The Royal Family

| 48 |

Tyler’s car still smelled of flowers. Just before driving down to Los Angeles, he’d stopped at a florist’s in the Mission and filled the back seat with funeral wreaths upon double plastic bags of melting ice.

A blonde salesgirl stood outside of a bridal shop, leaning against one of the parted steel shutters and smoking a cigarette. Her windows screamed with whiteness.

Previously Tyler had allowed himself to blueprint the structure of a future life lonely but not unpleasant, a life of sitting on empty bleachers on Sundays and holidays, gazing unseeing through the mesh of some park fence, politely oriented toward the baseball diamond upon which shouting Little Leaguers might or might not be practicing as he listened to the crows declaim: Ewww, ewww! in demagogic accents — not a bad life at all, a privileged one, in fact, a thickening-around-the-middle life of birthday cards to nieces and nephews, of going to movies; maybe he’d take up fine art photography in earnest some day. He already had the equipment and the technique; it sounded less tedious than jerking off into the locator fluid. And John and Irene would have their mixed-race children, the ones to whom on birthdays he’d send stupid cards; Irene, who’d owned cats as a child, but always wanted a dog, would have a German shepherd or maybe a border collie by then — the eternal Mugsy. Irene and John could visit Tyler’s mother in the nursing home in which she’d surely be settled, if in fact she were still above the dirt. Tyler himself would accordingly be free to relocate. His needs were low; perhaps he couldn’t live on three hundred a year, like the Unabomber, but ten grand per annum might well see him through. — No more photography, then, and no fancy women — maybe a bottle of bourbon when he wanted it. His grandfather had done nicely on Black Velvet. In the old man’s accounts of his vacations, whiskey of some sort would always figure. — I remember when Elma and I took a trip out to Salt Lake in a Pullman car, he’d say. Those were good times, Henry; you can’t imagine how good. Elma liked to rest, of course, so I’d sit with her and we’d have a few nips, and then when I got sick of that, why, I’d leave her alone and head to the dining car, order a couple shots… — Now his grandfather was dead. Life passed, full of passions like a van crammed with shouting dogs; every year there’d come another Easter without a resurrection, a Fourth of July without children or hot dogs or fireworks, a silent telephone, every month half a dozen bills in the mail.

He knew that twice a year, for ever on, at New Year’s and on August ninth, which was Irene’s birthday, relatives would clip the errant grassblades from around the corners of her headstone where the mowers of the sexton’s office hadn’t reached, polish the slab with window-cleaner, seat themselves upon a blanket, and sing hymns. She’d be well taken care of.

Taylor Street was full of cars and people in white summer shirts. They almost blinded him, like angels. He drove on.

In the O’Farrell Street parking garage a fat man whose tie was wrapped around his neck came strutting down the white line that spiraled along the path of waiting cars. Ugly cubical lanterns hung in immense grottos, and parking attendants waved their white sleeves.

Tyler got out and locked the car. It was a very hot day. A woman was yelling and sobbing on the pay phone. When she was finished, he dialled John and Irene’s number to see whether Irene’s voice might still be on the answering machine.

Hello? said John curtly.

Tyler hung up.

He’d forgotten that it was a Saturday. No wonder downtown was so crowded. With tentative steps he approached the fresh-smelling, faintly mysterious hedge-walls which ran along the perimeter of Union Square and walled the upsloping sidewalks which comprised the inlets of that park. A Peruvian quartet was playing there. The mandolinist was tight-lipped and intense — difficult to believe so sullen-seeming a fellow could produce such sweet sounds. The drummer, who wore a pillbox hat, kept gazing searchingly about him as he played. Of the other two men Tyler could not glimpse their features as he strode past. Some weary tourist ladies, one very fat and in purple, sat waiting, probably for the more energetic members of their family or other sociological cluster to finish shopping; they applauded the Peruvians from time to time because they were well-mannered ladies, but their expressions of stranded desolation never altered. Their lives were passing, tvacations trickling through the hourglass; moment by moment this warmish blue San Francisco day was being wasted. They sat beneath lush palm-trees, and distantly a trolley-car sounded its bell as he heard the ladies talking about grilled cheese sandwiches; then he was past them and could not hear anymore. (He called his answering machine: No messages.) The Peruvians had ceased. Some moving object, toy-red, caught his eye — an armored car. He wondered which parking garage it patronized. Now the Peruvians had begun again, a sweet song whose flute-wails did indeed remind him of mountains, although if their placard had said that they were Plains Indians instead he might have imagined open spaces. The melody dwindled behind him as he ascended the walkway to the high ground of seated ones and teeming pigeons, more hedges and then the pigeon-adorned column whose base said SECRETARY OF THE NAVY; he’d never taken the time to read the rest, and learn the significance of it. He sat down. A white girl in shorts, with nice breasts and a birthmark on the back of her thigh, hurried quickly past, almost goose-stepping, leaving him with the impression of a bland blurred face half obscured by chestnut hair. Was he the only one who looked at anybody? In the Tenderloin they always gave you the once-over as you went by; here they studied the sky, like astronomers, or watched the children whose hands they held, or spied out the reflections of their destinations upon their moving shoe-toes; let’s not forget that the seated ones had their blizzards of pigeons to watch.

It’s not at all impossible that John will marry again, he thought to himself. In fact, it’s very likely. When that happens, I’d better keep my distance. I’d better move away…

He wondered whether Irene’s parents had insisted on paying for the cemetery plot. She used to go to them in secret for money when she faced some unexpected expense, being afraid to importune John. But John did have that emergency backbone which during crises he could slip into his otherwise hollow spine. Tyler rather thought that he must have donned his most noble and generous armor so that no one could reach him, refusing to let Irene’s family contribute financially or in any other way, unless, as was plausible, they had gotten to choose the minister — their own, most likely. It was impossible to know who’d won, and Tyler couldn’t ask. When he’d offered to help, John had only said: I don’t need anything from you, Hank.

The sunshine felt uncomfortably warm upon his temples. A grey-haired man trudged by, clutching a sweater; out of the side of his eye Tyler saw the man stop to thrust an arm deep into the garbage can, peering, his mouth open. Then he shot suspicious looks at life and went on. Pigeons crawled and thronged. A long Muni bus eased down Stockton Street with a series of squeaks, and passed into shade.

Tyler got up and inspected the column. He read: CAPTURE OR DESTROY THE SPANISH FLEET…

Reflected palm-tendrils swerved and curved in the windows of Macy’s, and skyscrapers’ terraces swelled and bowed there as if in the throes of an immense explosion. The Peruvians’ music, gentle and strangely liquid, seemed the appropriate solvent for this image of dissolution.

| 49 |

Irene and John’s marriage endured for almost four years. Tyler cherished the conviction that according to some divine calendar she hadn’t been his brother’s wife for nearly as long as that, but he was equally certain that he had known Irene much, much longer than four years, which only went to show how inferior to locator fluid was certainty. As long as he could remember, he’d relieved his thoughts every now and then from reality’s blind bonds — a sort of recreation which possessed no power to harm him if he kept simultaneous sight of actuality, ideal and the angle of deflection between them; which is only to say that he trusted himself, not merely because he had to, but because he knew himself so well.

He remembered the first time that he had really been alone with Irene. It was a month or two before the wedding, and Irene, whose car was still in the shop because her sister had borrowed it and hit a lamppost, animated his ruby answering machine light to say that she needed somebody to drive her to the Kobletz outlet, where she and John planned to register. Tyler had been suprised when John, whom he met for lunch, explained that he was too busy; of course John was always busy, but one would have thought that a man so in love with suits and neckties would also be fascinated by the dinner service upon which he and his wife might someday entertain special clients — that is, rich people, whose nature John and Irene, or at least John, hoped progressively to assume. But Mr. Singer was shouting for the Knightman brief, and Tyler, between jobs as usual, had agreed, partly out of the sense of guilt which John usually inspired in him, and partly because it felt honorable, novel and almost titillating to act for the first time in the capacity of brother-in-law; his mother would be happy, too: she always wanted for him and John to get along better. At that time Irene had not made a great impression on him, his attitude scarcely stretching beyond the scrupulously benign. He remembered that as soon as they reached the showroom she’d needed to go in search of a restroom, and he’d sat observing a young couple who’d also come to register bone china for their wedding. The man had a weary, somewhat loutish face. He seemed ill at ease in his big boots, which fortunately made no mark upon the carpet. Tyler could see that he would not be the one to initiate divorce proceedings. Introverted and browbeaten, he might possibly be driven into a fling in three or four years’ time, or the bride might openly take a lover and end matters, but he himself, merely reactive, would wait for the axe to fall. The bride, a slender chestnut blonde, strutted about with a little smile on her face. The bridegroom followed her everywhere while she paced and swooped with tiny delighted cries. Awkwardly, he tried to put his arms around her, but she threw off that embrace with annoyance. Then he retreated to a table in a little thicket of that crystal forest, where he gazed moodily upon the plates and saucers of his future, yawning. The bride bestowed upon everybody, even Tyler, little smiles of rapture. Finally she returned to her groom, knelt beside him, and slipped her arm lightly around his neck as she commenced showing him plates. But he wore a glum face now which could not change. Offended, she retired across the table, and then the pair gazed silently at their knuckles until the saleswoman came. Standing over them, this muse began to reveal arcane principles while they gazed up at her lips like obedient schoolchildren, the girl thrilled to memorize the lesson (which probably had to do with prices), the boy afraid not to. This too was life, this charnel-house of cream pitchers rather than herpid flesh; it was the market, which must be respected.

Irene having returned with smiling apologies, and the other couple deducted from the scene, the saleswoman presently approached. Tyler still thought it strange that John was not there. But Irene already had a good idea of what she wanted. Perhaps John had given her instructions.

There’s your platter, salad plate, gravy boat, very unusual looking, said the saleslady. So there’s your basic picture. The covered vegetable is two-sixty; the platter is one-forty-five. Did you want to make a purchase today?

No, we’re just looking today, said Irene with surprising timidity.

Okay. Well, there’s a four dollar charge in tax. But you’re asking me to hold everything here, which must be respected.

Yes, said Irene.

When’s the day? said the saleslady with a whore’s grin, realizing, as any whore not too far gone sometimes will, that she had pressed the pecuniary side of the matter too quickly.

February twenty-seventh, said Irene, slipping her arm around Tyler’s neck.

That was the first time that she had ever touched him. He would not forget.

You know what we’ll do, said the saleslady, if it’s a hardship on anybody to call, we’ll work with you. We’ll call ’em right back. You can verbally pass that along. We always understand people on fixed incomes (this with a glance at Tyler’s grubby shirt). We’ve been in business since the sixties.

Do you think it’s too expensive? Irene whispered in his ear.

If the Crania is too much, we also have the Slovenia and the Russell, said the saleslady, who evidently had good hearing.

Tyler felt ill at ease. — Maybe we should call John, he said.

John? Who’s John? said the saleslady with sudden shrillness. You two are getting married and you can’t even decide for yourselves?

Pink spots appeared in Irene’s cheeks, and she squeezed his hand. Her hand was burning.

My assets are tied up in stock, John would have said. John would have gazed swiftly and critically at everything, with owlish eyes. Not even a solid platinum gravy boat would have satisfied him. But he would make a good husband in certain respects. Alert, cautious and solvent, he’d exemplify the phrase “to husband one’s resources.” Fat-jowled and pigheaded though he’d certainly become, he’d help Irene die rich.

You think we should call him? said Irene.

Oh, forget it, said Tyler.

It’s two-ninety for the burgundy, the saleswoman was saying. Now, what are we doing about the registry?

It’s a little hard for me, Irene was saying. Can we just write up an order and decide if we’re going to go through with it?

Sure, said the saleswoman. Now, we’re going to need your name, address and telephone number.

He heard the fat, gentle saleswoman at the next table saying of every choice: Oh, that’s pretty.

What did they all signify, these pale blank plates which stimulated no desire in him? Irene doubtless felt the same way about the vaginas of Turk Street or Capp Street. It was not what the commodity was, but the fact that it existed in so many varieties, each available, each with its own signature and price, so that choosing became a weariness. He wondered what effect this must have upon a person who became accustomed to believing that joy consisted of selecting and collecting one’s bought pleasures. This way of living sometimes struck him as monstrously evil. And yet Domino and the crazy whore were hardly happier. It was not that he objected to people enjoying their cutlery; it was the knowingness, the connoisseurship without enjoyment, the wastefulness of it all that depressed him.

On the way home he let her drive for the practice she said she wanted, and the separation between gas pedal and brake compelled her slender thighs apart. He sat there wanting to put his hand there, but didn’t. A billboard said: YOU’RE GOING THE WRONG WAY. When they got to the apartment where she lived with John, she kissed him many, many times on the mouth, but with closed lips. He wanted to lick her throat and didn’t.

The sound that the first shovelful of dirt had made when it hissed down upon her coffin, more or less where her chest must have been, was, he supposed, much less definitive than the clank of china being set upon a glass shelf.

| 50 |

It was a beautiful, beautiful service, his mother had said. I was so sorry that you couldn’t attend.

| 51 |

Bloodshot tail-lights of squat cars toiled up the Marina hill. The Union Street fair had just closed for the night, and on the sidewalk he saw giggly girls in short skirts drinking beer from plastic cups, attended by boyish fraternity types, one of whom, exultantly drunk, leaped onto the hood of Tyler’s car at the intersection, squatted, and gibbered at Tyler through the windshield. Making a peace sign, Tyler put the car in first and slowly let the clutch out. The young man hooted, and admiring girls laughed with their mouths open. The car began to increase its speed; the boy swayed, half-leaped, half-tum-bled off; from the looks of things he’d sprained his ankle. Tyler made a quick right to get away from them all, and then a left on Broadway, passing in due course the Broadway Manor Motel where for hire he had once broken up still another marriage. Following a black stretch limo through Chinatown, he felt suddenly nauseated by his own negative mediocrity, which had not only prevented him from doing anything good or important, such as making Irene happy, or getting her to love him, let alone saving her life, but actually compelled him to acts of petty evil. The Mark of Cain! He asserted that John was not a good person, either, but since John could not do much about that, having come from the womb ungood (and he also recognized that others, such as Celia, or his mother, or Mr. Rapp and Mr. Singer, dealt with his brother almost without irritation — a notable fact, tending to convict one Henry M. Tyler of prejudice), Tyler granted his own utter lack of justification in having, for instance, made advances to his brother’s wife.

He turned into the Tenderloin. Secrets wept behind grilles’ richly patterned speckles of pure silver and pure black, which resembled the pewter beads in the store called Gargoyle on Haight and Masonic. Once Irene had asked him how he went about his work in bad neighborhoods, and he’d said: You go in during the day, figure out where you’re going. And, sure, you’ll go back during the night, but you’re pretty much in a direct line, you know where you’re going, although of course it remains pretty fluid and things can always go south on you.

But I worry about you! she’d said.

Oh, my stuff is all sportcoat and tie, he’d lied.

He drove back and forth on Turk Street, looking for the Queen.

| 52 |

It was very foggy that night outside his apartment. Tyler poured himself a shot of tequila, no salt, no lime, with the phone trapped between right ear and upraised right shoulder as he said: Oh, I’ll hire that stuff out if you make it worth my while. I’m kind of a one-man operation here. To do good surveillance you really need three players on the team. No, my prices aren’t really that competitive. In all honesty, I can’t recommend my services. You might try Stealth Associates. All right. All right. Yeah, no problem. Thanks for calling. Uh huh. That’s right. Good luck.

He tore a details description sheet off the pad and wrote:

SEX female

RACE ?? [African-American?]

AGE ??

No shit, Sherlock, he said with a laugh.

He was afraid to turn off the light. In his mid-thirties, he had by strange starts developed a skin disease which prevented him from thoroughly sleeping anymore. He’d doze off for a couple of hours, and then a sensation as sharp and sudden as being stuck with a red-hot needle would awaken him, his heart clanging with panic. But it was not pain that he felt, but itching. The first dermatologist was too busy to see him for two months, and the second (or, I should say, the second’s receptionist) estimated that it would be at least a month and a half before the meeting of minds, so he went to a G.P. who said that it was scabies and charged him a hundred and twenty dollar consultation fee and wrote a prescription for an ointment that didn’t work at all. Every night he woke up scratching his legs and stomach until they bled. Sometimes his arms itched, or the insides of his ears. The next doctor said that it was atopic dermatitis, and prescribed a moisturizing cream which worked for about two weeks, until the itching suddenly proclaimed its malicious midnight presence. After that he adopted a routine. For three nights he’d scratch and fight with his flesh. On the fourth, too exhausted to carry on, he’d take a sleeping pill. Soon he became habituated and had to double up his medication and then switch to ever stronger brands. Finally a whore told him to try Vaseline, which worked like a charm. But sometimes he still awoke itching. He was afraid that tonight would be like that.

PECULIARITIES??

ALIASES Queen, Maj

CONFEDERATES Domino [??], Strawberry [??], Kitty [??], unnamed mentally unstable prostitute [??]

That afternoon in the Tenderloin he’d glimpsed the blonde hooker, Domino, wandering into a nasty little watering hole called the Wonderbar, and so under the rubric SUSPECTED LOCALITIES he wrote: Parking garage on Turk & Larkin, Tenderloin core area, Capp St/Mission core area [16th-20th Sts], Wonderbar [??].

His stomach rumbled. He sighed, shook a clattering tombstone batch of frozen spicy chicken drumsticks onto a glass plate, and microwaved them for four minutes. When he opened the microwave, sour orange grease flecked every wall. The drumsticks were overcooked on the outside and frozen on the inside. He gnawed them all down to their icy bony cores and microwaved them again for sixty-nine seconds. By then, he already felt queasy, so he set the plate on the counter and sat down again by the details description sheet.

CONFEDERATES Domino, Strawberry, Kitty, unnamed mentally unstable prostitute [??], Sapphire [??], others to be determined.

Let’s just run Domino through the system, he muttered, opening his fingers above the keyboard, but just then the telephone rang. It was a wrong number.

His skull ached. He dialled his brother’s number. His heart pulsated nauseatingly when immediately subsequent to the second ring John lifted the receiver and said: Hello?

How’s everything? said Tyler.

Oh, fine. Have you been calling my machine and then hanging up?

No, John. Believe it or not, I have better things to do.

Like what?

Oh, let’s say some guy rear-ends a person and he says I didn’t know it was stopped because the tail-light was off. You can tell whether or not the lightbulb was oxidized. You just photograph it since the lawyers will—

I thought maybe you wanted to listen to Irene’s voice on the tape.

John, is this going to be a friendly phone call?

You made the call, not me.

I get it.

I erased it, Hank. I wiped it out.

You mean Irene’s message.

You may be stupid but you sure aren’t dumb. That’s it exactly. Now it’s my voice on the machine.

Well, bully for you.

So if you keep calling my answering machine and then hanging up, I’ll—

You know, John, they have a service for paranoid people like you. Caller ID. It’s finally legal in California now. That way you’ll see the phone number of the—

Oh, forget it, said John. Irene’s voice was giving Mom the willies, that’s all. Let’s just forget the whole topic. Let’s just bury it, so to speak.

Yeah, sure.

Let’s just put a granite headstone over it and sing a few hypocritical hymns.

I thought you were the religious one.

Well, certain things make a guy wonder, Hank. I’m still trying to… Have you been calling my machine?

I’m getting tired of this, said Tyler. (For their honeymoon, John and his bride had gone to London, where Irene had loved Queen Mary’s dollhouse, Madame Tussaud’s, the Changing of the Guard.)

So you’re tired, John said. Well, what the fuck about me?

How’s work?

Oh, fine. This Brady contract is a bit of a snarl, but — Hank, I’m going to put you on hold. There’s somebody on the other line.

All right, said Tyler.

He watched the second hand on the kitchen clock snail around for a full revolution, then another. Gently he replaced the phone in its cradle.

| 53 |

He had a dream that he went to a whorehouse in Chinatown. It was a strangely white dream, so that the crowds of Chinese women and girls toting bulging plastic bags of just-bought produce, and the little boys reading comics, all wore the same tints one sees in San Francisco on a sunny foggy morning, with the low white house-cubes of the Sunset under fog, and the silver tracks of morning enlightening all the pale houses of Noe Valley. Chinese kids in white trousers and white T-shirts banged drums and cymbals lazily with a muffled sound, carrying a dragonhead and subsequent dragontrain which they didn’t bother to get under. Outside City Lights Bookstore they set off firecrackers which flashed white light. In the dream it must have been around noon. Where was he exactly? Perhaps not far from the future headquarters of the Hang On Tong Society, because the tall narrow cave-arch of rainbow graffiti (a white rainbow, of course) weighed him down with familiarity. The place had just opened. He discovered himself to be in a room which resembled a restaurant, although it was not a restaurant, and the waiters were just taking the white chairs down from the white tables. Now the prostitutes entered single file. They were so pure, so impossibly beautiful that for a moment he could not breathe. While they had Asian features, their complexions were paper-white (probably because the previous day Tyler had been studying Jock Sturges’s books of photographic nudes, in which flesh was rendered either paper-white or marble-white). Their loveliness stupefied him. For a long time he couldn’t make up his mind which girl to take. Then suddenly he saw one who was even more beautiful than the rest She stood a little apart from them, and she was white like snow. They called her the White Court. It cost three hundred and fifty dollars to be with her, which was more than he had ever spent, but when he paid white cash at the registration desk, the clerk told him that he had a full twenty-four hours; he didn’t have to leave her until ten minutes before noon the following day. A stunning excitement resonated within him and echoed. This time he would finally get to know another soul. He’d be with her, talk to her, listen to her, memorize every episode of her life, know her in every possible way.

She went ahead to get ready. Then a woman came to show him the way. He was following her when he saw his brother. Tyler wanted to believe that it wasn’t he, because it was so incongruous to see him there and because it ruined his plans. But John addressed him by name. He was sitting at a table working, as always, or perhaps reading the newspaper, which in the dream came to the same thing. It seemed he’d established himself here only for the atmosphere. Tyler said: Well, I guess you know what I’m here for. — Go to it, John said wearily. He chatted with John for a few more minutes, because that was only right. Then he saw that the woman who had been going to lead him to the White Court had already disappeared down the hall. He’d paid, but she hadn’t waited for him. He ran down the corridor, but couldn’t find her.

The whorehouse was beginning to get busy. A young man in a suit said to the clerk: I’ll take the White Court, please. — Tyler realized that his reservation was already cancelled.

Later he went out with another prostitute who was friends with the White Court, an ordinary woman who did not hasten his heart. He asked her what the White Court thought of him. She said: My friend said you didn’t do much with her. You held her hand, but then you did nothing but read the newspaper.

| 54 |

Brady called his machine and said: Know who this is? I think you do. Well, you’re through. No hard feelings, but I’m tired of paying for nothing. I could have found that parking garage without you, and what’s more, there’s never anybody home! I’m sorry for you, so I’m going to tack a little consolation check onto your fee after you send me your bill, but make sure you have receipts to back everything up…

John called his machine and said: There’s something I need to talk to you about. — Tyler erased that message.

His mother called his machine and said: I just wanted to see how you were doing, honey. — He called her but she wasn’t in.

A Mrs. Bickford called his machine to request a confidential appointment. Tyler wrote her number down.

A drunk called his machine and said: Goddamn you old goddamn you old goddamn.

The landlord called his machine to let him know that the toilet was working very nicely, in case he hadn’t noticed. He called the landlord’s machine and said thank you.

| 55 |

At Judgment Day we’ll all slide our jellyrotted flesh back onto our bones just as a street-whore slips her undies back on while she’s sitting at the edge of the bed, getting ready to go; and then time will crash like the hotel door splintering under the blows of God’s cops who’ve come to execute their bench warrant — back to the Hall of Justice for summary judgment, so that Satan can boil the flesh back off of us forever! Can there be judgment without pain? I would say not. Until the verdict, the soul must wait in fear; fear is a sort of pain. And Tyler, whose apartment windows were already fog-darkened, waited and waited for some exception to absolve him from rules, before the ultimate judgment devoured him. Lodging his pistol beneath his left armpit, he rose, dimmed down the brightness of his computer monitor because he had never felt like spending forty dollars on a screen saver, turned off the kitchen light, turned on the bedroom light, donned his windbreaker, locked up the apartment, descended the wet grey stairs, and drove away. He wasn’t desperate, merely bored. He wanted to do something new. Some homeowners study grass-seed, until lawnsmanship comes naturally; thus they while away the time before decomposition. Renters tend to be disinclined toward that solution. As for Tyler, rolling into North Beach, passing the purple neon waterfall behind the sign for Big Al’s, he decided that he ought to take up reading again. It might distract him. He admired his mother for all her book-knowledge, although she knew little of life, which was probably better anyway. In his past at home there had been much quarreling with raised voices, in the streets so many possessed souls attacking bodies, uttering demonic screams. No matter whether you sought the world out or hid from it, something would get you. — His friend Ken the wedding photographer used to jocularly shout at the cronies of some bridegroom: He’s been married so many times he’s got rice scars! and that was funny, but when he thought about it, it actually became not so funny because all the living had scars and then they got wounds, and more scars, and more wounds, until they died. That was a given, but didn’t anything lie beyond that? His mother was happy enough reading. She’d garnered wisdom of a harmless sort, like a philatelist’s, and taught him how to get it for himself. Tenderly he remembered the evenings that he’d sat beside John on the sofa and she’d read to them both from the Narnia books, the dog looking up, interestedly twitching its legs, and in bed he’d close his eyes and see the characters running silently upon the stageboards of his inner skull, while John cleared his throat in the darkness next door. Later his mother had bought them the whole set of Hardy Boys novels with their matching spines, and he had enjoyed them even more than John. He owned a gift for telling how the plots would turn out. Perhaps it was then that he wanted to be a detective. Use iodine fumes to reveal indented writing, he learned. Chloral hydrate is knockout drops. The Hardy Boys had made interfering with other people’s business into something exciting and brave; they never had to fill out surveillance forms, and their adversaries were always evil, unlike the Japanese banker’s wife in the Nikko Hotel who’d screamed and tried to cover herself when she’d seen his long lens against the window, while her lover fled to the bathroom; imploringly she clasped her hands; what had she ever done to Tyler? After that, he’d always felt sick when he took infidelity cases, the gaping mouth of the banker’s wife remaining impressed on his brain’s pavement like skid marks on an accident scene (they actually begin disappearing within minutes, which is why the well-prepared detective photographs them through a polarizing filter). And yet no unpleasant taste had troubled his soul when he’d brought Irene to the Kabukicho restaurant that time so long ago now, making use of the Japanese banker’s embossed silver card! Maybe he could not afford unpleasant impressions. Why, in that case, did he feel so downcast now? Turning down Columbus, he achieved the Susie Hotel with the four red ideograms upon its sign, and cool greenish-yellow brightness upstairs behind the curtained windows. He made a right, and fortune granted him a parking place in front of some littered apartment complex or housing project behind an immense gate. A pay phone hung in a steel box out front. He called his answering machine. No messages.

With John’s Minox in one well-zipped jacket pocket and his pistol in the other (his armpit had gotten sore), he entered City Lights to seek out the ink-scented whiteness between the thighs of books, and just across from the register stopped to survey the tall, narrow surrealism shelf of paperbacks: The Heresiarch, Maldoror, Irène’s Cunt, My Last Sigh, The Tears of Eros, The Jade Cabinet… For sentimental reasons he opened Irène’s Cunt and read: Irène is like an arch above the sea. I have not drunk for a hundred days, and sighs quench my thirst. That made him feel almost happy — why, he could not have said. But he was well accustomed to situations in which not all the facts could be explained.

In the checkerboard-floored poetry room where people sniffled and shuffled (the turning pages, surprisingly, were silent) he gazed out the window at the sparkling barbed-wire stars of neon rushing round the Hungry I outside (LOVE MATES, said the sign), accompanied by more neon, cars, and whistlers. A couple faced the wall of poetry, and the man said: Honey, one of the greatest, uh, Mexican writers is Carlos Fuentes. Have you read him? — The woman sighed. — I tried, she said.

A young blonde clutched her throat as she wandered in silence from Bao Ninh to Edward Lurie; when she squatted down to touch the spine of Dreams of the Centaur he saw a single strand of grey hair in the back of her head. It seemed to him that if he only found the right book to suckle from, he would be saved.

Another woman seated herself at one of the little round tables, pulled at her lower lip, and waited, or thought. Outside, a bus ground by. Someone uttered a quiet laugh. The shadows of browsers moved upon the floor.

| 56 |

With his hundred dollars’ worth of books in a paper bag he strolled up Columbus that hot night and found a new smoothie place with blue and pink tinted surrealist Rubenesque nudes on the walls, naked angels swimming in pastel clouds. A yawning old Chinese man passed the open window, and then, emerging strangely from the glare of a hotel sign, a drunk yelled: Smoothies, man! reached in, yanked a flower from a potted plant, and looped onward in the direction of City Lights, swinging the neck of his bottle with the same happy expressiveness of possession as the young lesbian a moment later who neared and vanished, twining her fingers ruthlessly in another girl’s hair.

I don’t want anything sweet, Tyler said to himself. Let me get something that’s good for me.

For a dollar twenty-five he ordered a urine-sample-like cup of wheatgrass juice, as emerald as ferric oxalate; it tasted, unsurprisingly, like liquid grass. — Well, I hope this does something, he thought.

The beverage, thick and bubbly like spit, vastly bored him. He gulped it down quickly and went back to the car. No messages on his answering machine. A police van hunkered black and blocky at the corner, its antenna bent back timidly. He did not feel ready to sleep. Why not drive? Tonight the Broadway tunnel was bright and empty, only one stern cyclist with blinking red lights at his heels to share with Tyler that echoing dismalness. At Polk and Broadway a traffic jam compelled one driver to yell: Fuck, fuck, fuck! — Tyler made a face. Fillmore: hill and hill, and then twin light-lines with car-lights in between, black bay ahead, and then the lights of Marin — Tiburon or Sausalito? He suddenly wasn’t sure. On Lombard Street two men were grinning and heil Hitlering at passing cars. Chestnut: He stared back into the glowing red traffic eye… Without much reason he swung left on this street, passing the Horseshoe Tavern where John had once bought him drinks, and then a juice bar where he used to meet John and Irene; here was the bank machine on Pierce where Irene used to come before she went shopping; here was the Chestnut Street Grill, which John said was no good (Tyler had never tried it); Laurel’s toy store, Scott, Divisadero, then apartment buildings rising fog-colored in the dark… He was wasting his life.

| 57 |

His friend Mike Hernandez in Vice called his machine and said: Listen, chum, as far as I’m concerned, rumors of the Queen’s existence have been greatly exaggerated. Not much comes out of that parking garage except the odd D.U.I. Well, I guess it’s always good for the occasional blowjobbing or flatbacking bust, but there haven’t even been too many of those lately. Sometimes I catch ’em across the street. If there is a Queen, you know who might know about it, uh, what’s his name, uh, Dan Smooth; you don’t wanna—

The machine beeped and cut Mike Hernandez off.

Hernandez called again. — Right, well, as I was saying, we don’t use him if we don’t have to, but the guy knows a lot. Lemme see if I have his… Hell, kind of a mess here. You know who might — no, screw that, just try the Sacramento listings, although I sometimes see him drinking by himself in North Beach. Anyway, gotta go, buddy; good luck with it. Gimme a—

The machine cut him off.

John called his machine and said: Disregard my other message. I don’t need to talk to you after all.

Brady called his machine and said: Listen, this is you know who; I forgot to say if you have any more of those surveillance reports, enclose those with your bill; I need ’em for my files.

The red light winked slyly. Outside he heard the finger-on-picket-fence sound of a key in a car lock.

The dental hygienist called his machine and said: Mr. Tyler, this is Marlene at Dr. Kinshaw’s office, and we have you scheduled for Tuesday for your six-month checkup and cleaning. Could you please call me if you have any problems in keeping that appointment? If not, I’ll look forward to seeing you on Tuesday at 10:30.

Somebody called his machine and didn’t leave a message.

Somebody did the same thing, again and again.

| 58 |

In the waxed faux-marble corridors of the municipal court building in Sacramento, double rows of reflected ceiling lights distorted themselves from circles into ovoids, and the jurors sworn, potential and alternate sat (the lucky early birds) or leaned against the walls, professional types complaining about how business was going to hell in their absence, while retirees declaimed about their children or the state of public schools today. A leggy woman looked around helplessly, then finally seated herself upon her briefcase, knees straining together as she sipped from a carton of chocolate milk. — I was raised a Catholic, and even I had second thoughts, the lady beside her said.

The door to Department Forty opened, and inside Tyler saw the table where the greasy-haired defendant, a boy, sat slumped beside a maternal public defender. Beside them swaggered the bailiff with his hands on his hips. Ceiling lights reflected on the D.A.’s balding forehead. The D.A. looked very pleased with himself. It must be an open-and-shut case of rape or something of the sort, yes, something unsavory, because old Dan Smooth, dressed in his Sunday best, was still sitting in the hall, waiting to be called as an expert witness.

Yeah, what’re you going to do for me, bub? he said. You’re Henry Tyler. Are you going to do for me what old John Tyler did for the Whigs?

Got time to meet me for a drink later this afternoon, Mr. Smooth?

Well, uh, Henry, I don’t know how long this shindig is going to last. And I did say what’re you going to do for me?

I’ll pay for the drinks.

Not good enough. Everybody wants to buy old Dan Smooth a drink. All the chippies are vying for the privilege of… What do I need your alcohol for?

Mike Hernandez down in San Francisco tells me you’re a very honest and generous man, Tyler hazarded.

He does, now, does he? Doesn’t sound like the Mike Hernandez I know, that skinny little…

Daniel Clement Smooth, please, said the bailiff.

Oh, they’re playing my song, said Smooth. I don’t mind telling you that I enjoy it. How about tomorrow? I’ll meet anyone, any time. I’m a democratic kind of guy.

Can’t do it, Mr. Smooth—

Call me Dan.

All right, Dan. I have some business down in L.A.

Mr. Smooth, if you don’t come into the courtroom right now there’s going to be a bench warrant issued, said the bailiff.

All right, Henry, mumbled Smooth. I’ll be at Vesuvio’s in North Beach on Friday round about eight o’clock…

He adjusted his soiled necktie and followed the bailiff importantly inside, bearing a sheaf of photographs in a translucent plastic envelope.

Tyler let out a weary breath.

In the jury pool lounge some were sitting with their heads in their hands, some were reading, a few completing their voir dire questionnaires, and many were good-humoredly laughing, playing cards while bystanders called out advice. Tyler sat down among them for a moment and thought about Irene.

| 59 |

Vesuvio’s, eh? That fancy tourist place? It hardly seemed like a Dan Smooth kind of place. It definitely wasn’t a Tyler sort of place — unless Tyler were trying to impress, entertain, comfort or prey upon Irene. Its Sacramento analogue might be — what? Tyler’s thoughts were covered with mold, like the bluish-purple felt on the pool tables upstairs at the Blue Cue, John’s kind of place, where laughingly incompetent couples paid thirteen dollars an hour to bend and click, the women often saying shit in low voices when they missed, an Asian girl in a black, black miniskirt cleaning up after them, setting the balls back into the triangular form and shaking them, laying the cue ball exactly onto the dot, gathering up used drinks from the long metal bar which guarded an expanse of tall mirror. (Tyler’s kind of place was the Swiss Club, an ancient bar which smelled of cigarette smoke and whose air oozed globules of weak light splashed with booze.)

Dan Smooth didn’t fool him. Dan Smooth was not and never would be the John type, the elegant or snotty professional type. Dan Smooth was the sleazy barfly type, the lowlife type, the Henry Tyler type.

Tyler knew a pretty little exomphalous court clerk who’d once made eyes at him. Every now and then he called her up and asked her for favors. This time when he telephoned, he wanted to know whether he could take her to dinner. It was time for payment, he said. Actually he was hoping to find out more about Dan Smooth. But the girl explained that she had a boyfriend now.

Okay, sweetheart, said Tyler, a little relieved. I’ll cross you off my list.

He had a dream that he and Irene were married and had a child, a slender half-Asian girl whom Irene was teaching how to throw a frisbee for the dog.

| 60 |

It being only Tuesday, Tyler possessed sufficient time to drive down to Los Angeles and back before the appointed day with Dan Smooth. His mother, bored and irritated by her own physical frailty, preferred for the sake of that novelty disguised as familial love to peer anxiously into Tyler’s problems. In short, she did not want him to go away.

I have a little job, he lied. It may be lucrative.

Then shall I call you tonight, dear?

No, I may be out on surveillance all night.

Tell me, Henry, is your work dangerous?

Not really, Mom. I try to avoid the dangerous stuff.

Sit down, said Mrs. Tyler abruptly.

The rust-colored blinds were always down in his mother’s living room, her car keys always on the piano stool. Tyler sighed and took a corner of the sofa. The car keys sparkled. — How are you feeling? he said.

Not very well, replied his mother almost bitterly. And worrying about you makes it worse.

I’m sorry, Mom, he said almost inaudibly. Tell me what I can do.

I want you to make up with John.

I don’t know how much use that would be, said Tyler. Nothing like that ever lasts between John and me. You know we’ve both tried.

But this is different. You know that, my dear.

Tyler was silent.

Henry, said his mother, gazing at him with a sad stern expression which he’d never seen before, I want to ask you something. And I want you to answer me truthfully.

I know what’s coming, her son answered with a crooked smile not unlike Domino’s.

Henry.

Yes, Mom.

Did you and Irene… Henry, did you betray John? You understand what I’m asking.

I understand pretty well, Mom.

Well?

Mom, your question humiliates me. I’ve been humiliated so much lately that I just don’t have much energy to… Can you see how it might hurt me to discuss it, Mom?

Henry, I want to know. I need to know.

It’s too late for that, said Tyler, rising.

For God’s sake! cried Mrs. Tyler, but her son, hanging his head, had already closed the door behind him. A moment later, she heard the coughing ignition of his car.

| 61 |

Sacramento is River City, they say, because it spreads its poisons, sterilities and occasional charms at the confluence of two rivers, but to me it remains Railroad City even if only in my wishful thinking; now it’s Car City and Mall City above all, city of hellish replications of arcades, gas stations, convenience stores, city without a heart, a strangely empty place whose downtown, once sunk down to river level, has turned its nineteenth-century boardwalks and Chinese doss houses into underground passageways invaded mainly by homeless sojourners and addicts of antique bottles (Peet’s Crystal White, The Perfect Family Soap); here, if anywhere, one might think, there’d be “meaning” or “history,” but instead one finds only rat-droppings. Aboveground they don’t care. The big developers try to keep the homeless out of their vacant lots; the city bureaucrats fine the developers whenever the homeless do get in and damage the public’s chain-link fences; and come summer most citizens get paralyzed by the ghastly sun, sitting indoors with sweat running down their cheeks — time then to go shopping or away. Come winter comes the rain, which fails to clean those graffiti-whitened fences outside the dwindling boxcar yards. The railroad tramps survive or not, uttering their wet, hacking coughs. And the street pimps sometimes use the slang phrase to pull a train, which means to mount as many women as a man desires. Meanwhile, the trains themselves crawl on ever more weakly, hidden among blackberries with flies all around. It’s been written that Sacramento only became the capitol thanks to sleazy railroad politics, whose expedient calculus of charging for freight poundage times distance required that this so-called destination city be erected in the middle of nowhere, to maximize that distance. As the city grew, so would demand; so would poundage. It all paid off. The long exposures of antique cameras show us men in top hats shaking hands, men in brimmed caps (the workers) lounging on top of locomotives. Here’s an old poster for the Sacramento Valley Railroad Company, whose trains began to run in 1856; by 1865 the Central Pacific Railroad swallowed it, running big cylindrical-nosed locomotives down J Street, locomotives non-aerodynamically boilered and belled in the dirt with their low cow-catchers pointing ahead toward progress, pale hunks of kindling in the open cars just behind. (In a photograph, a pallid figure in railroad livery stands on a high sidestep, his expression washed out to a bleak blankness like that high-noon dirt street streaked and tracked. He’s nobody; he’s Cain.) But Central Pacific, for all its locomotives’ victory wails, lost out to Union Pacific at last. And so another business lay down to sleep. Union Pacific’s yellow passenger cars whose sides read SILVER STATE and MONTEREY and SALINAS VALLEY rolled back and forth between heaven, wherever that may be, and earth, which is Sacramento, pulled by glossy black locomotives. And in innocent complacency over their attainments, the Union Pacific tycoons thought to epitomize Railroad City forever. But now in the oldest grimiest honeycombs of this commercial hive I find dead hollow boxcars; I see bleached ties between rusty tracks. The dank muffled deadness inside empty boxcars swallows history’s echoes. Who cares about history anyway? This is America. Moreover, this is California. I just read in the Sacramento Bee this morning a caution to parents selecting schools for their children: If the library contains any textbook which proclaims: Someday we will put a man on the moon, that book is not only obsolete, but dangerously obsolete, like the wide spaces between buildings and tracks in the old days. How much more so Plato and Kepler, or the near-exterminated California Indians! Everything movable, liquid, alive like long singing trains must someday become immovable like the yellow, frozen wrinkled toes in the Sacramento morgue, which are more lifeless still in juxtaposition to the humming fridge. (This place has the most amazing air flow capacity, a pathologist said to me once. The air pressure’s negative in relation to the rest of the building, you see, so there will be no odor whatsoever!) Yellow toes, and brown toes, hard and stiff, toes under clean white sheets; toes hard like ceramic or plastic, clean and stiff — that’s what we leave to our heirs before reentering the no longer track-streaked dirt we came from. Sacramento leaves its rusty railroads, inanely captioned by those who write for themselves alone. Here’s a message on a boxcar wall: CAIN WAS HERE. An old railroad bum coughs, with bronchitis in his throat. Beneath the scraped paint-layers of color on boxcars I find only cold metal, which someday must rust. Drooping palm trees, long tracks look out from rusty multi-wheeled altars. Sacramento, once I almost hated you for your ignorant plastic conformity, but your rusting boxcars remind me consolingly that all your ages are doomed. I imagine a more happy futurity when the two rivers will play around your toxic ruins, silently transmuting your follies back into dirt.

The railroad age had obtruded itself into Henry Tyler’s boyhood largely through school field trips to the train museum which lurked in the banal commercial cartoon entitled Old Sacramento. John had always liked trains better than he. The boyhood of the two brothers was naturally punctuated by family drives to caves and caverns, Sierra picnics, waterskiing, zoos, rare whitewater rafting trips when finances permitted, factory stores, burger joints. But one can hardly grow up in Sacramento without being aware of the trains. They call at night. They creep to and fro at busy intersections, irritating the drivers who wait in long lines of idling cars. They soak the gravel of the old yards with oil and creosote. The progressive city council fines, squeezes and diminishes them. — We think the Seventh Street punchline is imperative for the development of this city, I’ve heard our mayor say. We’d like an opinion on condemning this site and charging the cost to Union Pacific Railroad. — The grim, sweaty Union Pacific man grips the podium in both hands. He knows that the railroad tracks over Seventh Street are doomed. But once they’re gone for good, they’ll be loved. For now, they’re an annoyance, thwarting the energies of more evolved beings and mechanisms. John, for instance, wouldn’t have shed a tear had all the tracks been ripped out. But on the dresser in his San Francisco apartment he kept a shiny black model of a Southern Pacific locomotive. Irene used to dust it twice a month. Now John wiped it with a handerchief whenever he noticed it, which was far more often than he realized. On the mornings after she had slept there, Celia Caro sometimes emerged from the bathroom wrapped in one of Irene’s terrycloth towels to find him standing with the socks drawer open, holding the toy locomotive in his hand as he polished it caressingly, on his face a sweet and mysterious smile.

Precisely because they had grown up there, in short, the two brothers found Sacramento to be less than wondrous in its railroad character which blessed them almost subliminally with train whistles on long days and long nights — always fewer and fewer of those, and Mrs. Tyler never heard them anymore; they’d visited her as often as her own wish for chocolate. Tyler himself, who was destined, as we shall see, for spectacular railroad wanderings, remained yet ignorant of his susceptibility to trains, although afterward, when the disaster of the Queen of the Whores fastened on him, in league with certain other financial and emotional disasters, he lost the use of his car and began riding the N Judah and the J Church streetcar lines through San Francisco, becoming fascinated by the shiny, almost blue double tracks, which twisted down through hilly parks and then vanished under the ground. He never asked himself why those tracks lured him. But after a while they were wiggling through his dreams.

Who knows? Perhaps Tyler’s desperate freeway drives from Sacramento to Los Angeles and back were motivated not only by his love for the dead woman, but also by a lust for long journeys which the clattering songs of Sacramento trains dripped into his blood. In any event, this latest silent departure of his, which Mrs. Tyler would never forget, came between mother and son for the rest of their lives, like an infinitely long freight train backing between them at some midtown crossroads.

| 62 |

On his return from Los Angeles, where Irene’s grave was doing well on that hot and smoggy day at Forest Lawn with the lawn mowers roaring, Tyler got rewarded with a vandalism investigation case from the owner of an abandoned factory down on Townsend which was being broken into and smashed up night by night. — Sure, I’ll do it, he said. I figure it’ll cost you seven hundred receipted or five hundred under the table. — That’s cool, said the owner. Let’s go with the five. — Tyler, pleased to make headway against his stale credit card bills, drove straight there. His car still smelled of flowers. The owner, who continuously sweated, met him outside and gave him a key. — Kind of dusty in here, Tyler said. You ever get any transients trying to crash the place? Looks sort of un-slept in, though. — You tell me, said the owner. With these vermin chewing their way into my property, who the hell knows? — I was just wondering if the Queen of the Whores bunked here, Tyler said, always hoping to snare two streetbirds with one strategically sticky concretion of intellect, but the owner shrugged. Tyler rented a hundred-foot ladder from the paint store. Ascending this friend of hangmen and impatient heaven-seekers, he felt as if he were sinking rather than rising, because the spiderwebbed swelter compounded as he went, until he had to go back down in order to tie a rag around his nose and mouth. Outside, a truck horn sounded four times, reminding him of Domino. Because the owner did not seem good for more than the five, now already received, he decided to be efficient for once, and so, choking in the spidercrawling dust, he duct-taped to a ceiling beam two camera bodies, one with a fisheye lens attached, and the other sporting his four-hundred-millimeter lens, which he had prefocused at about five and a half feet above floor level. Now for transmitter, radio slave, cables and strobe. Although he stood eighty-odd feet above the ground, the gruesome air pressed on him almost as heavily, he fancied, as the dirt upon Irene in her casket. Gradually this thought of his, which had arisen only innocently, out of the useless loving care of tomb-tenders, gave rise to others worse and worse, until it seemed indeed as if Irene’s pallid face were swimming down toward him from the silken depths of terror between the ceiling beams. The young girl, long-fingered, rich-eyebrowed bride, where was she now? He would not ask who she was or had been. In previous years, having been hired by families in missing persons cases whose agonizing end he’d never allowed himself to foresee, he’d witnessed the talents of Dr. Jasper, chief medical examiner of San Francisco, hence skilled and rapid cutter (his yellow gloves wet with blood as he swigged from a coffee cup, slicing through a corpse’s shiny fatty neck), who could build a clay face out of a murdered man’s skull-cast, then plant artificial hair and glass eyeballs until the flotsam of a life, cracked and vacated seashell on eternity’s beach, lived again, at least in the longing vision of the father or wife upon whom Dr. Jasper must call to identify the dead. But in the darkness around Tyler the opposite sort of being had been conceived and was gestating into loathsomeness. Start not with the skull of her, but with the living Irene of his memories, whom he could see anytime he wished, simply by closing his eyes. Over her dark-eyed face, somebody had slid a bloated mask and was now packing it full of worms. Could this truly be Irene, the one of whom he dreamed? Which Irene now existed? Who waited for him at the end of his mind’s darkly barren turnings? Suppose it were this new other, this stranger! He forced himself to probe himself, like Dr. Jasper withdrawing a little urine from Irene’s bladder as she lay upon the marble slab; urine hissed up into the cylinder of the long syringe. He needed to know precisely this: Why was death so terrible? He could not even comprehend what he feared. Some people are afraid of nonexistence, and others of the actual process of dying. Perhaps what he most dreaded was the prospect of a marriage between life and death. At City Lights he’d dipped into a history of ancient tortures, one of which haunted him before he’d even discovered the crude engraving on the next page: Kill the condemned one’s sweetheart, then enchain him to her until they both rotted. Perhaps he did not love Irene enough, that he could not bear to be with her in this way. The ladder began to tremble. Understanding that it was he who trembled, he calmed himself, constructing a shell around the vision. This moment, which within other moments would lurk forgotten, nonetheless founded his future. He could not yet accept what he feared, but he had taken the first step toward accepting it. It had come, and so he said: Let it come. And the consequence of his courage — we can’t call it a reward, since it was not nice — was the realization that Irene’s death would attaint the remainder of his life. If he could somehow love, not only her, but also her putrefaction, then perhaps he’d win the victory. For now he could not. And so he squeezed the dregs of Irene from his mind, with the same degree of temporary success as if he had squeezed dry a sponge held underwater — as long as his hand remained clenched, new water could be declined — then descended those vibrating aluminum rungs to a plane more greasily substantial, if no less vile, than the hangman’s aerie. Directly beneath the cameras he established his vandals’ bait: a clean-swept floor, crowned by a table piled high with lightbulbs. Then he went out and locked up. Beneath the broken window which must surely be their entrance, he taped up a handwritten sign to goad them: STAY OUT, YOU ANIMALS! He drove back to the paint store and returned the ladder. Then he called his answering machine.

John’s voice, struggling to hold itself back, demanded that he telephone their mother. Brady’s voice inquired after the missing surveillance forms. The voice of his new client, Mrs. Bickford, confirmed her Tuesday afternoon appointment. The voice of a Mr. Okubata proposed a confidential meeting about a marital matter. His landlord’s voice advised him of a two percent rent increase beginning next month.

The White Nile deli on Bryant Street, patronized mainly by construction workers, made excellent roast chicken sandwiches. Tyler had long forgotten who’d told him about the place. He never went out of his way to eat there, but over the years now adding up to decades he’d inserted many pushpins into his mental map of San Francisco, and relied upon them, being a creature of habit, and habit comforted him even more now that Irene was dead: at least the White Nile was still the same. He bought the house special, which they wrapped up for him in white paper for ten cents more than last time. Almost immediately, he realized that he had no appetite. He imagined Irene telling him to eat in order to take care of himself. Then his stubbled jaws slowly moved, and he swallowed. After that, removing once again from its casket his embalmed sense of duty, he drove to a parking lot two blocks away from the factory, reclined his seat, laid out his receiver and radio control unit on the dashboard, then read from the Gnostic Scriptures, which he had purchased at City Lights. He read: Light and darkness, life and death, right and left, are brothers of one another. They are inseparable. Because of this, neither are the good good, nor the evil evil, nor is life life, nor death death. Again he saw Irene’s face. A worm was born from her nostril. If the Gnostics were correct, he must not reject this. But it was like standing idly by when somebody called her a Chink. He could not believe that the worm did not hurt her, and that he could not help. No doubt she was faded in her coffin, but he’d do what he could to help her look after herself. When it was too dark to see, he merely waited, almost enjoying the background hum of his receiver unit. Not long before midnight he heard a clang, then voices simultaneously echoing, angry, high-pitched and indistinct. Something smashed. The voices became louder. — That ain’t money, not even raw money! a boy was saying. You don’t know shit about money! — Another voice said: Something’s on the table over here. — When Tyler could hear them quite well, he pressed the square button on the radio control unit. In the factory, the flash fired once like a shocking warning. That would make the kids look up. — What the fuck! somebody screamed on the receiver. How many times in his career had he heard such Jeffersonian eloquence? Machine-gunning the strobe, he snapped off thirty-odd frames of film with his remote auto winder, which was slaved to the round button of the radio control unit. Meanwhile he’d started the engine. Of course they threw bricks and rocks, trying to knock the cameras out, but the strobe would have destroyed their night vision. He got some blurry shots which the factory owner later said weren’t good enough to convict, and one excellent frame of the enraged face of a brick-thrower. By then he was approaching the factory window with his headlights on bright and the passenger window down. As the vandals came leaping down in separately silhouetted panics, he leaned out and recorded them on his third camera’s police film, clicking and clicking away until they began throwing bricks at him. Conviction material! Then he shifted into reverse and sped away.

The cops got two of them. The factory owner, vindictive in victory, but perhaps Tyler would have done the same, prosecuted them for malicious mischief. They’d already cost him eight thousand dollars, not counting Tyler’s fee. One boy got off, but the other was already “in the system,” as lawyers love to say: two prior convictions for graffiti, and a current bench warrant for probation violation. They threw him in jail for thirty days until his hearing, then administratively revoked his probation. He served six months more behind bars. The factory owner told all this to Tyler, who would rather not have known. And yet he did not believe himself to be guilty of anything. He despised the random, cowardly nihilism of the vandals. Moreover, he hadn’t called the police when they were inside the factory; he’d given them a sporting chance. Perhaps that was the source of his qualmishness: He had taken no stand. But must he take a stand on everything, everytime? It had been just business. And the factory owner was satisfied.

| 63 |

Somebody warned him most threateningly not to take Mrs. Bickford on as a client. Narrowing his eyes, he met her on Tuesday as scheduled, but she didn’t want to hire him anymore; she was too scared, she said. He gave her the name of a battered women’s shelter and wished her luck.

Somebody wanted him to shadow some jurors. — I’d like to help you out, said Tyler in his most friendly voice, but I have all the work I can handle right now. Have you tried Pinkerton’s? Somebody said they specialize in shadowing jurors. I think it’s in their code of ethics.

Somebody down at H.R. Computer in Palo Alto wanted him to try to obtain a chip from their competitor, RoboGraphix. — Well, now, you know that’s illegal, said Tyler. How much can you pay?

Twenty thousand.

Are you recording this call?

What if I tell you I’m not?

I wouldn’t believe you.

What if I told you I was?

I’d figure you were trying to entrap me.

So you don’t want the twenty thousand?

I don’t break the law, period.

And I’m not asking you to break the law.

Dandy, said Tyler. Glad we got that crap out of the way.

By the way, I’m not recording.

I am, Tyler lied with a laugh.

Look, Mr. Tyler, if you—

Do they manufacture on site?

Yes, sir.

Gallium arsenide? That’s a pretty toxic process, I understand.

I believe so.

Well, let me do some looking around. I’ll call you back.

He called up his friend Rod on the force down in Palo Alto, and Rod said that the job wasn’t a sting that he knew of. Be careful, though, was Rod’s unsolicited and unnecessary advice.

He called up RoboGraphix and asked the secretary to send him a copy of the press release on the SBD-9000 chip.

What chip is that, sir? said the receptionist.

I’m on assignment for Computer Currents to write an article about you, said Tyler. It’s all over town that you have a fabulous new chip coming out.

Just a moment, sir. I’ll let you speak with one of our technical staff.

Yeah, who’s this? said the next voice on the line — a weary, suspicious, middle-aged male voice.

Yes, sir, my name is Charles Ångstrom, you know, as in wavelength, and I’m freelancing a piece for—

Yeah, who you with?

Computer Currents.

Who’s your editor over there?

Who am I dealing with, sir? said Tyler in his silkiest voice.

This is Hal Nemeth in the technical department, the voice said.

Well, Mr. Nemeth, I’ll be frank with you. I’m writing this article on spec. I have some friends in Silicon Valley who tell me that what you guys are about to release is pretty special…

Where are you calling from?

Menlo Park, said Tyler, which was true; he’d driven down for the occasion, and was calling from a pay phone there, between a big billboard for Caesar’s Palace and another for an upcoming club entitled Feminine Circus.

Look, Hal Nemeth said. You’re probably OK, but for certain reasons I can’t really get into, we prefer not to publicize anything yet. If you want me to transfer you back to Judy, she can put your mailing address into the database so that you get a copy of the press release.

Sure, I understand, said Tyler ingratiatingly. Thanks for your time.

Do you want me to transfer you?

Sure. Judy has a nice voice.

Hal Nemeth grunted sourly, and there was a click, and the next thing he knew the receptionist was saying: RoboGraphix. May I help you?

Is this Judy? he said.

Yes, this is Judy. How may I help you, sir?

Judy, this is Chuck Wildmore. I don’t know if you remember me, but my sister Karen has been trying to reach you.

Karen? I don’t know any Karen.

Your name is Judy, right?

Yes. But—

And you work for RoboGraphix?

Obviously this is RoboGraphix. Who—

Well, you must be the one, he insisted, enjoying what in the industry they called a “gag call.”—She’s in the hospital right now, which is why she asked me to call you. It’s kind of important to her.

But I’ve told you I don’t know anybody named Karen, said the woman in stony exasperation.

Well, I apologize for bothering you, but Karen said it was important. She’s in intensive care, you understand. You know, where they put those tubes into your arms. They say if you go in there you have a forty percent chance of coming out.

I’m sorry, the woman said reflexively.

She says you were a friend of hers a long time ago, and she wanted to see you.

Some friend. I—

Look. Would you mind giving her a jingle at the hospital? Or — no, that’s going to be a hassle for you. How about if I—

But I don’t know any Karen! the receptionist said plaintively. Can I put you on hold? I’ve got another call.

Sure, said Tyler. I’ll wait.

He listened to the tinny music, and then Judy picked up the phone and said: RoboGraphix. May I help you?

Hi, Judy. This is Karen’s brother.

Listen, Judy said, weren’t you the guy I transferred to Mr. Nemeth?

Mr. Nemeth? Who’s that? Listen, Judy, if you don’t want to talk to my sister why don’t you just say so? I’m trying to help her out. I don’t know what this is about, because we went our separate ways for years, if you see what I’m saying, but now she’s… Anyway, I guess I was wrong to bother you. Thanks for your time. I’ll tell Karen you were unavailable.

The girl hesitated. — What hospital is she in?

San Francisco General. No health insurance. It’s pretty chaotic up there, so if you call you might not get through.

I’m sorry, Judy said again. (Closing his eyes, he remembered Irene boredly picking at her fingernails.) Look, I have to go. There are three calls waiting. If your sister wants to call, I’m in the book.

All right, Judy. I’ll pass that along. Has your last name changed since she knew you?

No, I’m not married, she said, her voice dark, foggy and lost like beer bottles on the bottom shelf of a refrigerator case. My last name is Knowles, and I’m in the book.

For Palo Alto?

Sunnyvale.

Thanks a million, Judy. I guess it will mean a lot to her to speak with you, said Tyler, hanging up.

He called Dan Smooth about that drink on Friday at eight o’clock. He had to go to L.A., he said. Could they reschedule? Dan Smooth, momentarily as silent as the grating-sealed shops late at night in Chinatown, said at length that they could. He called his mother, who was having chest pains. He called his answering machine, but there was no new business.

He drove down to Los Angeles for another of what he called his secret visits, and after he had done his business there he telephoned his old friend Jake, a downsized engineer. He asked if there were any special place in an office where a small company would be inclined to store secret chips.

Well, said Jake, you start with any kind of chip you’re going to make in an exotic environment, it needn’t be a big place. If you’re going to hide things, it’s going to be by classifying the whole place.

They’ve done that. And then how would they store the actual chip? Would they have to keep it in a refrigerator or something like that?

Don’t expose it to any strong electromagnetic fields, or it’ll get fried, said Jake. That’s the thing. Well, actually I don’t know about field, but pulse is certainly a problem. You just want to put it in a conductive piece of rubber or foam to keep it from being shorted out…

And then I suppose you’d keep it in a safe…

The principal investigator’s desk drawer might be good. The safe is more sexy, of course…

Okay, so the principal investigator has got to investigate it. He’s got to make sure that it’s good, I guess.

Right. He verifies that it’s good by using a device called a comparator, which basically projects magnified images of a chip onto a ground glass circle. Well, that’s old technology now. A chip can be as complicated as the Thomas Guide.

I get it, said Tyler, narrowing his eyes. Anyhow, the principal investigator will be sitting at his desk, doing something with the chip. Maybe he’ll project a digitized image of it onto his computer screen. Maybe he’ll have a comparator. It really doesn’t matter, just as long as I have some idea where the chip is. Thanks, Jake.

He let the rest of the week go by and then called Judy at home on Saturday morning. — Judy, this is Chuck Wildmore again, he said, picking his nose. I’m sorry that Karen never called you. She died on the operating table. She didn’t regain consciousness.

Look, said Judy unpleasantly, I’ve been trying to think who this Karen might be, but I’m drawing a blank. I’ve never, ever known anybody named Karen except for one girl in third grade who hated me. I think you’re confused. I’m sorry for your loss, but I’d really appreciate it if you wouldn’t call me anymore.

Karen left you something in her will, he replied with equal coldness. I’ll let our attorney know that you refuse delivery. Goodbye.

Now at last he had her, for an avaricious curiosity came into the girl’s dull and hostile voice, and she said quickly: What did she leave me?

I guess that’s not your concern, said Tyler snappishly, since you refuse any connection with the family. I’m sorry I ever called you. Don’t worry, Judy. You won’t hear from me again.

Then tell your lawyer to get in touch with me.

Every time a lawyer talks to you about baseball you have to pay for his time, said Tyler, his voice now modulated to the melodies of patience. Judy’s estate is dirt poor, and I don’t have much myself, so with all due respect I’m not paying for an extra hour of legal consultation just to have his secretary mail you something you probably won’t appreciate.

What do you mean I won’t appreciate it? You don’t even know me. Where do you get off trying to define me?

I wasn’t trying to define you, Judy.

Well, what did Karen leave me?

It’s a little velvet box, with — do you want me to open it? I haven’t looked inside. I didn’t figure I had that right.

Yeah, the girl said carelessly, why don’t you open it?

There’s a ribbon around it, said Tyler, impressing even himself with this improvisation. Do you want me to undo the bow?

No, that’s okay, she said finally. Why don’t you send it to me?

I’ll send it to your office then, he said. It may be a couple of weeks before I get to the post office. I’m kind of in a state of shock right now, to tell you the truth.

Mr. Wildmore, I—

I don’t know whether to send it registered or not. It may be valuable. What do you think?

Cupidity won out, or maybe just good manners. — Look, Mr. Wildmore, the girl said, where are you?

Menlo Park at the moment. But I need to be in San Francisco at three-thirty to claim the body.

And you have the box?

Yeah. I have the box.

I thought you said the lawyer had it.

Judy, I’m getting kind of tired of being interrogated.

I’m sorry. You want to do lunch?

Tyler pretended to hesitate, then said in his best grudging voice: I guess I have time to meet you for lunch if you want.

And you’ll bring the box?

Sure.

The girl sighed. — You’re sure you’re not a nutcase?

I’m not a nutcase, said Tyler. I’m not even a nut. Where do you want to meet me?

Are you near a Sizzler’s? I always like eating at Sizzler’s.

Sure, said Tyler. I like their surf ’n’ turf. Karen was also very fond of Sizzler’s.

She was? Gosh, I wish I remembered her.

She was an awfully special person, he said, pretending that he was talking about Irene so that his voice would get properly sad. He closed his eyes and saw the mole on Irene’s forehead. His grief rushed in and carried him safely along.

He recollected something that another prophet had once told him: Your generic secretary is not a secretary by choice. Who picks a crappy job like that, all responsibility and no power? They start off like that because their Nazi husbands don’t allow them to have any job that’s higher status than that, and after the divorce they’re stuck. Secretaries hate their jobs, Henry. That’s why all the hackers get what they want by just calling them up.

I’ve seen plenty of secretaries with power, Tyler had countered. Plenty of old dragons. Plenty of smart ladies who know where all the bodies are buried.

Yeah, I’m talking about the young ones, his friend had said. Those poor, trapped young broads. It’s just like being a whore except the pay’s not as good.

Are you there? Judy was saying.

Yeah.

Look, I’m sorry if I was maybe a little bit suspicious. It’s just that, like, some things have happened to me before, you know, guys taking advantage of me and stuff.

I understand, he said. Then, thinking of Irene, he muttered: Jesus, I wish I could put my arms around her right now.

Are you sure you’re going to be okay? the girl said, obviously not wanting to sustain some stranger’s neediness.

Hm? Sure, I’ll be fine. See you at Sizzler’s, then. How about in two hours?

Okay, she said softly. ’Bye.

’Bye, he said.

Tyler went out and cadged a velvet box from a jewelry store. He took from his keyring an old key from an office in Emeryville where he hadn’t worked for twelve years; he’d always known that that key would come in handy someday. He put the key inside the box and tied a ribbon around it. Considering carefully, he went back to the jewelry store and bought a gilded silver pendant so that the girl wouldn’t be completely disappointed, and enclosed that with the key.

Judy was plump, unattractive, and shy, although her shyness she disguised as grumpiness. He bought them both lunch and sat there with her at a table beside the window. When she asked him what he did, Tyler tried to talk as much like an office rodent as he could: Oh, I work for CiceroNet. I’m new there. Basically, they do some kind of Web stuff. Originally I was a consultant. You know, it’s a time or money trade, and I’m here to help. That’s what I told them, and then I spent some time talking to see if I could wangle an extra few hundred bucks. I was pretty sure that they were going to bite, and it’s tempting to inflate things a bit, but I was honest; I kept their costs down…

He chatted merrily away in this jargon, his words as hurried as red ants rushing over terraces of bark, until he was satisfied that she’d stopped listening.

So tell me about you, he said. Do you like the people you work with?

Well, Mr. Nemeth’s kind of impatient sometimes but everybody says he’s the real genius, the girl said. I don’t know if he’s a genius or not. All I know is that he makes me work late sometimes, mailing out all those little diskettes and stuff, and I have to put them in special envelopes…

That’s not very nice of him, said Tyler. Can’t you bring a book or something for when he’s not looking?

Then I’d never get home. He makes me stop by the Federal Express place at night on my own time.

Tyler had been considering giving Judy a special desk calendar or something of the sort which when properly hung would orient a flat camera at Hal Nemeth’s desk, but now he saw that such grand plans wouldn’t even be necessary. All he’d have to do was take Judy out to dinner a few times, and sooner or later he could get her to bring the mail with her…

And then he was ashamed of himself. What had the poor girl ever done to him?

He handed over the box, stood up, and said abruptly: Well, Judy, this is from Karen, and I thank you for meeting me.

The girl’s mouth dropped open. — You don’t have to go, she said. I mean, if you don’t want to. I can see I made a mistake about you. I think you’re really nice.

Thank you, sweetheart, he said. You’re nice, too. I guess I’ll be getting back.

Don’t you even want to see what Karen gave me?

Maybe it’s something betwen you and her, he said. Well, see you around.

He strode quickly out, got into his car, and drove back to San Francisco, passing the airport with its gloomily lit runways and warehouses, its planes like robot iguanas waiting for the heat of some unholy day to burst through their dark torpor. Nothing but concrete, lights and fog ahead… The nearest parking garage was a sickening prismatic crystal of light. No security-minded Queen would ever set up shop there. It began to drizzle, and the pavement shone as black and strange as squid-ink. He remembered Irene with her baseball cap fashionably backward, thoughtfully bringing chopsticksful of black noodles into her mouth in a Korean-Japanese restaurant in Japantown; the highway was the color of those noodles.

He told H.R. Computer that for legal reasons he couldn’t take the RoboGraphix case. — So you want to kiss away twenty thousand, his client said. — Yeah, drawled Tyler, it’ll be a pretty amorous send-off… — He told his landlord that he was really sorry, but this month the rent would be three or four days late. Whenever he thought about Judy he felt guilty, so every day for the next two weeks he anonymously sent her roses.

Every weekend he drove down to Los Angeles.

| 64 |

After so profitably wrapping up that scam he got a call from John, who said: I was going through Irene’s stuff and found a letter that she wrote you last year.

Flinching from the vibrating anger in John’s voice, Tyler said casually: Is it important? Do you want to send it to me or do you want to read it over the mail?

Why don’t you stop by and pick it up, said John flatly.

All right. I’ll come by after eight.

John hung up.

When Tyler got to John and Irene’s apartment he found the living room crammed with boxes which gaped like graves. Wordlessly John handed him the triple-folded sheet of paper in lavender flare pen which ran:

Dearest Henry,

I hope this letter finds you well. Frankly, I’m a little worried that something must have gone wrong or you wouldn’t be considering disappearing.

I don’t know you well enough to understand if my concern is warranted or intrusive. Please forgive me if the latter is the case. Let me know how you are.

Take good care of yourself.

Love, Irene

John was standing there with his arms folded. — So, what did she mean by your disappearing? he said.

Oh, it was just a kind of black period I went through, said Tyler. I pulled out of it. I guess Irene must have realized it wasn’t such a big deal since she never gave me the letter.

Why didn’t you tell me about it? said John.

Oh, I hated to bother you—

But you never minded bothering my wife. Did she write you any other letters?

Well, said Tyler jauntily, who knows what else you’ll find when you’re packing those boxes?

Oh, just go away, said John. Go home.

You still working with that guy Brady?

So you really don’t feel any responsibility?

Well, I’ll be honest with you. Irene was my friend, my very good friend. I asked her how she was doing and she said she wasn’t especially happy—

Happy with what?

With her life.

What about her life, Hank?

I don’t know. I asked her to call me if she had any problems, and she didn’t, so I figure that you and she were ninety-five percent responsible and I was five percent responsible.

So you were responsible. What exactly did you do to her?

Nobody’s ever innocent, Tyler mumbled, looking at his toes.

It just doesn’t sound like Irene to do what she did, John said.

Well, as a matter of fact it was Irene who… oh, forget it.

Leave me alone, will you?

Sure, John. Thanks for the hospitality. And the great conversation, said Tyler with his hand on the doorknob.

| 65 |

Yes, Tyler had given up. According to John’s cruel characterization, he had long since begun to vegetate, his mind humming and drowsing though the blocky, sun-shadowed pastel landscapes of the Sunset District. (The Richmond District looked much the same.) As for John himself, he had likewise just now laid aside a quarrel with the world, of which such knowledge as he had — less than his brother’s, naturally — inclined him less to master it by analysis than to assert practical control of a small piece of it; and for the rest to find comfort where he could. Irene’s suicide had been both a desolation and a humiliation; but since, as we have stated without sarcasm, he was a member in good standing of the Order of Backbone, he sought not to get ahead of his other grievances. She left him no note, but for almost two months after her installation in the ground, Irene’s credit card bills kept arriving, like the uncanny communications of a Ouija board. Carefully reading them over before he paid, John never found lingerie purchases, or dinners for two that he didn’t know of, or any evidence of other untoward attachments. Nonetheless, his resolution regarding Hank was: friendly but cool, forever. Hank had had something to do with Irene’s death, at least indirectly. Thus John’s instant bench warrant, followed by summary judgment. Were Hank to forthrightly admit his complicity, begging pardon, John could perhaps forgive him, depending on the circumstances (although here John might have been deceiving himself; for when others dare to confess a fault whose existence we may have strongly suspected, but not yet proved to ourselves, we are more likely to gratify our anger than our magnaminity). Meanwhile it was important not to upset their mother unnecessarily. John had already decided that after she lay beyond harm he would, if his brother’s demeanor continued to be evasive, make the break. It wasn’t as if refraining from executing this sentence would assuage his loneliness, Hank never having been good for much; nor (by the same logic) would proceeding so render John any more alone.

Celia, on the other hand, had been sympathetic. During the first month she’d telephoned every day, more often even than his mother; she’d kept herself ready every night to come if he needed her, her overnight bag packed. He knew that each evening when she came home from work the first thing she did, after setting down her slender-strapped scarlet purse on the round table in the hall, and double-locking the door from the inside, was to sit down on her bed and study the answering machine light to see if he had called. (She was under instructions not to bother him at work except on special occasions.) How could he have called? Her telephone extension at work dangled readily from the synapses of his brain. He knew that she went home at five-fifteen, and so never telephoned her between five and six. But still, every day Celia paid him that absurd homage. Well, what if someone else had called? That must be the real reason that she checked her messages. Why wouldn’t she say so? Did she truly imagine him to be so thin-skinned or jealous that he had to believe she waited only for him? The improbable supposition that her motives might be exactly as she’d stated them very occasionally flashed like green numbers across his mental screen, but that made him shudder. He wouldn’t believe that; he couldn’t. How could a grownup professional woman be so desperate? And, if she were, how could he interpret such desperation except as an ominous warning of utter dependency, like a limp drowner dragging the rescuer down with her weight? Better, far better, to believe her capable of telling white lies! All in all, the matter perplexed John, and so he tried not to think about it, especially because it insinuated the parallel image of his brother entering that clammy apartment on Pacheco Street, then loudly and vulgarly pissing, the bathroom door wide open, while the answering machine, turned to maximum volume, blared out whatever propositions it contained. In Hank’s case, of course, the practice reflected merely professional desperation: Would there be a job, so that he could pay the rent? John had loaned his brother money more times than he could remember (which is to say, fewer than he believed; the grandeur of charity easily magnifies itself, if memory is not consulted). At least Celia had never asked John for anything except for his company. She saw him, he supposed, almost as his mother did: a handsome, vivacious boy of excellent prospects, a sweet boy, a practical boy, above all an honest and honorable boy, a success. Whatever John promised to do, he did. The rarity of his promises made them all the more valuable. Celia was clever enough never to extort his word from him, never even to gaze up at him with sadly begging dog-eyes if she could avoid it, for she feared John precisely as much as she loved him, and he was very easily annoyed. Needless to say, she resented feeling afraid, and hid that resentment so that she became his tenderest and most secret enemy. (Would life please bring me a man to love me? she prayed. Please? Please. So far, life only brings me you…) During John’s marriage she’d taken up evening paralegal classes to prevent herself from disturbing him too often. The fact that she was paying steeply in both time and money for these studies made her take them all the more seriously. She always got her A+, and the teacher praised her.

Celia was also known as a conscientious list-keeper. Whenever he visited her, John would find beside her phone a pad of paper inscribed with such items as:

fax badge names to Ellen

taxes???

reschedule hair appointment to weekend

cancel Sandy’s access code

deposit paycheck

return address stickers

call John

present for John

Something about him always appeared on every list. He began to suspect that she wanted him to notice her lists for just that reason. This added to his uneasiness.

John had made inquiries (not through his brother) and learned that her bosses treasured her. Her personnel file contained the following encomiums: hard-working, loyal, dedicated, outgoing, pleasant, cheerful, well-dressed, friendly, warm — in short, the epitaph for a cadre, no leader of any vanguard. She was a resource, not a threat. Had his opinion been asked, John, who knew her even better than the personnel office, would not have changed a single line. Strange to say, however, now that Irene was dead he found himself almost unattracted to Celia. Could it have been anything to do with the fact that she’d dropped her paralegal studies and no longer worked late for the insurance company? She was worried about him, she said. He was too stoic. On the Monday night after the funeral he sat waiting for her with his face blue-lit by his laptop computer on which he was busily defragmenting the hard disk’s files; the closet door opened by itself, and he got up to shut it, only to be met by Irene’s dresses, which hung there so soft and colorful and helpless, pretty skins of Irene’s which Irene would never again use, shapes of Irene at which he could not get angry. The doorbell rang. He rose, and buzzed Celia in. When she came he was standing by the open door with his arms folded.

I’m sorry it took me so long, she said. It was hard parking.

John continued to regard her, saying nothing. He saw that her overnight bag was actually a very large suitcase. He saw that her face had been overlain by an oppressively determined expression. It was the first time that she had ever come to him uninvited. Furious, he sat down at the diamond-shaped table by the window where the computer had finished chirring; with half a dozen keystrokes he quit the defragmentation utility and powered down.

Would you mind if I sat next to you? said Celia a little uncertainly.

Fine, said John. Mom’s having chest pains again.

You and your mother are very close, aren’t you? said Celia. Is she helping you, I mean now?

Let’s leave her out of this.

Celia lit a cigarette. — Whatever you say. You brought her up, not me. Would you mind if I sat down?

Her suitcase was in the middle of the long narrow hallway between the living room and the bedroom. Impatiently he carried it into the bedroom and set it down beside the rumpled bed, which embarrassed him. He could not remember when he’d changed the sheets. Irene used to do that. He closed the bedroom door on bed and suitcase, shot a glance at Celia, who’d remained standing, put a pot of decaf on to warm, and seated himself upon the sofa. She came next to him and almost touched his hand.

Ashtray’s over there, he said.

I feel so… I don’t know…

You’re up to two packs a day now, aren’t you?

Do you think she — did she know about us? she said.

Who? My wife? replied John in a loud, aggrieved tone.

Yes.

I’ll never get rid of her now, he said. After what she did, she has a hold on me like some kind of parasite. Well, you were here, so you know. When you see the face of somebody who died by violence and she was somebody that you — knew…

I understand. Remember when you had to—

Yeah. I don’t know how Hank does it.

I never met him. Well, just that one time when we were…

Maybe he gets his kicks from going to the morgue. What do you think, Ceel? There must be perverts like that. Of course he’s not a real detective, just a private eye. Maybe he doesn’t see that many dead people. But her face—I—

For a while he was silent. Then the phone rang. He picked it up. — No, he said. I’m not interested. I said I’m not interested. No, I’m satisfied with my long distance company. No, thank you. No, don’t call back at another time. No. Thank you anyway. Sonofabitch.

He slammed the phone down, red in the face.

Can I get you anything? Celia said.

Whatever’s worth getting I’m out of, John said shortly.

You want me to go to the store? I can get you some groceries…

Thank you, Celia. No, that won’t be necessary. Thank you anyway.

Well, she said, looking at the floor, how’s everything at work?

Oh, they tried to overturn the fraud conviction, but we got it reinstated on appeal. And Rapp…

Again he was silent for a while. — No, I don’t think she knew, he said. And if she knows now, I think she understands.

You think she sees us right now? said Celia almost inaudibly. I feel so—

Well, I certainly see her face. If she wants me to do something, I won’t refuse. Should I call to her? he asked, observing Celia with a cruel smile.

No — please don’t—

Irene! he cried out. Irene!

Don’t—

Irene, did you know about Celia? Is that why you did it? Irene, did I make you that unhappy?

He turned to Celia. — Nobody can say I didn’t mean well, he said.

No, John. Nobody can say that.

Irene won’t answer, he laughed. She’s taking the Fifth Amendment.

Stop it, stop it!

I’m going to drive her stuff down to her parents on Saturday, he said. It’s time to clean this apartment out.

If you want I could—

Maybe Hank told her. Hey, Irene! Wake up! Did Hank tell you about Celia? He saw us that time. Friggin’ Hank… They said they want all her clothes and crap. I don’t know what they’ll do with it. Maybe they can donate it through their church…

How are they doing?

Oh, fine. Did I tell you that her charge card bills keep coming in? She’s going to send me to the poorhouse yet.

Oh, said Celia, lighting another cigarette.

That’s quite a suitcase you brought over here.

You know what? Celia said. I feel as if you don’t care whether I stay or not.

No, no, no! laughed John, holding up his hands. You’re always welcome. Can I pour you a glass of wine? And there’s coffee on… You gave me that coffee grinder. I use it all the time. I even recommended it to Hank! I told Irene to recommend it to him but she…

Celia’s mouth had tightened, and she said: Do you want me to stay or not?

I said come over, didn’t I?

I thought maybe you changed your mind. John, I—

Let me get you that wine, John said. Did you say white or red?

What are you having?

Oh, don’t play that game. That’s manipulative. It’s just the kind of thing Irene used to—

White, thanks. John, you know I care for you so much. I just wanted to—

Don’t think I don’t appreciate your being here, he said to her, leaning forward to squeeze her hand. His rage had vanished as suddenly as it had come; he didn’t know why. Gingerly he explored the place within him where it had been, and found only hollowness. He said: I guess I feel pretty lonely at times. And I know you care for me. We can talk about all that tomorrow.

John—

Do you want coffee in your wine? Guess you don’t, so I’ll turn the coffee off.

I’ll get it.

No, you’re the guest. Can’t you see I’m… Oh, balls.

I love you, John. Your sadness breaks my heart.

Well, if you love me, just sit there and… I’m not so sad actually. What time is it? Let me check my messages at the office. You go ahead and get ready for bed, okay?

So you want me to stay?

I hope you brought your own toothpaste, John said. I remember you don’t like the toothpaste that I use.

| 66 |

The next morning, John’s friend, his desk phone’s amber button, winked at him most mirthfully. — What is it now, Joy? he said.

Mr. Singer would like to see you as soon as possible, said Joy’s voice.

OK. Tell him I’ll be there in five minutes.

What about your two o’clock with Mr. Brady?

How long does Singer need me for?

He didn’t say. Probably some quickie kind of thing.

Fine, Joy. Where am I meeting Brady?

At Spoletto’s, reservation in your name.

And that’s at two o’clock?

Let me see. Oh, John, can you hold one second? There’s a call on the other —

OK. Thank you, Joy, he said, hanging up. He made a note on his memo pad: Call

Mom tonight. —

He added: Flowers for Celia. —

… and crossed it out.

| 67 |

Celia had returned home. (Post Street was closed off, the San Francisco coroner’s white van parked among the police cars.) She dreamed that John was searching to buy Chinese figurines for a girl he knew. She woke up knowing that this meant Irene. She went to Grace Cathedral during her lunch hour and lit a candle for Irene, praying that the dead woman and John would be together in Heaven. She wept when she did it. That night when she lay down in her bed, she dreamed of the smell of fresh-baked bread.

| 68 |

The Vietnamese woman led Tyler into a room with a mattress, a chair, and a bathtub. She said: Thirty-five dollars is only for shower and back rub, okay? You want tea or coffee?

Tea.

Okay. Get undressed. I come back.

Tyler took off his shoes and lay down on the mattress. When she came in with the tea, she stopped dead, covered her gaping mouth with one hand, and cried: Why you not undress? What you want?

I just want to talk.

Your friend wait for you in lobby! she cried scornfully. Why you no talk with him?

I want to talk with you.

She squatted down beside the mattress, staring at him. Then she laughed bitterly and went out. He heard her yelling in Vietnamese with the other ladies.

After a while another woman came in. — What you want? she said.

To talk to you.

Why?

I’m lonely. I want to be next to a woman, just talking.

Thirty-five dollah not enough for talk, she sneered.

Okay. How much more do you need?

Twenty dollah.

And then you’ll sit next to me?

Okay.

He gave her twenty dollars more and she sat down on the edge of the bed with her legs open so he slid his hand in and felt the paper menstrual shield through her panties. He caressed the insides of her thighs for the half-hour she gave him, while she tapped her foot boredly. This reach of his had been the right card to play. As soon as he’d touched her, the suspicion on her face drained away, leaving a hard residue of contempt and weariness. He was safe now.

What do you want to know? she said.

I don’t want to know anything. Just talk to me.

What’s your job?

I travel.

You rich?

Sometimes. No.

At that, she lost interest. Better and better.

Have you seen much war? he said.

Much much.

What do you think about it?

She shrugged. — I think war is very good. Because many fight, many suffer, but then one side get what they want.

Do you have brothers and sisters?

I don’t want to think about them. I don’t even want to think about myself.

Are you married? he said.

Two times. Not now.

You lonely?

Sometimes. Everybody wants love. — She regarded him piercingly. We were all born naked. Why not get naked when we want?

He understood her pefectly, but figured that would have cost him another twenty or thirty at least. Brady had given him one last wad for expenses. In his business, of course, one could not always present receipts. Some of the quittances which Brady had seen him counting he’d filled out and signed himself. That was normal. And if he kept this money now instead of giving it to people such as the Vietnamese woman, Brady would never know. Or, more likely, Brady would understand, even approve; probably Brady had factored in a little graft as part of Tyler’s wages, or let’s say a bonus to which he had every right as long as he did the job. He felt sorry for this girl. Just as a freshly shaved pudendum, to which the stubble has just begun to return, resembles in texture a squid’s most delicately suction-studded tentacles, so his own thoughts, yearnings and veriest gratitudes, shaved by expediencey though they were, had begun to grow out upon his soul in a boneless sea-creaturely fashion bereft of the laws which two-legged dignity must worship. Sure, he was sorry. But he felt sorry for everybody. He never let that get in the way of his work. (A Sicilian lawyer he’d met had three briefcases, one for twelve-hour jobs, one for twenty-four-hour jobs, and one for thirty-six-hour jobs. This man’s best pleasure was reading Il Sicilio, then wiping his glasses and crying: The Italian government is very unfair! — After that he smiled, ate a doughnut, and forgot about the unfairness. Tyler was like that with his sadness.)

I already got naked with the Queen, he said, watching her.

I don’t know any queen. Are you a cop?

I did her in the parking garage around the corner. She took it up the ass.

Why what for you think I care about parking garage? she shouted. You think I have money to drive? You think I park my big big car in parking garage of the Queen? You stupid little cop! I’m gonna tell madame on you.

What’s the Queen’s first name? I want to buy her a birthday present.

That Africa who cares for her first name all just bad African people those goddamned Negroes always try to hurt me in the street…

Tyler gave up. He rose and said goodbye, tipping her five, then strolled around the corner to a phony Chinese restuarant he knew which had just translated itself into a barbeque place. He wasn’t hungry, and the sauce didn’t smell very good. The place was empty. The manager of the former Chinese place recognized Tyler right away and came running up to him and said to the new manager: Hey, you gotta meet Henry Tyler! He’s a character!

I don’t have time to meet characters, said the new manager.

The old manager hung his head.

What’ll you have, friend? said the new manager.

Barbeque, said Tyler wearily.

The cook, who appeared to be the new manager’s wife, brought him a paper plate dripping with grease and bulging with half-frozen, half-burned chicken covered with ketchup, while the old manager stood by tapping his foot.

How’s business? he said to the old manager.

Booming, replied the new manager.

Tyler took a bite of barbeque and his teeth struck ice.

How is it? said the cook anxiously.

Very good, said Tyler.

She smiled with relief.

All three of them were watching him eat. With considerable effort he finished the first piece of chicken. There were five pieces left.

How come you don’t use your hands? said the old manager. If you use your fork like that you’re only gonna get it all over your shirt.

Tyler ate the second piece and said: Does the Queen of the Whores ever come in here?

I seen her sometimes, said the old manager indifferently. She’s just a stuck-up bitch.

What does she look like?

Oh, about five foot two, you know, melons kinda like this, wears high heels and a tight mini, you know the drill… Somebody said she calls herself Africa. How’s the chicken?

Great, said Tyler, picking up the third piece.

How come you don’t use your other hand?

Oh, I wanted to keep it clean to touch the Queen with in case she comes in here.

She won’t be coming in here any time soon, said the old manager. I hear they sent her down to San Bruno. What do you think of the chicken? It’s my own special sauce.

Don’t talk about the sauce, said the new manager. We gotta keep it a secret.

The Vietnamese girl he’d just tipped came in and pretended not to recognize him. He beckoned her over. — Have some chicken, he said. I have plenty.

You already lonely again? she cried in disgusted surprise.

Always, he said. But I’m celebrating. I told you I did the Queen.

| 69 |

He went home, turned on his computer and ordered an economy scan for American women whose first names were Africa. There came the connection beep he knew so well, and then the wriggling cursor indicated that the machine was SEARCHING. Your search number is 0773427. Then the screen scrolled down to the disclaimer: Nothing was guaranteed. Even though Tyler had to pay, the disclaimer warned, he shouldn’t expect to get anything for his money. Nonetheless, the computer found thirty-eight matches, six of them with California addresses. So, flashing down blue-underlined screen menus, he ran six extended traces at twenty-five dollars each. Soon he had their dates of birth and social security numbers. The Department of Motor Vehicles database presented him with the physical descriptions on their drivers’ licenses. They were all black. One, a Mrs. Africa Lively, had a Beverly Hills address and phone number. Tyler telephoned her and reached an answering service man who said that she was in Europe until July. He ran a credit check on her just in case. She owned three mansions and a cosmetology empire. So much for her (probably). The second Africa, formerly of Colusa, was freshly dead. The other four Africas were all alive and in San Francisco. One had a parking infraction on her record. Otherwise they were clean. Tyler printed out their DMV descriptions so that he could stalk them at his convenience, then telephoned his mother, who said she hoped that he and John could spend a weekend in Sacramento with her soon.

| 70 |

You datin’? You datin’? cried the whore Kitty.

Just looking, said Tyler. How about you?

Are you a cop? You don’t have to intimidate me. I’m not a prostitute. I’m just out here tryin’ to make a little money. Hey! I seen you before! You was with that bigshot Mr. Lunch, and you — yeah, you’re Mr. Breakfast, and I gave you head. I give pretty good head, huh?

You sure do, said Tyler. How’s Sapphire doing today?

That retard bitch? She just pissed her pants again, and Maj said…

Glaring in alarm, a black prostitute in a white miniskirt elbowed her in the ribs.

Why, good evening, Tyler said to her. What’s your name, darling?

Chocolate, said the black woman, obviously pleased to divert the subject.

Well, that’s a pretty edible name. Are you feeling edible tonight?

How much you got to spend?

I like that plastic bracelet on your wrist. Did Africa give it to you?

Africa? What the fuck are you talking about? Are you some kinda fucking racist? That’s my hospital bracelet. I just got out of General today. Somebody stabbed me; I was in the trauma ward; you shoulda seen me…

Hey, Chocolate, if I give you twenty dollars can I have your bracelet?

What for?

Tyler lowered his voice and winked. — I want to take it home and lick the sweat off.

You catch that, Kitty? Chocolate laughed. Is this pervert for real?

Kitty slid her sunglasses down her nose. — What about me, Mr. Breakfast? Don’t I get a finder’s fee?

All right, ladies, he said. Here’s five for you and twenty for you. Let me just cut through this bracelet with my pocketknife…

He got into his car and drove happily home. The medical record number on the bracelet was 3144173. He wrote up a request for medical records, attached to a blurry old copy of a power of attorney he’d once done. He photocopied it four times and sent one to Admission and Discharge Records Department, one to Emergency Room Records Department, one to Medical Expense Records Department, and one to Billing Statements Department. Billing Statements wrote back right away and said that that information was confidential. Emergency Room and Medical Expense Records he never heard from. Admission and Discharge sent him a copy of the first page of Chocolate’s chart. Her real name was Brenda Wiley. He drove down to the hospital the next afternoon and by flashing his toy police badge convinced a young clerk to let him see the rest.

BRENDA WILEY

MR#: 3144173

PT TYPE: J

PATIENT EMPLOYMENT STATUS: 3

OCCUPATION: UNEMPLOYMENT

SSN: 544-38-5008

DOB: 11/12/1959

AGE: 37

SEX: FEMALE

There followed the bleak and tediously told tales of her misadventures and bodily misfunctions, bound into three fat volumes whose scope went back twenty-two years. The theme of any history of a body must be decay, but this body had begun to decline on or before the age of fifteen, when Brenda first married cocaine. By sixteen she was an experienced whore with her first crack baby inside her. There would be seven more. Over and over the medical chart said:

VAGINAL DELIVERY W/O COMPLICATING DIAGNOSES

PRINCIPAL: 644.21 EARLY ONSET DELIVERY 73.59 MANUAL ASSIST DELIVERY NEC

SECONDARY

70 MENTAL DISORDER — DELIVER

71 COCAINE ABUSE — UNSPEC

V27.0 DELIVER — SINGLE LIVEBORN

and once she gave birth to crack-addicted twins.

At first the chart approved the transparency of her urine, but as the years of bad living stained her, entries such as the following became the rule:

BLOOD COUNT AND DIFFERENTIAL

COLLECTION Clean catch

URINE VOLUME 5(a) reference units

COLOR Yellow

CLARITY Turbid ** H

and finally the chart proclaimed that her urine stank with a strange and evil smell. Her childbirth records told the same story:

R DELIVERY NOTE: Called to assess patient. Found to be 9 cm /c/o per Dr. Angelli. Foul smell noted from vaginal area upon exam. Mother refused to push when instructed; later refused not to push. Infant nose and mouth bulb suctioned. Meconium with foul smell. Placenta deliv. spontaneously, intact, mild staining, slight foul smell. Uterus firm; rectum intact. Mother in stable condition. Infant taken to CCIV. Intrauterine cocaine exposure. Baby is likely to be placed under protective custody.

Each time, Chocolate denied her cocaine addiction, and each baby was born cocaine addicted. As her chart said: Some concerns about accuracy in reporting. Somewhat open, but also grew a little irritable at times. She was tearful upon speaking of her mother’s death. Cognition was [illegible].

INDICATIONS FOR ADMISSION

RECENTLY HOSPITALIZED FOR PNEUMONIA

DRUG USAGE: Smokes cocaine x 22 years, last usage 3 days ago; 2 cigs/day x 25 years; “4 brandies/wk”

NURSE’S NOTES: Received via gurney accompanied by firemen. Rash over entire body.

WEIGHT: 179

EXAM: Hyperpigmentation and liquefication posterior neck.

SOCIAL HISTORY: Lives with “friend.” “Chore worker” since 1/10/87. All children live with sister — temporary custody. Single, unemployed, black female with 7th child. Doesn’t know where father is. Pregnancy is unplanned, but currently wants baby. Was in drug court from May 93 on. Due to stress of pregnancy and mother’s death, states she didn’t show up, so had to go to jail for 21 days. States that many of her belongings were stolen, so she has little in the way of baby clothes, etc. The longest time she has spent in jail was 1 year for possession.

SOCIAL SERVICE CONSULT — RECENT COCAINE USE — HOMELESS

NURSE’S NOTES: Patient found walking to ambulance with lower quad abdominal pain.

NURSE’S NOTES: Patient is not reliable enough to send home. Lungs diffuse. Wheezes throughout. Refuses adamantly to agree to induction of labor. Severe pneumonia

COMPLICATIONS: Diabetes

SOCIAL SERVICE CONSULT: Patient reports that she does not smoke cocaine now. Stopped 2 days ago. Incarcerated x 5 months.

IMMUNOASSAYS FOR DRUGS OF ABUSE: Positive for cocaine.

NURSE’S NOTES: Patient tends to be only marginally cooperative. Easily distracted and involved with physical occurrences.

DISCHARGE INSTRUCTIONS: Return to emergency room for observation of breathing difficulties.

NURSE’S NOTES: Stabbed in L abdomen by 6” knife this evening by room mate. Denies head trauma. Rapid speech. Hyperactive. Restless. Stab wound 7 cm deep. Eczema, hives. Breath smells of vodka.

CONSULTATION: Recommend leaving wound open. TRAUMA.

NURSE’S NOTES: Difficult to arouse. Agitated on arousal. Patient dirty. Incoherent speech. Home phone number supplied by patient is a pay phone. Speech slurred. Patient appears to be high on something. Denies drug use.

NURSE’S NOTES: Patient hypersexual. Continually exposes and manipulates her genitals, embarassing the other patients. Propositions doctors, interns, male patients, male relatives of patients, etc.

NURSE’S NOTES: 37 year old black female was going shopping earlier today when a man grabbed her purse, then dragged her along asphalt. She got away, then he chased her again, pulling her to the ground and kicking her. Some superficial abrasions, facial pain, swelling.

DIAGNOSIS: Closed head trauma, orbital contusion, knee and foot contusion.

NURSE’S NOTES: Coughing up blood. Right eye swelling and knee swelling.

And then in the back of her chart lay the envelope which contained a slip reading:

BRENDA WILEY AIDS INFO: Postive antibody.

He turned to the front of the chart and found:

NEXT OF KIN: AFRICA JOHNSTON

| 71 |

He instructed his computer to search for American women named Africa Johnston. None of them lived in California. But then how many Chocolates were there?

In his microfiche of the Los Angeles Superior Court index, which an old private eye had sold him for almost nothing, there were all the aliases one could want. No Africa Johnston, however.

| 72 |

Meanwhile Chocolate trotted around the corner to her homegirl, fat Mexican Beatrice, who, sunny believer, could often be made to do as she was told; and after Chocolate had described to her the grizzled white man who was searching for the Queen, Beatrice promised to relay this warning, crying: I come running, running!

| 73 |

Switching on his computer, Tyler searched two legal and two illegal databases for the alias “Domino” and found nothing. The fifth database, which limited itself to California and which invited him to access it for each of the state’s fifty-eight counties at eleven dollars each, gave him a match with the name Sylvia Fine in San Francisco County. Datatronic Solutions would have been better, but he owed them too much money. He entered the name in a sixth database and got her social security number. Running her name and social in a seventh, he obtained and printed out a lengthy file beginning

MUNICIPAL CRIMINAL

SAN FRANCISCO COUNTY

Main Court: 1987—06/29/96

Data Submitted:

Last Name

: FINE

First Name

: SYLVIA

Middle Init

: S

County

: San Francisco

76 of 14)

Case

: 88F08265

Date: 04/01/88

Case Type

: FELONY

Location

: SAN FRANCISCO

Subject(s)

FINE SYLVIA R

aka

FINE SYLVIA T

aka

FEINGOLD SANDY

aka

DOMINO

77 of 14)

Case

: 89M11352

Date: 01/02/89

Case Type

: MISDEMEANOR

Location

: SAN FRANCISCO

Subject(s)

FINE SYLVIA R

aka

FINE SYLVIA T

aka

FEINGOLD SANDY

aka

DOMINO

aka

BLONDE MARY

And so it went, on and on, for a dozen other crimes, all the way up to the present, which the file proclaimed as follows:

Court Runner (tm): Additional record(s) found in Municipal Criminal Courts:

CA-SACRAMENTO

CA-SAN DIEGO

CA-SAN JOAQUIN

Other crimes in other counties. Domino had been a very busy girl. He sighed. The file said:

*** End of Search ***

| 74 |

Tyler drove down to San Francisco’s municipal court, found a parking space five blocks away after considerable difficulty, and went inside whistling gloomily, the printout in his fist. He requested all case reports within the county’s jurisdiction, copying out the case numbers from the printout. — Oh, jeez, he said, cross because the courthouse clerk spotted Domino’s rap sheet and tore it off the file. — The next clerk greeted him by name. Tyler smiled, waved, asked about her family. When the documents came, he sat and leafed through their unhappy pages, learning that Domino had been arrested and convicted for prostitution eight times, which hardly surprised him, and that she had also served time for two counts of cocaine possession, one count of heroin possession, and three counts of felony assault. The clerk, liking Tyler and wanting to help him, had “forgotten” to remove Domino’s rap sheet, private possession of which was a crime, but since the rap sheet had fallen into Tyler’s possession inadvertently, so as to speak, possession was no skin off his nose. In Sacramento, San Diego, and San Joaquin, it said, the blonde had been convicted of many other sad and ugly acts, including one attempted homicide which she’d plea-bargained down, and she’d been charged with infanticide but acquitted on a technicality. — Poor Domino, he muttered to himself.

Yawning, he browsed through the trial transcripts:

Ms. Fine, how do you plead? ¶ No contest, Your Honor.

Ms. Fine, how do you plead? ¶ Guilty, Your Honor.

Really what he wanted were the names of co-defendants, co-conspirators. Although he wrote them all dutifully down and later ran them through his databases, he already knew that none would check out. Not one name was linked to the aliases “Queen” or “Maj” or “Africa.”

| 75 |

Every summer the great maple tree on his mother’s front lawn seemed to grow larger, wider, and greener (and of course it actually did), so that at sunset when he sat out on the porch drinking lemonade with his mother, that tree was as an immense crystal both gold and green which subsumed the entire sky, and his mother asked him if he would like another glass of lemonade, and he said: I’ll get it, Mom. — The pitcher was almost empty, so he mixed up more, employing fresh lemons and strawberry slices; she always made it too sweet, so he made it the way he liked it and brought out the sugar jar for her. This jar resembled in miniature the prism of one of those lighthouses along the Oregon coast. A metal lip on the top could be finger-hooked into a beak from which the sugar came vomiting out whenever the humidity was not overly high; he saw that his mother had scattered a few grains of rice inside, but these hadn’t prevented the sugar from hardening into a cylindrical brick, chipped into white rubble at the top only, thanks to his mother’s spoon-probings.

So you won’t be in this weekend? his mother repeated.

That’s right, said Tyler, gently swishing the ice cubes in his glass.

Where did you say you’re going?

I didn’t, but I’m going to L.A.

Business? pursued his mother.

Something like that.

You know, his mother said with gentle determination, John tells me that you very often make the drive all the way down to Los Angeles to lay flowers on Irene’s grave.

Tyler didn’t say anything.

You loved Irene very much, Henry, didn’t you? I know you did.

Tyler cleared his throat. — Yes, he said hoarsely. Yes, I did.

And you’re going to visit her again this weekend, his mother continued.

Maybe we can talk about something else, Mom. We’ve had this chat before…

Henry, I think it’s important that we discuss this subject a little further. I know it’s painful to you, but I’m concerned. I don’t think it’s good for you to dwell on Irene so much.

I’m sorry you think so, Mom, said Tyler, squeezing his glass. Far away, he heard a freight train.

There’s a certain question I asked you once before, and you refused to answer. Don’t worry, she said in a hard voice. I’ll never ask you again.

Fine.

May I be frank on a related subject? said his mother. I’m not sure that those trips of yours to L.A. are very beneficial to your relationship with John. It makes him feel odd.

So John’s been complaining about me again, said Tyler, squeezing the glass.

No, not complaining exactly, his mother lied, and Tyler, knowing that she lied, seeing and reading the lie and comprehending exactly what it implied, squeezed the glass and then put it down because he knew that if he squeezed any harder it would shatter in his hand; he was grateful that he’d realized that. John had once broken a glass that way, he remembered. (He thought of Brady jeering over and over: Are you emotionally compromised?)

Where’s Mugsy? he said.

I imagine she’s sleeping under the blackberry bush. That’s her little hangout.

Do you want me to take her for a walk?

That’s just what Irene used to say. Do you remember? Irene was so good to Mugsy.

Mom, I think I’ll go lie down, he said. Can I make you some more lemonade before I turn in? Oh, I see the pitcher’s still almost full. Should I bring the sugar inside?

Ascending the stairs to his old room with the battleship-green microscope, a birthday present, still on the bureau in which if he opened it he’d doubtless find many of his T-shirts from tenth grade, history kept at bay by mothballs, he undressed, admitting that his mother was right. He would stop visiting Irene. At least he would make this weekend the last time. Early the next morning he took his mother out for breakfast and then drove her home, promised to call her soon, promised to call John, promised to look for a girlfriend, waved goodbye, took I-80 West to the interchange and cloverleaved widely round to meet I-5 South. The day was already miserably hot. No traffic detained him in the Central Valley, and by the time he’d passed three hours he was already far past Coalinga; he wondered whether he ought to visit the Tule Elk Reserve sometime; that was a place he had always imagined going with Irene. At Pumpkin Center there was an accident, and then an overheated car blocked one lane near Grapevine, but he made good time still, and at the seven-hour mark was nearly in sight of the Korean florist’s shop near the Tropicana.

How’s business? he said.

Very slow, said the florist. Ever since after big riot here is no good. Black people no good. Make everybody afraid.

I’d like a dozen red roses, please.

Yes, sir. You is always same same. Your wife is so lucky. She is Caucasian like you?

She did look pretty pale in that open coffin, he said. Thank you.

The stones at the cemetery went on and on, but he knew how to find her very easily now; he sat down on the grass early on a hot dry endless Long Angeles evening of idiotic cloudlessness and meaningless freedom; up the green from him, some Koreans were singing hymns. Her stone was clean and polished. There were flabby, stinking, horribly rotten flowers in the metal holder — maybe his. He replaced them with the red roses. He looked around to make sure that no one saw or cared. Then, stretching himself out full length on the grass, he laid his head upon the stone. He stayed like that for a long time. Finally he turned his head slowly to touch with his lips that deep, cool, V-stroked letter “I.”