you from the street.” She reached past him and lifted a couple of treats from the cup. “Let’s go to the movies in Hyannis.”

“I thought we were going tomorrow.”

“Let’s go tonight, too. Let’s go both nights.”

A signal he couldn’t read, something in the hesitation of her hands as she held a tiny sugar heart in the fingers of each and looked completely uncertain about herself for once, made him want to say yes. “I’m supposed to work, but I’ll make it quick.”

“Oh, are you working at the station tonight?”

“I have to talk to my boss about something. I don’t think it’ll take too long. I’ll pick you up at your place in about an hour.”

“Don’t eat,” she said. “Let’s have dinner. I’ll let you bullshit me all you want.”

English had been surprised to find himself in possession, after a single afternoon on the case, of Jerry Twinbrook’s mail — a letter, a bill, and a bank statement. As an interrogator he’d fallen short, getting nothing in the way of names and numbers. Mrs. Twinbrook had wanted to talk only about paintings, mentioning important figures and styles and periods as if they were things he found in the papers every day. She’d seemed as anxious to locate her son in the history of art as she was to find him in time and space. “Maybe I should go back and talk with the father,” English suggested to Ray Sands. “The father seemed a little more down-to-earth.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Sands said. “It’s typical. There’s never any information from the people who suddenly can’t find a family member. Nothing in the way of hard facts, in any event. If they don’t have documents, they don’t have anything.” He laid his head back against his stack of pillows. He was dressed in pajamas now, he was pale, there were medicines on the nightstand and a flat dark outside the bedroom windows, in which hovered the reflection of his bedside lamp. “Families communicate a lot less than they think they do,” he said.

English stood nervously in the room, went over and closed the curtains without asking. “This one’s from an art gallery,” he said, handing Sands the envelopes one at a time. “Here’s a bill from Blue Cross. And this looks like a bank statement.”

“That’s the one that tells the tale.” Sands opened the bank statement first.

English crossed his hands behind his back and waited, curious to find out how much Jerry Twinbrook made and how much he spent.

But Sands wasn’t interested in those numbers. “New England Telephone,” he read as he lifted one of Twinbrook’s checks up to the light. “Take it.” He flipped through others. “A tavern; a tavern”—he held each check close to his face—“same tavern, Walker’s Inn; Hammond Office Supply.” He turned this last check over. “That’s in Marshfield. So are these taverns,” he said, consulting the backs of those checks.

English looked at the payment to the phone people: seventy-two dollars. “Where’s Marshfield?”

“It’s between Boston and the Cape, on the Bay.” Sands flipped through more checks. “Phil-Hack Realty, also in Marshfield. This man’s bank and his house are in Orleans, but his life seems to take place in Marshfield.” He turned the check over again. “Dated January 3.” He handed it to English. “Now, nothing is certain, but if you told me you guessed that to be some sort of monthly payment, I’d have to agree.”

English was lost. “Monthly payment for what?”

“For real estate, young man. A house, a piece of land. Possibly an apartment, if this agency handles rentals.”

“But he lives in Orleans. I stopped in and talked to the neighbors. They know him. He comes and goes. That’s where he gets his mail.”

“Perhaps he’s moved.” Sands looked amused.

“Now what?” English said.

“Do as much as you can over the telephone. Call these taverns, call Phil-Hack Realty, see what they have to say about Gerald Twinbrook. You can call the taverns tonight. They’ll be open. Use the phone in my office. Make a note of the calls. If you get no help, try the two art galleries.”

“What do I say?”

“Identify yourself and tell them you’re a detective — not a private detective, a detective. Don’t identify your client. Just say you’re trying to reach Gerald Twinbrook, Jr., on a routine matter. Give them a description if the name isn’t familiar. Did you get a description?”

“His mother says he looks like the people in his paintings and he has brown hair.”

“And what do the people in his paintings look like?”

“Tall and skinny, is about all.”

“He was in Walker’s Inn twice last month, and at this other one, what is it—”

“The Ends.”

“At The Ends at least once. They know him, I assume. They cashed his checks.”

“I’ll talk to them right away,” English said.

“Fine. But before you call anyone, find out if by any chance he has a telephone number in Marshfield. It’s possible you might be able to call Gerald Twinbrook himself.”

“I’m amazed.” English was telling the truth. It was something to see this detective indicate the blank space named Gerald Twinbrook by surrounding it with facts — like the pumpkin the school kid had surrounded with his arms, a while ago, on Commercial Street. “I could get to like this job,” English told his boss.

“Names and numbers.” But Sands didn’t look as triumphant as he might have. He waved English away from his sickbed. “Go. Go,” he said softly.

“I’ll be right back.” English was glad to leave.

Downstairs he turned on the overhead light in Sands’s office-studio, drew the curtains, and sat down in the swivel chair to play with the tennis ball that had been lying on it while he called the two taverns in Marshfield.

Both bartenders knew Jerry Twinbrook but hadn’t seen him in at least a couple of weeks. Evidently he was missing.

English put the tennis ball back where he’d found it and travelled up the stairs to report this news to Sands. But the detective was asleep, with his hands folded over his groin in an attitude that made English feel sorry for him, and English left him alone.

Grace Sands, however, was awake and active. He found her just inside the front door with a feather duster, stroking the two umbrellas that jutted from the ceramic umbrella stand. “I got a million things to do,” she was whispering, “a million things. A million.” In a worn grey dress with a white scarf tied around her head, she looked like a charwoman.

“Hi again, Grace,” English said.

“Bud is sick upstairs,” she told him. She’d said these very words on admitting him half an hour ago.

“Yeah, I just got done talking to him. He’s looking better.”

“I — is he gonna be all right?” Worry crumbled her soft old face. “What am I gonna do?”

“He’ll be fine.”

In English’s perception the lines of power in this household suddenly reversed themselves. He felt the presence of Sands, sick and asleep in his upper chamber, held aloft by the concern of this woman.

And then a curious impulse struck him, an idea he realized he’d been having all along. “Maybe you should go upstairs and see if he needs anything,” he suggested to Grace.

“Oh …”

He wished he hadn’t said it.

“Oh, all right.” She looked around like a person hopeless of finding one small item in a huge storehouse.

He wanted to take it all back. “I suppose he’s all right,” he told her. “Really.” But it was the wrong way to put it. Grace was preparing herself for the ascent, growing visibly heavier with the weight of determination. “Maybe,” he said, “I can find out if there’s something — I could bring it to him, tea or whatever.” English was desperate for her not to go now. He’d only wanted to have a look in Sands’s desk.

But she didn’t seem to hear him and hefted herself upward, one step at a time.

English moved into the office while she was still only halfway up the stairs. He slipped open the desk’s center drawer and found pens and pencils, a screwdriver, loose paper clips, a small kitchen knife, two worn gum erasers. In the two file drawers on the right there was nothing to catch his eye — they were just files, what had he expected? There was no file called “Truth Infantry,” nothing about “Agent Orange.” Everything seemed to be labeled “Correspondence.” “Correspondence — Harold & Fine,” “Correspondence — State Street Bank.” “Correspondence — BPA” turned out to be letters to and from the Boston Policemen’s Association.

That drawer was only half full. The lower one held files about John Hancock Insurance, T. Rowe Price investments, correspondence about a prize for the biggest fish, sponsored by the RCEB — Retired City Employees of Boston. A folder labeled ET CETERA was empty.

Behind the folders, in the back of the drawer, were stacked three blue-black American passports: William Michael Pierce, George Terrence Morris, Gregory Arn Shahan. The picture had been pried from each one. English thumbed them through, squatting on his heels by the open drawer, suddenly light-headed and unable to read, and then put them back stained with the sweat of his hands.

Things he’d seen at the movies prodded him to a nerve-racked microscopic study of the drawers he’d opened. Had Sands put a piece of tape or thread across their seams, in the hope of detecting any tampering? He picked up the tennis ball from the swivel chair and rattled it — for God’s sake, it was a tennis ball, a tennis ball. In the single left-hand drawer he found two more tennis balls, and a couple of chewy rubber toys with tin bells inside, for pets.

He left fast, and outdoors, as he found a cigarette, he promised the dark street that he’d keep his nose out of other people’s desk drawers and other people’s business, their phony passport business, or whatever it was.

As he waited in his Volkswagen beside Leanna’s building, English rolled down the window to let the cigarette smoke out and let in the chilly smoke of wood stoves in the houses up and down this quaint street of trees. He checked the contents of his billfold and prayed over his gas gauge, that it stay above Empty round-trip. In Leanna’s apartment the light went off. The hotel was dark now — three floors of historic wooden architecture, with assorted outbuildings named for famous women, most of them entertainers and none of them saints. “I got about thirty bucks,” he told Leanna when she reached the car. “Don’t break me.”

“It’s Dutch treat,” she said. “Is money tight?”

“I had car trouble on the way up here in December. The repairs ate up all my savings.”

They drove in what was for English a nerve-unraveling silence to that part of Hyannis, fifty miles down the Cape, where two shopping centers faced each other across the highway. “We’ll never find this vehicle again,” he told her. In the parking lot the million cars of late shoppers diminished from horizon to horizon. In his mind, the Cape’s population exploded. He’d thought himself almost alone on this peninsula, but now he felt crowded. It was almost eight, but all the stores were open. English and Leanna found their way across the random paths of citizens into the mall, past one goods-glutted window after another, and down into a tiny basement restaurant something like a cave. “Are we dealing with Italian or Mexican?” English couldn’t tell. Candles in Chianti bottles on the tables and sombreros stuck flat against the walls mixed up his expectations. “It’s omni-cuisine,” Leanna told him. “Shopping-centeranian, I guess. But the food’s wonderful. This is the best table, right here.”

“Is there more than one?” His eyes were getting used to the dimness.

He had it in mind to locate a phone and tell Sands that Jerry Twinbrook was well known in Marshfield, a report he felt he’d promised to make quickly, but he got interested in the cocktail menu instead. “One margarita. Just one. Uno,” he told the waiter, who was elderly and dressed in a black uniform like a miniature cop. “Two,” Leanna said. “Dos,” the waiter said, enjoying himself.

“I have to watch out about how much I drink in this town,” English confessed to Leanna. “One of the cops on the late shift gave me a warning.”

“When was this?”

“Well, it was the car trouble I said I had. Actually, it was more of a small wreck. The guy said he wouldn’t give me a breath test because I wouldn’t pass, but he made a few promises about keeping his eye out for me in the future. No telling what shift he’s working now.”

She looked happy, and covered his hand with hers. “You’re kind of always in the wrong lane, aren’t you?”

“In this case,” he said, “that was exactly it.” He leaned closer. “Is it okay for me to tell you you have beautiful eyes?”

She laughed. “You think you’re so sexy.”

“Animal magnetism is all I have.”

“All you have,” she said, “is a black leather jacket.”

Because Leanna was so enthusiastic about it, they both ate chicken cacciatore. “You’re right, it’s real good,” English said. “But I believe they threw the ass end of this chicken in here.” He raised a piece on his fork to show her. “The Pope’s nose.”

“The Pope’s nose?”

“Yeah, the tail. That’s what they call it in Kansas, anyway.”

“That’s anti-Catholic.” She appeared serious.

“You know what I’d do if I was the Pope? Every time I ate chicken, I’d ask loudly for the Pope’s nose.”

“You’re not funny. You’re too perverse.”

“And then I’d eat it.”

They drank white wine and English felt tired. He had a sense of dead water all around him. “Why are you with me?” he asked her.

“I haven’t got anything better to do,” she said, and he saw that she was only being frank.

“And why are you with me?” she asked. In the candlelight her eyes seemed dark, sacred. Her face was soft and disappeared, when she leaned back out of the glow, into a blankness like that of the faces in Jerry Twinbrook’s paintings.

“It’s because of your face,” he said.

It seemed she’d heard it many times before. She let the subject die in a short silence. “I wanted to ask you something. I was wondering what you meant about being a knight of faith. Remember?”

A cold wind blew through the room but nothing moved. “I don’t know what it means.” He felt terrible. He needed something funny to say. “I just have the feeling I am one.”

“It’s from Kierkegaard, right?”

“That’s not where I got it. I heard a priest talk about it, I think. I don’t remember exactly.”

“Are you going to mop your face with your napkin now?”

“Yeah,” he said, and he did.

“I’ll tell you my secret, if you’ll tell me yours.”

“What’s yours?”

“Is it a deal?”

“Only if I think your secret is worth it.”

“Lenny, is it a deal? Whatever it’s worth.”

“Okay,” he said. “You first.”

“I’m tired of the gay life. I just keep getting hurt. That’s why I’m with you.”

“Is that it?”

“Ever since I saw you at Mass that day, I’ve known it was going to be you.”

“Because I was at church?” It shocked him that he could talk, because all the sensations he’d felt when he’d first had tea with her, lightheadedness, a great momentum, a vision that she was made of air, were coming over him again. “I’m not that religious.”

“I know. That’s the only time I’ve ever seen you at Mass.”

“Because I’m still recovering from it,” he said. “One shot lasts a long time with me. I’m serious.”

“I believe you.” For a minute she just watched his face. “So what’s your big secret? What is it that makes you so — closed up?”

“It’s just crazy,” he said. “A crazy feeling.”

She said nothing, but only held on to the stem of her wineglass, her left hand in her lap, and watched him.

“It’s this crazy feeling that I’m being called,” he said finally. “But I’m not listening.”

“Called to the priesthood — is that it?”

“I don’t know. I told you, I’m not listening.” He felt as if his heart would break now. “I’m running away.”

She said, “Don’t you want to know what it is?”

“No,” he said.

“What do you think it is?”

“For all I know,” he said, “I could be the Second Coming.”

She didn’t receive it as lightly as he’d tried to send it. “But, Lenny,” she said with great tenderness, “don’t you see that’s crazy? It’s a delusion.”

“I told you it was. I said it was crazy. But I’m still running away, no matter what. Maybe the idea is just a fantasy, but the fear is for real.”

“But if it’s just some kind of delusion, then what’s there to be scared about?”

“I’m scared it’s not really a total delusion. It could be just a blown-up version of the truth. Like”—maybe he was making a fool of himself, but it was started now—“like a kid who thinks his mother’s calling him to come inside and be the man of the house, when really she just wants him to clean up his room or something like that. But she’s calling, that’s the thing, she’s calling.” He felt the world loosen around him. It was as if the small restaurant suddenly gave him all the space he needed.

Leanna seemed very moved by all this. She laughed, but her voice was hoarse. “Whoever’s calling you, don’t go in, okay? Stay out here with me for a while.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Definitely.”

There was a sweet shyness between them now, a moment that didn’t live through the little conversation with the waiter, the declining of dessert and the business of paying the check. English conceived that he hadn’t, from the start, ever been in charge of this romance, if that’s what it was, and he gave up. Waiting for the change and thinking nothing at all, he hit on the idea that the way to deal with this woman, with his time on this eerie peninsula, maybe with his whole life, was to stand back and look at it as he would a painting he didn’t understand and probably couldn’t appreciate. Climbing up from the dark underground into the decadent glitter of vending, he watched this shopping center as he might one of Jerry Twinbrook’s beaches, the arrested moment of it, and he thought he caught the somber heart of each bright color, the moons, so to speak, of which these colors were the suns, the softer actuality that Jerry Twinbrook had known about for a long time. He was wrenched by a thought: I’ve got to find that guy. It was a necessary thing.

Someone was calling him. “Somebody’s calling you,” Leanna said, catching him at the edge of the walk before he stepped out into the vast parking lot, where they didn’t need to go — the theater was just across the mall. “Lenny English!” It was Phil, his landlord’s cabdriver cousin, lounging against a black limousine-like taxi. “Where are you, in another world?”

“How are things?” English surfaced from his dreams. “You’re on the early shift tonight.”

“I’m on two shifts, man — it’s the prime of my life, time to move, time to make money.” Phil drew English close, his arm over English’s shoulders, and put his head down as if he were going to say something about their shoes. But he had something to say about Leanna, who waited on the walk and looked at the window of a store. “Lenny English,” Phil said. “There’s only one way I can tell you this: That woman there goes after girls. She don’t go after men. You hear what I’m saying?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you get the underlying meaning?”

“She’s a dyke.”

“Can you handle it that I told you that? Are we still buddies?”

“She’s just a friend,” English said, embarrassed. “But listen, I’m glad I ran into you.”

“I’m glad I ran into you, too, man. I been rooting for you. I know it’s tough in a new town.”

“What I wanted to ask you about,” English said, “you’re a ’Nam vet, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah — how’d you know?”

“You have that quality,” English said.

“What. I’m a little zoned, maybe?” Phil was concerned.

“No, no, it’s just, you know, that quality.”

“Yeah, I get it,” Phil assured him. “Right. Right.”

“I was wondering if you know this guy Wilkinson, I forget his first name. He’s head of ’Nam Vets for Cape Cod.”

“Wilkinson? Sure. Yeah. I know everybody, man.”

“What about the Truth Infantry?”

“Truth Infantry?”

“Yeah.”

“Truth Infantry? I don’t know. I’ll find out. Get back to me, okay?”

Leanna was stepping over to them, and so English wanted to change the subject. “Have you ever heard of the artist Gerald Twinbrook?” he asked Phil.

Phil seemed to think he was on the spot now. “Gerald — yes, I have. I have. I’m familiar with his work.”

“You know him? Do you have any impression of him maybe?”

“Gerald Twinbrook?”

“Twinbrook, yeah.”

“Twinbrook … No, I don’t.” Phil’s tone was that of a person being interviewed. “I, uh, it sounds vaguely familiar, that’s about it.”

“This is Leanna.”

“Hi, yeah, I know you,” Phil said.

“You know me?”

“Well, what I mean, you know — I don’t know you,” Phil said.

“Phil. That’s Phil.”

“Hi, Phil.”

“Get in touch with me, man. I’m in the book.”

“Good deal,” English said.

“I think we’re late. We’re going to the movies,” Leanna said.

“The Red Shoes,” Phil said. “See The Red Shoes immediately.”

“We are,” Leanna said. “That’s the one.”

“You’re gonna love it. I cried,” Phil told them.

“I’ll give you a call,” English said.

“I’ll answer,” Phil told him as they hurried off.

They were late for the film and had to go all the way down to the second row. English got very edgy sitting beside her and thinking only about the dark, and about sitting beside her. Within two minutes, the movie was embarrassing him. Was it too stupid? Was it possible she wasn’t enjoying herself?

Then he remembered that he still hadn’t talked to Ray Sands. “I need all the change you’ve got,” he said as softly as he could. “I have to call Provincetown.”

“Okay.” She gave him her coin purse out of her handbag.

“I was supposed to tell my boss something. I have to call him.”

“Okay.”

Halfway up the aisle he realized he could have asked her if she wanted any popcorn — they’d been in too much of a hurry coming in. But he couldn’t go back now. I’ll get popcorn, he thought. Buttered, medium-size. He pushed through the doors into a small panic of kids and patrons entering and leaving the other movies in this place. He felt much better here, where the pandemonium was outside him, than he did in there shoved up against Leanna’s warm breathing silhouette, where it was all in his heart. I am a grownup, he declared to himself, cutting in front of two little boys wearing paper 3-D glasses, who were about to use the pay phone by the ladies’ room.

“What’s the 3-D movie?” he asked them as he deposited seven quarters. But they were mad at him and wouldn’t say.

Grace answered.

“Mrs. Sands. It’s Lenny English. Is Mr. Sands awake by any chance? I think he was expecting me to tell him something, but he was asleep—”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s terrible!”

“Terrible,” English repeated.

“Bud’s sick! What am I gonna do!”

“He’ll be okay. Don’t worry—”

“Bud’s turning purple! He got vomit all over him!”

“Wait a minute. Hold on,” English said. “Is this for real?”

“Who are you! Why you did this to Bud!”

“Try and — wait. Wait a minute. Can I speak to Mr. Sands?”

“Bud fell over — he got a face like a beet!”

“I’ll talk to him tomorrow,” English said before he could think of anything else to say.

“Yeah! Okay! Tomorrow!”

Grace hung up, and so did English.

He dialed the radio station, because Sands lived nearby and maybe somebody could run over and check on him. His palms were slick with sweat because he felt he might be in a position to make a terrible mistake, something fatal. The line was busy.

Before I do anything, English thought, I’m going to get some popcorn. As he waited at the counter, another twelve-year-old wearing white paper 3-D glasses that were crooked on his face told him, “Hey, your jacket looks 3-D! It’s wild!”

“Shut up,” his sister said, grabbing the back of his neck. “God.” She looked up toward the heavens.

“It is 3-D,” English said. “This is 3-D.” He was annoyed, even frightened. “Real life is 3-D.” He got his popcorn and the lady laid his quarter change in a spot of melted butter on the glass. Before I do anything, he thought, I’m going to go to the bathroom and wash my hands. In the bathroom he splashed his face with water and forgot all about his popcorn, knocking it with his elbow and spilling half of it into the neighboring sink. He heard a man talking to his child in one of the stalls: “ … or I’ll take you home right now.” I have got to function, English told himself. “That’s the last time we try that,” the man’s voice proclaimed. Wiping his hands and face with paper towels, English heard them passing behind him toward the rows of sinks and mirrors and the exit. The faucet went on and he could hear the father saying, “That’s disgusting.” English asked himself, Why am I listening to this? I’ve got to think.

False alarm, English decided.

But he couldn’t let it pass. He wanted someone to reassure him, he wanted to feel at ease. He hurried back to the pay phone, clutching his half-empty bucket of greasy popcorn. The line at WPRD was still busy. And now Sands’s home phone only rang and rang and nobody picked it up.

I’m calling in a false alarm, he told himself, dialing the operator. “I don’t know how to say this,” he told her. “I think there’s an emergency in Provincetown, but I’m not completely sure about it. Could you get the police to check on it?”

“I don’t understand what you mean,” she said.

“I just—” Speech deserted him. He couldn’t explain. “Please connect me with the Provincetown police,” he said. “It’s an emergency.”

“I’ll connect you,” she said, and rang them.

Someone answered. “Whoever you are,” English said, “do you know Ray Sands?”

“Who am I talking to here?”

“I’m his assistant. Leonard English. I’m in Hyannis, I just talked to his wife, and she says he’s very sick. Could you check on him? Do you know him? He lives on Cutter Street. If he, you know, if he needs an ambulance—”

“Ray Sands? Sure, we’ll check it out.”

“Great. Unbelievable. Thanks.”

“You’re entirely welcome,” the person said.

English put the phone back: I’m done. It’s out of my hands. He left the bright lobby where nothing made sense.

In the darkness he found Leanna and handed her what was left of the popcorn. “I don’t want this,” she said. He hunched down in his seat and began eating it himself. “You make a lot of noise,” she whispered. “Don’t eat with your mouth open. Look at her outfit,” she said of the woman on the screen. “What a fox.”

For two minutes he tried to settle into the movie, but it was like watching a film within a film. He was very much aware that the people on the screen were larger than the people in the theater, and that their statements came out of loudspeakers and echoed from the wall behind him. Someone was dancing and people were applauding. “Weird things are happening,” he whispered to Leanna. “I gotta make another call.”

“Are you a drug dealer?” she whispered. “Because you sure spend some time on the phone.”

This time there was somebody to answer at Ray Sands’s house, a policeman who identified himself quickly and English didn’t get his name. “I called about an ambulance earlier,” he told the officer. “I wanted to find out if Ray Sands is okay.”

“Who is this?” the policeman’s voice said.

“I’m his assistant, Leonard English.”

“Your boss is pretty sick, Mr. English. He’s on his way to Cape Cod Hospital right now.”

“Cape Cod Hospital? What’s wrong with him?”

“It looks like a heart,” the policeman’s voice said, “but I wouldn’t diagnose.”

“What’d the ambulance people say?”

“That’s what they thought — a heart. You’re his assistant? You pretty close to him?”

“No,” English said. “I’m not.”

“They were doing CPR on him, the whole routine.” Now he heard the excitement in the policeman’s voice. “I’d say he wasn’t too alive when he left here.”

“Well,” English said, “okay. Thank you.”

“You’re entirely welcome,” the policeman’s voice said.

He stood in the aisle, bending down to speak to Leanna. “Listen, I’m all fucked up. There’s an emergency.”

She looked at him and turned back to the screen and then looked at him again. “You mean urgent business, or a real emergency?” She looked at the screen.

“My boss is having some kind of heart attack. Where’s Cape Cod Hospital?”

“It’s here, in Hyannis. Near the airport. Don’t you know where Cape Cod Hospital is?”

“Show me, would you? I’m completely lost.”

English couldn’t get the attention of the emergency room’s clerk, a well-kept young man doing twenty things at once, gesturing to an orderly and searching through a cream-colored filing cabinet while holding the telephone receiver between his shoulder and his jaw and saying, “Yeah — right — yeah,” into the mouthpiece. Surrounding the clerk in his office, which was nothing more than an oversized cubicle, what appeared to be patients’ charts cluttered every surface. There were charts on the floor covered with the prints of shoe soles. The waiting room English stood in was glutted with patients and their relatives and friends, all of whom seemed to be holding bloody rags against their faces. English tapped on the cubicle’s wired-glass window again, this time more forcefully. Behind him a burly man in a bloodstained down-filled vest was explaining to the others there how his wife had been injured. “First I kind of pinned her with this arm,” he told them, “and then I went to work on her face with my elbow.” When he dropped his red soft-drink can in the midst of gesturing with it, he started to cry, saying, “Now I spilled my fucking Coke. I just plain lost my head!” He marched across the hall into the trauma room and English saw him in there examining the features of his wife, an immense woman sitting on one of the high, narrow gurneys with her legs dangling. The man looked into her eyes, now blackened, and into her sutured face. He fell to his knees before her. Meanwhile, “You’re going to be all right,” the clerk said into the telephone. “You’re going to live forever.” Children were screaming, men and women wept, and Coca-Cola spread out over the floor and under the plastic chairs. One man, sitting stock-still in the middle of all this, gripped a hunter’s arrow in his fist and stared at it. English felt this was no place to come for help. He wanted Leanna, but she was in the ladies’ room.

The radio on the clerk’s desk started beeping. The clerk answered. A kazoo-like voice lost in spitting static spoke to him. English couldn’t make out a word, but the clerk was astonished by the message. “What’s your ten-twenty? What’s your ETA?” The radio’s voice crackled back at him. “Shit,” the clerk said. He seemed to notice only now that he was still holding the phone receiver in his hand. He hung it up and then immediately lifted it again, looking at the intercom on his desk and surveying its buttons helplessly. He dialed a number on the phone and said, “This is ER. We got a heart arriving in about — less than ten minutes.”

“I think I know that patient,” English said to him through the hole in the glass.

The clerk ignored him. “Yeah!” he said into the telephone. “Page it now!” He examined the intercom again, but seemed to have forgotten how it worked. He began yelling, “Helen! Helen!”

“That’s Ray Sands,” English said through the hole. “He’s a detective, and I’m his assistant.”

“Okay. Okay,” the clerk told him.

A nurse, tall and heavy, came out of the trauma room across the hall, walking crab-footed and seeming in no hurry. “What are you screaming about?” she asked the clerk. But at that moment a voice came over the public address: “Dr. Heart, emergency room. Dr. Heart, emergency room.”

“You’re kidding!” the nurse said. “I got seven patients in the goddamn trauma room. Get in here,” she ordered the clerk.

“There’s coffee under the desk, Officer,” the clerk said to English. “Keep it a secret.”

English stepped from the waiting room and through the door of the cubicle by way of the hall, as the young clerk elbowed past him saying, “Help yourself,” and followed the nurse into the trauma room. Together the clerk and the nurse began wheeling startled patients on their gurneys out of one of its doors and into the hallway, down near the fire exit, where they left them.

Leanna was back now, standing in the waiting room on the other side of the glass. “Did they put you to work?”

“The guy thinks I’m a cop,” English said.

But he was so dazed by this emergency that he couldn’t hear himself. Under the clerk’s desk was a coffeepot and white Styrofoam cups, one of which he filled, bending over and, as he did so, feeling that his back was vulnerable to some vague hostile thrust.

People from another part of the hospital swiftly hauled past his cubicle a portable EKG machine on buzzing plastic wheels.

In the midst of movement, English felt required to move. He stepped from the cubicle and saw, far down the long hallway, a flock of doctors and nurses running toward him, covering their breast pockets with their hands as they ran.

“I’ll be over here,” Leanna said, and disappeared from view, passing deeper into the waiting room’s stunned turmoil.

English was breathing hard and witnessing events in small, frozen frames, as from the window of a journey. He was drinking his coffee. It was still hot. He’d just taken a sip and put down the cup, and the fingers of that hand were still warm, and he still tasted the artificial creamer on the tip of his tongue as the ambulance pulled up outside, its dying siren lacerating the air. He smelled medicine and heard a dozen conversations at once. As he moved toward the sliding doors of the emergency entrance, he felt himself tearing away from these details and felt the strands of them being burned from his person. The doors slid open, cold air blew over him, and he ducked aside to make way for the ambulance men rolling the wheeled stretcher into the hospital, moving as fast as they could run. One pushed the stretcher, one covered the patient’s mouth with his own mouth, the third pressed on the patient’s chest with both hands. Ray Sands, dressed in his pajamas, the shirt of them torn open, was the patient. English followed along into the trauma room, where the man performing mouth-to-mouth turned to vomit in a sink along the wall while a nurse put a respirator mask over the patient’s blue face, and half a dozen medical people, like the fingers of a fist, closed in on the stretcher.

English stood and watched for several minutes, seeing nothing, while people in white smocks went to and fro around the stretcher and came and went from the trauma room, speaking in low, urgent voices. When he felt the strength returning to his arms and legs, English left and went back to the clerk’s cubicle, nodding absently to an ambulance attendant — the one just pushing the stretcher — who loitered in the hallway now, holding a cup of coffee in one hand and in the other Ray Sands’s set of false teeth.

The clerk had his intercom working. He talked into it and the telephone both at once. “Anybody you need?” he asked the intercom, and the intercom answered, “Anesthesia!” “Anesthesiologist,” he said into the telephone.

By this time there were medical people all over the place, many of them without a purpose, it seemed. They spilled out of the trauma room and into the hallway, where confused patients tried to sit up in their mislocated gurneys and demand an explanation. A nurse rushed out of the trauma room just as a priest was rushing into it, his black garb billowing behind him. They banged into each other. The girl was thrown against the wall. She recovered, started off again, abruptly halted, wheeled, and hurried back through the doors behind the priest. English and the clerk, leaning together close to the intercom, listened to the clunking sounds of a machine giving Ray Sands’s heart stiff electric jolts; and then they heard the steady whine the EKG emitted when it was taking a flat reading. There were so many similar sounds, the dentist’s drill, vacuum cleaners, the high test tones of radio stations; and in his weightlessness and complete openness to all sensation English understood deeply, for an instant, that this was music. Over the intercom came a girl’s breathless voice asking, “What medication? I forgot, I forgot—” “Couple of aspirin, and call me in the morning,” one of the doctors said, and those gathered around the corpse broke into laughter over the priest’s rapid monotone and the music of the EKG. The clerk shut down the intercom. “All over,” he said into the phone, and put away the receiver.

Looking up, English saw Grace Sands standing on the other side of the glass, next to a policeman. She was crying out, and her face was as she’d described her husband’s: like a beet, swollen and shiny. She seemed not to have heard the clerk’s pronouncement. She’d mistaken him for a doctor. “He gotta make it, please, he gotta — Doctor, do something!” She broke loose of the comforting and restraining hand of the policeman, who stood behind her with the flaps of his winter cap turned up and flopping like a mongrel’s ears and making him look even more at a loss, in the face of a widow’s torment, than he probably already was. “Make him well, please, you gotta, you gotta!” Her features were so changed by panic that English wouldn’t have known her except by the mist of white hair around her head, and also by her apron, which he recognized from their New Year’s Eve dinner together, the back-yard barbecuer’s smock with lettering on it: When It’s Smokin’ It’s Cookin’ and When It’s Black It’s Done. The clerk seemed to read this slogan carefully, and then slid aside the glass between them and offered her a box of Kleenex. “Oh, thank you, Doctor,” she whispered, “thank you, thank you,” staring at the Kleenex and never touching it.

A real doctor, a tired old man, came into the waiting room. Grace saw him and clamped her lips together over her sobs. Wordlessly, he took her elbow with one hand while giving the policeman’s shoulder a friendly squeeze with the other, and he guided her from the room and into the hallway to talk to the priest. The clerk opened and closed one file drawer after another. “Where are those death certificates?” he said.

The phone rang and the clerk stopped his search to answer. “They’re all done,” he said. “They’ll be coming back in a minute.” English felt thirsty, and then suddenly saliva flooded his mouth and he thought he’d be sick. “Deceased,” the clerk said, and hung up the phone. Out in the hallway, the new widow started screaming at the priest and the doctor.

English caught sight of a beautiful woman with long black hair. Then he saw it was Leanna, looking as if she belonged right here in the middle of all this. She seemed to know exactly what she was doing, but she wasn’t doing anything except standing by the water cooler with her arms crossed before her.

The nurse called Helen came in and sat down heavily in the chair beside the clerk’s desk, sticking her rubber-soled shoes out in front of her and chewing viciously on a lollipop. “Got rid of half our patients,” she said, and English noticed for the first time that many of the injured, even untreated ones, were gone or were leaving, no longer impressed, maybe, with their own contusions and abrasions. The clerk, standing beside the filing cabinet, began to tremble. English could see it plainly. Helen was also shaking as she showed the clerk where to find a death certificate, and English noticed that she chewed up and swallowed her lollipop stick. English lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. When he turned to rest it in the ashtray, he found two others, both his, already burning there. The widow sobbed loudly in the hallway, while the priest spoke reassuring phrases. Helen went back into the trauma room to cope with the patients whose ordeals had been interrupted. The hospital was quiet again. English wondered if a human soul drifted along these corridors now, but he found — much to his alarm, to his great anguish — that he doubted it.

The clerk’s tiny office seemed to be the crossing point of any number of paths in this hospital. Within the space of a few minutes, doctors, custodians, orderlies on break appeared one by one and asked, “How’d it go?” and were told, “Deceased,” and wandered off. Leanna slept softly in one of the waiting room’s cheap plastic chairs. English stayed around, thinking he should talk to Grace Sands, but all he was able to say was “Grace—” as she passed by, flanked by the policeman and the priest, and then she was gone.

The automatic breath and rattle and thump of the entrance’s sliding doors repeated at intervals, letting out the people who’d been a part of this death, until the clerk’s cubicle and the rooms around it were as still as the moment before a concert. But English stayed where he was, half sitting on the clerk’s desk, because he knew he couldn’t handle a car. “Taking a break?” the clerk asked him.

English nodded.

“That guy looked old for a detective,” the clerk said. He glanced at what must have been Sands’s chart. “Born 1915.”

“He’s retired,” English said. “Was. Was retired.”

Helen came and leaned in the doorway, looking jolly. “Had enough excitement tonight, Frank?” she asked the clerk.

The clerk looked at the clock on the wall. “Wow. Only thirty-two minutes to go.”

The phone rang. The sound echoed all over the building, it seemed. It woke Leanna, the only person left in the waiting room. English was going to say something to her, anything, but she looked around and then closed her eyes again.

“Everything went real smooth,” Helen was saying on the phone. “Deceased,” she said. “Deceased. I think he was basically DOA.” She was looking at Sands’s chart. “It was his fourth coronary.” English was more than surprised to hear this: he felt betrayed.

“The mortuary people oughta be around any time now,” Helen told the clerk. “Help me get this man’s clothes off, would you?”

“Me?” Frank said.

“Everybody’s gone. Sue’s at the snack bar. Andy’s down at CIC. Come on, it goes with the territory.”

But the sliding doors sounded again as soon as they’d gone into the trauma room, where Sands lay, and Helen had to come out and greet two new arrivals — one of whom English recognized, a Vietnamese man from Provincetown. “What seems to be the trouble!” Helen asked, stooping down to this foreigner and enunciating loudly.

Frank came out of the trauma room. “I’ll take this man’s chart,” Helen told him. “You get back to work.” She was getting a kick out of Frank’s discomfort.

“Could you give me a hand, Officer?” Frank asked English, indicating the trauma room.

“Actually—” English said.

“The morgue’ll be here any minute. I’ve got to get his belongings together.”

English followed him into the trauma room.

Except for the body, it was empty of people — a space full of white examining tables, machinery, and high cloth partitions left at incidental angles.

The body was dead, it was not alive in any sense at all, and the face was other than any living person’s, the eyelids pinched into sockets that looked empty and the toothless jaws wide open and the lips forming an astonished “Oh!”—but the flesh was heavy when English lifted the legs so the clerk could pull off Sands’s pajama bottoms, and the flesh was warmer than his own when he raised the bare legs so the clerk could remove Sands’s shit-stained boxer shorts. “I guess you’ve seen a lot of dead bodies,” the clerk said to English, “but this absolutely spooks me. It really does. It’s not in the job description.”

Resolutely, as if charged with this office among men, English began dragging the left arm from its pajama sleeve. “I’m glad to be alive,” he said. Together, because it was very heavy, much heavier than it should have been, they reached behind Sands’s neck and raised the torso, and the clerk pulled the shirt out from under it. Ray Sands lay naked and grey and large between them. English felt an unbearable thrill in his chest, as if it were empty of everything but a clear light.

Helen appeared at Sands’s feet. “Get some dividers around him, you guys,” she said. “I have to bring this man in.”

“What’s his trouble? A fight?” Frank asked.

“No. His foreman drove him over from the factory. Foreign body, left eye,” she said. “I’ll call his doctor.” She left Frank and English to roll three cloth partitions into place around the body.

The Vietnamese man came in, escorted and then politely abandoned by Helen, and sat on the next gurney. English said hello to him. They were hardly acquainted, but the man was something of a personality, Provincetown’s sole Asian refugee, Nguyen Minh—“Fwooy-en,” it was pronounced. He’d been a pilot for the South Vietnamese Air Force and had flown hundreds of missions, though he looked even now not much older than a boy. In the war’s last days he’d stolen an American helicopter and guided it out over the China Sea toward some destination he’d believed worth reaching, taking along as many others as it would carry. But the helicopter had been shot down, or its fuel had run out, or its engine had given up, and all these people had gone down in the water to sink or swim. A few stayed afloat, for two days, and were rescued by the U.S. Navy. Now Nguyen Minh sat on the edge of the high gurney, his hands between his knees and his black tennis shoes dangling down, and stared at the cloth partition protecting him from the sight of death. The skin around his left eye was puffy, and the eye had turned pink. English was comforted by the presence of this small, patient man, because he himself had never touched, or even seen, a human corpse before. “How long have you been working at the factory?” he asked Nguyen Minh.

“About tree yers,” Minh said. He formed his words carefully, as if he had a peach pit in his mouth.

“Do you like your job there?”

“I have a machine,” Minh said. He smiled. “Die cast.”

“You got something in your eye?”

“Some piece of metal.” He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“You’ll be okay,” English said.

“Maybe so.”

“Do you ever wish you could go back to Vietnam?” English was nervous asking the question; it felt like prying.

“They’re all dead there. My parents, and my brother, too, and all relatives. It’s no good there.”

“Was your brother a pilot?”

“He was a monk.”

“A Catholic?” English was astonished.

“No. Buddhist.” He smiled. “My brother did the self-immolation.”

“Jesus Christ,” English said.

“No,” Minh said. “Buddha.”

“Do you know that guy Nguyen Minh?” English asked Leanna as he drove the last mile into Provincetown. “Do you know that his brother was a monk, a Buddhist monk back there in Vietnam, and he burned himself up?”

Leanna reached her fingers to the back of his neck and stroked the locks of hair and eased his muscles, for a few minutes, until he turned off the highway and into Provincetown. “Let’s go to the Beginner’s,” he said. “I want to get a couple of beers and dance with my shirt off.”

He felt easy in the atmosphere of Provincetown now, its boarded-up windows and its silence of waiting post-something. English himself was still dizzy, and the Beginner’s was the outward image of him, the dance floor shiny under changing discotheque illumination and pounded by gigantic speakers, but occupied by only five or six people who swayed, out of their minds with drink, in stationary circles; a place frantic and lonely both at once, eddying pointlessly in the wake of last summer. English didn’t take his shirt off, but he threw his jacket aside and drank a Cuba Libre in three swallows.

“Suddenly the trouble is,” he told Leanna, “I’m not too sure about life after death.”

“What?” she said.

He couldn’t hear her for the rising insanity of “Cruisin’ the Streets,” but being heard wasn’t the issue, not at all. “The Resurrection of the Body seems like a crock. That guy was so dead.” Impatiently he signaled for another drink, scooping the air over his empty glass.

He danced with a woman, and then Leanna danced with the same woman; and then the three of them danced together, he and Leanna sandwiching the woman between them and smiling at one another over her left shoulder. “Who is she?” Leanna asked him when they were done — the song didn’t end, one blended into the next relentlessly, all at the same relentless beat; they just stopped dancing when they were tired.

“I don’t know her,” English said, “but let’s take her for a ride in your hot tub.”

“I don’t operate that way.”

“You’re operating that way right now.”

“I’m dancing.”

“Let’s all sleep together. I’m lonely,” English said.

“I have to know the person first.”

The woman was from Michigan, but looked European. She was overweight in a bouncy way, and didn’t like interrupting the smooth flight of her evening, or even opening her eyes, to answer English’s questions. “’Bye, baby, see you around,” she mouthed as the stereo speakers blasted the room with these words, and she danced away and danced back toward them with a face peaceful and bathed in moving colors and sang, “Remember me as a pink balloon …”

“This music leads to violence,” English said to her. “You want to go sleep in a hot tub with us?”

The huge female voice of the record spoke: her love was alive, it was like the sea …

“You’ve had a bad night,” Leanna told him.

“Aaaaah-ah-ah-aah-oh!” the great sound sang.

“I just want to, I don’t know, blow it,” English said. The woman danced, short and squat, alone behind her closed eyes. Disco trumpets rose, choral voices rose, it was like Heaven; silence opened and a rivulet of chimes fell over the steady beating of a great heart … Ah shit, ah shit, English thought, not you.

In the overheated lyrics of rock and roll he often heard the sorrows and pronouncements of a jilted, effeminate Jehovah, and this song made even grander, more awful claims than most, suggesting that Her love was profoundly uncontrollable and maybe not actually friendly—

Not you, I don’t know you—

— as inexorable as the ocean eating the sands of the Cape from under his feet, willing to take forever, if necessary, to drown him. Nothing would lift him from the waters: “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” it was called.

Infinite disco love boomed, a wounded woman calling forth these bits of light to swarm over the walls. Her love was alive? It was monstrous. “I’m not here,” English said out loud. “So shut the fuck up.”

Not you, not you, not you—Crackling dance-hall lumens circled these headless idiots in a whirlwind. Voices — angels — saints—“Fuck it,” English announced, “let’s just blow it.”

The bartender was pointing him to the door. Leanna was crying. The woman was laughing, glass lay in shards across the puddles of the bar and changed colors. Not you, not you. “Not you, goddamnit, not you …”

Leanna and one of the bartender’s friends helped him out into the knives of winter. “Time for Disco Inferno,” English said. “Let’s get serious.”

She was having a hard time getting his clothes off as he tilted in the kitchen’s doorway and tried to kick away one of his shoes. His sight was still twisted and the rhythm still beat against his head. “Endless disco,” he told her.

She was crying. She punched his chest. “Goddamn you,” she said. “Where did you get that leather jacket, anyway?”

“It was given to me,” he said.

They stepped, both of them naked and English feeling incredibly white, into the small yard behind her apartment. There was old snow beneath his feet. “My feet know,” he told her, “but my head isn’t getting the message.”

“Here’s the message.” She swept a bulky black cover from the hot tub, stepped delicately in, and pulled him by the arm in after her. “I don’t want to fool around. I don’t want to touch you.” They sat naked across from each other in the wooden vat, attended by hardened drifts of snow, while warm camomile-scented waters churned around them, around her breasts, and the vapors of his mind revolved and dervishes of steam passed between them and the stars froze in the untroubled night above.

English woke the next morning while it was still dark. His hands felt of grease, and the hair on his forearms was matted with it. Groping for his pants and cigarettes he knocked over a bottle on the floor by the bed, the action of whose water-filled mattress made him feel queasier than even he had a right to. He cut on the lamp. Filippo Berio olive oil. She’d given him a massage. He got a Marlboro lit. He wasn’t sure that smoking was approved of here, but Leanna was still sleeping and he assumed, because he’d spent the evening in a hospital and looked down into the face of a corpse, that everything was permitted. She was under the sheet and blanket in a lump, all but her sleep-softened face and dark tangles. They hadn’t made love last night, or any sense. He watched her long enough to make certain she was breathing.

In the kitchen he found yesterday’s Boston Globe on the counter and yesterday’s coffee in a glass pot. He washed his face, hands, and arms at the sink, but got into his pants with his legs and buttocks still oily. In the papers he read about a murdered nun, a woman killed by unknowns in Brazil, and it started to seem to him, as he smoked cigarettes and drank cold coffee and imagined and imagined her last moments, that if what he imagined was true, then the earth was uninhabitable. This fear passed through him slowly, as though he’d eaten of it, and he cried. By the time the sunless daylight had come, the feeling had rarefied into a spacious hatred attended by the stink of brimming ashtrays.

There was no sense waiting for Leanna to wake up, no use wondering how she felt about him, in a place like this.

After dressing he went downstairs into the hour when paperboys might be delivering, but the street outside was empty. The seats of his Volkswagen were chilly and brittle. He shut the car door softly. There wasn’t any place open where he’d find breakfast, and so he told himself he’d go without it as a respectful fasting before Mass. It was the first he knew he was going. But he didn’t mean to go to St. Peter’s here in Provincetown and confront the figure in the mural beckoning from its rock in the storm. He’d been back there once, on an afternoon when the pews stood naked, and had discovered that the figure wasn’t Christ at all but somebody completely different, St. Peter it would stand to reason. In that case, he was just beckoning you into the folds of the Church, not into the storm. But please, don’t beckon me at all, not this early in the morning. English started the car and drove out to the highway and moved off down the Cape.

He didn’t see the name of the town he entered some miles later. On an unreal Main Street like the one in Ray Sands’s electric train’s landscape he found a Catholic church, Our Lady of the Waves, and also a café that was open, where he decided to have breakfast after all and wait for Mass.

At five to eight he stood before the heavy doors of the church feeling no hunger. The wooden entrance offered a Southwestern-style bas-relief severally and gaily colored and depicting Christ, looking quite a bit seedier these days, unshaven rather than bearded, his hair not flowing but unkempt, stalled beside some wooden flowers and keeping out of the way of orange slats of wooden sunshine. The crowds in the summery Cape atmosphere he’d never seen might move easily through this doorway, but English, with his mind on Ray Sands and murdered nuns, could hardly put his fingers on the handle: Jesus sheds His heat like tin upon you, spreads His tropic love, His Florida, on the army smashing in the faces of His brides. If we were truly as alone as that. He pushed through the doors to take Communion. There was never any explanation, never any consolation, but everything could be laminated by a terrible endorsement.

The interior was cozy but unheated. A blue sponge of Holy Water in its receptacle just inside the door was frozen solid. But he heard people talking in a room off to the side, and then it occurred to him that, of course, they often had the poorly attended dailies in some smaller room. He probably could have saved gas by going to St. Peter’s and still have evaded the call of its patron saint. He headed toward the voices.

In the tiny room he took a seat among old ladies in a row of folding chairs. The priest was just donning his vestment by the makeshift altar, and his head, round-faced and middle-aged, came up through the neck. “Yes,” he told them in tones faintly Irish, “he attended church regular.”

One of the women said, “It’s a shame.”

“Was there an evening service last week?” another said with worry. “I missed it, I didn’t know—”

“A meeting of the choir,” the priest said. “And he dropped dead right there by the door.”

The others clucked and ohed.

“He turned to his wife,” the priest said, “turned to his wife and told her, ‘Martha, this is it.’”

One of the women was also a witness, and said, “And then he keeled over, just like that. I feel so sorry for his son — you know, the son lost his own son last summer, and here, six months later, his father. What a world.”

The priest was lighting the candles. “Doesn’t he have something to do with basketball? The son?”

“He coaches. He coaches down South. They were in Albuquerque for the championship.”

“That’s right.” It was coming back to him now. “He couldn’t be reached to tell him all day.”

The others all shook their heads.

“That was a close game,” Father said. “North Carolina won it at the last buzzer.” He took his place behind the altar and lifted his hands above the chalice. “The ball,” he said, “was still in motion.”

But a late arrival, another old woman, was just coming through the door. “Did you see Pavarotti on Channel 9 last night?” the priest asked the others, politely waiting a minute to begin.

At the homily, Father said, “I don’t usually give a homily at the morning service, but I should say about Simone Weil, because I was in a discussion … You know Father Daniel, he’s here from Lynn for a while, he mentioned Simone Weil, and it’s very interesting, she never joined the Church. But you could say she was very much in the Church, very concerned about suffering. She was a little like Joan of Arc, you know, she got an idea in her head and that was it: she wouldn’t give it up, starved herself to death. She said she wasn’t going to eat any more food than the people in Hitler’s concentration camps, and this is the thing about faith, or about conviction. She died. For what it’s worth,” he said. “Just something to think about. We’re blessed with plenty to eat in this country. We read about famines in the Bible,” he said, “but …” He paused to show he’d finished with the homily and began the Eucharist.

Hung over and unsorted and fatigued, English couldn’t pay attention to the Eucharist and heard only the most disquieting phrases, “This is the cup of my blood” and “We eat your body and drink your blood.”

Afterward, as he turned his car onto the highway, English met a cloud of rain that must have been pouring water down for some time, because the police directing traffic around some roadwork were dressed in bright orange Day-Glo slickers.

Simone Weil. He’d heard of her, didn’t know much about her, wasn’t particularly interested. Who would be? Hitler had killed millions, and by her gesture of starvation she’d managed to raise the count by one, that was about all you could say for her. Still, if the message arrived, and you believed it came from God … Vague hints beyond the periphery. An aroma opens onto an avenue. Messages issue from the toast, Kill your captain …

A storm was a bad thing, because English’s windshield wipers didn’t work. The cops’ raincoats looked like blowsy neon through the strings of rain. TOWN OF WELLFLEET, their car insignia read.

It was the hometown of Phil, the cabdriver. English turned around up the road and drove back to the town’s café to wait out the rain and call him.

“You’re right around the corner,” Phil told him on the phone. “Look, man, I can’t talk — you wanna drop around here? You play cards, man? Poker?”

“I’m flat-ass broke anyway,” English said.

“Good, good, then you don’t have to spend ten hours with these guys, and what happens is, you end up that way anyway, right?”

Phil was upstairs in an old yellow house not four blocks north of the church where English had just tasted God’s flesh. The apartment door was already standing open and the hallway smelled of stale smoke. Phil had been up all night, too. He met English at the door, burned-out, giddy, and hoarse.

“I am so far ahead, man,” he told English, “so far ahead.” Impatient voices called him from the kitchen, and he led English in to where several men, easily pictured eating pigs’ feet in a barroom, sat around a table covered with cards and cash.

English drew himself two glasses of water in quick succession from the faucet, standing at the sink and looking at small-town back yards out the window.

“I hate to gloat, you guys,” Phil said. “I hate to gloat. I hate—to gloat. So what brings you around here, Lenny?”

“I was at church,” English said.

“Excellent,” Phil said. “Good for you.”

“Third Street,” the dealer said. “Ace, never hurts. No help. Nuthin. Possible flush, hearts. Two sixes. No help. Sixes bet.”

“You want a beer, man? Church is over, right?”

“I don’t drink in the morning unless I’m hung over,” English said.

“Your bet, sixes,” the dealer said.

“You hung over?”

“Yes,” English said.

“Hey. Hey,” the dealer said.

“O-kay,” Phil told him. “Two.”

“Call.”

“I’m out.”

“Fold.”

“Call.”

“Four.”

“Flush, my ass,” Phil said. “Six.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah, ditto.”

“I call.”

“Fourth Street,” the dealer said, giving Phil and the other man their fourth cards. “Bust the flush. No apparent for the sixes.”

“What’d you wanna see me about?” Phil asked English.

The dealer rapped the table. “Come on. Sixes.”

“These for the taking?” English indicated a forest of bottled beer beside the sink.

“Help yourself. What’d you wanna see me about?”

“Can I tell you something without you getting a terrific resentment?” the man dealing asked English. “We’re trying to have a poker game here.”

“Remember I was asking you about something called the Truth Infantry?”

“Those guys are mostly in New Hampshire,” one of the other men said.

“The winners want to talk, and the losers say, Let’s deal,” the man in the seat next to that man said.

“Listen: bet or check,” the dealer said.

“They’re like — paramilitary,” Phil said. “Two dollars.”

“They’re all up around Franconia. I gotta see one more. I call.”

“See what? You only get five cards, man. Your flush is busted.”

“New Hampshire?” English said.

“Yeah,” Phil said, “all except your boss. Know what? He’s the head of it. The Generalissimo of Jive.”

“Fifth Street,” the dealer said. “Another heart, too late. No help for the sixes.”

“You mean — Ray Sands?”

“Oh yeah,” Phil said. “Stewart, Stewart, Stewart,” he said, shaking his head sadly at his opponent. “Two dollars. Yes, yes, yes,” he said to English, “Raymond Sands. Which means that you,” and English hoped he meant the other man, “are gonna get fucked in both ears at once.”

English drove back into a town fallen on by drizzle, but the town might as well have been in flames. If he was the assistant to the deceased head of a paramilitary squadron, in what sense, he couldn’t help wondering, would he now be viewed as the head of it? Phil had lost his hand of poker to a pair of nines, much to the satisfaction of his friends. “Kicked in the head by Karma,” he had announced. The sight of a police car in the A&P parking lot thrilled English like a drop through the dark.

His eyes were full of sleep. The shine of rain on the asphalt blurred abnormally, looking less liquid than electric. His strength for the day was spent, yet it wasn’t noon. He had appointments at the station’s production studio, but he imagined he’d just skip them, go home, and leave this world for one of dreams he wouldn’t quite recall when he woke again.

But first he stopped to look in on Grace Sands.

Grace came to the door red-eyed and generally disarranged, wearing the same clothes she’d been wearing last night at the hospital. “The operator,” she said. Her lips quivered wildly and she gestured behind her at nothing.

He put his hands into his pockets. “Grace.”

“The operator is rude.”

“Grace,” English said. “Do you know who I am?”

She looked past him, over his shoulder, and then turned to peer into the living room she’d just come out of. “I’ll make some tea,” she said.

“Very good.”

“Sit down!” she cried as she left him standing in the hall. “What you call it — the couch. I make some …” At the far end of the house, where her voice had faded, he heard a faucet going on.

He went to the desk in Sands’s office and took the three blue passports from their drawer, and then stood still in the middle of the room, not a pocket anywhere in his clothing big enough to hide them.

With a pencil he started a rent in the lining of his jacket, ripped it wider with his fingers, and stuffed the three documents out of sight; then walked, his elbow jammed awkwardly against their bulk because he’d torn a hole large enough for them to fall out of, across the hallway and into the parlor.

Sitting back on the flowery divan, English closed his eyes and listened to a singing along his taut wires while Grace disturbed the kitchenware. Now that his eyes were shut, his vision was acute: across a curtain of phosphenes he watched primitive, shrunken heads devolve into faceless splashes.

“So. So. So,” Grace said, coming back with a tea service held out before her.

“Oh. Here.” He took hold of the coffee table with both hands and moved it three inches to the left, pointlessly.

“And you going on a trip,” she said, setting down the tray.

He studied the two small cups, the unadorned white teapot, the bowl of sugar and pitcher of milk, the plate of lemon slices. “Not to my knowledge.”

She took her place across from him and poured him out some tea. “Bud gonna be along real soon.” Some sort of unpleasant thought crossed her face. She put her hands in her lap and looked at them.

“Very tasty.” English sipped his tea.

“I don’t remember all the numbers, and she’s rude,” she said. “So rude I’m not gonna talk to her, that kind of person.”

After a moment she looked at him in fear. “Are you waiting for your photograph while it’s developing?”

English sighed. He felt his lower lip trembling as he touched it to the rim of the cup.

“Bud got a personal friendship with our Bishop, Bishop Andrew.”

English said, “I’m glad.”

“The Bishop, our Bishop, you know Bishop Andrew? He visit my Bud personal last week. Lenny,” she asked him now, “where’s Bud?”

“I beg your pardon,” he begged her.

“Do you think Bishop Andrew gonna come?”

English set down his cup. “I don’t know, Grace.” He put his hands on his knees.

“I hope so. The Bishop himself, I be very honored to have him at the funeral.”

She wiped her nose on the hem of her apron. “To speak at Bud’s funeral.”

He closed his eyes on the idea of people standing around a grave and this poor woman trying to fathom it all. What kind of funeral was that? “I don’t have to go, do I?”

It simply came out. He wondered if he’d actually said it.

“Oh no, no, no. You go ahead, you finish your tea,” Grace told him. “You stay till your picture develops.”

Lovemaking was a rare, shy, false thing between them. They never did much more than kiss sweetly while naked. “I don’t know,” he said, “why I can’t get it up.” Naked and sitting Indian-style amid the bedclothes, Leanna asked him, “If you’re not worried about your sex conduct, and nothing else is wrong, then what’s bothering you?”

“What sex conduct?” English said.

Leanna wasn’t a virgin after all. She and Marla Baker had wanted a baby once, and they’d hired a man to make love to both of them. Neither had gotten pregnant, and so all Leanna had bought for fifty dollars was her deflowering in an airport motel.

“Yeah, I paid for it, too, the first time,” English admitted. “Twenty dollars.” He ran a finger from the crook of Leanna’s elbow down to the frail bones of her wrist. “It was a black lady with needle marks.”

“We almost got back together,” Leanna said. “But Marla went to New York because her husband was having her followed.”

Suddenly English wanted to leave his life. “Who was following her?”

“Marla’s a tough lady. She’s older. It was a father thing. She’s too old for me.”

“Just one, okay?”—English was lighting a cigarette. “You almost got back together?”

“Blow it out the window,” Leanna said. “Open the window, baby.”

He crouched naked by the window he’d opened and blew smoke through the screen out over the empty parking spaces of the empty hotel. It must have been past 3 a.m. They slept together all the time and didn’t sleep. They were lovers, and they didn’t make love. It was one of the strangest things that had ever happened to him, and in a couple of senses it wasn’t happening. “What was her husband having her followed for?” he said.

“Oh, it’s a whole complex thing. They’ll never get divorced. He keeps compiling evidence against her, and she keeps letting it fuck her mind all around. Marla reacts. She was in P-town as a reaction, and she’s in New York right now just as a reaction to his moves. We practically lived together the last three summers, and she wanted to hide it from him. Deep down she thought it was sick to be gay. But,” she said, “you’re only as sick as your secrets.”

He watched the street, dipping his ashes into his hand. “I never heard that one before,” he said. “As sick as your secrets.”

“It must’ve been a private eye from Boston. Marla wanted to catch him. She went crazy, looking over her shoulder all the time. She put on a black raincoat and snuck around outside her building one night. It got so weird,” she said, “it got so scary.”

By the open window he dangled his cigarette from his lips, and put his arms around himself against the draft.

“Last summer she finally decided not to go home. We were going to — I don’t know. Then she met Carol; then …” Her thoughts drifted off on a sigh. “You start to think, Who is this guy? If it was a guy. It could’ve been a woman. They have women detectives now.”

“The truth is—” English began.

“We’ll never know the truth.”

“Maybe that’s right,” English said in despair, “maybe that’s best.”

“What’s bothering you?”

“Do I look like something’s bothering me?”

“You look like you’re hiding and peeking out the window. You’re an uptight, late-night DJ.”

“There’s something I’m supposed to do. But I’m not doing it.”

“You’re guilty before God. You should go to Confession.”

“No,” he insisted. “I should go to the police.”

“The who,” Leanna said.

“Sands was into some kind of passport thing, phony passports, and I was like — his secretary, part-time. But I didn’t know anything about it. It looks bad. It just looks bad.”

“If you haven’t done anything, why go to the police? Let them come to you if they want.”

“Right, that’s just it. But somehow it won’t sound so logical if it turns out I did do something. Like, I’m an accessory. Then I say, Well, I didn’t know, and they say, What didn’t you know? I mean what, exactly, didn’t you know? You know?”

“I know you’re only as sick as your secrets.”

A phrase came back to him from somewhere. “Sick unto death.”

The sheets whispered and Leanna came across the bedroom to embrace him from behind where he squatted with his chin on the windowsill. She ran her hands along his shoulders and arms and cupped his buttocks in her hands. “I wouldn’t worry about it, honey man,” she said into his ear. “A smoker’s Karma is to die from cancer, not from secrets.”

“Kicked in the head by Karma,” he said.

“Where are you going?”

“I gotta go. I’m going home,” he said. “I need some sleep before I go to work.”

That night, he prayed. He threw off the blankets in the small, sleepless hours and put himself on the floor by the bed.

English didn’t kneel in prayer each night out of habit, but fell to his knees on rare occasions and in a darkness of dread, as if he were letting go of a branch. To his mind, God was a rushing river, God was an alligator, God was to be chosen over self-murder and over nothing else. He thanked God he had two arms and two legs, he thanked God he had two jobs and some variety in his life, he prayed to God to let him make love to Leanna. Satisfy these yearnings, he prayed, or take them the hell away. He didn’t pray anymore for faith, because he’d found that a growing certainty of the Presence was accompanied by a terrifying absence of any sign or feeling or manifestation of it. He was afraid that what he prayed to was nothing, only this limitless absence. I’ll grow until I’ve found you, and you won’t be there.

Whenever he found himself praying, he knew he was at the very least jammed up inside, probably crazy. He got up off his knees and put his clothes on, and his shoes, and he sat in the room’s only chair with the room’s only book, Best Loved Poems, reading the index of first lines in the back. Nothing grabbed him. Tell me what to do. He spun the pages out under his thumb, but the poem he turned up had nothing to do with his situation, and anyway, he wanted guidance, not literature. Tennyson, Lord Byron, you had to be in the mood. Somebody cleared his throat in another room, somebody downstairs dropped a shoe, somebody wrenched a spigot somewhere and the pipes cried out, but for five seconds, ten seconds, English couldn’t believe in these people. A familiar thought came to him, one he didn’t like: What if there’s really nothing? Suppose I’m all there is? What if there’s only a child telling himself a story, and the story is the child, and the child is me? I’ve got to stop living in these rooms alone. I’ve got to pray because I can’t stop thinking these thoughts. Prayer is my home. God is inside it. Coleridge is also there. Walt Whitman. The end of the world. And the deep, dark secret of my life. It’s a case of answering the door and being entered.

Outside his door, some men argued loudly over nonessentials as they stumbled up the staircase. Checking his watch, he discovered that it was I a.m. as they hurled themselves, from the sound of it, against the door across the hall.

He was an hour late for his shift at WPRD. He was in trouble. In his mind he pictured his attendance record at the station, discounting absences during the day following his employer’s death, and tried to convince himself it wasn’t a bad record.

It appeared to him, as he got into his pants, that the men outside were backing up violently against his door in order to get momentum for their forays against the one across the hall. In a minute they’d break down the wrong one. And in fact it was happening. He watched in disbelief as his lock tore through the door frame. A fist shoved a pistol in English’s face, and a man said, “You ripped off my TV, my stereo, and my bag, man, and you put it in the yard and got your car, and my sister was home, man, she saw you. I recognize you. You’re the same fuck I chased outta the yard Tuesday, man, Tuesday night. You rip-off bastid. You came back.”

English said, “I …”

“You’re coming with us.”

“I didn’t,” English said.

“Come on, thief. You’re coming, or I swear to fuck I pull this trigger.”

“You’re wrong,” English said as the man shoved him down the stairs by use of the gun. “Just look at me.” There was another man behind them, he noticed now. “Look, in the light,” English insisted. “I’m not the guy. I’m not.” His feet kept slipping out from under him on the stairs. “Look at me.” His feet were bare. He didn’t have a shirt on.

“Louis,” the man said when they were standing by the car.

“What?” the man behind them said.

“Goddamn it, come around me!” the man said. “Open the fucking door, man. Get in the back,” he told English. “Get in the back, get in the back. Louis, goddamn it, get in the back! I’m standing on the street here!”

English sat in back, the gun no longer trained on his flesh. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” the man said, starting the car and trying to steer with the pistol gripped in one hand. English hunched forward with his elbows between his knees. The man next to him was breathing hard.

They were already passing the A&P on the way out of town. In a second they’d be on Route 6. At this point, to English, shivering in back without a shirt, Route 6 stood for the end of everything.

“Listen, please, there’s a mistake,” English said.

“One word.” The driver whirled around as he accelerated onto the highway, bringing the pistol’s mouth right up against English’s scalp. “One word and I promise I’m gonna do it.”

Louis, the man in the back seat next to English, said, “I like your style.”

“You think I wouldn’t? I’ll do it right now, you want me to show you?”

“Yeah, right,” Louis said.

“Okay.” The tires cried as the driver slammed on the brakes, and grated as they bit the gravel shoulder. “Okay. Right now.” But the car regained the highway without stopping.

“Shit. Jambo,” Louis said.

“Fuck I wouldn’t.”

“Just drive right.”

“You think I don’t know how to drive?”

“Okay.”

“No. No. I’m asking you.”

“Okay. Okay.”

“Hang on, man. I know how to drive. See this?” Jambo wiggled the steering wheel. “That’s how you drive, brother.”

“That ain’t how I drive,” Louis said. “I do it much different.”

“Hey, listen, man,” Jambo said. “Okay. What about the time I took you to the fucking Zone to cop and you said you were gonna turn me on because it was my wheels, man, and I skipped work, man—”

“Okay. Jesus Christ.”

“I risked my parole for you, man, because you said you were so fucking sick—”

“I told you, I appreciate it,” Louis said.

“And then, hey, listen”—he seemed to be talking to English—“I’m sitting there in the car and the place is hotter than shit, which nobody mentioned, this fucker here never told me the Man’s cruising by every two seconds, I’m on parole, not even supposed to leave Newton: two! hours I’m fucking sitting there pissing my pants. And then so this cocksucker comes out finally, this cock sucker, he comes staggering out with his eyes pinned and like fucking puke all down his shirt, man, and says”—Jambo affected deep, moronic tones—“Hey, man, like Jesus the fuckers fried me, man, but I did you a big fucking favor, man — tell this guy what you gave me, Louis. Come on, you think you’re such a fucking saint.”

“Oh, shit, never mind. I told you—”

“This tiny little fucking glassine envelope with fucking dust, you know little bits of dust stuck in the corners, man — I mean he shoulda throwed it in the trash, right? Dust, man. Two hours and he brings me the garbage after he shoots his arm full. You gave me dust. I risked parole.”

“Hey, Jambo—listen to yourself.”

“And now you wanna pull this fucking bullshit, telling me you done me big fucking favors, man.”

“Do you hear yourself?” Louis said. “That’s all I have to say: Do you hear yourself.”

“Yeah, I hear myself.”

“Then that’s all I have to say,” Louis said.

Jambo turned around in English’s direction. His face was a darkness. But English had the impression that he was trying to communicate something out of his eyes.

“Turn around, turn around, turn around — Jambo, you hear me?” Louis said.

“What’s the matter?”

“You were almost off the road. Don’t you realize anything?”

“I’m driving, man. I’m driving this car.”

“Okay.”

“I’m driving.”

“All right!”

They drove for a long time down Route 6. Then the streetlamps revolved overhead as they turned into a town. A number of thoughts swarmed through English’s skull — as to his duty now to observe the scene and memorize landmarks, as future evidence — like wild horses over a hill and down and out of sight.

He felt carsick, but couldn’t stop watching as the light of streetlamps passed repeatedly over the driver’s chest and wide neck.

Jambo stopped the car on a tree-lined street in front of a building that might have been a church or a village hall.

The little town seemed locked down for the winter. Nothing moved on the street except the brittle wind. Jambo lit a cigarette and rested his forearm on the steering wheel, never letting go of the pistol.

“Whatsisfuck got hit right here, last winter. Dead,” he said. “He refused to look both ways.”

Louis rolled down his window. “You cold?” he asked English.

“I don’t have a shirt,” English said.

“That’s what caused me to ask,” Louis said.

“Louis,” Jambo said, stretching convulsively to dip his ash out Louis’s window, “don’t talk to the guy.”

“It was just about the temperature.”

“I mean it, man. You’re better off. Just be like a doctor. Surgical.”

Louis changed the subject. “Nobody’s here, man.”

“Give me a list of your other famous discoveries,” Jambo said with disgust, starting the car.

“Where are we going now?” Louis said.

Jambo turned off the car again. “Fuck if I know.”

English closed his eyes and counted to one hundred. He started over at one again.

“There was this nurse in detox?” Louis told Jambo with shyness, as if trying not to brag. “And when I got out of there she said, ‘Come on over.’ So I went there and they were having a party. So, I was feeling pissed off, because it’s like, when she said, Come over, I thought she meant, you know, come over, just me. But anyway …” He cleared his throat, and stopped talking.

Jambo laughed. “Me and this guy I was in the service with, Eddie Martin. We picked this whore up and I said, ‘Eddie, get in the back seat, she’s gonna blow me in the car.’ Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh!” He imitated a vacuum cleaner.

English put his head between his knees. Louis pulled him back up by the hair.

“Whoosh! Whoosh! Oh, baby. ‘Five dollars,’ she says.” Jambo smacked his palm loudly with the pistol. “Bam! How’s that for five dollars? Out cold! And Eddie says, ‘What’d you do?’ He come around and starts jerking off right over her, she’s out cold: ‘Best I ever had!’” As Jambo tasted this memory again, bouncing up and down in the driver’s seat and repeating, “Best I ever had!” and miming the rapid hand flutter of masturbation, English started to cry, squeezing out his voice in a whisper so as not to be heard.

In a few minutes, the headlights of another car washed over them.

“That’s him,” Jambo said.

He turned around and nudged English upright with the gun. “This is a 9 millimeter Browning automatic.” He forced the barrel between English’s legs. “I don’t wanna hurt nobody,” he said.

“A pickup truck ran him down, man, and he died right there, right out front,” Jambo was saying, “died with over a thousand dollars in his wallet.”

In the light he turned out to be a wide-faced blond man.

English thought this must be a very old public restroom in what must be a basement. The floors were concrete. Mildew streaked the walls. The urinals were metal, and in a distant area of shadows there appeared to be shower stalls. Equipment hung from the walls — ropes, mops, brooms. A tang of cleanser.

English himself sat in a wooden cane-bottom chair talking to a man who wore a gigantic novelty hat of furry silver-blue velvet, nearly a yard in diameter.

“Am I on LSD?” English asked.

The man indicated Jambo, who stood over English. “Some items are missing. Why did you steal things from this person’s house?”

“I didn’t. You — there’s a big mistake,” English said, and Jambo came around with the flat of his automatic pistol on the side of English’s ear. “Tell me what to do,” English said. “I’ll do anything.” In the ringing of his head, the words sounded like fuzz.

He looked at Louis, who stood aside watching Jambo out of wounded, soulful eyes.

The man lifted the brim of his colossal hat and wiped the perspiration from his brow with the back of his hand. “Get me a chair,” he said, and Louis brought him a wooden chair.

He sat down in front of English, very close, and leaned forward into English’s face. “Some items are missing. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“I promise—”

“There is no mistake. Think back. Some items are missing. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“I swear to God, I swear to Christ,” English said, “I don’t know.”

“What did you take?” the man said.

For God’s sake, what did I take? he asked himself. If they said so, then he’d done it.

“Think.”

The dawn burst. “The passports?”

“The passports. That could be a part of it, the passports.”

“Oh, God, the passports.”

“Your word. Passports is your word.”

“This is a really — it’s a bad situation,” English said. “They’re gone.”

“That’s just what I told you to start with. We’re getting nowhere.” The man stood up. “Are we getting anywhere?”

“Yes,” English insisted, “yes, we are. You didn’t say anything about passports. I told you passports.”

“Who said anything about passports?”

“I — look — you’re not asking me anything. Just ask me and I’ll tell you. Anything.”

“Where are the missing items?”

“They’re down a sewer opening at Cutter Street and Bradford. Practically in front of Ray Sands’s house. I thought if they — I didn’t want to get in trouble. They were lying around. He died. I thought somebody, you know, lawyers — maybe I’d be an accessory.” He thought he should look higher than the man’s knees, that self-respect required it, but he couldn’t. “Did you know Ray Sands had a heart attack?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the man said. “Ray Sands. Passports. It’s a mystery.”

“But you said—” English said.

“Items.”

“Right, you’re right. You didn’t say anything about anything. You’re right.”

“Items.”

“Right, you’re right. I’m sorry.”

“Are you a tough guy?”

“Me?” English said. “No, no.”

The man turned away and English was afraid he was readying something that would hurt.

“I was in a fight once,” English said, “in a bar. I got knocked off the stool, right off the stool, one punch. Not much of a fight,” he apologized. He longed to please these men, to amuse them. “How many cards are there in this deck, anyway?” he said, crying.

Louis was saying, “He dudn’ know nuthin. Can’t you see he don’t know fuck?”

And the man in the huge blue hat pointed at himself and said, “This individual thinks he knows something. The problem is you, the problem is your attitude.”

Louis punched English twice in the mouth, once with each fist.

“You’re like a kid who doesn’t want to wash his mommy’s car,” the man told Louis. “How can this person feel encouraged to share?”

Louis made a noise like a pig. Perhaps he was laughing.

“Man, this is so wasted,” Louis said.

“Watch!” the man told him. He came near and spread his fingers on English’s scalp, and hooked his thumb into English’s left eye, right where the tears were flowing out.

“You are a disappointment,” the man told Louis.

English felt defeated. He had so very little, and he wanted so much to give. “Here’s what I know. Ray Sands was supposed to be the head of something called the Truth Infantry. I swear to God in Heaven I don’t know anything about it except that, what I just said. I found three passports in his file drawer and they looked phony, so after he died I threw them down the sewer in front of his house. Almost in front. Right around the corner. I don’t know if they washed away or if they’re still there, because I don’t know about the sewers in Provincetown. I’m telling you every — I’m telling you everything. You have it all, all of it, I’m not holding anything back. I’m scared because you’re acting like I must know more, something about something else, but I’m just — nothing. Nobody. See? I’m so scared of you, look, I’m even peeing in my pants. You guys are in the Truth Infantry, right? That’s okay, I don’t know you, I’m not gonna tell. I promise to God. I believe in God,” he said, “I believe in love,” and even as he said it he knew he would never forgive himself: “I love you.”

All the way back down the Cape in the car not a word was said. English was glad of it. Perhaps Jambo and Louis felt it, too, a bleary discomfort following their unreasonable intimacy.

They let him off in North Truro, and he walked through that tiny community and along the trail of seaside motels into Provincetown, about three miles, wearing no shirt or shoes. He did not experience any kind of chill at all. By the time he reached his neighborhood it looked to be quite late, maybe near dawn. The streets seemed very much an epilogue. The universe had lived its history. By now his feet ached, and his naked chest was frozen as senseless as an iron shield. From now on, whenever he wanted to, he had the power to kill himself. But he put it off a few more minutes.

At home he shut his room’s broken door as best he could and sat in the only chair and rested with his feet up on the bed, looking at a book. After a while he had to use the bathroom. While he was in there he dropped his clothing around his feet and stepped into the shower. The pipes sang relentlessly, and the handles of the spigot in their white gloves seemed to hold themselves out begging as he washed the blood away.

It was growing light as English climbed the hill to the rear entrance of Leanna’s hotel. He turned at the top of the concrete steps up to the back yard: the town before him looked truly inanimate, a collection of innumerable tons of stones and boards. Out on the harbor the small blue ice floes were turning pink. The night’s darkness had sunk down into the water, just under the glimmering surface.

Often Leanna forgot to lock the back door. English turned the handle and thought for a second that she had, for once, remembered. He tried again with more strength and found himself inside, next to the laundry machines, looking into her kitchen, which he entered, and where he poured himself a glass of milk.

The living room, doubling as the bedroom, was full of the odor of her sleep. English stood just inside the aura of her dreams, sipping his milk and unbuttoning his shirt with one hand.

Leanna had had almost all her hair cut off. She was sleeping on her side and looked like no one he knew. Panic clouded his feeling: he’d come into the wrong room, found the wrong person, and now he could only have the wrong words; even his hands and his face felt wrong. But in a minute she woke up and smiled at him. She’d combed her hair back in the manner of a young hoodlum. Now it was tousled like a baby’s and made her gaze more confused and beautiful. He came close and sat beside her.

“What happened to you?” she said.

“I didn’t even know it was you,” he said.

“Your face looks — fat, terrible, I don’t know,” she said.

Feeling no place to begin his story, he said, “I hit the steering wheel. I had to stop suddenly.”

Here in the candlelit world of the bed he was all right, lying with Leanna in the soft glow of the sheets, beside the pack of Marlboros, the grimy ashtray, the half glass of milk. Men had beaten him up. He’d stepped through a curtain into a world of meat, a slaughterhouse. Oh, God, I am a mess, he thought.

Suddenly, though she was touching him, he knew for certain that Leanna was going to get rid of him tomorrow, or even die tomorrow, and fear moved a finger around in his stomach.

“I love that saxophone,” he said.

They were naked. She was stroking his back with oiled and scented hands, moving them toward the heart, always toward the heart.

She paused, wiped her hands on the white towel, and leaned forward over his head, supporting herself by a hand between his shoulder blades, to turn up the jazz on the machine.

“Gato means cat,” she said sadly. It was a Gato Barbieri record.

She bent down and kissed the side of his face.

“It looks like you were in a fight.”

“A fight?” he said.

“You’re going to have two black eyes.”

He turned over beneath her, she rising a bit to help this maneuver, and now she sat astride him lightly, groin on groin. They’d been like this many times by now, uselessly.

“I don’t know much about you,” she said.

“You know everything I know. Maybe more.”

She watched him silently.

“I grew up on a farm.”

She watched him. “What was the worst thing you ever did?” she said.

“Why do you want to know?”

She only watched him, running her thumbs along his collarbone.

“One time I tried suicide.”

“Suicide?”

“It was a mistake.”

She slipped down beside him and drew him close. “You tried to kill yourself?”

“I didn’t succeed.”

“How old were you?”

“About one year younger than I am now.”

Away from the window, down out of the light, her face was too dark for him to see.

“How? What did you use?”

“Death by hanging,” he said, “was my sentence.”

He kissed her falsely, trying to draw them both into some kind of interlude. But she drew away.

“Did it feel sexy?”

“What.”

“Did it feel sexy when you killed yourself?”

The question frightened him, and he tried to drop back into his interior thoughts, scramble in there for an answer, something flip, something silly—

And then she asked, “Did you come?”

He tried just listening to the saxophone. She watched him — staring right through his mind, he had a feeling, down his throat and into his groin.

“Did you come?”

They touched. It felt hot. He was hard. She wouldn’t let his eyes go.

“Did you come? While you were hanging, did you come?”

Right now he almost had the power to say that he’d really killed himself. That his life on earth had stopped and then started somewhere else — here, now. That he’d hung himself, died, and been brought here to wait for God’s word. God’s charge, the task that would bring Lenny English back from the dark.

“Go ahead,” she said.

He moved partway inside her.

“More,” she said.

She put her arms around him and held him tightly. “Oh!”

He stopped still, though he wanted to move inside her.

“Who are we?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Leanna, I don’t know.”

“Rock. Slow.”

“I’m afraid to.”

“It’s all right.”

“Just slow,” he said. “I swear.”

He didn’t know which of them was the maiden and which the seducer. He thrust more deeply, all the way in, and it didn’t actually matter.

“But why is it you?” she asked him. “Why isn’t it somebody else?”—and he knew what she meant, he understood that nobody mattered, that love was just making love, calling to itself out of the void, and they might be kissing, they might be touching, they might be lying face to face and staring at each other in wonder, but there was nobody home — nobody but love, so why is it you? Couldn’t it be anybody? Only you, Leanna, only your lips of fever and moss, and don’t ever let it stop. Only you. You’re the only nobody for this nothing in the world.

He stopped, breathing hard, his life roaring. He’d killed himself, gone blank, and wakened: here, now.

The saxophone ceased. The needle left the record, abandoning them to a silence

— which he broke finally by saying:

“Yeah.”

— which he shattered completely by saying:

“I did. I did come.”

She pulled him to her again, and he kissed her. She reached down between her legs, where he was, and put him inside her again. They watched each other, staring each other down. He felt ashamed and alive, he felt seen. On her parted lips a mysterious, an unspeakable question trembled. Or was it an answer? He kissed it away. Rising up into the window’s view, he let a little daylight touch his closed eyelids.

He opened them. Leanna was his lover. The morning burned his eyes. It was getting on April, but no April he’d ever seen. Colder and harder than March.

Since Sands’s death two months ago, English had been staying at Leanna’s hotel. What he liked about it was that he wasn’t on display here. Far from it. He was practically in hiding. As long he was around the place, he had to keep entirely out of sight of Leanna’s friends. “Suppose,” she explained to him, “some of your straight friends found you in bed with a man?” He didn’t bother telling her he had no friends, straight or otherwise, except for her.

He didn’t explain where the marks on his face had actually come from, or why he wouldn’t go home. And he knew she didn’t ask him about these things because there was something, despite their animal closeness in the bed, that separated them, something like a jagged line down the comic-strip panel showing that they weren’t there for each other but only talking on the phone. Then why was he convinced that hiding beside her was the only thing keeping him alive?

He saw each working day dawn and stayed in bed. He smoked cigarettes and watched the light move down the sides of buildings. Eventually it got dark outside, and Leanna came back to bed.

Sometimes he felt they’d been there together among the mussed sheets so long he didn’t know what season it was — he thought it was summer, that he’d met her on an afternoon sapped and lulled by sunburn. Sometimes he stood in the kitchen after they made love and stared out at the rotten leaves on the black vinyl cover of the hot tub, and at the snow patches disfigured by blue shadows, and the things he saw seemed to change and simultaneously stay the same, as if clouds passed swiftly over whatever he saw, even the walls and blankets.

The weather kept him in, too — the wind and the rain, the howls and tears of the world. A week into April it snowed deeply, half-thawed, and froze in a cold snap. A second winter hardened around their slow island. But the edges of this island were frayed.

Leanna said one morning, “I have to talk to a cop. My gun is missing. I think Tucker took it. Did you ever meet Tucker? He stole it.”

English turned down the radio and stood naked beside it. “I,” he said, “I didn’t exactly know you had a gun.”

“Well, I do have a gun, but it’s missing. That’s why this cop, Eddie, is coming over.”

“What do you mean? What kind of gun is it? You mean you have a handgun?”

“A.32.”

“Jesus. I didn’t know you had a gun.”

“Well, I have a gun. This is a hotel, and I’m the only one around.”

“You have a license and all that? What do you need in Massachusetts, anyway? A license or something?”

“It’s registered. It’s legal.”

“Except it’s missing?”

“I’m pretty sure Tucker took it.”

Lately anything to do with violence, even sirens on the television in another room, caused dread to congeal in globules in the back of his throat. “Is this person, this guy Tucker, is he a Vietnam vet, do you happen to know?”

“I don’t think Tucker’s a veteran of anything, except reform school or someplace like that.”

“And so what is his connection with you?”

“He was working around here. He was staying right over there,” she said, pointing out the window at the little cabins named for famous ladies, “but now he’s gone and my gun’s gone. The money’s all here, though.” She was sitting at her desk with the telephone, the message-recording device, the bunch of slots for keys, the drawers, the cash box. It was eerie to see her among these things and to know that some of them hadn’t been used or even touched for months. It made the hotel seem all the more closed.

He was satisfied that this stolen gun and this thief Tucker had nothing to do with the people who had injured him. But when you thought about it, in the general flow of events nothing could be viewed as separate from anything else, and this pointless theft was another wave of evil dragging him out over his head.

English considered these things on his first day outdoors, when the sun, which had burned away most of the snow on the streets, came over the roof and started on the footprints he’d left in the frost covering the shoveled walk. He was sitting on the wooden lip of the hot tub. Under the black vinyl the waters burbled and hiccuped. The air smelled of woodsmoke and a mix of things that had been trapped for a while under the snow. Leanna put her head out the back door. “Flush the drugs,” she said.

She was followed out onto the patio by a fresh-faced, uniformed policeman.

The sun struck English’s skin at that moment, raising gooseflesh. The air stirred the crumbled leaves in his hand. Through an open window came the tinny sound of Boston’s only country-Western station. All of a sudden it was spring.

“It works, but it’s not paid for,” Leanna was telling the officer. She meant the hot tub.

English felt uncomfortable around the authorities. He supposed it showed right now in his lack of anything to say.

Leanna was talking about the thief who’d stolen her gun. “He was an unhappy person. I talked to his mother on the phone once.”

Though nobody had asked, English said, “I never met him.”

“What about the.44 I sold you?” Leanna asked the officer.

“I’ve got a Browning that shoots better, but otherwise, it’s my best one,” the officer said, as he wrote down notes on a pad.

Later, after the officer had written it all down and gone away, and some clouds had blown in from the sea and the light had withered, English went inside and started washing the dishes. “Are you in the firearms business?” he called out.

She came in from the living room, where she’d been doing her accounts. “In my whole life I’ve owned two guns, and I’ve sold one.”

“I was just wondering.”

“Will you relax?”

“Sure thing. Yes, I will.”

“Why don’t you go out?”

“I will. It’s spring.”

“Go.”

“Lend me some money. A few dollars.”

“I’ll lend you all you want. But if you want to feel like a person, you’d better get a job.”

“I have a job.”

“Really?” she said. “When was the last time you showed up around there?”

“I called yesterday. I’ve got a production date tomorrow. Big bucks.” But he wasn’t thinking about his work at WPRD. He was thinking instead of Gerald Twinbrook, Jr., the missing person, and his detective’s vocation.

“I need to make a couple of calls right now, too,” he said. “Long distance.”

“Dial away,” she said, and left him with the phone.

For a minute he watched her at work out back, sweeping twigs from the iron lawn furniture.

It was spring, and he was making a fresh start. He got Mrs. Gerald Twinbrook, Sr., on the phone.

She’d forgotten who he was. Then, when he reminded her, she said, “We’ve got another agency on it, Mr. English.”

“He’s still missing, then.”

“It’s been four months. We’re resigned to the worst.”

He cleared his throat needlessly. “Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.”

“I called almost every day for a week. I talked to … to Mrs. Sands several times, but she was very …”

“Right, right,” he said.

“Anyway, a lady from her church finally answered one day last month and explained to me that poor Mr. Sands had had a heart attack.”

“Yeah, it was — it was weird,” he said, thinking it was the wrong word.

“If only I’d heard from you a little sooner.”

“Yeah, yeah. So you took it to another outfit?”

“In Boston, yes. Carter Investigations.”

“I’m fired.”

“Well, I don’t know if I would say fired. Perhaps you can work with the Carter people. I wouldn’t go so far as to speak for them, you understand, but I would certainly insist they consult with you to begin with. And that’s just what I’ve already told them. Any progress you’ve made, and so on.”

“I haven’t heard from anyone.”

“It’s not for lack of trying on their part, Mr. English. They’ve been phoning your office without any luck. They tell me—”

“I wasn’t around. This whole thing — I mean, Mr. Sands dying, that whole business — what a thing, really. I’ve been beside myself.”

“I understand, Mr. English, truly I understand, and believe me, I’d like to help in any way I can, but our concern, of course, is with—”

“Pay me if I find him.”

Mrs. Twinbrook emitted a number of syllables, I, uh, we, well—“Certainly, uh, Mr. English. Yes, you see, but we already have the Carter agency—”

“Only if I find him. Only if I get results. Is that fair? That’s fair, isn’t it? In fact, it’s totally unprofessional. I mean—”

“Well now, Mr. English, if you find my son, you will most certainly be paid.”

“I just want an excuse to find him.” An inexplicable rush of sentiment dizzied him and wet his eyes. “Don’t ask me why. This whole thing has got me — I have to do something.”

“You were Mr. Sands’s assistant. Are you actually a licensed detective yourself?”

“Of course I am,” he said. “Should I bring my license with me next time I see you?”

“Don’t you carry it with you anyway?”

“It’s kind of big. It hangs on the wall,” he guessed, never having seen one.

“All right. Please understand you are not working for us, Mr. English. It’s just that I don’t want to discourage you if — if you should be successful—”

“If I should be successful in the efforts I am not making for you.”

“I’d have to let that be the final word.”

“I’m fired but I’m not fired.”

“Now you’re speaking past the final word, aren’t you.”

“Okay. Okay. You’ll be hearing from me, Mrs. Twinbrook.”

“I’d rather you communicated with the Carter people. All right?”

“Because I’m not giving up. It’s that simple.”

“Goodbye.” She hung up. He didn’t know whether to characterize that as actually hanging up on him, in the rude sense, or what. He decided it was just a decisive end to an indecisive talk, and promised himself he’d be more decisive in the future. Which was now.

He dialed Jerry Twinbrook’s realtor in the hope of getting Twinbrook’s office address.

Before he could change his mind, someone answered. “Phil-Hack Realty: Bob Edwards.”

“Hi, listen, excuse me, my name’s Leonard English, from Provincetown.”

“Provincetown! How are things up that way? You getting some of this warm front across the Bay there?”

“Yeah. Yeah. We’ve hit a thaw. I’m convinced it’s spring.”

“Well,” Bob Edwards warned him, “wait till you hear it from the ducks. The ponds are still frozen down here.”

False laughter tore itself from English’s throat. He rubbed away his sweaty palm print from the desktop.

“So what can I do you for, Mr. English?”

“Well, Bob, I’m kind of interested in the Twinbrook property over there. Jerry Twinbrook? He says it’s right on the water and he wants to sell. Can I get a look at it maybe? Sometime soon?”

“Twinbrook.”

“Jerry Twinbrook. Gerald. Junior. I believe he’s a junior.”

“Hang on. Right with you.”

While English waited he pictured Bob Edwards, a youthful man with perhaps his tie loosened and his shirtsleeves rolled up, dialing the police on another line.

“Hi. Mr. English.”

“Lenny. Lenny.”

“Lenny, yeah, listen. I’m afraid he’s given you the wrong realtor. We rent him some office space, but we don’t handle any property for him. Gerald Twinbrook, Jr.? I get that right?”

“Right.” Speak. Tell me where it is. Tell me where the office is.

“Still with me?”

“Sure, but — you think he was pulling my leg? Office space.”

“No, no, no, of course not. He’s probably handling the sale through another realtor. Got us confused.”

“Yeah,” English said, his hands tingling. “That makes sense. Listen, can I get his office address from you? He doesn’t have a phone there. I’ll run down tomorrow and get it straightened out, and take a look at what he’s selling.”

“He doesn’t have a phone in his office?”

“Not — not under his name, anyway.”

“Gee,” Bob Edwards said. “That’s a long drive on a slim chance. What if he’s not around?”

Goddamn it. Goddamn it. “I’m going to Boston anyway,” English succeeded in telling him.

“Well then, stop off at the Thomas Building and see him. It’s a converted Victorian just off Route 3 on your way into Marshfield. Got a big sign out front, little parking lot. Can’t miss it.”

“Good deal. Listen, you’ve been a big help.”

“Sure I have. What a guy, huh? Give us a call if we can assist in any way. Will you do that?”

“Okay. Definitely. Yeah.”

“If you pass the Amoco station on the road into Marshfield, you went too far.”

“The Amoco. Thanks.” Too far? He’d be passing an Amoco on the way out of town. “Thanks a million.”

“Hey. What a guy.”

On the outer door of WPRD’s building someone had tacked a poster of a bound, silhouetted figure. Its caption read AS LONG AS AFRICA IS IN CHAINS YOU WILL NOT BE FREE.

As he read it, the probable truth of this idea lowered itself down immensely onto English’s heart.

Suddenly he changed his reason for coming. He’d set out with the idea of quitting his job, but now he thought he’d just beg off working this afternoon. This world was no place to be unemployed in.

Inside, he was greeted solemnly by the program manager, a man named Haney, a small New Yorker with very dark skin and large, sentimental eyes. Haney stirred a cup of tea while he stood in English’s way, and then he sucked loudly at the liquid’s surface. Lately Haney’s eyes had gotten tighter, and shiny. “I wanted to talk to you about that,” he said when English told him he’d have to miss that afternoon’s production date.

“I know you did. I’ve been missing a lot.”

“Not a lot,” Haney said. “Not a lot. But I wanted to talk to you about it.”

“I was doing some secretarial work for Ray Sands,” English said. “Did you know that? There are some things, some loose ends, some things to be cleared up.”

“I understand.” Haney sipped at his tea and began watching his desk, two meters across the room, as if something were happening there. “We’ll struggle along for a time.” But the struggle was going out of him. “I’m lost. I don’t know where to begin, without Ray.”

English would have thought that Sands had taken no hand in the management of this station; that his passing wouldn’t have produced a ripple. He felt sorry for Haney. “I’ll make it up to you. Sometime.”

“As a matter of fact, now is just such a time. I’m about to engineer a show you’d be able to do much, much better. Will you give Alice a hand? Alice,” Haney called, cradling his teacup as if it were a trophy for the type of managerial snooker he’d just accomplished, “Lenny’s going to help, I think.”

English turned around and found Alice Pratt standing behind him smiling a wide, sweet smile he couldn’t quite have sworn was bogus. Alice was, to his way of thinking, a fat, discarded hippie, dragged down by two monstrous happy-face earrings.

Today Alice was interviewing Charles Porter, a young man to whom English thought the word “decent” would be well applied, the head perhaps of an infant family and a small business, a tenor in the choir — but Alice had invited this man onto her show because he was, it turned out, mixed up in the occult, and was supposedly a reader of invisible personal emanations he called “auras.” In calm, assured tones, keeping his lips close to the microphone, Porter explained how the cones and rods in the average eyeball kept these things hidden from the sight of most of us, and blessed the good fate that had made his own eyes a little different. It was a live show, and English’s job was to stay in the announcer’s room with them — there was no separate engineer’s booth — keeping track of program time and steadying the volume meter by dialing the “pots” up or down. He couldn’t let go of his notion of Porter as papa to a wife and preschoolers, and English wondered how he liked eating breakfast with them and seeing them surrounded by colorful force fields like alien creatures while they drank apple juice in their pajamas. English noticed, and not for the first time, that Alice Pratt’s dizzy overresponding irked him a lot, in particular because he couldn’t decide if it was desperately false or only camped, as it were, on the borders of insincerity. As he wore earphones, they were talking right into his head, but English was busy enough that he didn’t listen. He heard no words, only Alice’s voice as it scratched at the edge of a plea, wanting what everyone wanted, whatever that was; listening to her, he wanted it himself suddenly, aching as if he’d downed a shot of fuel and chased it with a flame. What hid behind her smile wasn’t bitchiness or malice but the trembling of the lost. This wasn’t the way to be engineering right now, how unprofessional — I’m a mess, he thought. What is it we all want? Whatever it was, he wanted Leanna to bestow it on him, and he denied automatically and viciously the fact that he probably couldn’t get it from her. Everything was so clear when it came through the earphones! Something was filtered out, some obscuring, personal static. It was his own presence. His reactions to people, their reactions in turn — all the fog of himself was lifted, leaving only the others.

After the show, he found himself standing out in front of the building with Porter, only because the two of them happened to be leaving at the same time.

“Okay,” English said, zipping his jacket against the wind, “what do you see?”

“Your aura is green.”

“I’m envious?”

“Green denotes empathy. In the case of auras anyway.”

English thought, He reminds me of a dentist.

As if dealing in something embraced as universally as oral hygiene, Porter explained that English’s greatest asset — and greatest defect — lay in his ability to feel what others felt. “It’s a talent, a gift, but it can be a real hazard for you. It’s easy to take it too far. You can end up suffering needlessly just because you can’t stop suffering along with someone else.”

“I hadn’t noticed anything like that, to tell you the truth.”

Charles Porter shrugged and smiled. “Then I’m wrong.”

English was impressed by that. “And does every person get only one aura? Is there anything else you see?”

“There’s a yellow, or golden, corona there. You have a creative streak — very dangerous when coupled with empathy. You can easily begin empathizing with situations you only imagine. Find yourself getting stirred around by things that aren’t really—real.”

Finding an affable, unapologetic citizen who believed this stuff was unnerving. English would have felt less uncomfortable if the man had tried to sell him something, or asked for a donation.

He pointed at the building door and at the poster that said AS LONG AS AFRICA IS IN CHAINS YOU WILL NOT BE FREE. “You mean I’m the person who feels like that poster.”

“Or the opposite,” Porter said. “The opposite danger is that in trying to protect yourself, you build up a calloused attitude. You cut yourself off from other people and from your true feelings. The thing to do,” he said, “is to concentrate on seeing that golden light coming out of you, right from your heart. If you concentrate on the gold, you counteract the tendency to get too empathetic. The gold energizes your creativity.”

“Excuse me, but this sounds like bullshit,” English said, lighting a cigarette.

“Well, it’s not stamped in bronze. I’m just an educated guesser, pretty much like everybody else. But I have the same tendency to empathize, and that’s what I do, I try to visualize a golden light around me.”

“I didn’t mean to insult you.”

“No, no.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No. Don’t be.” Porter smiled.

English blew his cigarette smoke sideways. Just the same, the cloud ended up in Porter’s face. English waved it away, deciding to let that serve as a parting gesture. This whole business embarrassed him, and he walked off suddenly in search of Gerald Twinbrook.

The wind sang mindlessly along his VW’s broken antenna as English passed over the Sagamore Bridge. This was the first time he’d left the Cape since the night he’d arrived.

To English it was ridiculous that anyone would go around imagining a golden light shining out of his chest. But he knew he’d probably start doing it. One of the things he liked least about his nature, and something the aura viewer had failed to touch on, was a way he had of falling instant prey to the power of suggestion. “I’ll try anything twice,” he’d sometimes joked, and the few people in his life who’d known him very well hadn’t laughed.

He passed the Amoco station on Route 3 and turned around, having already missed the turnoff to Route 93, and also the left turn onto 3—every turn required of him, in fact.

The Thomas Building wasn’t active today. The parking lot served only a small yellow bulldozer and a third-hand Ford with a flat tire, and now his own VW. A sign on the building’s door said NO MONEY KEPT ON THESE PREMISES. A typewriter clicked faintly in an upper office, but the place felt empty, and despite its aging exterior, the inside of it smelled new, a hint of sawdust, a ghost of hammering. The walls and floor were thin and vibrated with his steps, while the staircase, evidently untouched by the remodeling that had broken the old house’s spaces into offices, was solid. There weren’t any lights on anywhere inside. The afternoon sun lit up the streaks and eddies of dirt on the window he climbed toward up the stairs.

On the second floor English found empty offices, their doors ajar, and one with TWINBROOK written across its wood with an indelible pen. The door was locked.

The confusion of wrong turns that had marked his route here now overwhelmed his mind — for some reason English hadn’t thought of having to get in. He was no burglar. Yet certainly he lacked a key.

He’d been turning around and going back too much today, but he had to go back to his car for a screwdriver and climb with considerable self-consciousness back up the stairs to confront Twinbrook’s door. He knew nothing of locks, but the door was flimsy and gave sideways easily when he pried between door and frame with the screwdriver. In the pauses of the typewriter upstairs, he held his breath. He might have pried the bolt from its housing in one try, but it took him a minute to work up that much boldness. It made a noise, just a squawk, coming open; he closed it silently behind him. The light switch did nothing, but soon he found a light, an overhead fluorescent that must have been provided by the tenant. Its cord hung down before the desk and lay across the floor in loops, a thick red extension cord that made English think of carpenters at work.

When he let loose the light chain, he located himself in a scattering of white papers. Stacks of books and typesheets covered the floor, spilling from Gerald Twinbrook’s desk and chair: old wooden things from the era of steam heat and big iron radiators.

Sands had said it would be here, in this room, under a book; penciled in the margin of a letter, doodled absently on a pad — a name, an address, a phone number: the answer. And English believed him. It only needed finding.

He judged it was around noon. No one had been here in months, and they wouldn’t be coming back today. He had all the time he could use. Then why did he feel rushed? In a daze of reluctance he walked in small circles around the office, skimming the surface of all this data, glancing at the typesheets and file folders on the desk, reading the title of the top book on a pile of books beside the chair, failing to find significance or purpose in two dotted maps and a ragged list of names taped to the wall behind the desk.

The light hummed overhead. It made him nervous. He turned it off.

He sat in the wooden chair before the desk and lit a cigarette. There wasn’t any ashtray around, however, and in fact not even a wastepaper basket — crumpled white sheets of typing paper, which English understood weakly he’d have to uncrumple and peruse, filled a corner like a drift of snowballs.

Catching the handle of a drawer with the toe of his shoe, he opened a space of visibility into which he peeked as he might have down a shaft of darkness, or under a shroud: more paper, more folders, more books, all stacked in a pile that stair-stepped into collapse at the back of the drawer, which he closed as soon as he’d fully opened it.

In the other double drawer he found Twinbrook’s typewriter, an antique Royal table model that didn’t need hiding to protect it from theft.

He checked the heating conduit along the office’s baseboard and found it cold; but the room was sunny, and he took off his jacket.

On the floor beneath the window was Twinbrook’s white telephone. English picked up the receiver, listened to the dial tone, and hung it up again. For a while he looked out the window at the trees beneath him, stubby evergreens addressed, almost dwarfed, by the great blade of a Caterpillar tractor beyond them, a looming brown shadow backed by the sun in a cleared lot of yellow dirt. High above the earth he’d scraped clean, the tractor’s operator sat in the open cab, drinking from a thermos and looking at the trees in front of him.

English stood still while the typist in the upper office walked across the ceiling, shut the door overhead, and descended the stairs. When the door downstairs banged and the person was gone, English looked around the room at the mounds of papers and zigzagging columns of books with real irritation, as if the typist had intentionally left him here to do all this reading and thinking without anybody’s comfort.

Now he stood behind the desk and examined Twinbrook’s maps — two large ones, of New England and of metropolitan Boston, stuck full of red-, blue-, and yellow-headed pins and annotated with symbols he couldn’t make out.

Suddenly English turned, gripped a stack of books and papers on the desk, arranged them before himself like a meal, and sat down.

At page 173 Twinbrook had left off reading a book by Stephen King, and marked his place with a shred of typing paper. He’d spilled coffee all over one called Life After Life by a man named Moody; the leaves were wrinkled and suddenly antique. A fresh-looking paperback copy of Tarantula by Bob Dylan appeared never to have been opened. There was a schedule of buses passing through Marshfield; nothing was marked or underlined. But signs and marks and annotations crowded the pages of Encyclopedia of Card Tricks by somebody named Hugard and another called The Greatest Power on Earth, which appeared to be about atomic weapons. There were in-house phone directories for several corporations, including IBM and AT&T, but none of the names in these directories was marked or underscored. It occurred to English now to shake out the copy of Tarantula in the hope a slip of paper, something bearing a name or a number, might float from among its pages.

At this point a plan for coping with the major part of this mess — the part that weighed the most anyway — came to him, and he went around the room stooped over, collecting stacks of books and leaving any other kind of paper to lie where it fell. He piled the desk with volumes and began shaking out the pages — a paperback Tibetan Book of the Dead, a dictionary, novels by Georges Simenon and Graham Greene, three James Bond books, a fat one called The Fourth Way, a Bible, another Bible, and then he ignored the tides — collecting every bookmark and looking at it.

On one he found four telephone numbers with out-of-state area codes. He pocketed it. Every other bookmark was a blank shred of typing paper.

Outside, the Caterpillar started up with a gigantic clearing of its throat, and English went to the window to watch it flounder, roaring, in the storm of dust it had raised. As the operator measured a sapling with its blade, it seemed to recover its mind; as it came against the tree, its bawling became steady and thoughtful for a few seconds, and then outraged as the rollers shrieked across the treads and the blade unstrung the plant from the ground. It was sweet to hear the noise.

Coming in through the glass window, the sun’s mild warmth burned the air. English pulled his sweater over his head and sat down at the desk. For a moment he considered these questions: Twinbrook, are you missing or are you hiding? Have you left a clue or have you covered your tracks? He was chain-smoking, mashing his cigarettes out on the floor. Do you mind, Twinbrook? Come in and tell me to stop.

He began on the sheets of paper — hundreds, maybe thousands of them. Many were ballpoint sketches and doodles, some were handwritten lists of names, all of them brand names or the names of political groups or business corporations.

He found two carbon copies of such a list, neatly typed. The listed corporations included IBM, AT&T, all the big outfits English had ever heard of. There were about three dozen of them. The Daughters of the American Revolution, the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan. There was a circle around “Truth Infantry.”

English stood up, greatly excited. Circled! But had Twinbrook circled it, or had he, English? He was holding a pen in his hand. He put the page on the desk and drew a circle on it. The ink looked identical.

Twinbrook, is this a collection or something? What do you want with these names? I’m not going to read the typed stuff. I don’t like reading.

By the time he’d separated the blanker, less intimidating handwritten sheets from those crowded with small print, the sun had passed by the window, and now he realized he’d have a harder time reading unless he turned on the overhead fluorescent.

In fact, most of the typed sheets weren’t typed but photocopied articles from newspapers and magazines. Some of them described freeway accidents or the weather. Others showed beaming brides and grooms, looking, thanks to the copying process, like black-faced riverboat minstrels.

None of these reports seemed connected with any other. But the corporations turned up again. He found two lists of boards of directors, apparently copied from a magazine article. Twinbrook, Twinbrook, Twinbrook. Are you nuts?

English was out of cigarettes, his eyes felt dry and sleepy, and he’d decided, at what point he wasn’t aware, not to turn on the overhead light for fear of attracting attention. He wasn’t used to this kind of labor, this rowing through a sea of letters and words, and he’d satisfied himself already that he’d made a fair try at getting it done. But he stayed a little longer because, to tell the truth, he wanted to satisfy Ray Sands. Sands was dead, but English still felt his power to approve or disapprove. He was still working for Sands. He was carrying out Sands’s instructions. After all, people didn’t die instantly. Their images lingered, and they had to fade away before you could ignore them.

He carried a folder to the window for a little more light. Across the face of it Twinbrook had scrawled the name SKAGGS. English opened it and was shocked and irritated to read, in Twinbrook’s handwriting:

Brain Death II Veith, FJ

Brain Death I

JAMA 238 (15): 1651—5

10 OCT 77

238 (16): 1744–8

17 OCT 77

life after death:

J Nerv Ment Dis SEP 77

(Stevensn) 165 (3) 152—70

What he could read of these notes seemed to consist mainly of names and numbers and dates; but the dates were old, the names weren’t full names, the numbers weren’t phone numbers.

— 1975 attitudes

British physician

— dead body

— saving life

death — heart lung death

but DRS say should be brain

Twinbrook, you sick bastard, what are you thinking? Are you aware you don’t make any sense?

NYTimes

call wwwwww what is guy’s name?

call people on panel

— get address of wwwwww; where can I get

copies?

later, interview people by phone

The folder held a thick photocopied article: “BRAIN DEATH: I. A Status Report of Medical and Ethical Considerations.” English was terribly thirsty and wanted a smoke. There was a page evidently typed by Twinbrook:

what you are holding in your hands is a book about … etc. And I think it is always a book about the verge in conscoiiouslness, the splitting apart of the world, and the end of time. I’m not a writer of essays. I write first of all because ETC. talk about the headless man or bodiless head in Brazil what a visitor to this country might think of as a pre-funeral ceremony: strangers who won’t be invited to the funeral driving slowly in single file alongside an accident

Yeah, I get it. People driving past an accident. I get that. Right, brain death, I get that.

I know more about you than your own mother.

How did panel operate?

Was agreement the general rule?

Did opposing views find compromise

in final report? Or did

some views go down to defeat

while others formed basis for report

findings?

Who does all the work?

Me. I do all the work. You go crazy, and I do all the work.

He must have been missing for years before anybody missed him. English was frightened for this man.

Among the pages, most of them flecked with words in Twinbrook’s tiny, nearly illegible hand, English found the photocopied columns of an old newspaper—The New York Times, a heading revealed, of September 1, 1870; and others from September 4 of the same year. They explained the name SKAGGS on the folder’s cover: in Bloomfield, Missouri, sometime in August of 1870, according to these articles, a man called John H. Skaggs had been hanged for murder. His executioners had marched him up to the front of the scaffold so that he wouldn’t have to look at the noose just at that moment, and asked him if he wanted to talk to the crowd of people who’d come to watch him die. The killer had obliged everyone with a long speech. “I would like for you all to have some sympathy for me,” he told them; and, talking specifically to the young boys: “In the first place avoid drinking of whiskey; and in the next place avoid the love of money better than you do your God; and in the next place whatever you do avoid lewd women. I want every little boy that hears me to remember that until he lies on his death-bed; then when he is on his death-bed he cannot foller after these things, and never forget it whatever you do.” His sentimental sermon rushed down the column and the printed words seemed to shrink on the paper. “I don’t know but what there is some here on this ground that looks upon me probably as a tyrant, as an outrageous — a tremendous man, but then that is not for you to judge, for you know not. I hope, therefore, that no lady nor no gentleman will look upon me with any contempt as disgraced in my name. I would be glad how well you may all do; I hope to meet you in the better world than this troublesome world is. This world is nothing but sinfui — nothing else; one sin will lead to another. I hope this may be a warning to every one of you, that when you go home, and after you eat your supper and lie down in your bed I hope this may run through your hearts, not only one time, but as long as you live. I think that I know that it is a mighty horrible thing to be brought up right at death’s door and stared in the face. There is none of you like me; you have no idea …” Maybe this incident was long past and everybody involved in it was dead, but English was filled with embarrassment. The guy should have spat on the onlookers.

English wondered how the townsfolk must have felt watching the finish of a person’s life. Death wasn’t such a stranger to them, probably. The people of Bloomfield in 1870 had probably, every one of them, strangled chickens with their bare hands and shortly afterward eaten them, and seen close relatives languish in their final illnesses at home, and one or two might even have had a loved one dying in an upstairs bedroom while they attended John Skaggs’s execution. To watch a public hanging might have been a fascinating and exciting, probably a troubling, possibly even a terrifying and humbling experience. But it wouldn’t have altered the shape of the soul of a Bloomfield resident.

English thought of those days, the mornings, afternoons, and evenings before the First World War, as a time when everything made sense. Everybody shared a philosophy of life as basic as the soil and as obvious as the sky. You couldn’t go sixty or sixty-five down a turnpike and end your journey in a city of thunder and smoke. He envied the people of Bloomfield their assumptions, even though he couldn’t have said, exactly, what their assumptions had been. He just knew that in those days the world had been founded on things everybody understood.

According to this article, however, there were two men present at this hanging who, while they also lived in the town of Bloomfield, had already found their footing in the twentieth century, this region of the blind where there was no telling the difference between up and down, wrong and right, between sex and love, men and women, even between the living and the dead. These were J. H. Jackson and Joseph F. MacDonald, doctors of medicine who were officiating at this ceremony. They carried with them galvanic batteries of a type generally used for feats of entertainment at carnivals. By the power of electricity they meant to revive John H. Skaggs after he was hanged.

English turned on Twinbrook’s light and spread the article before him on the desk.

At the time the Sheriff cut the rope of the trap a violent shudder was manifested on his countenance; he leaped back and jumped down the steps at two bounds; subdued exclamations came from the crowd, the children screamed, and the women hid their faces in their handkerchiefs and sobbed as if their hearts would break.

A gang of deputies carried the murderer’s body into a room in the courthouse and laid it out on a bench. The two doctors bared its chest and ran wires from the battery to the bone above the heart. When MacDonald turned the battery’s crank, John Skaggs, though he was dead, flailed and moaned.

The sheriff and the reverend tried to stop them, but the doctors couldn’t be distracted now. The sheriff took away their wires, and the doctors ran the current through their own bodies, placing a hand on the battery and a hand on the victim’s chest. Was Skaggs still a perpetrator, English wondered, or was he now the victim?

It was getting cold in the room. He needed Leanna. In the space of two months he’d been broken out of a loneliness like ice, in which he’d felt nothing, and warmed in a way that charged every nerve and made two hours’ solitude a torment.

The Times reporter closely followed the resuscitation attempt. At five past three the right leg moves; eight minutes later the left arm flails out at nothing, the mouth froths, and the face twitches; at three-twenty Skaggs’s pupil responds to light, and the doctors draw some blood from his arm; ten minutes pass, and they turn him on his side and the reporter says he “now presents an appearance only to be described, perhaps, by the word slaughtered.”

Leanna came back to his mind. She liked to put her head on his chest and listen to his heart. “How could one person ever hurt another after doing this?” she’d asked him the first time. “But we do.”

By twenty after four the body of Skaggs is sweating and his feet are no longer cold; in five minutes his pulse is seventy-five. But he doesn’t open his eyes or speak.

By nine o’clock the experiment is over. Skaggs is dead again.

The collapsed quality of Ray Sands’s lifelessness came back to English’s mind — the sense, as he’d stood and watched his dead employer, that every bone in the man’s body had been ground down to powder.

When he got back to Leanna’s, he could smell the camomile-scented steam rising from the hot tub before he rounded the stone steps onto her back patio. He heard someone laughing, and a splash. He wouldn’t be joining her there. He hadn’t been in the hot tub since the debauched night of Ray Sands’s last coronary.

As he came around the building’s corner onto the patio, he found her half out of the water, leaning over a woman he didn’t recognize at first. They were kissing.

“Leanna?” he said.

She looked up at him. A casual greeting started from her, he could see it moving on her lips. But she couldn’t quite pull it off. After a couple of seconds she said, “This is Marla.”

English saluted mutely.

Leanna said, “Marla Baker.”

Marla smiled. “Hi. How do you do?” she said.

Marla had gone under and come up, so that her hair was slicked back and her eyelashes glistened. She seemed very summery. English suddenly felt how warm it was today, and even a little humid.

“Well,” he replied, “I’m feeling very weird.”

“Lenny,” Leanna said.

“Weird?” Marla said.

“Like — weird and kind of sick.” He sat down on one of the iron lawn chairs. The seat was wet, and he stood back up.

“Lenny,” Leanna said, standing up, too — naked, the water streaming off her—“maybe we should go inside a minute.”

“I’ve got to get some air,” English said.

“Okay,” Leanna said after a long pause.

“I’ll take a walk. I’ll call you later or something. Nice meeting you,” he said to Marla. “I remember you. I’ve seen you around.”

The spot of wet on the seat of his pants bothered him as he walked down Bradford and then over to Commercial. And the warm and sweetened breath of the day bothered him, too. The springtime. Buds on the tips of rosebushes outside the town hall, buds like dewdrops shimmering on the shrubs, a frail green trembling in the tips of twigs. The demented crocuses were hauling themselves up out of the earth. He moved faster, trying to get away from the signs of this grisly miracle, looking in all the windows instead of at the world. There were merchants inside the shops now along Commercial, cleaning, painting, tearing loose the signboards of bankrupt businesses and raising up the bright names of new ones.

The trouble and ache of the last few minutes circled the center of his feeling and then dropped away. Later for that. Now was the time for other things — for the next thing — for figuring out what to do now, this instant. Oh this town, with its harbor glinting like a blowtorch at the end of every alley … He’d walked almost as far as Cutter Street, where Grace Sands might still be living. And where Ray Sands must have kept any material, any files, he may have had regarding Gerald Twinbrook.

English turned up Cutter. Right away he felt the strands of a certain kind of nauseated pity touching him. He didn’t want to see Grace. On the other hand, he wanted those files. Maybe she wouldn’t remember him. Or maybe she would reach out and strangle his heart, pleading for an explanation of absolutely everything.

Nobody home. His knock sounded the emptiness of the rooms behind the double doors. Standing tiptoe on the mushy lawn, he tapped on the windows and tried to peek in. The lace curtains seemed to have survived from obscurity, like the antique gown of a jilted bride. They were shut tight, without a crack to see through.

From the next-door neighbor, a young woman carrying a baby and walking barefoot and coatless across narrow Cutter, going tiptoe among the frigid rivulets of snowmelt, he got the latest. Grace Sands had moved to the old folks’ home. “You know — Shirley Manor,” she said. The baby, peeking out of its blue blanket, regarded him with a powerful serenity.

“Why are you barefoot?” English asked the woman.

“I’m just going from my mom’s house back to my place,” she explained with a little embarrassment. She pointed one at a time at two houses facing each other across the lane. The house she’d been making for was next door to the Sands residence.

“Who took Grace over there to Shirley Manor, I wonder,” he said.

“It was the Bishop. Bishop Andrew,” the woman said.

“Bishop Andrew?”

“Yeah, weird, huh? He comes over sometimes when he’s on the Cape. He’s a relative or something. The first time I saw him I was surprised. I didn’t know he drove an El Camino,” she said.

An El Camino? This irrelevancy irritated English unspeakably. He stood in the lane for a while after she’d left him, chewing viciously on the inside of his cheek.

When he was alone on the street again, he moved quickly, willing himself not to think about it, around the side of the house to the kitchen door. English hadn’t been back here before. There was no yard to speak of, only a tall board fence three steps away from the glass-paneled back door. He broke a panel of the glass with his elbow, gouging a small tear in his jacket’s leather sleeve. It didn’t make much noise at all.

He took a deep breath, standing quietly by the door, and then surprised himself by bursting into tears. Something must be getting to me, he thought, yanking out his shirttail and wiping at his eyes. The sobs doubled him over and shook him as if dislodging a strange, heavy obstruction from his throat. When he stood up straight again his heart was lighter, though his head hurt and his eyes felt wounded. He reached his right hand carefully through the shattered panel, opened the door, and went through the kitchen and the airless living room to Ray Sands’s work area.

English had a cigarette while he puttered around in his dead boss’s studio, peering into the tripod camera’s lens, repositioning the two tungsten lamps, and blowing smoke into the somber darkroom. In the office itself he found the file drawer open and empty. It stood to reason that Sands’s executor would have been here, and maybe, thought English, there was cause to remove the files. But he couldn’t help it, the numberless fingerprints of a conspiracy blazed brightly on all the objects around him now.

The telephone on Sands’s desk was working. English dialed the numbers he’d found in Gerald Twinbrook’s office, and had a couple of conversations. The first two were New York numbers, one no longer in service and the other belonging to an art gallery; but the person answering hadn’t heard of any Gerald Twinbrook.

“So this isn’t his gallery? He doesn’t show paintings there?”

“I know my artists,” the man said. “I don’t know Gerald Twinbrook.”

The third number belonged to the Notch Lodge in Franconia, New Hampshire. A recorded message told him the lodge was closed from October 10 until the first of June.

Franconia — the Truth Infantry — matters drifted together into secret shapes. His head said: What if this, what if that? What if it all ties together, what if somewhere a bad man sits making sense of it all, with my fate in his hands? This situation is adding up. I’ve got everything but the area code on this one. He picked up Ray Sands’s felt-tipped pen with the idea of writing down all the facts of the case — the people, the places, the connections — Provincetown, Marshfield, Franconia; Ray Sands and Grace Sands; Marla and Carol and Leanna; Twinbrook and the Cape light and John Skaggs, the unholy nineteenth-century Midwestern Lazarus; Twinbrook and the big corporations and the Truth Infantry and God and Jesus and the Bishop … But the pen was dry and he decided in favor of letting these things boil inside him until they produced a driving steam. He turned over the few papers on the desktop, a couple of errand lists in Ray Sands’s small, square hand, several bills with the payment vouchers torn away, and when he uncovered what he saw, for an instant, as a white card on which were penciled the words Kill the Bishop, but which he found under the lamp to be an envelope bearing, in Sands’s print, the name

Leanna Sousa

it was like walking past a phone booth just at the moment someone says “Hello?”—that one word corkscrewing out of a whole life.

He put the envelope down and dialed the fourth telephone number, one in the 202 area. A woman answered and said, “Good afternoon, this is the White House.”

“White House?”

“This is the White House. You’ve reached the telephone number of the President.”

“The real President? I mean,” English corrected himself, “the real phone number? Can I talk to him?”

“If you’ll state your purpose,” she said, “we’ll connect you with a staff member who can help you.”

English hung up on her.

He picked up the envelope bearing Leanna’s name.

It wasn’t addressed to Leanna, or to anybody. Her name ran across the upper left corner, just a notation. English held the envelope gently. He thought of steaming the flap loose or getting the thing X-rayed, and then he just tore it open with his thumb, remembering the owner of this communication was dead. The note was handwritten on yellow lined paper. He closed his eyes and willed himself to understand that it couldn’t possibly be an instruction to him from God to kill the Bishop of his diocese. And it wasn’t, he saw, from Sands to Leanna, which he’d also feared, but to Marla Baker from the lover who’d lost her that winter — from Carol.

Dear Marla,

This evening you called and before I recopy what I read to you on the phone I just want to say how important it is for me to express to you those thoughts. It’s very frightening for me to put my feelings on the line, without that edge of “control” or the notion of the “observer” lurking in the wings. So …

just spent an agonizing evening thinking and feeling about possibly everything under the sun — wanting to write down and clarify that confusion — the confusion of wanting you, really desiring you — a desire that runs very deep and continues to cut deeper — I say cut because this kind of opening is at once pleasurable and painful — I’m in a dilemma — for me, some very important things are happening between you and me — and I want for you to have all that you want for yourself — but I also have “wants”—at issue for me now is whether I’m able to continue being sexually involved with you while you are involved sexually with another woman again — with Leanna again, I almost couldn’t write her name. — I know I’ve never felt the sexual and sensual highs I’ve experienced with you, but now I’m beginning to feel myself construct limits and barriers between you and me — in my mind and body. I realize that ideally this shouldn’t be so — that I should be able to be totally and fully there with you — to leave mysel open to the experience of your love and affection — regardless of who is sleeping with you tonight or any other night — and I’ve been trying real hard to deal with that one in as open and rational a way as I possibly can — but I know that for now that is beyond me. I want you very much, I want to continue to grow and nurture my love for you, to allow it to unfold, recognizing our sexual selves as an essential part of that love’s core — I think you know I wouldn’t ask for this unless I felt what was happening now was pulling us apart—

I guess there isn’t much more to say other than that you embrace the above as an expression of some really deep feelings that I felt compelled to share with you. It scares me when you talk about being “fucked unconscious.” That’s definitely not the Marla I know — let me know, please, how you’re feeling and what rages or anger you have for me. I hope what I’ve said won’t be resented — keep loving!!

Loving you,

English put his head down on the desk. Why did everything vibrate when he touched it? — strands of an indecipherable web, connections that shouldn’t be there. The coincidences of his life assailed him. The walls of the world were soft; wherever he bumped up against them he pushed through into inscrutable chaos and naked meaning and Heaven and Hell. But there was comfort in touching this letter. It gave him peace just holding it in his hand. It brought to mind the lonely safety of those nights he’d spent listening to Carol and Marla’s conversations, those nights when he, the only one awake in the world, had known all about them and had forgiven them.

When he got outside, the sky had darkened. Within minutes a stiff wind was blowing over the harbor. Now what? Was it going to snow? Winter into spring into winter. Miss Leanna had turned into Mister. Wafer and wine into body and blood. And people dying — passing from life into meat. All these transformations. They were too much for him.

English stopped in at the Yardarm Tavern because they’d recently gotten a videotape player, and from all the way out in the street he could see film credits wandering up over the big screen. Lawrence of Arabia.

He sat down at the bar, and before anybody could get near him he said, “Nothing, thanks. Nothing. Nothing.” A guy on drugs clutching a teddy bear to his chest pulled up a chair two feet from the screen and got in everybody’s way, exclaiming about the music. His friend, an older man, said, “Daniel, I have a drink for you at the bar.”

“The sound track is incredible! Unbelievable! I’m experiencing this!”

“Daniel,” his friend said. “Please.”

“Could you turn this up, please,” the man cried out, passing his bear back and forth before the screen.

The older man led him out of the place by the hand. “I’m experiencing this!” the younger one repeated. His friend said, “Everybody’s experiencing it. I’m very embarrassed.”

English said, “Okay if I use the phone?”

The bartender snagged it and set it down in front of him with a negligent, easy grace. “Who cares?” he said.

English watched the movie, vaguely following the course of events in the life of this great hero. In a while, tiny figures lay slanted against the swirling yellows of a desert sandstorm. He thought it must look very much like the inside of his own mind.

He dialed the phone and when she answered didn’t identify himself, just started right in. “I have various things to say to you.”

“I’ll have to cut this short,” Leanna said. “I’m in the middle of washing my hair.”

“You’re not washing your hair.”

“I’m washing my hair, Lenny.”

“Let me hear the bubbles. Put your hair next to the phone. Let me hear the lather fizz.”

“Don’t be absurd.”

“You’re not really washing your hair,” he said.

“I’m washing my hair, so now if you don’t mind—”

“I do! Leanna, wait, I do mind — God, I wish I could look around on the other side of this jagged line, like they do in the comics.”

“In the comics?”

“Well, they do that sometimes. I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t make something like that up, Leanna. Because I would never snow you. I would never lie to you.”

“Are you just going to hassle me? Is this going to be that kind of call?”

“Okay. Okay. Okay. Sorry.”

“That’s okay.”

“No. I mean, you know. I’m sorry.” He sighed. “So how long has Marla been back in P-town, anyway?”

“Since April first.”

“Right. And I’m the April fool, right?” He winced to hear her sigh. “How come I haven’t seen her around?”

“You haven’t seen anybody. You’ve been indoors for a month.”

“Are you back together with her? Obviously you’re back together with her. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“It didn’t come up.”

“Jesus. It didn’t come up? Come on. Why didn’t you tell me?”

She didn’t say anything.

“We’ve been going together for weeks now,” he pointed out.

“Is that what you call it? Going together?”

“Man, I don’t get this,” he said. “Please, don’t back up on me like this!”

“Why don’t you come over?”

“Why? So I can watch you two get it on in the hot tub?”

A silence. Then: “No. So I can dry my hair while you’re on the way.”

“Is she there?”

“No. Not — not when you get here.”

“Christ. She’s standing right there.”

He hung up.

A crew-cut woman in dance tights and a big overcoat nodded off in the corner. There was celery sticking up out of her drink.

A muscle boy in a sleeveless sweatshirt laid his cheek down on the bar and gazed at English, his eyes misted with a barbiturate vagueness.

A small dapper gentleman two seats away knocked back a shot of something and exhaled an invisible sweet cloud. His smile broke in two and he quickly signaled for another.

In the midst of these chemically happy patrons, English tasted a sadness. Knew its idiot exile. He took nothing stronger than the free popcorn placed in salad bowls around the place, but he felt as if his own machine was running on the wildest concoction, the adrenaline and sorrow of a broken love.

He called her again within five minutes. “Is she there?”

“No. I’m alone now.”

“How’s your hair?”

“It’s alone, too.”

“Don’t do that. Don’t act like it’s funny. Listen, listen, something’s bothering me.”

“Obviously.”

“No, a question, one question, something’s bothering me. The night I came in, in the morning, and your hair was all cut off. She did it, right?”

“No. I did it myself. I told you that.”

“Okay. You’re not lying?”

“She wasn’t even in town then, Lenny.”

“You’re not lying?”

“Everything’s right out in the open, isn’t it? What is there to lie about? I’m seeing Marla, Marla’s seeing me, we’re going to try again.”

“Try again. What do you mean ‘try again’?”

“It’s different now. Things were tense, we were tense, before. This stuff with her husband, all of that. Then she got involved with Carol, and then she got paranoid about this surveillance business. It was the circumstances. You don’t know what it’s like, feeling you’re being followed around. We think we can … I don’t know. We’re willing to try again.”

Anger started behind his eyes as he heard her talk about surveillance, about paranoia. “Look,” he said, “you shouldn’t be messing with your own sex. You and me, it’s more natural. You and me—”

“For me, it’s more natural to be a dyke,” Leanna said.

“But you don’t even make love!”

“We make love.”

“But you can’t, you don’t, it isn’t like you fuck her.”

“Fucking isn’t everything. With you and me, it really wasn’t anything.”

Though her words were direct, her tone was not unkind.

“But we just got to that part. Give me a chance. Now is when it starts to get good, don’t you realize that?”

“You can have all the chances you want, Lenny. Nothing’s changed.”

“Nothing’s what? Nothing’s fucking changed? Are you back with her or not?”

“Yes.”

“Then—”

“—but nothing’s changed between you and me. I mean, not if you don’t want it to.”

“I want you all to myself.”

“But now Marla’s back in the picture.”

“Are you saying you want to do a three-way?” A prurient thrill banished his anger for a second.

“No,” Leanna said. “One-on-one with Marla, and one-on-one with you.”

“What bullshit.”

“We’re free in this life,” she said.

“What an absolute motherfucking fantasy.”

“Why don’t we figure out what we want and then make it work?”

“At least,” he admitted, “you have the balls to ask for it.” A sudden envy of her stung him, and he banged down the receiver.

He sat staring at the bartender, who opened a plastic bag and poured English’s bowl full of free popcorn without looking at him.

Baby, we hated each other in another life, English declared inside himself as he left. Let that be the last word. Outside, the harbor was producing its effects, and again the weather was all different. Cancerous blossoms of fog undoing everything. Two blocks east he stopped at a wet pay phone and dialed Leanna’s number, but she didn’t answer.

English forgot completely, as soon as he woke in the darkness that night, that he’d been dreaming of tumbling in a coffin down a flight of stairs. But he certainly felt like somebody who’d just done something like that, queasy and rattled, his ears ringing. He thought he’d better write this down. He got out of bed and sat in his underwear with a big loose-leaf notebook and a disposable pen. Generally he carried this notebook around in his car’s glove compartment. He’d meant to use it to keep track of all the cases he’d looked forward to solving here in this town, but the pages were white and unblemished. As if from outside the window, he looked at himself sitting in a blue chair stained with other people’s drinks.

Holding the notebook in his lap, his ankle crossed over his knee, he started a letter to Leanna:

Many of the feelings I’ve been having lately, breaking down crying when alone, the sense of a cloud between me and God, the intuition that now, behind the cloud, is the time of faith—

But a shock of inspiration passed through him, and he turned to the next blank sheet and began a letter to his dead parents:

Dear Mom. Dear Dad.

I never knew how to talk to you. We made up a way of being together in the same room, and once we’d established that, we never deviated. Nothing ever got said. It was like some of the rote Masses I’ve been to. I know the priest isn’t home, I know he’s

He turned that page aside. It was all coming out now. He knew who he was. On the next sheet he started an open letter to the tattooed ghost that was stalking him, the dead GI in Vietnam, the one who’d been drafted in Lenny’s place, sent overseas in Lenny’s place, marched over swamps and shot at and killed instead of Lenny:

There are worlds, whole worlds too small to see, in these tears. Maybe one of them is at peace. I wish I could bring you there.

— Now he knew who he was writing to. It was the invisible one, the missing man, the ghost who could put real daylight into false landscapes; it was Twinbrook, Gerald Twinbrook, Jr.—

If you like the fields we’d walk away from the road into the fields, or we’d go fishing, if that’s what you like to do. The sun would set and we’d build a fire. The trees and rocks would shrink and their shadows would grow. People don’t have eyes by the light of a fire. No, that’s glib and pointless. It’s all glib and pointless. In the worlds that live in these tears just as much as in the real world, I’d stare at you and have no idea who you were, for hours. One word after another would get choked in my heart. I wouldn’t be able to ask your name. You wouldn’t be able to see my face. After a while the fire would go out, you’d be lost in the dark, and I would cry these tears.