The Subject Steve

Many thanks to Gerry Howard for his wisdom and skill and to Ira Silverberg for his faith and diligence. Thanks to my family and friends and friends of the family. Thanks to Gordon Lish. Thanks to the Supreme Council of the Squanderers-Alex Abramovich, John Barr, Lucas Hendrich, Tom Moore-and to Marc Maron, co-drafter of the Astoria Statement.

The author also wishes to thank the subject.

Bastards said they had some good news and some bad news.

"Stop," I said. "I've heard this joke before."

"What joke," said one of them, the Mechanic.

"He means that joke," said the other, the Philosopher.

"That bit about the doctors. He thinks we're doctors."

"Aren't you?" I said.

They had white coats, their own wing.

"This ain't no joke, Jack," said the Mechanic. My name's not Jack.

My name's not Steve, either, but we'll get to that. "We have some good news and some bad news."

I can't remember what the good news was.

The bad news was bad. I was dying of something nobody had ever died of before. I was dying of something absolutely, fantastically new. Strangely enough, I was in fine fettle. My heart was strong and my lungs were clean. My vitals were vital. Nothing was enveloping me or eating away at me or brandishing itself towards some violence in my brain. There weren't any blocks or clots or seeps or leaks. My levels were good. My counts were good. All my numbers said my number wasn't up.

Fine fettle for a dead man, they said. Days, they said, months, maybe a year, maybe more than a year. It was difficult to calculate. Nobody had ever died of this before. By their calculations there could be no calculations.

"You'll have to live like the rest of us," the Philosopher told me. "Just less so."

"You mean more so," I said.

"No time for semantics," said the Mechanic. "You'd best get ready."

I readied myself for the period in which I'd have to get ready. I waited for the time during which I'd have to wait. I tied up loose ends, tidied up accounts, put my papers in order, called old friends. I didn't really have any papers.

I did have friends.

I had Cudahy.

I called Cudahy.

"I'm coming to see you," said Cudahy.

"Come soon," I said.

I called my ex-wife, nothing if not a loose end, or at least a bit of untidiness, what with all we had left unaccounted for.

"I knew you'd call," said Maryse. "I had a dream about you last week. You were walking through the pet food aisle at the supermarket and a kind of viscid bile was streaming down your chin."

"It wasn't a dream," I said. "I'm dying."

"I know, baby. I'm dying, too. But we've tried so many times already. We just have to learn to live with things the way things are. Things are not so bad. Truth be told, I'm not unfulfilled by William."

"William's a very good fellow," I said.

"He's not you," said my ex-wife, "but then again, you're not him."

William had once been my hero. Then he whisked away my wife. Now he was a very good fellow, a fucker, a thief. He deserved to die of whatever everybody had ever died of before, but with more agony, a heavier soiling of sheets.

"You may not hear from me again," I said.

"That's probably a wise choice," said Maryse.

"I don't think it's a choice," I said. "I'm really dying."

"Don't threaten me," said Maryse.

I quit my job, jammed a letter under my supervisor's door. He waved me in anyway. It appeared I had to interview for the right to quit.

"What kind of contribution do you feel you've made to the agency?" said my supervisor.

"I was quiet in my cube," I said. "I never fastened personal items with tape to the wall. I leered at female coworkers in the most unobtrusive manner possible. My work, albeit inane, jibed with the greater inanities required of us to maintain the fictions of our industry. I never stinted on pastries for my team."

"What makes you think you're qualified to relinquish your present position?"

"All of the above," I said. "Plus the fact that I'm dying."

"Dying of what?" said my supervisor.

"It's new," I said.

Home, I threw away my watches, my clocks, my clock-radios. I kept my Jews of Jazz calendar up on the kitchen door. The knowledge of days was crucial, I decided, the marking of hours a mistake. I spread old photographs out on the coffee table, Scotch-taped a nice lifetime of say-cheese to the walls. Tacky, maybe, a mural like this, but what's tacky to the terminal? I studied the faces of all those friends and family and friends of the family. There they posed, on throw rugs, on sofas, in fields. Sitting or standing. Alone, in groups, in tandems, foregrounding fountains, friezes, pagodas, squares. Some of them were still living, others still dead. They had lived known lives, died, well, understandably. What I was dying of, I mused, nobody anywhere had a picture of somebody dead from it.

I mused this for a damn long while.

I mused this for almost a day.

I called up my daughter at the School for Disaffected Daughters. My ex-wife and I had agreed it was the best place for our Fiona to flourish and grow. We'd married out of school, Maryse and I, maybe just to be rebellious, fallen into factionhood the way rebels at rest will do. The worse things got, the more we cooed our devotion. Maybe our devotion was a blister we were waiting for the proper time to pop. I guess we wanted to see the pus.

"Fiona," I said, "I have some news."

"Don't tell me," she said.

"I have to tell you."

"Tell me later," she said. "I've got a lot on my plate."

"I'm going to tell you now."

I told my daughter I was dying of something no one had ever died of before.

"A rare disease?" she said. "Wow, that's wild."

"Not rare, Fiona. Mysterious. Rare would imply other sufferers. I'm the only one. Or at least the first. The pioneer. Think mud barns and locusts, rough cotton bonnets."

"I don't follow," said Fiona. "Do you feel sick? Is it some kind of therapeutic bonnet?"

"I feel fine," I said. "I'm in fine fettle for a dead man, in fact."

"Is that from a song?" said Fiona.

"Maybe it will be," I said. "Maybe I'll write a song."

"I've got to go," said Fiona. "I'll check in to see how you're doing."

"You mean to see if I'm dead."

I'd been a bad man. Bad hubby. Bad dad. Well, not bad. Less than bad, which was worse. But I'd paid for it. I mean, I was paying for it.

"Please, Daddy, don't say that," said Fiona. "What if this is the last time we speak?"

She hung up on me, on "speak." Typical of her disaffection. Typical of her disbelief. I figured she figured it all for a song or a game. What else is it when you're thirteen and test just shy of genius? When she has to pick the suit they bury me in, then she'll believe it. When she has to pick the urn they pour my burnt bones in.

Weekdays were clinic days. The Philosopher and the Mechanic wished to meet with me often as I was such a special case. Already my malady had begun to further their careers. They were collaborating on a book based loosely on my autopsy.

"You look amazing," said the Mechanic. "Doesn't he look amazing?"

"Luminous," said the Philosopher. "Luminous with this mysterious rot."

We sat on overstuffed sofas in the Special Cases Lounge. A man in black surgical scrubs brought us tea and lemon cake.

"Can I get a drink around here?"

"Not officially," said the Philosopher, "but here."

He plucked a bronze flask from his coat.

"Brandy?" I said, sniffing it.

"Cognac," said the Philosopher. "With a dash of metham-phetamine."

"Tell us," said the Mechanic, "how are you coping with the emotional devastation of your predicament? How do you go on living knowing you are going to die?"

"How do you?" I said.

Both men nodded, made noises in their mouths, scribbled on the notepads in their laps.

"What?" I said. "What are you doing?"

"I don't know what he's doing," said the Philosopher. "I'm just jotting down some top-secret notes."

They were both bastards, but at certain moments I got the feeling the Philosopher was also a prick.

"Did you run those tests yet?" I said.

"Which tests would those be?" said the Mechanic.

"The ones you said you were going to run to get a better idea of how much time I had left."

" Have left," said the Mechanic. "You're not dead yet."

"Excuse me?" I said.

"Fascinating," said the Philosopher.

"We conducted the tests," said the Mechanic. "Frankly, they left us more baffled than before. Honestly, I can't tell you anything more than we've already told you. You're dying. You're dying quite quickly. The rest is a mystery better explored in our upcoming book."

"Your book," I said. "I don't give a rat's ass about your book. What about the cure?"

"Cure for what?" said the Mechanic.

"You know damn well it doesn't have a name," I said. "You're the ones who didn't name it."

"You see our problem," said the Philosopher. "Who's going to grant us the time, the money, the facilities to research a cure for a nameless ailment from which one person presently suffers? What are we going to do, mount gala events to raise funds for the Fight to Save Steve from Whatchamacallit? By the way, how's the hooch? The speed gives it a nice bite, right?"

"My name's not Steve."

"No, but my point stands."

"We need more clients," said the Mechanic. "Or patients, if you prefer. Until then, I don't know what to tell you. We'll do what we can."

"What's in our powers."

"Our purview."

"Our ken."

My daughter disaffected, my ex-wife whisked, me dying quite quickly of radically accelerated Whatchamacallit, I decided, here in the grips of aimless urgency, to sin.

By sin, I mean fun, harmless.

I got a deal on some pharmaceutical-grade cocaine from the Philosopher. The Mechanic gave me a phone number, instructed me to ask for either Greta or Clarice.

I got Greta.

Greta brought Clarice.

Both of them were tall and bony with bone-colored and ash-colored hair.

Both of them were professionally, abnormally delicious.

"Kiss the dead man!" I said, throwing off my robe. "Fondle his fettle!"

We passed some days this way, prancing, sucking, snorting, heaving, shrieking. We ordered in dinner, Indian, Chinese. Greta, an aspiring dramaturge, directed us in choice bits of Aristophanes. Clarice hand-tinted my knees for a ritual dance of our own device. We built cities with popsicle sticks, baked peanut brittle, fudge. We invented a game whereby each woman pissed down my throat and I, blindfolded, guessed by odor alone whose water it was.

Easy, what with Greta's penchant for wheatgrass juice.

When the sun rose on the last day Clarice shook me awake.

"Time to settle up," she said.

I figured it was money well spent. What's seventy-three thousand dollars to a guy with Whatchamacallit?

I sat there the rest of the morning wondering how to tell Fiona she was now officially a hardship case.

Then someone was knocking the knocker on my door.

"You'll feel better once they come up with a name for it," said Cudahy.

He stood in my kitchen and stirred his tea, an enormous man in a neon-flecked track suit.

He'd once captained the national shot-put team.

"I don't give a damn about the name," I said. "I just want to live."

"I want you to live, too, buddy," said Cudahy. "Believe me."

"I do believe you," I said.

Cudahy was my best and oldest friend. Best and boon. Maybe we'd drifted apart at times, I into the smoked-glass murk of corporate life, Cudahy into his far-flung entrepreneurial endeavors, which included a stint in foreign bride importation, but we'd never let the thread of our friendship snap. There was too much truth and not enough language between us for that.

We'd run the beet fields and subdivision lots of our boyhood together, slept under the yard stars, stolen off with the family whiskey into the wooded night. We'd scorched town birches with our homemade flamethrowers, burned out all the gypsy moth cocoons. Moth-O-Caust, we'd called it. We'd stood behind the toolshed and listened, amid the clatter of rake tines and paint tins, to our fathers make shuddering men of each other.

This last we'd never discussed.

"You know," said Cudahy now, "you should have called me after Maryse left. I could have gotten you a new missus for less than ten grand. Tits, an adorable accent. Grateful to be free of the emerging-market yoke."

"What's done is done," I said.

"That's the attitude," said Cudahy. "That's the attitude of a man who wants to live!"

"Don't saw the pine for me yet," I said.

"That's it, baby!" said Cudahy. "No pine, no crepe, no wreaths!"

He spun a hard orbit on the linoleum. Tea ribboned out of his cup. The cup shattered on the wall.

"Shit," said Cudahy.

"Nice put," I said.

Cudahy took the spare room, kicked in expenses from the fat roll in his track suit pocket. We cooked lavish meals from newspaper recipes-veal marsala, rack of lamb-played blackjack past midnight, watched old westerns on the VCR.

Every time there was shoot-out Cudahy would recount his own days of gunplay, usually some kind of pimp jump in the lime-colored corridors of a formerly Socialist apartment block.

"They got my driver Vlad in the head, point-blank," he said one night. "I figured I was a goner until I stumbled across a ventilation duct. Hard to believe I fit, but I did. And so here I am. And here you are. Death's luck goes south, too, you know. Hit me."

"I think the reaper's due for a run."

"Don't talk that way," said Cudahy. "This living and dying shit, it's all a matter of attitude. It's like you're at the Worlds with a couple of fouls and you need one clean put to qualify. The Swedish judge is gunning for you and you're thinking, 'I will stay in the circle, there is nothing for me outside the circle. Fuck Scandinavia.' "

"What are you talking about?"

"Say it: There's nothing for me outside the circle. Fuck Scandinavia."

"There's nothing for me outside the circle. Fuck Scandinavia."

"Exactly," said Cudahy. "Worked for me. I silvered. Then I got out of the shot-put racket for good. I mean, chucking a steel ball over and over again. For what? The travel, sure, but all in all it was a waste of time. And you know what else? When you're a great shot-putter, they hate you for it. They really do. Not true of, say, the discus. The discus-throwers have a feeling of community. They have that statue. Hit me. Fuck, busted."

When I phoned the clinic to confirm my next appointment, the Mechanic took the call himself.

"We've got some exciting news," he said. "A breakthrough. I can't tell you over the phone, though."

Cudahy popped a bottle of raisin schnapps.

"To beginnings, breakthroughs, fresh starts," he said. "May the upshot of all this be nothing more than a beautiful new-found invigoration that informs your long years ahead."

"That's nice," I said.

"It's an old peasant saying," said Cudahy. "The literal translation is 'Better you fuck yourself than they fuck you.' Good luck tomorrow. I'll be waiting with some coq au vin."

The next day the nurse led me past the Special Cases Lounge and through a slim metallic door. We stepped into a bright amphitheater, a room like a grooved well. The Philosopher and the Mechanic stood down at the bottom of it behind a semi-translucent scrim. Dozens of others filled the raked seats. Some craned back to catch my eye, nod, enact hopeful semaphore with their thumbs. The Philosopher stepped out from behind the scrim. A lectern rose into his hands from some hushed hydraulics in the floor.

"Good morning," he said. "Shall we begin? Now as some of you from the press may be unfamiliar with medical jargon, I'll try to stick to layman's terms. But first, a small caveat. While our tests can't be considered foolproof, the sheer quantity of data and the unequivocal agreement of it cannot be wished away. Since we have nothing comparable by which to judge the subject's condition, there is, to be quite candid, some element of faith involved, but I would by no means refer to it as a leap of faith. Consider it more on the order of a small hop. Or perhaps even a skip. Okay, then, on to the main presentation of our body, or rather, well, you know what I mean. ."

There were giggles in the gallery. The lights dimmed. The Mechanic slid a videocassette into a dark notch in the wall. Out of speakers mounted in the ceiling came the whir and sputter of an old film projector. Nice touch, I thought, listened as a chimey melody, familiar somehow, seeped into the room. It was American educational music, that old warped hope in major chords, and it bounced along to the vistas skating by on the screen: mountains and mountain valleys, jungles and jungle clears, lakes, rivers, streams, each yielding to the next in a bright ceremony of splice and dissolve.

Last was a light-filled forest, where all manner of creature began to stir, make their first nervous pokes from burrow and mound. I'd seen footage like this before, felt fourteen again, dozing in my snowboots, waiting for the afternoon bell. How much I'd always envied the tight life of voles. The hidey hole was happiness.

No expectations down there.

Now the shot pulled out a bit. Here a stunted horse drank from a creek. There an odd bird jerked worms from the earth. Here came a rustle in the brush, a gentle tremoring that sent bugs the size of bullets to wing. Something huge burst into view, a shambling immensity I knew from coloring books, dioramas of yore. The woolly mammoth. Hairy-hided. Shovel-tusked. A great shaggy thingness. It looked about with what could have been innocence and not a little fear in its eyes. I wondered how much it cost to rent a toothless elephant, trick him out for another geological age. There wasn't much time to wonder. The music tripped into a darker key, some molester-on-the-carousel lilt. It was the end of innocence, or the end of something.

It was bum luck for the mammoth.

A band of humanoids lumbered up, a hunting party, crude men with crude spears in their tufted fists, loud language on their tongues. They whooped and hollered, circled the beast, rushed in and out and in again, stabbed until the mammoth's hide blew bright spouts of mammalian blood. The woolly fellow thumped to his knees, bellowing, bellowing, us thrust up now into the black pain of his mouth. His cries and the taunts of the hunters started to fade. There was darkness now, silence. There was darkness with a few faraway pricks of light. The universe. Universal shorthand for the universe.

We were moving through it now. We were gliding toward a greenish-bluish ball. Our ball, the home sphere. Sea and tree and all those organic shenanigans, all that fluke life. We were flying right smack into the middle of the fucker, flying and flying until it wasn't flying anymore, it was falling, and we were falling now through clouds and sky and down upon the body of a city, row house bones and market hearts and veins of neighborhood, arterial concretions of highway and boulevard and side street, falling now to a low float over pavement, a hover here in some lost alleyway, a superannuated little gland of a place, where a solitary figure walked with his hands stuck in his windbreaker. The figure began to glow, as though suddenly sensor-read, his organs swirls of grained color, his skull a glassy orb of dim pulses and firings, the lonely weak electrics of homo erectus. The man stooped for his shoelace. The picture froze at the beginnings of a bow knot. Through the speakers came the sound of sprocket jump, the flutter of reel's end. The screen swiped to test bars. The music leaked away. The lights went up.

The Mechanic took the lectern, spoke into a thimble he'd slipped upon his thumb.

"Any questions?"

There were questions.

"Should we assume the figure, the visible man, as it were, is the subject?" called a woman with a series of laminated cards clipped to her pantsuit.

"What's with the woolly mammoth?" said a kid with a video rig strapped parrot-like to his shoulder.

"Forget that," said an old man in a hunting vest. "What is the point of any of this? Is this some kind of gag?"

"I assure you," said the Philosopher, leaning into the Mechanic's amplified thumb, "this is no gag. Nor could it be construed as a bit. The visual aid is merely meant as a tool to help you better understand the scope of what we're about to tell you. Ladies and gentleman, the subject, who, as some of you may already have ascertained, is seated here among us, which I note as a precaution against insensitive comments regarding his condition, this subject is the first known sufferer of what I believe will and should be referred to from now on as Goldfarb-Blackstone Preparatory Extinction Syndrome, named, I might add, for its discoverers, Dr. Blackstone and myself."

"Without being technical," said the kid with the parrot cam, "what exactly is the nature of PREXIS? PREXIS for short, right? I mean, what's the deal, nontechnically speaking? And why should we care, given all the diseases out there right now?"

"To put it bluntly," said the Mechanic, "those other diseases already have a name. And with it, a cause: viral infection, chemical compromise, cellular glitch, inheritance on the genetic level. This syndrome, though now named, still has no identifiable cause, which does not mitigate its unquestionable fatality. This man is going to die. But here's the kicker: he's going to die for no known reason. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but eventually, and irrevocably. He may show no signs of it yet, but he will, trust me. And though he may be the first, I assure you he is not alone. Like the beast in the film, and the prototypical bipeds who felled it, all of us here, too, will someday be extinct. And not from nuclear catastrophe or chemical weaponry or environmental collapse, but from something else entirely. Who knows? Perhaps the cause is sheer purposelessness. At any rate, be advised, this subject, Steve, this mild-mannered thirty-seven-year-old ad man, is but the first in line. Maybe you've been lucky enough to dodge everything else, the cancers, the coronaries, the aneurysms, but do not consider yourself blessed. Goldfarb-Blackstone, or PREXIS, if you will, is guaranteed to claim us all."

"Aren't you just talking about death?" said the old man.

"Unfortunately, yes," said the Mechanic.

"But don't we already know about death?"

"What do we know? We know nothing. Now at least perhaps we have what little light the work of Dr. Goldfarb and myself can shed on it."

"I'm interested in what you mean by purposelessness," said the woman in the pantsuit. "Do you mean boredom? Do you mean to say this man is actually going to die of boredom?"

"That's one way of putting it, yes," said the Philosopher.

"Dynamite," said the woman, darted out of the room.

"Why didn't you tell me sooner?" I said, back in the Special Cases Lounge.

"We weren't sure."

"We couldn't be certain."

"All the data accounted for."

"All the numbers in."

"Sorted."

"Crunched."

"Mashed."

"Mealed."

"Until a granular quality obtained."

"Then checked and counterchecked against findings in our database."

"Adjusted for error."

"Baseline error."

"Human and otherwise."

"Human and counterhuman."

"We had to be precision-oriented on this one. Or orientated."

"Either way."

"We had to be scientists about it."

"If we're not scientists, what are we?"

"If we're something else, who are the scientists?"

"So," I said, "how long have I got?"

Cudahy was waiting on the corner near my building. It looked like there'd been some sort of accident. News trucks and radio cars cordoned off the better part of the block. Cudahy threw a parka over my head, guided me up a hillock of root-ruptured pavement toward my door.

"Don't answer the vultures," said Cudahy.

"Which vultures?" I said.

Here they were upon us, pressing, pecking through my fuzzy sheath.

"How does it feel to be dying?"

"Do you believe you are bored to death?"

"Have you had any further contact with the mammoth?"

Cudahy shouted them all down. I felt his huge arms wrap around my head.

"Scum," said Cudahy, bolted the door behind us. "Wish to God I had Vlad with me. That guy sure knew what to do to a journalist."

I let the parka slip to the floor.

"What's happening to me?" I said.

"Hell if I know," said Cudahy. "Why can't they let a man die in peace?"

"I'm in fine fettle," I said.

"Sure you are."

"All I did was go in for a checkup."

"That's how they get you," said Cudahy.

He cracked a bottle of beef-flavored vodka, turned on the TV. The woman in the pantsuit beamed up from my stoop. She fiddled with a coil of metal in her ear.

"Yes, Mike," she said, "he appears to be barricaded in this building you see behind me. And, truthfully, I can't say I blame him. Who wants to be the pace car in the race to oblivion? But there's another question, Mike, which I think you broached, or maybe breached, earlier. How do we know he's the only person on the planet with Goldfarb-Blackstone, or PREXIS, as it's so rapidly come to be known? It's hard to believe that this man, this so-called Subject Steve, is even the only victim of terminal ennui in this city. And if there are others, are they dying, too? Are we all, perhaps, dying? Have we, perhaps, always been dying? It's too early to tell."

"This is insane," said Cudahy. "A mass hallucination. I've read about this kind of thing. You do a lot of reading on the track and field circuit. Downtime. Cafes. You get educated. History is full of this phenomenon. It'll blow over."

"I don't see it blowing over," I said.

"It's just started to blow, buddy. There's a whole blowing-over process. Anyway, you've got more important things to think about. You're still, on a personal level, dying."

"But I'm in fine fettle," I said.

"Fettle is irrelevant," said Cudahy. "Science has proven that much."

Now a man I knew appeared on the screen. He sat at an office workstation, his thin hair blending with the fabric of the cube-wall weave.

"One thing I can tell you about the subject," said the man, "he always bought doughnuts for his team."

"Pastries!" I said. "Better than doughnuts!"

"It's okay," said Cudahy. "Calm down."

"It wasn't doughnuts."

"It's okay," said Cudahy.

"What are they talking about, boredom?" I said. "I've never been bored. Lonely, tired, depressed, of course. But not bored."

"I think they mean that as a euphemism," said Cudahy.

"A euphemism for what?"

"I'm not sure I follow," said Cudahy.

This was about the time I started to weep. This was the kind of weeping where after a while you're not quite sure it's you who's still weeping anymore. Some wet, heaving force evicts your other selves. You're just the buck and twitch, the tears. You fetal up and your thoughts are blows. Phrases drift through you. Rain of blows. Steady rain of blows. There's no relent. There's no relief. The hand of a comforting Cudahy is a hunk of hot slag. The world is a slit through one bent strip of window blind. The noise of the city, the hum of the house, the hiss of the television, is wind.

I fell asleep, woke to a bowl rim at my lips.

Fiona.

Dimly, men in Stetsons rode past boomtown facades and out onto a pixilated plain.

"I love this part," I heard Cudahy say, dimly.

"Fennel soup," said Fiona. "Drink."

"They're doomed," said Cudahy. "They know they're doomed, and they also know their only shot at grace is precisely in that knowledge. There's an army of vicious Mexicans out there waiting to shoot them to pieces."

"I'd like to see the Mexican side of the story," said Fiona. "I'd like to read an oral history from the Mexican perspective."

"An oral history," said Cudahy. "I bet you would, honey."

"Gross."

"What's going on?" I said. I figured they needed a chance to adjust, to my state, to their consideration of my state. My worry was that I could sleep too much. A dying man sleeps too much, maybe his power slips away.

I needed all the power in my purview, my ken.

Cudahy muted the doomed hooves.

"Daddy," said Fiona.

"So," I said, "you heard. You came."

"PRAXIS," said Cudahy.

"PREXIS," said Fiona.

"You didn't seem so worried before," I said.

"I didn't know how serious it was."

"Baby, I have some bad news. About your educational opportunities."

"It's okay. Uncle Cud told me. I hope the fucking was worth it."

"Only time it's not worth it is when it's free," said Cudahy.

"Daddy, I want you to know I'm going to be here for you. That part is settled. Don't argue with me. It's what I need to do now. For me as much as for you."

"Thank you, baby," I said, and sang to her, weakly, the song about aardvarks I had sung to her in the days before her disaffection.

Then I spit up some fennel shreds.

The next morning Cudahy went out for food, the early papers. I watched him pilot his bulk down the stoop, disappear behind a satellite truck. My good Cudahy, back from the wide strange world.

My fondest Fiona.

"You'll ruin the paint with all this tape," she said, pulling my scrapbook mural down.

I thought back to the time Fiona was six, seven, caught a double zap of chicken pox and scarlet fever. She got so quiet there on the living room carpet playing divorce with her Barbies. The sores spread and her blood boiled. We watched her body take on the silken deadness of her injection-molded friends. It all came to high drama, or my high dramatics, me running crazy through the neighborhood with my doll-daughter in my arms, Maryse screaming for me to come back.

"I've got us a cab, schmuck!"

The doctors shamed us for our delay. Maryse and I, we'd been inches from the abyss of nefarious parentage, practically Christian Scientists, but Fiona would live. It must have been our luck that got us so hot, basted us both in visions of hump and dazzle. Or maybe it was some awful need to screw within wad's shot of the abyss. Home, we drank a little wine, put on some of that sticky saxophone music we used to keep around to drown out the bitter squeaks in our hearts. We gripped each other's privates and started to kiss, but our mouths were pruned things, insipid divots. My wife's wetness was all for William the Fulfiller now. We conked out drunk on the carpet, woke up around dinnertime, checked in on our baby. Fiona was bent up in her fever's waning. Maryse and I held hands beside the little plaid bed.

"I'm leaving you," said my wife.

"I know," I said.

Fiona claimed she remembered none of it, but she still bore a mark from those days, a pock where a scab must have flaked, smack between her dry green eyes.

It was about the size of a sunflower seed.

Cudahy came back with cabin food. Siege supplies. Soup cans and sandwich meats and bouillon cubes in silver foil. He pulled a newspaper from the grocery sack, folded to an item: "Doc's Prog for Our Kind: Game Over." Beneath my ex-wife's picture was a caption: "Ex-Hubby the New T. Rex."

"Where'd they get the photo?" I said.

"Eye in the sky, probably," said Cudahy. "Or the DMV."

"Mom gave it to them," said Fiona. "She left a message on my cell. She's getting calls from talk shows. She wants to know how you feel about her speaking publicly on the matter."

"You mean whoring herself."

"Sharing her experience, hope, and strength."

"Tell her she can do whatever the hell she wants."

"I knew you'd say that so I already said that."

"There's a guy out there," said Cudahy. "He's offering his help."

"Reporter?" said Fiona.

"Don't think so," said Cudahy. "He told me to give you this."

It was a mimeographed brochure, lettered in splotchy monastic script.

Have you been left for dead?

Do you number among the Infortunate- shrugged off by family, friends, physicians, priests?

Have you been told you're beyond all hope?

Are you incorrigible, inoperable, degenerative, degenerate, terminal, chronic, and/or doomed?

Are you lost, are you crazy, or just plain sick?

Maybe you should snuff it, friend.

Go ahead.

Pull the Trigger.

Turn up the Gas.

Do it.

Do it, coward.

Did you do it?

You didn't, did you?

Okay, don't do it.

You're not worth the mess you'll make. Not yet.

Here's a better idea:

Call the Center for Nondenominational Recovery and Redemption and deliver back unto yourself your dying body and your dead soul.

No malady, real or imagined, is too difficult to cure.

Forget the scientific phonies and the quacks of holistic boutiques.

Forget the false love of New Age shamans.

Forget the false touch of healing retreats.

Your health, your freedom, your salvation is a toll-free call away.

Ask for Heinrich.

All major credit cards accepted.

Squeezed along the margin in fountain ink was this: "I Have the Cure.-H."

I made of this inanity a nice coaster for my coffee mug.

"They'll really be coming out of the woodwork now," I said.

"What woodwork?" said Cudahy. "We're on an island of concrete."

Walking back to the clinic for my next appointment a few weeks later, I saw what Cudahy had meant. I'd lived in this city long enough to forget the absurdity of the place, all these surfaces refracting us in shatters, this tonnage that bore down on us with hysterical weight.

Someday sectors of this city would make the most astonishing ruins. No pyramid or sacrificial ziggurat would compare to these insurance towers, convention domes. Unnerved, of course, or stoned enough, you always could see it, tomorrow's ruins today, carcasses of steel teetered in a halt of death, half globes of granite buried like worlds under shards of street. Sometimes I pictured myself a futuristic sifter, some odd being bred for sexlessness, helmed in pulsing Lucite, stooping to examine an elevator panel, a perfectly preserved boutonniere.

I'd be the finder of something.

Now, walking along, I had only the sense of losing myself.

Yes, I could perambulate unpestered, unthronged. My saga was stale. There were fresh griefs upon us. A beloved lip-sync diva had choked to death on a sea bass bone. The troops of our republic were poised on the border of a lawless fiefdom in Delaware. The Secretary of Agriculture had been exposed as a fervent collector of barnyard porn. Worse, he had a yen for the young ones, the piglets, the foals. Bestiality was one thing, opined the ethics community, but for God's sake, these were babies. There were wars and rumors of war and leaks of covert ops. There were earthquakes, famines, droughts, floods. A certain movie star had made box office magic once more.

The National Journal of Medicine 's scathing rebuke of the veracity of Goldfarb-Blackstone Syndrome, its excoriation of the ailment's namesakes as "freakshow impresarios," had barely made the back pages, the spot after the break.

The air was out and I was glad of it. My fine fettle continued to obtain. Still, I somehow felt bound to these men, Goldfarb and Blackstone, the Philosopher and the Mechanic. They'd shocked me into keener living. I was brimming with bad poetry and never reading the financials. I can't say I knew what counted in life but I was beginning to glimpse what didn't. I had Fiona back, and Cudahy, too.

I owed these doctors a courtesy visit.

The Philosopher was sniffing something from a vial of handblown glass. Dark powder dusted his nose.

"Want some?" he said. "It's a new synthetic."

"Cunt's out of control," said the Mechanic. "Making his own yay-yo, to hell with the world."

"Oh, piss off, Blackie," said the Philosopher. "Just a little pick-me-up."

These were not the dashing scientists of the amphitheater. The Philosopher was unshaven and looked long unwashed. His lab coat was covered with cobalt smears. The Mechanic had developed a tic of the eye that might have seemed lewd had the psychic deterioration which motored it not been so plain.

"Galileo," said the Philosopher through hinges of spit, "why have you forsaken me?"

"Cunt's dreaming of Pisa," said the Mechanic. "Can't see the truth of the situation. We got busted. We ran a scam and we got busted. I told him the mammoth bit was too much. Stupid. We could have had our own disease. Now we have squat. You can't patent death, I told him. You can't copyright a fucking nonstate, let alone the extinction of a species. Especially ours. Didn't I say this? I said this."

"So, am I dying or what?" I said.

"God revealed it to me," said the Philosopher, "yet now I must defy God to appease the church. I shall perish from the hypocrisy. ."

"That film, that idiotic film," said the Mechanic. "Somebody's cousin with an educational library. Dumb. Dumb, dumb, dumb. So now we have what? What do we have now? The answer is C: Squat. Squat is the correct answer. We had everything going for us. The two names, perfect. You need two names for a good disease. Goldfarb-Blackstone. A Jew and a white guy. What's not to trust? Can't be a conspiracy, right? I mean, sure it could be for some people, but we weren't planning on this being a black disease. They have no insurance, by and large. I mean, well, what I mean by that is by and large. I'm not a racist, you know."

"I didn't know that," I said.

"It's true."

"But what about me?" I said.

"What, you?"

"Yeah, me."

"Oh, you. No, you're dying. Sorry, kid. Hate to say it."

"Dying of what?"

"I don't know. We haven't figured it out yet. What did we call it? Whatchamacallit. Good enough name as any, I guess."

"But you said it was a scam."

"The scam was everything else. See, we just wanted to stick out from the others. What's wrong with that? A brand, you know? Brand recognition. Brand-what's the word-leverage. Something for people to worry about on the drive to work. Something for the pharmaceuticals to jump on, the comedians to joke about. PREXIS dot net. Lots of people die all the time from nameless, mysterious diseases. What, do we deal with even a fraction of the shit that goes on? The answer, by the way, is D: Less than a fraction of the shit. It's like all those murders. Most go unsolved."

"What murders?"

"Exactly."

"So, what am I going to do?"

"I don't know. Cry. Pray. Go see the castles of Scotland."

The Mechanic's eye began to spasm anew, as though straining to vomit some abominable vision. The Philosopher fondled himself on the sofa.

"Doctor, doctor," he sang, "gimme the news. ."

"Consider yourself the luckiest guy in this room," said the Mechanic.

"But I'm dying," I said.

"But nothing."

I found new doctors, furnished myself with further opinions. They slid me through tubes, onto tables, gurneys, toggled instruments that seemed forged in sterile smithies somewhere, cold bays carved deep into germless rock. They siphoned me, decanted me, bottled and labeled me, my blood, my snot, my waste, whatever coursed through me or sat in me, vatted, casked, the distillations of the guts, the body's gurgling treatment plant. They called me back, called me in, peeked into the corridor, closed the door.

The one with the eyeglasses sighed as she slid them off.

The one with the mustache stroked the bristles into place.

The fat one farted, made a meek look.

"Who can be certain?" they all began. There was concurrence about the uncertainty of certainty. There was concurrence about me.

I was dying of something.

It had no name.

Nobody wanted to venture one now.

I thought about Greta. I daydreamed about Clarice. I wondered if their industry had a tradition of charity work. I sat at home with Cudahy waiting for the symptoms to declare themselves. There had to be symptoms. Death could not precede the symptoms. My symptoms were late bloomers, but bloom they must. They owed me that much, whatever tribe of misery they hailed from: trembling, confusion, amnesia, aphasia, fevers, nomas, blebs. Dizziness, fatigue. Labored breathing. Loosened bowels. Blindness, boils, bedsore'd ravings, sears, flares, wens. Who knew? Nobody had ever done this kind of dying. Oh pioneer, the Patient Zero, the Subject Steve, the me of my given name, the me of my given fate, the chump of mysterium, the presymptomatic simp.

Did I deserve it?

Sure, like you deserve it.

Maybe only for being born.

Maybe only for wanting to be.

Because I did want to be. I wanted to stick around, stay in play. Who doesn't? you ask. Some doesn't, I reply. Me, I'd been there before, the brink, the brink of the blank. I'd come close with Maryse, closer by my lonesome. I'd practiced noose knots, stocked up on pills and gin. Maybe I wasn't the most likely candidate, but I definitely rated dark horse in the auto-snuff sweepstakes. I'd lived enough days when the days didn't end fast enough, days so chock full of me.

But now all I could think was: Let me live! Banish me, shun me, shoo me away, argue me off, but let me fucking live!

Already I was nostalgic for my sorrows. I wanted to savor heartsmash again, desertion, distraction, desolate nights, all the aches and bruises, love's bunions, the mind's bum knee. My mouth watered for bitter fruit. My belly panged for crow. There were no disaffected daughters in the patent-pending nonstate, no wife-pilfering Williams, no medallions of pampered meat. There were no tax forms to fudge, no binges to regret, no sweet depletions of the soul. There was nothing save a nothingness shot through with utter nothingness.

I wanted to keep myself in the realm of somethings, even all the awful somethings.

I wanted the cure.

I got curatives. I got pills, chemical injections, cautious portions of radiation served up by aproned technicians, junior chefs in the kitchens of deep frequencies. I got everything everyone got for dying of everything else, of known killers, named decimations.

I was still insured and they had all sorts of notions at their disposal, long shots, Hail Marys to spare.

"Nothing to lose," was their mantra. "Everything to be gained."

Loss gained. Loss never paused. Nothing took. The pills, the shots, rays, they made me sick. The symptoms! The symptoms had arrived! I thinned, I curdled, I shed.

Cudahy nursed me, nurses doctored me, and all seemed for naught. I was some sort of deliquescing human unit shuttled between home sofa and hospital cot. I sipped nutritional shakes from tin containers, dribbled them out on bathroom tiles, Cudahy's shoes. It was Cudahy who stood by me, truly, in toilet stalls, in taxi lines, in vestibules of vague stink. Maybe we were bound together by the beet fields of our boyhood, or the sweaty secrets of our fathers. I didn't think too hard about it. I was too weak, too grateful. I'd sent Fiona home. I required a secret fiefdom of shamelessness now.

The Further Opinions admitted to varying degrees of bewilderment. A surgeon named Lovinger wanted to cut. She just appeared one day, a voluptuous phantom there in x-ray where I loitered in my paper smock.

"I want to gut you," she said, "get a look-see. I've got a hunch. I'm a good huncher. This conversation is just between us. I can cut like nobody's business. Can I cut you?"

"I don't know," I said.

"I'm your last best hope."

Lovinger laid her hands on my shoulders. Supple, milky hands. A tiny Hebrew letter on a chain swung above the slope of her breast. She said it stood for life. It looked like a little ski-lift chair. I pictured us in it, an Alpine idyll with my surgeon-lover, Lovinger.

"Okay," I said. "Let's cut."

I was borne off in a whirl of orderlies to the new meat ward. My suitemate was an old man, a warren of tubes, puffs of rotted hair. The skin on his face looked blasted underneath, blood bombs gone off in secret detonations. The Los Alamos of all of us. Other men, younger men, slightly less ravaged versions of him, sat grave and dainty on the edges of his bed.

"You're just here for the money," the man said. "Save your breath. It's all going to the Elks. And the black kids. I promised scholarships."

"Dad, we really should discuss this."

The old man turned to me. I saw arid eons in his eyes.

"Fathers and sons," I said.

"The daughters killed me, too. And the daughters-in-law. All of them. Everybody. Except the Elks. I extend my gratitude to the Elks. They made a place for me. Saturday nights, some cards, some laughs. I'm a businessman, but I never forgot where I came from. I used to go down to the tough schools and make speeches to the black kids. They understand hardship. I told them if they didn't get knocked up or join those machine-gun gangs I'd send them to college. Maybe it's a waste, but if we get one good fellow out of it, one Washington Irving, it'll all be worth it."

"Dad, please."

"The papers are drawn up, Randy. You're Randy, right?"

He put out a crusted hand. The nearest son took it, started to cry.

"Christ," said the old man, "what I wouldn't give for a tough black son."

I slid out of bed, stood.

"Where you going?"

"I smell encroaching nothingness," I said.

"I know what you're smelling," said the old man. "It's not my fault. It's because the girl hasn't come. I keep pushing the button and she never comes."

The surgeon Lovinger caught up with me in the lobby.

"You've got to let me cut," she said. "I've got us a room and everything."

Cudahy was waiting for me out on the curb. The taxi driver took us through the park.

"Detour," he said. "Parade."

"What parade?" I said.

"Landlord Day," said the driver. "See the float?"

A great papier-mache tenement house was rolling down the avenue. Men in matching motor caps carried signs: "Rent Control Is Mind Control."

"It's all about the little man," said Cudahy.

"The little man?" said the driver.

"The little lord," said Cudahy.

There was an old movie on TV about android gladiators. It was set in the future, the late seventies. Cudahy sat beside me, cubing feta cheese.

"You know," he said, " 'robot' is a Czech word. I can't remember what it means. Here, this came."

He pushed an open envelope across the cutting board, shrugged when he saw me rub at the vinegar stains.

Dear Enrollee:

This notice hereby notifies you that your health plan has reached its maximum amount of maximum expenditure. We want to thank you for being such a faithful and valued customer.

_Sincerely,

Fran Kincaid

Accounts Representative_

"This," said Cudahy, knifing at the screen, "is where the android's faceplate comes off to reveal a menacing tangle of wires. It's like a simile for our technology-crazed society."

"Insurance company cut me loose," I said.

"You're better off. I don't have any coverage. Look at me. I'm fine."

"I was fine, too."

"Fran Kincaid," said Cudahy. "Accounts representative. What do you think old Fran is doing right now? Slipping into her home-from-work dungarees, whipping up a little din-din, maybe?"

"What?"

"I can almost smell it," said Cudahy. "Garlic potatoes. Yum. Another tough day at the office, and now Fran's unwinding with a little Chablis, calling her sister, the perennial grad student. 'So, what's up, sis?' 'Not much, how's by you, Fran?' 'Oh, the usual, bringing ruin down on the poor slobs of the republic.' Am I right? Fucking Fran."

"Who?" I said. "Grad student?"

" 'Look, sis,' " Cudahy went on, doing voices now, twitching up his mouth, "'you've got to find something and stick with it. The rest of us Kincaids, we work.' 'Up yours, Fran, everything's so easy for you, you don't get my deal at all.' 'Mom was right about you, sis. You're not as smart or as pretty as you think you are, but not dumb and ugly enough to take care of yourself. It's sad, really.' 'At least I didn't marry what's-his-name.' 'At least I didn't fuck my high school trivia team coach.' 'Finger-fucked.' 'Titter titter. Mmm.' 'What are you cooking, Fran?' 'Garlic potatoes.' "

"Cudahy," I said. "Hey."

"What?"

"What are you doing?"

"I don't know. It just wells up in me sometimes."

It was the last thing I'd ever hear him say. I nodded off while the androids praised Caesar in transistorized Elizabethan, woke to a bad stench. Cudahy's beautiful heart must have blown on a sprint to the john. His pants were at his ankles. I'd never noticed how hairy and slender his ankles were. All that grunt and shove of him rising up from those tender stalks. A new roll of toilet paper lay near his hand. I turned Cudahy over, saw a bubble on his lips. The bubble probably meant he was still breathing. Somebody said that, later. I sat there with his bright enormous head in my lap.

"What words could even begin to capture the indomitable spirit of our beloved Cudahy?"

I'd rented out a so-called intimately priced room in the basement of Ferguson's Funerary. Now I stood beside a wreathed easel festooned with snapshots slipped from a binder I'd found under Cudahy's bed. Shot-putters, mostly, a few light-damaged Latvian brides.

"He was a huge man with a huge heart," I continued. "He had no coverage."

I looked out to Fiona, my only fellow mourner, apart from Ferguson. Somebody else loomed up in the shadows behind her, a tight bloat of a man in aviator shades. He must have sneaked in while I'd been fussing with the easel. His shirt looked damp from the sink, his white-yellow hair tucked beneath a vintage derby. A great berry-colored stain fell down his cheek. Fiona's new beau? A far-flung colleague of Cudahy? Some wet brain weeping at the wrong bier? Ferguson had hinted he could hire grievers. Maybe this freak was on the house.

"Welcome," I said. "Thank you for coming."

The stranger gave a nod of grim salute and I resumed my address, but as I started talking I got the odd sense he was taunting me somehow. His eyebrows pogo'd up past his sunglass rims. He did some herky business with his elbows. Tremors, I figured, tried to ignore it, prattled on for a while about the birches and the beet fields and the moth cocoons. Most of it went dead in my mouth. This wasn't any kind of eulogy, more like a pitch, a campaign presentation. Sell the suits on how you mean to sell the legacy. Keep it punchy. Avoid the coy. I wished I had some graphics with me, visual backup, some fresh data, too. What was the mourning-Cudahy demo, anyway? His folks were dead and his family scattered. I sputtered onward into Cudahy minutiae-shoe size, culinary proclivities-groped for a grace note, a tag.

"So long, Cud," I said.

I signaled Ferguson, a tiny man with a sun-peeled nose. Ferguson made for the urn, a Florentine, he'd called it earlier, flourishing his line of them, but the stranger beat him to it, lifted the lid, peered in.

"What the hell are you doing?" I said.

"Not really what you'd call ashes. There's bone chunks in there."

"I'm going to have to ask you to leave," I said.

"When, man?"

"When what?"

"When are you going to ask me to leave?"

"Now," I said. "Leave."

The stranger made a gentle scooping noise in his throat, prelude to a loogie.

"Don't," I said.

"Lovely service," he said. "Very moving."

"You're in deep shit, son," said Ferguson. "I do cop funerals."

"You don't scare me because you're so midgety," said the stranger. "Are you aware of how midgety you are?"

"Please," said Fiona. "Please leave."

The stranger regarded Fiona with not a little tenderness. He tipped his sunglasses down to maybe do something cunning with his eyes. The stain on his cheek had a glittery quality.

"I'm Dietz."

"Fiona," said my daughter.

"Tell your father over there I have a message for him. The only cure is the disease."

"All right," I said. "That's it. Get out of here. Go."

"Relax," said Dietz.

"I'll relax when I'm dead," I said.

"That's original. Just remember what I said."

"What did you say?"

"Goddamn," said Dietz, and all his swagger seemed to drain from him at once.

He smacked at his head with the heel of his palm.

"You don't remember what you just said."

"I told them I wasn't ready for the people world."

"What are you talking about?" I said.

"The fucking clusterfuck is what I'm fucking talking about."

Dietz froze for a moment, then broke into a dead run out of the room. Ferguson locked the door behind him.

"I'm sorry, sir," he said, "I thought he was a friend of the deceased."

"It's okay."

"If I'd known he was going to pull a stunt like that I would have booked him a seat on the pain train."

"You?"

"I used to be a jockey," said Ferguson. "It's all just in the knees. You should see what I can do to a coconut."

"Do you need money?" Fiona asked me on the cab ride home. "How much was the cup?"

"It's called an urn," I said. "Who was that guy?"

"Forget him," said Fiona. "Probably busted out of some psych ward. Where'd you get the cake for the urn?"

"Cake? You sound like a venture capitalist with a coke habit."

"I was dating one for a while. During the boom."

"I don't want to hear about it."

"Of course you don't. Look, it's not my fault I had an early puberty. I didn't put the hormones in the milk supply."

"Can't I just not hear about it?"

"Here you are not hearing about it. Happy?"

"Within parameters," I said.

"So?"

"Cudahy had some cake on him. I used most of it for the cup."

"I can borrow from Mom."

"I wouldn't hear of it."

"William's loaded."

"William fulfills."

"I'm serious."

"I'm sure you are. Why don't I just move in with them?"

"I'll ask."

"I'm kidding."

"I'm not. Daddy, you're very sick. You need people around."

"What about you? I thought you were going to take care of me."

"I'm in a weird transitional place, right now. I don't think my presence would be good for either one of us. I need space to work it all through."

"Work what through?"

"My hatred for you."

"You hate me?"

"I didn't say that," said my daughter, diddled her pock.

I sat up the night with Cudahy's vodka, his videotapes. Shoot-outs, showdowns, duels in the sun. Frontier dust and destiny. No transitional spaces or places. Nothing to work through. Draw. Slap leather. Fill your hand. Cudahy believed in that kind of clarity.

Never could myself.

When Fiona was born I worried about the bills, my paternal deficiencies, my potential usurpation in the eyeshine of my wife.

"You are blessed," said Cudahy.

When I made team leader I grew furtive, paranoid, teased out every encounter for portents of sedition.

"Relax," said Cudahy, "you're a winner."

When Maryse left me, Cudahy drank to her riddance. Then he drank a shitload more and confessed to having loved her and even licking her ear one Thanksgiving while she tested the yams with a fork.

"There was a negligible amount of ass play, too," he said.

The truth was I knew all about it, but I let Cudahy confess and I forgave him. Forgiveness, like sin, is maybe just a matter of dwindling alternatives. Hell, it was only an ear, some ass, and Cudahy was no William, either.

We ended the evening of his confession in a bear hug under boulevard lights. Maybe we were both thinking of our fathers there in our boozy embrace.

This last we didn't discuss.

I cried for the both of us now, big vodka weeps. I draped myself in Cudahy's track suit, those Valhallan warm-up duds, fell asleep while a bearded coot on the tube paid out a mine shaft fuse.

"This'll fix 'em," the coot cackled.

I dreamed I was the dialogue coach at the mine shaft location.

"No, really cackle it," I instructed the coot.

Later I dreamed my body had become a kind of cavern, too. Gypsy moths fluttered by the hundreds in my obsidian belly, drove clouds of wing dust up my stone throat.

Cudahy's dream likeness walked across the black pools and guano mounds of me. He had a gold Zippo, a can of my mother's HairNet spray. Wild gouts of fire rippled from his hands.

"Relax," said Cudahy. "You're a goner."

I woke up and reached for a water glass. The coaster beneath it unfolded, effloresced, a time-lapse flower.

Do you number among the Infortunate?

Did I number?

I numbered.

I dialed right down.

The driver of the van said his name was Old Gold. He was a hairy kid with big crooked hands. Stuck on, those hands looked, maybe just for our drive. The van appeared to be a patch job, too. Mismatched doors, a yard-sale grille, a gummy coat of grayish paint. Bucket seats were bolted down where a banquette must have been. There wasn't much else. Stacks of blankets, some clementine crates. The floor was rotted through in places. You could look between your shoes, see bits of road.

"Thanks for the ride," I said.

Old Gold said nothing, aimed us toward the tunnel mouth. These ancient gullets under the river tended to unnerve me. Too much speed for a burrow-lover. No warm dirt. I longed for the peace of an upward grade, us spit back to surface air, countryside, the towns. The van bucked through the greasy-tiled tube. Sandhogs, those were the men who built these things. I'd seen shows on the history station. Some got buried under bad walls with their bologna sandwiches. Progress, the crime. Progress, the cable premiere.

"Think she'll hold up?" I said.

"Who's that?"

"This baby," I said, patted the steering column.

"No touch," said Old Gold. "No touches."

"Sorry," I said.

We eased up into daylight and I noticed thin starbursts of scarring along his eyebrow, the near hinge of his jaw.

"Are you a boxer?" I said.

"When I was a kid," said Old Gold, "my father nailed an oak board up on the kitchen door. We had to hit it ninety-eight times with each hand before supper."

"Ninety-eight?"

"A hundred, I think the lesson would have been lost on us."

"I think I understand."

"I fought Clellon Beach once."

"Never heard of him."

"You were never in the Navy."

"That's true," I said.

"I knew it was true when I said it," said Old Gold. "I don't need your affirmation. I've been mothered by fire."

"What?"

"Nothing," said Old Gold.

We drove north in new silence. Factories into farmland into forests, forest towns. We made a pit stop near a place called Mapesburg. Old Gold bought gasoline and a twin-pack of cupcakes, laboratory pink.

"You're not a veganite, are you?" he said.

"A what?"

"Because these, I believe, originate in Alabama. You know, hydrogenated."

"These are fine," I said.

"Oh," said Old Gold. "You're one of those."

"One of what?"

"Fine, fine. Everything's fine, dear. No, trust me, I'm fine."

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

"So, you're an I-have-no-idea guy, too. Not an uncommon combo, come to think of it."

"Hey," I said. "Cut it out. This is crazy."

"You want to know what's crazy?" said Old Gold. "Climbing into the ring with Clellon Beach. That's fucking crazy."

He threw the van into gear, gunned into good, easy speed. I felt strangely calm. I'd always been a gifted passenger. Bliss in my boyhood had been the backseat, that foliate blur, the folds of my father's neck, the way my mother, our "navigator," twisted around with her maps and her snack mix, lowered each sodium-enhanced doodad into my hand with the gravity of ancient rite.

Our family had a tradition of bleak getaways. We were always lighting out for some cold rocky coast. My father would walk out on a seawall, stand there with his arms crossed in what I took to be the existential defiance of certain dust jacket photographs. He worked for a home appliance company, wrote and edited operating manuals for juicers and drills and electric ranges, so a more gloried relation to the word might have been on his mind. Or maybe he was mulling a plunge, icy respite from life's dips and dives. Eventually he'd amble-even haunted he was one of the few legitimate amblers I've ever known-back to where my mother and I shivered on a tartan blanket, her conjuring the tidal chop in charcoal on a window-sized sketch pad.

"All my pretty ones," my father would say. "Fuckeroo'd."

I'd laugh. It was a funny word.

"Fuckeroo'd," he'd say again, and it wasn't that funny anymore.

Maybe the man had a feeling for the coming whammies. Like my mother falling in love with his cousin Manny, a guy who tended to brag about his Caddie's "nigger-locks," and her moving out to Arizona to help him run a profitable vanity press, lending her editorial hand to such titles as Tao Jones: A Poem Cycle and Favorite Recipes from the Mossad.

It wasn't just that she'd ditched him for his kin, either. Worse for my father, I think, whose mightiest praise was contained in the word "pro"-"You know, that paperboy, the Mickelson kid, he's a real pro"-she and Manny were now at the service of the amateurs, the no-talent fatheads with money to burn.

"Manny's never even read a fucking book," said my father. "Now he makes them."

"Hey," I said, home from school for the weekend, "the Wright Brothers never flew until they built a plane."

"Your flip college-boy remarks aren't helping," said my father. "I'm in a lake of fire here."

Still, my mother was my mother. I couldn't just forget all the hugs, the kisses, the granola and caramels. I took no sides over the years, or, rather, took both sides for whatever gain there was for a grown man. A few times I flew out to Phoenix with Fiona and we'd all sip fresh lemonade by the swimming pool.

"Your father hates me," my mother said once. "It's eating him up, I can tell. It's terrible. He needs to move on. Honey, if Maryse ever leaves you, remember to move on. Don't let it eat you up."

"I'll take care of him, Grandma," said Fiona.

"Do you people know something I don't?" I said.

"Hypothetical," said my mother.

"Just a scenario," said Fiona.

This mother and daughter were like sisters sometimes, doting on each other, turning on each other, teaming up. It was quite a thing to see. When that desert sun got in my mother's eyes and she did a head-on with an oil truck, I saw a lot of the light go out of Fiona. Some people get the lesson a little too early.

We flew out for the service, sat by the pool one last time, drank lemonade from a powder mix. Manny had locked himself in his Cadillac. He was hidden, mostly, but we heard his sobs, saw his boat shoes poke up past the dash.

"So, that's it?" said Fiona. "The whole thing's just a pile of random bullshit?"

"Some people," I said, "believe there's a purpose to it all."

"What, you mean like Heaven?"

"Some people," I said.

"Those would be the idiots, right?"

"I was raised to believe that those were the idiots, yes," I said. "But who knows?"

"Not fucking Grandma," said Fiona.

"Nobody can be sure," I said. "Have you ever heard of Pascal's wager? He said you might as well believe in God because if you don't, and God exists, you're screwed."

"Is that in the Pensees?"

"The what?" I said.

"He sounds like a chickenshit," said Fiona.

My father lost his mind with grief for the wife he'd already lost. Then he found another wife. I guess I wasn't as welcoming to Wilhelmina as I could have been. Maybe I begrudged him his new stab at happiness. I'd gotten used to the shell of the man and didn't necessarily wish the man back. It all came to some kind of head, though I can't quite remember what kind. I do recall my father's hand on my neck and a sliver of boiled leek on his lip. It's that father-son stuff. So much moist, fierce quivering muddies the picture sometimes.

My father moved to Pittsburgh with Winnie and now I got cards in the card seasons, snapshots of his duplex, his new felonious brood. Sometimes Fiona would visit him, file reports.

"He's deeply involved with a pen nib collector's club," she told me once. "The club has religious overtones but he won't reveal them. His sons-these would be my uncles, I gather-drop cinder blocks from highway overpasses. Winnie, as you know, is much younger, Amway pretty. She told me I was a winter girl in autumn colors."

"Dad," I said. "Oh, Dad."

"That's just what I always say," said Fiona.

"Feels good, right?"

I hadn't told my father I was dying. I was afraid he'd say what he always said by the seawall.

"My dad didn't have anything like a punching board," I said to Old Gold now. "He tried to make me tough in other ways."

"Funny, I don't remember inviting you to compare our childhoods. Anyway, there's nothing to compare. I've been mothered by fire."

"Why do you keep saying that?" I said.

"Bears repeated repetition."

I looked out the window, watched the world unspool. Guardrails, guardrail rivets, mile markers, thruway kill. We were in high country and I was glad of it, patches of spruce and plowed fields in the valley below us, dark hills ahead. Up here, all this majesty, maybe you could just convince your flesh to reconsider.

I took out the brochure for the Center for Nondenominational Recovery and Redemption. The man who'd answered the phone the day before had been rather brusque. I heard wet noises, the snap of form-fitting rubber.

"Director here," he said.

We made vapid talk about upstate counties. Mostly I just listened to his voice. He had a good one, easy, kind of reedy, like a talk show host people go out of their way to persuade you is smart. I started to trust it, that voice, trust him. I wanted to fill up the void with my trust.

"Look," I said. "I don't know who you are or what you do, but I won't beat around the bush. You say you have the cure. If it's rat guts under my armpits, I'm willing to give it a whirl. Crystals and chanting, praying, tonal healing, whatever it is, I'll do it. I've read your brochure, and I've got to say, in my best days I'd be laughing my ass off. But things are a little different now. Good old Western know-how seems to have shit the bed. Everyone says I'm a goner but no one can tell me why. So, now, I ask you, a total stranger, what should I do? Tell me. Please. Consider me your willing victim."

"I think you have the wrong number."

"Is this Heinrich?"

"This is the director."

"May I speak to Heinrich?"

"You are speaking to Heinrich. You are doing nothing else but speaking to Heinrich."

"You wrote me a note."

"Yes, I did. I saw you on the E.T.E."

"The what?"

"The electronic thought eliminator."

"The electronic-"

"The television."

"You wrote me a note. Someone brought it to my house."

"That would be Naperton."

"Okay, Naperton brought the note. All I know is that you said you had the cure. I've got it right here. 'I have the cure.-H.' I deduced that the H stood for Heinrich."

"Wonderful deduction," said Heinrich. "You really are a wonderful deducer."

"I'll let that slide," I said.

"Of course you will."

"How about we get real for a minute," I said.

"I'd advise against that."

"What's the cure, Doc?" I said.

"I'm sorry," said Heinrich. "But I'm not a doctor, and, as I may have stated earlier, you have the wrong number. You seem to be in search of a miracle. I don't traffic in miracles. And I don't associate with victims."

"Then what do you do, if I may be so bold as to ask?"

"Bold? Don't be ridiculous. All I'm sensing from you is a man who doesn't want to die. That's the deadliest condition of all."

"I've had my fill of philosophers," I said. "I guess you're right, I do have the wrong number. I thought you wanted to help."

We hung there for a while.

"Wait," said Heinrich, finally. "It's not your fault you're so faulty."

"Thanks for that."

"There'll be a supply van coming back to the Center from the city tomorrow. You can catch a ride."

"How much is this going to cost me?" I said.

"Cost you?" said Heinrich. "Why, everything."

"Maybe I should tell you now, I'm broke."

"I understand," said Heinrich. "It's not a problem. Money helps, but it's not a requirement. I'm talking about everything else."

"Sounds like you've got a cult up there."

"Everything's a cult, son. If it's not a cult it's a man sitting alone in a room."

"And in return I get cured?"

"Possibly. Or perhaps what you get is a brief moment of recognition before you pass into nothingness, which technically one cannot really pass into, it being a nonstate, but which I phrase this way for practical reasons."

"Given a choice, I'll take the cure," I said.

"Given a choice, he says," said Heinrich.

Now the sun was just another money shot behind the mountain tops. Old Gold bore down on the wheel.

"I hate twilight," he said.

"How long have you been at the Center?" I said.

"Three years. I'm in the 'Lives' part of the Tenets, even. 'Old Gold Speaks.' Wrote it myself, except for the spelling. Estelle did the spelling."

"Three years," I said. "Long time."

"Is it? I wouldn't know. I know that if I blink I'll miss infinity."

"That's deep," I said.

"Mothering fire'll melt the smartass right off of you," said Old Gold.

"Can't wait. So, do you know Heinrich well?"

"I know him."

"What's he like?"

"Clementines."

"Excuse me?"

"He likes clementines."

It must have been near midnight when we hooked hard onto a gravel road. It had begun to rain and Old Gold hit the high beams, hacked the liquid dark.

"Almost home."

We drove up to a metal gate. A man in a wet suit fiddled with some padlocks. Old Gold rolled the window down.

"Brother Bob," he said. "At it again, huh?"

The man held up his hand.

"Might as well cut the bitch off," he said.

We drove on through the compound, pulled over by a rain-rotted cabin.

"This is you," said Old Gold.

"You sure?"

"The Virgin Suite."

The cabin was dry, lit low with a Coleman lantern. An old stove stood in the middle of the room, kindling in a basket beside it. Part of the cabin seemed claimed, the bedsheets mussed, boots and socks stuffed under the cot. Candle wax puddled thick on a card table, and on a notebook open to a blank page. A piece of hemp rope dangled down from a rafter beam.

My end of things was fairly bare. A blanket, a bath towel, a cot, a moldy bedroll with a book wedged in the twine. There was a note in the book, scrawled on a swatch of grocer's paper. The only cure is the cure.-H. I balled up the note. Cutesy tautologies would herewith be tossed beneath the cot. Now I took up the book, a dark hardback with embossed lettering: The Principles and Tenets of Nondenominational Recovery and Redemption, by Heinrich of Newark.

It was some sort of compendium of community rules-numerated, bulleted, with footnotes, appendices. Towards the back was a section called "Lives Lived and Redeemed," a brief table of contents: "The Ballad of Estelle Burke," "Dietz Versus Dietz," "Notes on Naperton." I flipped ahead to a chapter called "Old Gold Speaks":

Listen, I fought Clellon Beach in a Navy smoker and I can tell you that man was a huge fucking killer. It's a wonder I didn't die from his blows. Before Clellon I was just your average country Jewboy with tough hands from hitting the kitchen board and not thinking of all the things my daddy did to me mentally and on the physical side to prepare me for the world, but what world? His world? He had a sick one. When Clellon did up my skull the way he did with the quickest combos you've ever seen, or really that you've never seen (they were that quick), I spent a month in the base infirmary hooked to the life machines and it was here that all the poison gas seeped out of the safe part of my brain and poisoned me up through to the gills. I was a walking time explosion even before I could even walk again. Then I read this book (well, probably not the very copy you're holding) and I found in The Director's words something to live up to for. I went then to embark on my pupilage under him and have gone through the phases of awareness and have been mothered by fire and have delivered myself unto myself and I am a hero and a cloudwalker and I don't blame Clellon for my bad lives but he's a hero, too, and someday there will have to be a reckoning of us because that is the lost way of men and women from back in the age of continuum. Oh, and Old Gold was my Navy nickname only. My real name is Avram Cole Younger Gold."

Cloudwalkers? Continuum? This was the cure? I dimmed the Coleman down, stretched out on the cot, awaited my symptoms, what I now considered my symptoms. They tended to muster at night, those nervy shoots and shudders I used to figure for the natural rot of me.

I'd had a cancerous aunt who went to Guam for a medical miracle-it's how I knew about the rat guts-and she came back flush with remission. She died the next spring but I'm pretty sure her excursion bought her another season of precious decay. Maybe the difference was that they knew what was killing her. Me, I was dying of something no one had ever died of before.

Maybe Heinrich could name it.

Or at least write a new section of the Tenets called "Lives Lost."

Now I did something I hadn't done in a while. It felt good in my hand, throbbed there like some wounded bird you've just found in the woods. I cast Greta and Clarice in a stroke number based on material from another medium, pictured jets of gaudy lady juices piped out of Vegas fountains. Jennifer Applebaum, whose solitary nipple hair had enslaved my senses for a year of junior high, appeared now unbidden in a fur stole. Even Maryse had a caustic winning walk-on.

Harem arrayed, I came like Xerxes back from giving it to the Greeks. I let what spilled dry to a new skin on my fingers, fell off into a dream about figs.

"Somebody got some."

The man from the gate sat on the far cot in a paisley robe and a watchman's cap. He looked my age, a little younger. Boyish, worn by the linger of his boyishness. He pointed oddly at me now. It seemed I'd kicked away my blanket in the night. My pants were at my knees, my hand doing make-work down past my belly, some idle, half-asleep flippering.

"Bachelor habits," I said.

"Me," said the man, "I'll lie in bed, do it all day. Won't get up till the dinner bell. Then I get disgusted with my regression and I must impose strictures. Sign up for extra chores. Won't touch myself even to wash it. I'm Bobby. Bobby Trubate. The real one. Actual size."

"Glad to meet you," I said.

"You'd be Steve," said Trubate.

"That's not really my name," I said.

Trubate set his cap on the pillow, felt with his fingers along his skull.

"Ever take your hat off but then it feels like it's still on?"

"Nerve endings," I said.

"You a nervologist? What if it's some supernatural force pushing down on my head? Something your science can't explain."

"Anything's possible," I said.

"Oh, you think so?"

"Within parameters."

"Well, I guess it's my duty to welcome you to the land of the Infortunate. Come on, it's almost time for First Calling."

Trubate led me out into the mudshine, the morning. We walked past a row of cabins thrown up on either side of the rutted track. The walls were rough timber with some patches of plywood, tin. The compound stood partway up the mountain on a terraced clear. Below us, where the forest steepened to the valley floor, buildings sloped down both banks of a river, near a high steel bridge.

"That's Pangburn Falls," said Trubate. "The de facto town. Some of the old-timers used to go down to Pangburn, but not since Wendell died. Have you read 'The Wanderer Wendell' yet?"

"No."

"An inspiring text."

"I didn't see anything about a Wendell in that book," I said. "Or you."

"I haven't earned canonization just yet. I'm only in the early middle phases of continuum awareness. I haven't been mothered by fire. But I'm taking notes. I want my Life to be stylistically innovative. Like my work on the silver screen."

"I'm sorry," I said, "I'm not familiar with your work."

"Sure you are," said Trubate.

"I don't think so."

"You've seen me a million times. The junkie, the junkie car jacker, the corrupt senator's junkie son. I do them all. 'Who was that guy?' you wondered. 'He's good.' I'm that guy. I am good. I'm a fucking craftsman."

"I don't get to the movies much," I said.

"Yeah, you go read to the blind every night."

"I've done that."

"Sick fuck."

"What are you talking about?"

"You think they want to be reminded?"

Now the track curved down a bit.

"There's the dining hall," said Trubate, nodded down the hill at a clapboard building the size of a country church. "The chicks sleep in that wing sticking off."

"I didn't know there were any," I said.

"It's mostly dudes up here. It used to be all-dude. Because of our increasingly chick-run society and all. But Heinrich had an epiphany on that, so now there are exceptions. That's his crib, by the way, right down there."

Near the dining hall was another cabin, the only one I'd seen with a porch.

"Who built this stuff?" I said.

"Read the Tenets. Over there are the barns. We have a bunch of milking cows. Naperton runs the farm. We make a damn tasty organic cheese spread. Sell it down in the city. Have you ever put your hand in a newborn calf's mouth? It's amazing. Sensuous, yes. Erotic, sure. But not dirty. Not at all. And up there through the hill trail is the mothering hut. I wouldn't worry about that now. Your time will come. We're all very excited about the project."

"What project?"

"Sorry, that's the old me talking."

"I don't see the fence," I said. "Where's the fence?"

"What fence?"

"You were there last night. At the gate. With a lock."

"Yes, I was. I signed up for gate duty last week. Penance, I guess. Not that I'm religious, just a fucking pig."

"So," I said, "if there's a lock, and a gate, where's the fence?"

"Why in the world would there be a fence? We're not convicts."

"But there's a gate."

"You've got to have a gate. What else are you going to arrive through?"

Down below us the dining hall door skidded open. People made their way across the lawn to Heinrich's porch. We jogged down the slope to join them, fell in with Old Gold. Nearby a woman and a teenage boy who shared enough odd jut of nose and jaw to pass as mother and son talked heatedly. Others poured in now from all parts of the compound, some limping, some severely bent. The Infortunate seemed to specialize in warped bones and voided stares. They rolled out straw mats on the grass or just squatted there, diddling the moss, decapitating dandelions, muttering at the sky. A man in a derby kneaded the neck of a young woman in a wheelchair. She was fat and beautiful with a swoop of henna'd hair. The man caught me staring, tipped his hat brim up. I saw the berry-colored stain on his cheek.

"Dietz," I called to him.

He looked at me darkly.

"Dietz," I said. "Do you remember the message?"

"Who's that?" the woman asked him.

"A people," said Dietz. "A people who needs to relax."

"How's the clusterfuck?" I called.

"Cool it," said Trubate, slung me toward a patch of grass.

Now the porch door swung open and a man in a hunter's vest angled up to the rail.

"Naperton," I whispered.

"You know him, too?"

"He knows me."

Naperton drummed his clipboard, peered up at the sky.

"Good morning, morning!" he said.

"Good afternoon!" said the gathering. They spoke as one in a somewhat feverish singsong. Here and there, perhaps, were hints of sedition, or at least drill-weariness, but most of the Infortunate sounded sincerely joyful, near exultant, insane.

"Evening is upon us somewhere!" said Naperton.

"Good morning, evening!"

"The past is before us!"

"We're coming, past!"

"The future is gone!"

"Fare thee well, future!"

"Now is. ."

"Now!"

"Now is. ."

"Now!"

"Iam. ."

"Me!"

"Iam. ."

"Me!"

"And who are you?" called Naperton, pointed out to the crowd.

"I am me, me am I!"

Old Gold jammed his head into the earth, jerked himself up into some kind of ecstatic teeter. He stabbed out his hands and made banshee noises. Some clapped in time to his spasms, his war whoops. It was hard to tell if this was encouraged. Others pinched their eyes and puled. Dietz looked out from beneath his hat with an expression of bored expertise. Trubate rocked beside me, rapt. Old Gold tipped back to the grass, sunlit beads of spittle on his lips.

"I am me," he said. "Me am I. I ma me. I me ma. I ma me ma I."

"Well done!" called a voice.

There was a new man at the rail. He had hair of wavy silver, thick country arms, wore dungarees, a dirty dress shirt. He looked like a midwestern math teacher, a professor with a hobby garden. I knew at once it was Heinrich. Some calm of the high ordinary pulsed out of him, soft, metronomic, a charisma of reduced noise.

"People," he said quietly now, "I have something to impart to you. A fable, if you will. It concerns a lonely zookeeper and the beautiful, fiercesome tigress who fell into his charge. When I say lonely I mean lonely, okay? The zookeeper, I mean. So picture it, an anonymous little fellow, no friends, no family, no love. Nothing. Picture a poor little man whose most intimate conversations take place over cash registers, at salad bars, or in the bathroom mirror. Are you picturing it? It's important that you picture it. This is what we call in the biz guided imagery. It's still very big in the biz right now, this guided imagery thing. So, picture it, okay? Loneliness. Loneliness of the unrelenting variety. Understand, I'm telling you all this not to embarrass this man, who exists only on the plane of parable, anyway, but rather in what you would have to grant is an honest go at character development. Because I believe in character development. People, you should never consider me not in agreement with the idea of character-driven image-guided parable. But we're off the beaten track, here, really. We're far afield the ground-down path. What I want you to picture, really, for parable's sake, is this lonely zookeeper whose only companion is the beautiful and fiercesome tigress who has fallen into his charge. Because, and this is important, the motherfucker couldn't take his eyes off that cat. Motherfucker was in love with that stripey bitch. Unnatural? Okay, sure, unnatural. I don't even know what natural is, people. Not in this world. And I sure as hell am not going to lay a moral trip on you. Oh, I know, morality is so important these days. Our society, it's fracturing and fissuring and fragmenting and all the other f-words, too, all because of a lack of moral structure. Well, not on this mountain, people. You want slave morality, that's the next mountain over. This is Mount Redemption. This is my fucking mountain. Got it? Good. So, let's get back to our regularly scheduled parable. When last we left, our lonely zookeeper was lusting for the tigress who'd fallen into his charge. And let me tell you something, a lust like this makes room for calculation. So one night he shoots her with a tranquilizer gun and climbs into her cage. He gets down and holds her drugged-up head in his arms, kisses her, whispers in her ear, works himself up into a lather, a slaver. Do you like slaver better? Let me know. Drop your suggestions in the suggestion box. But in the meantime, listen to me. This zookeeper. He unzips his trousers, dig? He whips it out. He whips it out and does the deed. The deed. He does it. Dig?"

"We dig," called Old Gold.

"Okay, then," said Heinrich, his voice rising. "Deed done, the zookeeper sets his watch alarm to coincide with the duration of the sedative and snuggles up beside the cat. He sleeps a sleep he has never known before. A golden sort of sleep, the deep, dreamless slumber of the unvanquished. Unvanquished, as in yet-to-be-vanquished. Am I laying it on too thick? Maybe I'm laying it on too thick. But when, tell me people, when is it ever really thick enough? I've never once seen it thick enough. It's always too thin, isn't it? Too damn thin.

"Anyway, back to our sympathetic bestialist. Because a story like this depends on sympathy, so I advise you all to sympathize. Or empathize. Which is more sympathetic. Back to the zookeeper's frequent and clandestine mountings. Back to the unvanquished thickness of our golden empathy and the zookeeper's feline humps. Repeat once nightly for, oh, a week.

"So one evening the zookeeper is thrashed awake by the newly roused tigress, who lets loose a howl that could serrate the stars. You like that? Serrate the stars? I made that up. That's not in the original parable. But that's how these things work. Thousands of years of revision, refinement. I'm storytelling, here. We're gathered around the cookfire here. Fire, man. Pretty fucking exciting. Now the tigress, she howls, she leaps, and the zookeeper, he just barely rolls away from her wet snapping jaws, wriggles himself out of the cage. Just barely. Witness the zookeeper, bruised but intact. Intact, but scared out of his mind. Picture scared, people. Picture load-in-your-skivvies scared. Visualize, visualize.

"Whew! Can you say that, people? Whew? You can bet your ass the zookeeper said it. Whew!

"Never again, he vows. Never again. But the next day, hosing down her cage, she appears to him almost coy, lazing there in the afternoon heat, and it seems to him that with those sultry squints of her tigress eyes, those drowsy paw strokes on her smooth belly, that sexy way her feline spittle ropes out of her mouth, maybe she's. . well, it's just a hunch, but maybe, I mean couldn't she actually be acknowledging their tryst, or, can you believe it, assenting to it! Why not? thinks the zookeeper, which I say for the sake of fable, for in truth no man can say for sure what another thinks, especially someone who doesn't exist. Still, hell, why not? Their love is forbidden in her kingdom too, right? It's probably just as thrilling.

"The zookeeper, however, is not unwary, so that night he returns to her cage door with a double dose of cat tranks locked and loaded. He draws a bead on her exquisite rump, but finds himself unable to pull the trigger. He shudders to imagine the shock of the needle piercing her hide. He dreads that baleful look on her face as the chemicals creep through her system and shut her down in stages.

"We are lovers now, thinks the zookeeper, we have built a trust. Or at least a tryst. So Zoo-man tosses the gun away and strips off his uniform, enters the cage armed only with his otherworldly tumescence. Do you all know what a tumescence is?"

"A tumessens!" called Old Gold. "That's a boner!"

"Nothing but, young Avram," said Heinrich. "Nothing but. So here we got Mr. Lonely Zoo-man with his parable-derived, parabolic boner looking down on the object of his love, the winsome, ferocity-graced tigress.

"Come to Daddy, zookeeper coos.

"But does Tigress come to Daddy? Does Tigress bend to Daddy's whim? Fuck no! Tigress leaps! Tigress pounces! Bitch munches him up!

"And as the zookeeper lies bleeding to death, he sees it, his tumessens, if you will, now a pale tiny thing pinched in his pawed lover's maw.

" 'Why?' moans the zookeeper. But as he twitches there in the corner of the cage, he remembers another ancient and oft-cited ditty about a frog and a scorpion and a not dissimilar breach of trust, and suddenly he knows perfectly well why."

"It's a fable within a fable!" said Old Gold.

"Avram Cole Younger Gold, we have college boys here who aren't as sharp as you. You're damn right. Fables within fables. Wheels within wheels. Such is the way to wisdom. And to madness. But back to our story. The zookeeper remembers this other little number about a frog and a scorpion, or a tarantula and newt, or a salamander, it doesn't matter. And the zookeeper, now in his pulped puppety death throes, now in what the Teutons might call der Todeskampf, the zookeeper says, 'I understand, my love, I understand, I know why you did this. It's because you're a tiger. That's why, right?'

"Now the big cat leers at him, her flat eyes coins of a darker realm. You like that? Coins of a darker realm? I'm still tweaking that. But anyway, the tigress she looks at him, this dying zookeeper, she levels her leveling gaze at him.

"'Listen, punk,' she says, 'the fact that I'm a tiger's got nothing to do with it. It's just that you got stingy with the good stuff.' "

I laughed. It was hard to tell if it was okay to laugh. I guess it wasn't okay.

"People," said Heinrich, "I want to welcome a newcomer among us. His name is Steve. Get up, Steve."

"I'm Steve," I said, and stood.

I waited for welcome, for hugs, finger gongs.

Nobody said a word.

"I'm Steve," I said. "Provisionally, I'm Steve, and I'm dying of something. Nobody knows what it is, but it's killing me. I don't want to die. That's about it. Thanks."

"Sit, Steve," said Heinrich.

Trubate tugged me to the ground.

"Seen worse," he whispered.

"There you have it," said Heinrich. "Provisionally Steve. A provisional man afraid to confront the truth. Pretty damn pathetic, ask me."

"Hey!" I said.

"Hey, what?"

"Where do you get off with this shit?"

"The question is," said Heinrich, "where do you get on? Or here's another: who are you?"

"I am me," I said, approximating Old Gold's quaver.

"Not yet, you're not. You're not shit."

I barely took in the rest of the meeting, my first First Calling. There was something said about illicit speech acts in the trance pasture, a tentative scheduling of the next cheese run, a note or two about revisions to the chore board. A kid named Lem, the one I'd seen bickering with his mother, was singled out for various community infractions. Heinrich passed a sentence upon him which I did not understand. Others shuddered. I started to wonder if I'd made a major mistake. I'd read about places like this in my father's stroke books, back in the grand old days of investigative porn. Depressed kid joins up with a guru, empties his checking account, splits for parts unknown. Feds find him chunked for canning in a mackerel plant. Friends note he was always kind of a follower. "Fuckeroo'd," says his father, Vice President of the Nibs of Nod.

Heinrich didn't end the meeting so much as abandon it, wander back into the porch shade. The gathering sat for a while, silent, like an audience savvy to the possibility of a trick ending. Then, in staggered waves of bravery, or boredom, they stood.

Lem's mother took my arm.

"I'm Estelle Burke," she said.

"But are you you?" I said.

"Don't take it so hard. When I was a little girl in ballet school the teacher was always toughest on the most promising students."

"Is that where you learned not to take it so hard?"

"I never learned," said Estelle. "I wasn't promising."

"Your boy seems to have gotten himself into some trouble," I said.

"Heinrich is Lem's father. Spiritually speaking, of course. He'd never do anything to harm Lem. Or me. I don't care what he says at First Calling."

"Bark is worse than his bite?"

"This has nothing to do with dogs," said Estelle.

"It's a saying," I said.

"Sayings say nothing," she said.

We crossed the lawn to the dining hall. Sun spilled down on long pine tables. Some morose-looking sorts were busing breakfast trays.

"Can I get some food?" I said.

"You'll have to ask Parish."

"Where's Parish?"

"I was expecting who's Parish."

"I'm on the quite-fucking-hungry side."

"You've been assigned to kitchen duty."

"Kitchen duty? I'm a sick man."

"Take a number."

"I'm not kidding."

"Who's kidding? Chores are sacred."

"What?"

"Read the Tenets."

"Everyone's really recommending that book," I said.

Parish the cook explained patiently that a missed meal was a meal missed. It was a fascinating theory. He was a hard little potato of a man in a tight pink T-shirt that read: There are no shit jobs, just shit people. His rhinestone-studded tool belt bristled with spatulas and slotted spoons. He pointed to a steel box bolted to the countertop.

"That's your new girlfriend," he said. "Keep her hot and wet and we'll all be happy."

The machine was easy, a push-pull job, just the kind of sweaty rote that maybe makes the doer dream of sickles on the Winter Palace steps, or cocoa-buttered asses in Daytona. I finished in about an hour, numbed by the slosh of water and tin. A steam rash ran from my hips to my neck. I worried it, another symptom. I stood there with my shirt open, clawing the spread.

"It'll go away," said Parish.

He handed me a plate with pita bread, some runny cheese.

"Just this once."

Out in the dining hall I took a table near a great stone hearth. Nailed above it was a double-handed saw, rusted, cracked in the grips. Flat on the mantel beneath it was a copy of the Tenets. I took it down and started to skim:

In the beginning was the bird, rotating me back to the late great forty-eight. After that, more service to the state, Uruguay, El Salvador, Pepsi, Bell. But why bore you with corpses, the assassin's litany? Suffice it to say I was one of those who made you safe and warm and free enough to ruminate upon your pain, an activity formerly restricted to aristocrats, and thus helped you along your poison path. .

And then it came to pass, late in the winter of 1982, that I met Notwithstanding "Notty" Naperton, ex-dairy farmer, in an upstate drunk tank. Upon release we reconvened at Ned's End Tavern for a breakfast of boilermakers, then retired to his room above a hardware emporium to wax incoherent about our disappointments, our regrets, our boats missed and doomed dinghies boarded. We were petty, hateful men and we both saw the world for the meaningless worm farm it was. We wondered what possible reason there could be to perdure. Now at this juncture Naperton confessed his clincher. The only thing that kept him on this earth, he told me, was the fact that an inoperable tumor had been detected in his brain. He was dying and he felt he had no right to intervene. Nonsense, Notty, I told him, we've been stripped of all possible actions save one. Suicide is the only uncompromised gesture left.

Even wasting away from a grapefruit brain is a kind of complicity in the nightmare of life, I argued, not to mention the fact that all variety of scum profit from your illness. Naperton was soon swayed. I, myself, had been contemplating the act for a long time. I'd snuffed enough lives in the employ of democracy to know that any idea of the preciousness of my own was pure affectation. At dawn we drove up to the place you stand now with a pair of pistols, fully intending to vacate our fleshly premises, and with no delusions about tenancy in any afterworld, either. We sat on the forest floor amidst the spruce needles and the pine cones and stared down our respective barrels. I suggested a three-count. Naperton complained that he'd left no suicide note. He had an ex-wife he claimed to still love who deserved explication. I told Naperton that the shape his diseased brain matter took on the tree trunk behind him would serve as ample explication. I commenced my three-count and Naperton let me reach two before he stopped me again. Tears were streaming down his face. "Wait," he said, "what if we lived?" I admonished Naperton to stop delaying the inevitable. I began to grow frustrated, as when certain Honduran activists had resisted my offer of an easy and silent termination. I considered disposing of the three-count altogether, also aware of the possibility that Naperton was in no condition to live up to his end of the bargain. I was about to waste the poor fuck and then attend to my own mortal self-infliction when Naperton's query suddenly struck something deep within me. A chord, I think they call it. "What if we lived?" Such a simple, and yet infinite, question. I looked around, took in the trees, the moss, the fungus nestled in fallen timber. I heard the tittering of birds, the rustle of life in the brush. Everything seemed puny and the puny things true. You could take possession of yourself in the tiny and mindless movements of this earth. You could start all over again. You would have to be birthed anew, without fear, without belief, without state, without civilization. You could be redeemed! Philosophy? Never! The despair of the philosophers was correct, their correctives patently false. I knew then that we would build something here. I laid the gun down and watched Naperton do the same. "Do you feel it?" I said. "Feel what?" said Naperton. "Your tumor," I said, "it's gone." Behold, subsequent diagnostic procedures proved it so!

And later:

dopefiends, drunks, nutjobs, fools, terminal cases, melancholics, paranoiacs, chronic onanists, rapers of pigs, bad poets, etc.: This is your home. We have made for you a home. To live in our home you must forsake all others. This should not be difficult. You would not be here if you were welcome elsewhere, if you flowed without incident or complaint through the global circuitry of want. The world is pain and early death for most, Slurpees for some, wealth and ease for a very few. And as for that business about passing through the eye of a camel, or a needle, or whatever, don't believe it. Even now the elite are developing the right nanotechnology for the job. The Center for Nondenominational Recovery and Redemption was founded by Heinrich of Newark and Notwithstanding Naperton with the belief that the tired and the sick were getting a raw deal in our republic, sent off to the corner with a broken toy called God, or Goddess, or Higher Power, or inner peace. All modes have conspired against you. Take your place among us and deliver yourself unto yourself. We accept all major credit cards.

Now came a page entitled simply "The Tenets."

There is a vast gulf between those who have been mothered by fire and those who have not. Respect said gulf.

Periods in the trance pasture are mandatory.

Chores are sacred, prayers debased.

Televisions, radios, telephones, or any other devices designed for broadcast or communication to or from the given world are expressly forbidden.

God is dead. Godless man is dead.

Violence will be met with decisive violence.

You are you.

To each according to his culpability, from each according to his bleed.

We are spawn of woodland apes. No code has been undone. Neither faith nor reason will deliver us. We must look to the trees.

The given world has already calculated the potential worth of your unhappiness. No country, no religion, no corporation is your friend. No friend is your friend.

Now something damp and tentacled was doing a dance in my hair.

"It's your time to shine," said Parish.

He handed me the mop, pointed to a bucket on wheels. The water stank of some chemist's idea of the woods. I mopped the dining hall, tried to picture a New-and-Improved Pine-Scented Forest. Antibacterial spatterdock was just sprouting near a lake of lye when my eyes began to sting. I went to the kitchen to rinse them, found Parish peeling a kiwi.

"Good job," said Parish. "Don't forget to punch out."

He showed me how, dropped a slice of rye into an Eisenhower-era toaster. We waited for it to pop. There was a corkboard near the door, a spotty hunk of pumpernickel pinned to it.

"The problem," he said, "is that the punch bread rots."

"That would be the problem with punch bread," I said.

I hiked back up the dirt track to my cabin, found Heinrich lying on my cot.

"Power nap?" I said.

His eyes ticked past me toward the rafters.

"See that rope?" he said.

"Noticed it last night."

"Guy name of Wendell. Bunked here for a while. Of course he figured the drop all wrong. Strangled. That's usually how the do-it-yourselfers go. No time to learn the craft."

"Why did he do it?" I said.

"That's the question of a child, Steve, but I'll try to answer it. Wendell was a slave. But half free. The pain is too unbearable for a man like that."

"His family must have been upset."

"We were his family. We were upset."

Heinrich gripped the cot frame, vaulted off it.

"Your bunkmate," he said, "that Bobby. He talks too much. I adore him, but sometimes I worry he will never reach continuum awareness. I'm not worried about you."

"Maybe you should tell me what you're talking about before you decide not to worry."

"It's no big secret, Steve. Just try to remember the one or two moments in your life when fear broke for lunch. Quite a feeling, right? Now imagine feeling that way all the time."

"I don't think I have too much time left to feel anything."

"That's what Naperton thought."

"Behold," I said, "subsequent diagnostic procedures proved it so!"

Heinrich's punch landed somewhere in the vicinity of my liver. Next thing, I was performing a sort of fetal waltz across the floor planks.

Heinrich hovered near the door.

"I'm not saying it's great literature," he said, "but we take the Tenets pretty seriously around here."

I didn't hear him leave.

Dinner that night was some lewd stew I'd watched Parish concoct, undercooked carrots and pulled pork in ooze. I believe he threw some kiwi in there, too.

"All I know," he'd said, "is that there's got to be vat of something at the end of the day. That's all I know and all I need to know."

I served myself from said vat.

"Steve-o," called Bobby Trubate. "Join the kiddie table!"

He was sitting with the woman in the wheelchair I'd seen at First Calling.

"This is Renee," said Trubate.

There was another man at our table, balding, with bad skin, and jowly, I thought, until I noticed the good-sized goiter under his jaw. He'd outfitted himself as some kind of eighteenth-century European infantryman, down to the britches and boots, the leather cartridge box.

"That's DaShawn," said Trubate. "He's a Jackson White."

"I told you," said DaShawn, "I don't approve of that term."

I leaned in to Renee, pointed to where Dietz sat with Heinrich near the hearth.

"Your boyfriend banish you?" I said.

"My boyfriend?" she said. "Fuck you."

"She bites," said Trubate. "But does she swallow?"

"Fuck you, too, Bobby. Mr. Hollywood."

"Fuck Hollywood," said Trubate. "I'm not Hollywood."

"Let me try again," I said to Renee. "I'm-"

"Please don't try again. I know who you are, and this isn't some fucking singles retreat."

"Renee is muy sensitivo," said Trubate. "She knows guys like to hit on her because they think she's easy and they figure they're saints for doing it. And they can't help but wonder what it's like to ball a hot gimp. Hell, I wonder."

"You've really got me all figured out, Bob," said Renee. "I'm so lucky to have a spokesman like you. Explaining my predicament can be so exhausting."

"See, she's touchy," said Trubate.

"She's right," I said.

"She's about to puke," said Renee, rolled off with her stew bowl in her lap. We watched her bump a nearby table, swivel, swear.

"They don't want your pity," said DaShawn. "They want ramps."

"She wants tunnels," said Trubate. "Wet warm ones."

"What?"

"Let's just say she's leased some serious property on the Island of Lesbos."

"Renee's gay," said DaShawn.

"Go ahead, use the clinical term," said Trubate.

"What's it to you?" I said.

"Oh, it's a lot to me," said Trubate. "What, are you some kind of tolerance cop? Look, guys want to fuck each other, that's cool with me. That's the Socratic Method, for God's sake. But chick on chick? I find that exclusionary."

"Exclusionary of you."

"Dude, obvo."

"DaShawn," I said, "where are you from?"

The lance corporal looked up.

"The Ramapo Mountains."

"Is that how they dress up there?"

"This is a replica of the uniform worn by Hessian mercenaries during your colonial war."

"My war?"

"I don't think the Founding Fathers had my kind in mind when they penned their immortal words of liberty. We descend from a mixed breed of runaway slaves, Indians, and Hessian deserters. All enemies of your glorious republic."

"I don't remember signing anything," I said.

"He's the only Jackson White that ever went to college," said Trubate. "The rest of them live in little shit shacks with broken antennas on top."

"I'm not white and my name's not Jackson," said DaShawn. "They're cable-ready up there now."

"What brought you to the Center?" I said.

"What brings any of us?" he said.

"I'm here for a cure."

"DaShawn's here for that fucking egg on his neck."

"Grave's disease?" I said.

"Who doesn't have that?" said Bobby Trubate.

"We're working on my thyroid," said DaShawn. "Among other things."

"Good luck, pal," said Trubate.

"Cease transmission of negative ionic force, please," said DaShawn.

"He says that sometimes," said Trubate.

"I'm saying it now," said DaShawn, and stood, made for the bus cart with his plate.

"Why be such a pussy?" Trubate called after him. "You're already ugly and fucking insane. Why add to your problems?"

"You have such a way with people," I said to Trubate.

"I'm a truth-teller. That's how I ended up here."

"Just that?"

"Well, the speedballs, too. Don't you read the trades?"

"Not your trades."

"Right, I forgot. You're pretending I'm not a celebrity. Well, doesn't matter. I've been in and out of lots of joints. My problem is the enormity of my talent. My manager suggested this place. Saw an ad somewhere. I haven't heard from him since. Good riddance, though. I'm into deep meaning now. Like I'd ever bother to do television again. Unless it was quality television."

Someone was tapping a water glass. I thought of all the flatware and silverware out here tonight I'd be on intimate terms with in the morning. Parish had been full of huzzahs for my hose work, said I possessed an intuitive form of the bubble dancer ethos: let no dirty or dirty-seeming thing pass through. Now the tapping got louder and the room hushed down. Heinrich rose before the hearth.

"People of recovery and redemption," he said, "I hope I speak for all of us when I say to our brother Parish in the kitchen, with regard to our fare tonight, well done, well done! But now we must move on to graver concerns, namely the execution of our sentence upon young Lem Burke for crimes against the community and egregious violations of the Tenets. Lemuel, if you will."

The boy stood.

"Please," he said softly. "Please, don't."

Estelle Burke howled from the doorway. Old Gold hooked her under the arms, gagged her while she kicked.

"Please," said Lem. "I promise I won't do it again."

"Won't do what again?"

"Those things."

"I'm afraid," said Heinrich, "that you have yet to exhibit any comprehension of your transgressions. Harness!"

It looked something like a rolling wardrobe rack. Naperton wheeled it into the room.

Lem was weeping now.

"Please, please don't."

"Disrobe!" said Heinrich.

Lem was a skinny kid, all rib cage. He palmed his crotch, looked out at his mother, still cinched in Old Gold's arms.

"Up!" said Heinrich.

They lifted the boy by the elbows, slid his feet into rawhide straps, tied his wrists down near the wheels. Lem swung there for a bit and Heinrich stooped to the floor, ran his fingers in the boy's hair.

"People," said Heinrich, "it is only through a symbolic reenactment of our deepest secret, our darkest desire, our most monumental shame, that we can ever hope to transcend our own limitude. Now look at this kid. Fucking incorrigible. Breaks all the rules. Steals food from the kitchen. Sneaks into town without permission. Brings back controlled goodies with which to obviate himself in the trance pasture. Well, boys will be boys. But boys will also someday be men. Childish men. Narcissistic sheep. In young Lem's case, however, we have an opportunity to avoid all that. He was just a small child when his mother brought him here, and let me tell you, our beloved Estelle was in pretty sad shape. A tumor with shoes, you want to know the truth. But she found the strength to heal herself, my friends. Her body saved, she sought then to be truly nondenominationally redeemed. Young Lem, it was decided, would be raised here among us. But though he began in purity the boy has become much corrupted over time. Good as dead, really. What are we to do? How do we effect some sort of reversal? We must try, at any rate. He belongs to all of us, in a way, but he still belongs to his mother most of all. And it is she who must save him now."

"No!" said Lem.

"Saw!" said Heinrich.

Naperton and another man slipped the hideous thing off its hooks, slid it down into the crack of the boy.

"Bad wiper," Naperton mouthed to the crowd.

"Now," said Heinrich, "when I say symbolic I don't mean that something very real isn't going to happen in a moment. Here's the deal: we're going to saw this little shitbird right the fuck in half unless his mommy sucks him off to big jiz. Big jiz! Them's the rules. I think fifteen minutes is fair. I mean, she's a mighty handsome woman. So, what do you all think? Pretty nifty, right? Lem, I figure you get through this, what in the whole wide fucking world is there left to fear? Rest easy, kid, in a little while you'll either be dead or a god. I only wish someone had done this for me. Estelle, my sweet, come on down!"

Old Gold wrestled the woman towards her son. Benches scraped the floor and tipped. Brethren scurried, parted.

I stood, shook Trubate's hand off my arm.

"This is fucking crazy!" I shouted. "Stop this now! Take him down!"

"Or what?"

"I'll call the police. They might be interested in your idea of dinner theater."

"Steve," said Heinrich, "darling Steve, that there is the threat of a victim, not a hero. A phone call? You're going to make a phone call? Man, are you neck deep in the big dark darkety dark."

"Take him down now," I said.

I saw heavy movement in my periphery. Heinrich bore down on me with glittery eyes.

"Hey," he said. "It's just a hummer."

Heinrich said, "Start anywhere."

Heinrich said, "Let memory scamper to the glades of the now."

It's hard to believe people buy this brand of tripe. But then you picture the very same man pressing a SIG Sauer barrel to the brow of a sleeping Indian, a trussed nun.

You let it slide.

Heinrich gave me a ballpoint pen, a notebook with a Velcro flap. The Velcro, he said, was so I'd feel safe.

"Like a seat belt?" I said.

It was a good pop, spleen region. Put me on my knees.

"Like a seat belt," he said. "That's humorous."

It's hard to know what's humorous anymore.

I started the first notebook soon after my head wound healed, the one I received the night Estelle Burke publicly pleasured her son. Sorry to say I missed that particular spectacle. It was Parish, I later discovered, who did me my concussive honors, employing what he termed the "old cast-iron hat."

I've been writing, or itemizing, as they call it, ever since.

Heinrich says I'd better get it all down. He believes I'm really dying. Sees it in my eyes, he says. Dimness and some flickering. It's nothing any doctor could detect.

"What if I'm not dying?" I say.

"God forbid," he says.

"Itemize, itemize," he says.

I haven't written anything like this in years. The copy I confected for a living was never more than a line or two, designed to capture the allure of the new, to shimmer with efficient leisure and sumptuous toil, the ongoing orgasm of the information lifestyle: "Software with a Soft Touch," I wrote, or "Reality for Those Who Dream," or, simply, "How Did You Like Tomorrow?"

You've probably seen my work on billboards, on takeout coffee cups, between perfumed pullouts in those surveys of venality otherwise known as slicks. Somebody actually wrote this crap, you said to yourself.

You were absolutely right.

I was a droplet in the steady rain of crap.

I had, I guess, like my father before me, a naif's faith in words. When I was twelve, thirteen, I won the fire safety essay contest for a longish tract, "The Oil-Soaked Rags of Death." Captain Thornfield, he of the silvery sidewhiskers and exquisitely braided dress cap, lauded my genius to an assembly of my peers.

"You boys and girls should take some pointers from this young man," said the captain. "Most especially the part about how the family unit must establish a regrouping area a good distance from any hypothetical conflagration."

I took his praise to be the seeds of fervent tutelage. The next contest nearly a year away, I dashed off another treatise, "Five Alarm Soul: Studies in Hazard," delivered it to the captain at the borough fire station. Included was an appendix citing each instance of tire tower thuggery I'd suffered at the hands of his hoodlum sons. I wanted the poor man to forsake his blood for the purity of our flame-retardant enterprise, to rid himself of his progeny, take me under his sooty wing.

I never heard back from the captain.

Then it was all those English major essays, user manuals for the spirit's vaporware.

I was kind of a whiz at it, too. My father took pride in my hermeneutic seizuring. He wanted for his son anything but his mode, a poetics in the service of multispeed blenders. I shamed him soon enough, shilling for the silicon sultanates.

"Too Much? Too Fast? Tough Cookies-Deal or Die," I wrote when they wanted something Boom-punchy.

I got a raise, an options package, new digs.

I got a regrouping area in hell.

It'd be nice to know how long I've been here at the Center. Clocks and calendars do not abound. Heinrich says he won't turn tricks for time, that suns and moons and seasons are taunts enough. Sometimes I crave the old exactitude, daydream about the timepieces I threw away back when the Philosopher and the Mechanic first handed down my verdict, my suspended sentence, my frozen state. Now I live life in vague thick drift, my days something crated in Styrofoam, shipment on hold.

I got a phone privilege a while back, called Fiona, begged her to fetch me, her suffering pa. She said she was locked into her own emotional arc at the moment, couldn't afford the shift in trajectory.

She'll be fourteen in June.

"Besides, Daddy," she said. "What are you complaining about? You're alive, aren't you? You're riddled with PREXIS and you're defying all odds. Something must be working."

"I'm not riddled. I hate that. Riddled. Anyway, there's probably no such thing as PREXIS."

"Whatever, dude. I mean, Dad."

Every morning after First Calling I do my bubble dance while Parish preps, a vegetable slaughter. The man raves on between swipes of his Chinese cleaver.

"You're in the weeds now, skipper! You're in the weedy weeds! Look at all those spoons and saucers! They're so dirty!"

"I'm a crawling king snake," I say.

"You're nothing, babyducks. I'm the stewman and you're the stewboy. I'm your daddy in food!"

"Knock it off, Parish."

Which only induces him to start thwapping me with a slotted spoon.

"Baby! Babycakes!"

"Cut the shit, Parish."

"I'll cut your mother's shit. I'll eat it."

"Bet you will."

"Is that an insult?"

"Just let me do my job."

"You don't have a job, you have a chore. Read the fucking Tenets."

"I've read them."

"All you've read is the back of the tater tot box."

Thwap.

"Stop it."

"I'll stop when you admit to me that I'm the stewman and you're the stewboy."

"Okay, Parish, I'm the stewboy. But you're crazy."

"I'm in a healing process, yuppie fuck. I walk the high road."

Thwap.

"Violence will be met with decisive violence," I say.

"Very good. You have read the Tenets. That's a nice one, too. I'll make sure it's engraved on your tombstone, Skippy."

Thwap. Thwap.

Punch bread time, perchance?

Emancipated by the advent of Parish's inevitable dopamine downtick, I'll seek solitude in the trance pasture, or study the Tenets until dinnertime. Some nights Heinrich might have a word or two for the collective ear, a disquisition on the condition of our republic, the United Stooges of Moronica, he calls it, or, rarely, announce an evening of cabin visits. There's a weekly square dance called by Parish which enough of us boycott to render the event more amplified cris de coeur than hoedown. ("Bow to your partner," Parish will command, "now bow to your neighbor who was banging your partner while you were in the hospital with hepatitis.")

Mostly I look for lulls in the evening when I can slip off to the brush with Renee. Yes, Renee. Her initial bluff was hurt entreaty, I guess, because a few mornings after we met she wheeled up to my cabin door and announced she was curious about terminal cock.

"Seduction is a subtle art," I said.

"I'm not seducing you," said Renee. "This is a field study."

Now I'm always scouting for a clearing to which to wheel my voluptuous crip. Nippy nights are a hardship but I pack a quilt and we make our rough way up the hill trail towards the ever-so-mysterious mothering hut. Sometimes we ditch the chair and I bear her in a fireman's carry-look at me, Captain Thornfield! — over the roots and crags, lower us down behind some cold oak. Compensation is not the word for what Renee does with her hands and her mouth to triumph over her dead half. I've discovered marooned colonies of feeling down there, too. We'll lie under moonlight for hours, tell jokes, sing jingles, make puppets of our private parts. I'll kiss her breasts, kiss the blue vein in one of them that must flow to her heart, a quiet river running through a church.

Speaking of church, it was organized religion that stole my baby's legs away. Some soused bishop jumped a curbside in his El Camino. This was in her hometown, Neptune, New Jersey. Renee was just seventeen, window-shopping for a slutty top for school. She spent a year in bed and a few more trying to be a miracle of physical therapy, dreamed of the day she'd stagger through a cheering gauntlet of male nurse beefcake, but she never got past cod flops on the padded floor. She took to gin, launched a newsletter called Gimp Snatch. Heinrich found her doing wheelchair doughnuts in the parking lot of Arman's Adult Motel. He told her he was trolling for souls. She said she'd blow him for a ride home. That was years and years ago.

She says she's humped most everyone here except Parish and DaShawn, whose goiter and imperious manner drove her away. She says she'll do who she pleases, that no God or blitzed minion of Him, or, for that matter, any kind of cut-rate chariot will stop her from being the woman that girl on the sidewalk was outfitting herself to become.

I do worship her mostly paralyzed pussy and I am maybe in love.

She says she admires my hands, so ladylike.

I told her I'd let that slide.

"Of course you will," she said. "You're my lady."

This morning Naperton took the van down to the city to hawk our redemptive hoop at the farmer's market. I've shopped there myself in a former life, strolled rows of kiosks manned by suspicious Amish with their Lincoln beards and judgmental scones, tarried at fruit bins and herb trays tended by Wall Street dropouts, or runaway teens with tracts on bio-dynamism in their rucksacks.

Oversoul Spread, I understand, is big with the Sunday gourmands. There's a mail-order business, too. Sales, along with exhaustive donations from the Center's more moneyed brethren, keep us in Parish's improvisatory slops while we mother and trance ourselves to redemption. Only those with exorbitant levels of continuum awareness are permitted to make the trip. A cheese run is high honor.

We eat gobs of the stuff, too. It spreads thin, tastes a bit like a battery.

"It's what the city people crave, Skippo," Parish said. "They think the cheese will cleanse them of their sins. They're not about to be mothered by fire now, are they?"

"Are you?"

"I've been in the hut. I'll be in it again. I'll get it right."

Parish was a line cook in a Chapel Hill ribhouse until the day a customer died on his shift.

"So I put peanut butter in the chili. So what? It's a time-honored thickener. One in a million the bitch would be allergic, and her old man a goddamn state senator, to boot. There's a law named for her now. Ever hear of LuAnn's Law? It's a food safety bill. It's an anti-peanut-butter bill, really. Which, if you look at it historically, the peanut and its uses being the achievement of a black scientist, that would make LuAnn's Law a piece of racist legislation, ask me. But nobody does ask me. Nobody ever asks me. At least to cook for a living. Not anymore. Who'll hire the big bad chili killer? That's when it all started for me. Smack, whiskey, alimony, syph."

"Sounds like a song."

"Oh, it's a song all right. Now get on the stick, Stewboy. Papa's got a brand-new spatula. Spanky-spanky."

Funny how even the nutters get sane enough for the few minutes it takes to spill their guts.

Then it's the redeye back to Batshit Isle.

Today I sat in the trance pasture for a good hour after First Calling. I shut my eyes and made to enter that peaceful ripple of a kingdom Heinrich calls the shit-free zone. It was a nice place to visit until that wife-filcher William started bum-rushing my void.

Scamper, scamper.

I met William in the dorm rooms of higher yearning. He'd wormed a double for himself down the hall, a sumptuous bong chamber tricked out with batiks by spree killers and oil portraits of famous French Marxists he'd painted on black velvet. He fancied himself some kind of conceptualist at the time. Everything was a concept. Every concept was ripe for dismemberment. He liked to trace punk rock back to the age of Luther, don used toupees.

I once asked him who the hell he thought he was.

"A gangster of contingency," he explained.

He was my hero and for my worship I got first dibs on the women he'd bed and flee. My job, as I saw it, was to coddle them back to some sort of flummoxed spite, whereupon they'd jerk me around for a while, the William proxy, then give me the boot.

I thought it a commendable system at the time.

Someday William and his cruel, pretty face would be known to all the world, of that I was also convinced. Artist, philosopher, provocateur, such petty designations would merely constrict his force. I figured I'd best tag along and witness this bloom, be his blasted Boswell: Behind the Scenes with William P; William P: A Life, an Art; The Packed Bowl: The Life and Times of William P.

Other fevers seized him, though.

Next thing, William's scoring callbacks from the leading investment firms in the country.

"Dudes are making scads," he told me, chopping down some crystal on a Baader-Meinhof pop-up book.

He'd taken to wearing twills.

"What happened to contingency?" I said.

"What could be more contingent than money?"

He looked almost priestly there at the snort end of his soda straw.

Make no mistake, I was happy to see him when I spotted him years later thumbing violently through Peruvian flute disks at a midtown megastore. He was a tad pastier now, pinched into some flashy tailoring, maybe a Milanese number. I noticed a kind of bleary epiphany in his eyes when he saw me, as though I were some object mislaid long ago with not a little remorse.

I kissed him, called him Billy, took him home to meet the family.

File it under fuckup, I guess. Warm and defeated as he'd seemed in the megastore, William came to merciless life over linguine and wine. Maryse was in his thrall well before the garlic loaf was out of the oven, and there was Fiona at the far end of the table, making nervous pokes at her head hole.

Poor dear, poor daughter, torn between deadbeat biology and this glad shimmer of a man. William was rich, toothy, world-luminous. He had tales to tell, wisdom to dispense. I was bitter and middling and whatever I dispensed tended to stain my shorts.

It was never much of a contest.

"You're shaking," somebody said.

DaShawn stood over me here in the trance pasture. His tunic was soiled. His goiter looked bigger.

"Shaking with solitude," I said.

"Sorry, then. I was wrong to disturb you."

"How's the merc trade? Kill any Continentals today?"

"Whoa," said DaShawn. "Let's get something straight here. I'm not some nutbin Napoleon. I know who I am and, more importantly, when I am. I have a degree in indigenous studies from Ramapo State College. I just prefer traditional dress."

"I'm sorry, DaShawn. You have to understand that I'm an asshole."

"I do understand."

I started to thank the man for such rare comprehension.

"Shhh. I want to show you something."

DaShawn led me out of the pasture and through some brush. We hiked our way up the hill trail through a steep rise of spruce.

"What are you doing?" I said.

"I told you, I want to show you something."

A burning scent was coming off the mountain, rich and dry, full of campfire cheer. We strayed off the trail and hacked our way up to a great forked elder. There in a clear was a tiny cottage built of thatch and brick. Smoke rifled out the tin flue.

"Ye Olde Mothering Hut," said DaShawn.

"I wonder who's in there," I said.

"Heinrich's in there. And somebody. We never know who it is until it's all over. That way there's no shame."

Now shrieks carried over the clear.

"Damn," I said.

"The Iroquois," said DaShawn, "in fact many of the eastern tribes, not to mention the plains tribes, prided themselves on their ability to bear torture. If you got captured by an enemy, you were already dead and disgraced. Your only recourse was to maintain dignity during the ordeal."

"Stoic."

"Not stoic. They'd go bananas. You motherfucking bear-fucker, your tribe is rabbit shit. Something to say while you're being flensed alive."

"Was this passed down in family lore, DaShawn?"

"I researched it for my thesis. My family passed down a fondness for Ring-Dings."

"We had Devil Dogs," I said.

"Those are good, too."

A man stooped out of the hut. Bits of ash hung in the air about him. He was naked, smeared with soot and blood. A piece of metal poked out of his hand.

We saw a flash, heard a boom, felt something thud into the elder.

Tonight, after pears in syrup, Heinrich stood for a word. He'd showered, looked rested, his wet hair combed back into an impromptu pompadour. There were still a few streaks of ash on his hands, a little scallop of dried blood on his ear.

"People, I have an announcement to make. It concerns our very own Bobby Trubate. Today was an extra-special day for him. You know of what I speak. It's uncertain if we'll ever see him again, but suffice it to say he has finally tasted truth. Trubate. Perhaps name is destiny, after all."

"You hear that, Spanky?" Parish whispered into my ear.

I nodded, spooned up some pear.

Back at the cabin Old Gold was stuffing Bobby's clothes into a duffel bag.

"Did he go home?"

"I don't know," said Old Gold.

"What happened?"

"I don't know. I guess he was no match for mothering fire."

"He's a good guy."

"Avram, has it ever occurred to you that a lot of this stuff might be figurative? That really the idea of life is just to get along as best we can under the circumstances?"

"Oh, you mean like Nazi Germany?"

"Don't pull that Nazi shit with me. I'm a Jew, too."

"Who said I was a Jew?"

"I read it in your story in the Tenets."

"Maybe I just meant that figurative."

Old Gold left and I lay in my cot for a while. My classical kindergarten education had trained me to always take a few moments before sleep to review my day, ruminate on any schoolyard atrocities the banality of evil or banality may have glossed. Pigtail tuggings. Marble-maimings. Bastard shot at me, was all I could think. My day, for the most part. There was a knock at the door and Heinrich capered in all soft-shoe, twirled a phantom baton.

"Cabin visit."

"Are you going to tuck me in?"

"I could, but then you'd just get up again to proceed with your wheelchair assignations."

"No secrets around here, huh?"

"Renee," said Heinrich. "Poor kid came here thinking about miracles. Just like you. People get crazy ideas. Even smart people like Renee. They think they're going to overcome their personal tragedies. They employ the phrase 'personal tragedy.' But I have deep feeling for Renee, I do. Marooned colonies of feeling, even."

"No respect for Velcro, either."

"Privacy's a dead end, Steve. What's the saying? Last refuge of scumbags?"

"Do you read everyone's items?"

"I paid for the pen, man. And the paper. So, how did you like being shot at today?"

"Is that what that was?"

"Toughie. How's your mysterious rot going?"

"I'm not sure."

"That's a good sign."

"The symptoms come and go."

"As they will."

"It's not all in my head."

"Hey, if it's in your head it's in you."

"I'll try to remember that," I said. "Or my head will. What were you doing to Trubate in the mothering hut?"

"Midwifery."

"What happened?"

"You were there."

"Is he dead?"

"Why would he be dead?"

"Because his things were still here. Because I heard those screams. Because you-"

"Careful now. I what?"

"I don't know."

"No, you don't, do you? You're deducing again."

"I want to leave here."

"And go where?"

"Home."

"Where would that be?"

"Shit," I said, "you tell me."

I threw a fit. I decided to throw a fit. It was a technique I'd honed at the agency. Sometimes, uncertain times, it proved judicious to appear unhinged. A timely spaz bespoke passion, salary-worth. Mine were maybe tantamount to office culture, too, like the late-night car service or the Monday massage. Don't pitch a Steve, people would admonish, except they said something else because as I may have mentioned, my name isn't Steve. Now I careened around the cabin looking for props. Swipes and kicks were a crucial part of the show. I started for the Coleman, dreaming of a drywood blaze. Heinrich stuck his foot out. There was time to clear it but I tripped anyway. The finish is the hardest part of the fit. That foot was a gift.

"Calm yourself," said Heinrich.

"Thank you," I said.

"Are you calm?"

"Extremely fucking calm."

Heinrich put his hand out.

"Listen," he said. "This is your home. You have to accept that fact. Acceptance is the key to everything. I need you to be the hero of your own life, Steve. Also, I need your help."

"My help."

"Work for me, son. Don't be embarrassed. The dependence of a great man upon a greater is a subjection that lower men cannot easily comprehend."

"Who said that?"

"Halifax."

"I wouldn't know him."

"I read his maxims on the can. The cheese spread has real possibilities. We need some snap. We need some pop. Soft cheese for a soft touch."

"Now you're quoting me quoting myself."

"Too heavy for me," said Heinrich. "The levels, the levels. But I know you'll do us proud. One more thing. Don't ever sneak up on me at the hut again. I'll put one in your neck. Now, let me see your eyes. That's what I thought."

"What?"

"More dimness. Less flickering."

The ant trundling a piece of thread across my windowsill had a brain punier than the blackhead I was teasing out of my nose with opposed thumbnails, but he must dream, mustn't he? Of what? Love? Work? Popcorn skins? Bolts of lint? Maze rats dreamed of mazes, according to the latest studies. Maze rat scientists dreamed of rats. I was dreaming of cheese.

I scoured my corporate memory for all those phrases we used to bat around in lieu of competence. Brand leverage, brand agility, viral replication of the core brand identity. How about isotopic marketing? Meme buzz? Meme juice? Brand spill? The older types, the so-called salesmen, they'd laugh at us, go on about how there was no difference between hawking a webcasting network and an oatmeal cookie. Then they'd beg us for cocaine. Me, I was never much of a salesman. Sometimes, in my cups, or in a moment of weak arrogance, I called myself a court poet in the multinational kingdom. Better days I'd just call myself a hack and get on with the work.

Renee lay beside me in my cot, the Tenets tilted on her belly.

"Don't pop it," she said.

"Why not?"

"I want to."

I tendered my nose to the lamplight.

"Go ahead."

"Hey," said Renee, "did you know Heinrich has a son? Or had a son?"

"It says that in the book? I missed it. Ow!"

"There," said Renee, held out the dark squiggle, my coagulated essence, in her palm. "It's vague, towards the end of the preface: 'My only issue emerged somewhat amphibious, due to pharmaceutical miscalculation on the part of his mother. He lived for a while in a ventilated, see-through tube. Then he returned to precellular nullity.' "

"That's not so vague. How could I have missed that?"

"I think I have an older edition."

"Why would he take it out?"

"Why would he put it in?" said Renee. "At least like that?"

"That's part of his appeal."

"Appeals to you, maybe."

"What aspect of the master most pleases you, young novice?"

"His shoulders. From behind he looks like my father."

"Women and their fathers," I said.

"Is that supposed to be insightful?"

"It's a saying," I said.

"You have a daughter, don't you?"

"I did. I definitely did."

"You're breaking my heart. I feel my heart actually cleaving. Is cleaving the word?"

"We thought the school was a good idea."

"I'm sure it was. It's you and your wife that weren't such a good idea."

"We tried."

"That's what I mean."

"Lay off, okay? I want to ask you something. Did you know Heinrich reads our item books?"

"We give them to him. Before we're mothered by fire."

"I mean all the time."

"I don't think so."

"He read mine."

"He must like you."

"I don't trust the bastard."

"Don't talk that way, Steve."

"I'm not Steve."

"You keep saying that. I'm all for mantras, but really, the trick is to find one that isn't so rooted in negation."

"Listen, why don't you drag your numb ass back into your little fucking go-cart and get lost. I have work to do."

The compound was quiet tonight, lit low by a pale slice of moon in the sky. The wind carried moans of milk cows in their stalls. Renee wheeled off near the dining-hall door without a word. She'd been crying. I'd thought she'd been sneezing but she told me through snot-wet bursts that this was how she cried. Wires crossed up after the accident. Not that I would care. Now I looked over towards Heinrich's cabin. He sat near the window, reading by candlelight. Strains of some cantata poured through the crevices of his home. His sloped shoulders bucked with what looked to be spasms of amusement. Maybe Renee's father laughed like that. I sneaked up to the sill. Let him put one in my neck, I thought.

Heinrich saw me, cracked his window.

"Evening," he said. "Out for a stroll?"

He laid the pamphlet he was reading on the sill. Adult Children of War Criminals: A Copebook.

"Cheese to Ease the Disease," I said.

"Not bad," said Heinrich.

"It's terrible," I said.

"Yes," said Heinrich, "it is."

"I don't have to help you, you know."

"It's a free country. A dry county, but a free country."

"I don't even know what the hell I'm doing here. I think it's some bizarre belief that the more ridiculous the situation is, the better the chances of something good coming from it."

"That is bizarre," said Heinrich.

"You don't have the fucking cure," I said.

"Good night, Steve."

"You know, you could go to prison for what you're doing here."

"I could go to prison for lots of stuff," said Heinrich.

Dietz called me over from his doorway. He said he had some bourbon, a little weed. Lem was building a customer base. Dietz's cabin was small and stank of Dietz. Books and torn parts of books and chunks of cinder littered the floor. There was a doorless mini-fridge in the corner. Pasted over the opening was a poster of a well-stocked ice box-pickle jars, milk jugs, wrapped steaks, fruit. Dietz sat on a steamer trunk with his derby in his lap. He was pinching out the creases in the brim. His Coleman threw light up on his berry stain. He caught me staring at it.

"Mark of Cain," he said. "Born with the thing."

"I like it."

"I don't care so much about it. When I was a kid, sure. Girls, before I met the right kind. But it's hard to get people to look you in the eye. Look me in the eye."

"I'm looking."

"Yes, you are."

"What do you want, Dietz?"

"What do I want? What a question. I remember when I was a child my folks took me out to the beach. I hadn't said a word yet. Mute little fucker. Far back on the baby curve. But it so happened that on that day I saw something out on the water. Something that appealed to me. It appealed to me enough to summon language in me. Language was called up from my tiny toddler database for the first time in my tiny miserable life. What do you think I said? Remember, I saw something that appealed to me."

"Seagull," I said. "See the seagull."

"That would be grand, Steve. See the seagull. I'd be a fucking poet now, wouldn't I? No, I did not say see the seagull. What I said was, I want boat. That's all I said. I want boat."

"You knew what you wanted."

"My mother was amazed. She cried, she says. She says she cried."

"Did you get boat?"

"They took me out on a day cruise. Bought tickets, bundled me up. They were not wealthy people, Steve. Vermont syrup trash, tell the truth. But, like I said, they bought tickets, bundled me up, walked me up the gangway. We're out five minutes and I'm a goddamn disaster area. Or so I've been told. Five minutes sounds like an exaggeration, an embolism, not an embolism, you know what I mean."

"An embellishment."

"Point is, I'm a wreck. Puking, weeping. Sea sickness. The sickness of the fucking sea. And it's at this moment in the experience I make utterance once more. Once more language is called upon to do my bidding. What do you think I said?"

"There are so many possibilities."

"No, there aren't. You're missing it. Think about it logically. What could I have said? Okay, I'll tell you what I said. No more boat. That's what I said. No more boat. Now, I'm a dude, I'm the kind of dude that can babble on and on. To anybody. About anything. How many times, for instance, do you think I've said a word like anybody, or anything, in my life? Millions, probably. How many times have I said the word probably? How many times have I used my gift of language to explicate myself out of this or that shit-fucked situation?"

"Extricate."

"How many times have I said shit-fucked, or situation? Brother, it's all language. Dope, cars, finger-banging, rock 'n' roll. It's all just language. You think it's not, buddy, but it is, trust me. You think the ultimate is out there somewhere, beyond language, but it's not. It's just totally not. For example, what's the ultimate, anyway? It's a fucking word. But here's my final point, Steve. For all those goddamn words, for all those combinatory combinations of words, for all their various shades and schadenfreudes of meaning or unmeaning, it just comes down to two basic things. I want boat and no more boat. That's all there is."

"I know what you mean."

"You have no idea what I mean. Do you really like my stain? Or do you mean to say you like to look at it?"

"What's the difference?" I said.

"That's a good question. I wish I had the answer. But I'm just a dumbfuck. I'm just trying to keep it together."

"Did you know Wendell?"

"I knew Wendell."

"What happened to him?"

"He couldn't find the language," said Dietz. "Hungry?"

He pointed to his picture of food.

Bobby Trubate was back in his cot, hooked to a drip, wrapped in loose gauze. His face was bruised and runny, his mustache singed down to a ridge of hairy blisters. He looked like some formerly majestic bird pulled from a crash site fuselage.

"Jesus, Bobby," I said. "What'd he do to you?"

"Saved me," said Trubate.

Estelle lounged in the corner with a magazine from the Johnson administration. There were stacks of these around, good for pop scholarship, kindling. I don't know who collected them, but paeans to the sexual revolution and tawny sideburns abounded. I tended to pore over the ads myself, stereos like space bays, secret sodomy in the Rob Roy ice.

"Funny to read this crap, now," she said. "It's like inscriptions in your yearbook. Remember me when you're a movie star. Send me a postcard from Paris."

"We need to get him to a hospital."

"He'll be fine. I've been looking after him."

"They took his stuff."

"There's a laundry run."

Trubate began to moan. His body sputtered under the sheets.

"Did you know," said Estelle, "that before this was the Center for Nondenominational Recovery and Redemption, it was a POW camp?"

"A what?"

"Simulated. For executive types. They'd come up here for a huge fee and Heinrich would keep them in cages, torture them."

"Didn't read that part in the Tenets."

"Editorial discretion."

It looked like Bobby wanted to speak. His lips split their scab caulk and sound dribbled out.

"Maa. .Faa. ."

"Ma?"

"What is it?" said Estelle.

"Maah. . Faah. ."

"Mother," I said. "Father."

"No," said Estelle. "Mothered by Fire. He's acknowledging his passage."

"Maah. ."

"What is it, Bobby?" I said.

Trubate strained up from the bed.

"My face," he said. "My fucking face."

Estelle was tired. I told her I'd watch Trubate for a while. He slept like a stone, or a stoned man. Maybe there was some morphine in his drip. His wounds, I saw now, were mostly superficial, show-biz gashes. Character-building for the character actor. Maybe he could ride the crest of the next disfigurement fad to stardom.

Me, I was going to ride the hell out of here. There was nothing for me here, nothing shit-free. Organized psychosis had its rewards, but I was pretty sure you needed a future to reap them. I was a dying man, futureless. A lone wolf. A lone wraith.

I dozed at Trubate's bedside, got up near dawn, walked back to Heinrich's window. He was asleep at his desk when I tapped on the pane. Heinrich didn't wake so much as boot up. You could almost sense the circuits firing, the cautious ascent to speed.

"I need to talk to you," I said.

"Your need is your demand," said Heinrich, waved me in.

We sat in wicker, sipped root tea. Books, bales of them-paperbacks, hardbacks, chapbooks, manuals, sheaves-spilled out the rough pine shelves. There were survival guides and bird guides and bound sets of American Transcendentalists, but also computer manuals and some simulation theory I recalled my pal William flogging himself to ecstatic bongstates with in college. Heinrich set his tea mug down on an upturned clementine crate. He followed my gaze to the encrusted Esperanto phrasebook beside it.

"Since the misfortune in Babel it has been a dream," he said. "I think it's folly, myself. Everyone should sing his own incomprehensible, inconsolable song. What I want to do here is help people find it."

"Is that why you ran a POW camp?" I said.

"That was a business proposition."

"Clearly not a very lucrative one."

"I did okay. Look, Steve, I'm a soldier. I've been all over the world hurting people. I don't apologize. Who am I to apologize? But this, all of this, it's a surprise to me. What I. . what we have done here. What we've made. You've heard me make my crazy speeches to them. My beast-tales. Maybe I have fuck's clue what I'm talking about, but at least I am talking. And maybe we're getting somewhere, too. The mothering hut. Who could have known the power of such a thing? It just came to me one day. I thought it was an interrogation facility. It was an interrogation facility. We used it for a sweat lodge in the off-season. Naperton said it first. Like giving birth to yourself in there."

"Sounds like kitchen duty."

"Hardly."

"I guess I'll have to ask Bobby about that."

"Mister Fucking Melodrama. You love this stuff, don't you? You loved it when those quacks told you you were dying and you love thinking I have some awful plan for you. And here I was banking on the idea that your cowardice was just a surface ploy. You really are addicted to your existence, aren't you? You'd be better off strung out on smack."

"I just came to say goodbye."

"Goodbye."

"And thank you."

"For what?"

"I don't know."

"There's going to be a reckoning tonight. Old Gold will face his demon. I think you should stick around. Maybe you'll change your mind about all of this. If you don't, wait outside your cabin. Naperton's making a cheese run tonight. He'll give you a ride."

"I'll be there."

"It's too bad," said Heinrich.

"What's that?"

"I was hoping you'd be my entree into a whole new market."

"I'll recommend you at the racquet club."

I did the day. I did the rest of the day. I went to the kitchen for my bubble dance. I did big hellos.

"What are you grinning about?" said Parish.

"These all the dishes?" I said. "Bring it on! Greasy platters, gunked spoons, the dried ketchup of martyrs! Bring the shit on, Parish! I am the cleanser."

"Who gave you permission for giddiness, you little shit? Listen, I'm in a funk. I'm in no mood."

"I'm all moods," I said. "In and out of them."

"I'm the boss of you," said Parish. "I set the mood."

We squared off. I got up on boxer's toes, popped Parish in the tit. He dropped me with a whisk handle to the mouth. I got up, got quiet, rubbed my teeth.

"Oh, don't be sulky," said Parish. "I think you're charming. I'm just having a day. Too many peepers on the potatoes. I don't like to be so seen by tubers. I'm sorry. You're the cleanser, okay?"

"I'm the cleanser," I said.

"That's my boy. Now don't forget to punch out."

My rye'd gone green.

I went back to the cabin to check on Trubate. The room was dark and stank of balm. He was sitting up, the drip ripped from his arm. He stared up at the rafter beam.

"Bobby?" I said.

"Bobby died in a fire," he said.

I walked out to the trance pasture, saw Lem Burke sitting in the punk weeds, smoking a joint, gerrymandering an ant colony with a stick.

"Got some of those in my cabin," I said.

"What?"

"Ants."

"What kind of ants?"

"I don't know. Black ants."

"These are red ants."

"Communists."

"I wouldn't say that," said Lem. "They just do what seems right."

Lem whipped the stick. It careened off my knee.

"Sorry," he said.

The weeds were high. I could only make out the top of the kid's head. He was so long and scrawny, weedlike himself. It seemed like he'd always been here, sitting, dreaming, playing Hitler with dirt life.

"Hear about Old Gold?" I said.

"Poor fucker," said Lem.

"You don't like it here, do you?"

Lem said nothing.

"How's your continuum awareness coming?"

"Why do you ask so many questions?" said Lem. "What are you trying to hide?"

"Sometimes people ask questions just to find out things."

"My continuum awareness is coming along fine," said Lem. "The past present and future are entirely saturated with one thought, one image, one sensation. My mom knew what she was doing, tell you that."

Smoke was rolling off the ridge. Both of us sniffed at the sky. Wolves, I thought. Rabbits, I revised.

"That man Wendell who had my cabin," I said. "What happened to him?"

"He died."

"Heinrich says he hanged himself."

"You know you splooge in your pants when you do that?"

"Yeah," I said.

"Guess everyone knows. I'm finding that the older I get, it's not that I learn new things, it's more like I find out how much of what I know is common knowledge."

"That's a good way of putting it."

"Don't condescend."

"I'm not."

"Don't deny your actions."

Lem was truly a child of this place.

"Did Wendell leave a note? An explanation?"

"Yeah. There was a note. It said, Please note."

"Please note?"

"Please note."

"Damn," I said.

"That's what I said. Want some of this?"

"Yes," I said.

I hardly noticed Lem leave. I hardly noticed anything except the helium panic of the pot, the warp of the world, the fissuring. I decided to give the shit-free zone one more shot. No more boat. No more no-more-boat. I thought about nothing. I zeroed in on nothingness. Nothingness rose out of the ether to greet me, to embrace. I heard music now, horns, a brassy vamp. Flashpots, fireworks. The nothingness dancers chorus-kicked through smoke.

"Please note! Please note!" they sang. Kick-turn. Kick-turn. Balcony gels, leotards, hip jut. This was not for nothing, I thought. Then the weed wore off. The garter belts fell from the trees. The sun was going down.

I did not hate twilight.

I went to fetch Renee.

I rolled her out to the milk barn to see the calf twins born last week. Romulus and Rimjob, Old Gold had named them. They were dark and frisky in the moonlit pen, big sweet pups. They nuzzled our knees at the rail. Renee put her hand out and one of them took it with a soft sucking sound up to the wrist.

"Oh, my God," she said.

"I'm sorry," I said, "about those things I said the other night."

"You have to try this," said Renee.

"I need to tell you something," I said.

"You really have to try this."

I stuck a loose fist out for the other calf. It made a rough warm womb of its mouth for me.

"Jesus," I said. "That really is something."

"Isn't it? No wonder cows are sacred in Japan."

"I don't think it's Japan," I said.

"I hate you," said Renee. "Let's have a hate fuck."

"Over there, then," I said, "behind the hayrick."

"That's called a hayrick?" said Renee.

"Sure," I said.

"Sounds like Heinrich," said Renee.

"Don't say that," I said.

There were no dessert speeches that night. We bused our plates and marched out of the dining hall. Portable lights lit the lawn outside, night-game bright. There was a chop in the air and the lamp casings hummed. Somewhere behind us an engine gunned. The glow of brake lights parted us.

Naperton slid down from the van, popped the hatch, reached in to struggle with some kind of ungainly parcel. The thing seemed to twitch in its plummet and when it hit the lawn we saw what it was-a man. He wore a blindfold, handcuffs of clear plastic. Blood had dried on his shaven head. Naperton pulled the blindfold off. The man just stood there and blinked for a while. The lights were probably putting a wildness in his eyes but he looked a tad touched anyway, the type who spends his childhood plucking butterflies apart, or Scotch-taping patriotic ordnance to gerbils, only to make his way up the living chain in a great pageant of abuse.

But who am I to talk, mastermind of the Moth-O-Caust?

He had tattoos. A steely anchor on his sternum tipped into a fat black heart. A target spiraled out from the top of his skull. The bull's-eye read "C.B." There was a logo on his shoulder that looked familiar. I nearly retched when I read the legend beneath it: Tough Cookies-Deal or Die.

Now we all watched as Clellon Beach rolled to his knees and made to somehow stand.

Naperton kicked him in the hip.

"Fuck you," said Beach.

"Fuck me?" said Naperton. "I'm old enough to be your grandfather. You wouldn't want to fuck me."

Naperton kicked him in the mouth. Tooth bits stuck to Beach's lip.

"That all you got?" he said.

"For now," said Naperton. "Try our sales representative tomorrow. Unless you'd be interested in this."

Naperton kicked him in the stomach. Beach puked through his teeth.

"Picador," said Heinrich from the porch, "I think the bull is ready."

He stood at the balustrade in a stained dinner jacket and a wire-fastened beard, Odin emceeing a varsity football banquet.

"Dig the beard?" he said. "Had the thing in my closet for years. I was God one Halloween, if you can believe it. Costume contest. Some Little Orphan Annie cunt won. Mr. Beach, it's an honor to finally meet you. You're a storied figure in our later gospels, so it really is a privilege. 'A huge fucking killer,' if I remember the text correctly. Well, maybe not so huge. What do you go, one-forty, one forty-five? But then again, Abraham didn't live hundreds of years, either, did he? Mythology is beyond fact-checking, I'd say. Wouldn't you? Did they tell you why you're here?"

The man moaned.

"I didn't hear you," said Heinrich.

"I told them," said Beach. "There was nothing in the container, I swear. I went on board myself. It was empty."

"What container?"

"The container."

"All day," said Naperton, "about the container. The foredeck container, he says."

"Thank you, Notty. I do believe I understand. Clellon, are you thinking you're here because of some dirtbag job you botched? Some double-cross you cooked up in a Norfolk flophouse? These are things of Clellon Beach the man. We don't give a rat's ass about him around here. We are solely concerned with myth. And you are myth, Mr. Beach. You are the demon who stalks our beloved Gold. Through no fault of your own, I might add. Nonetheless, now there must be a reckoning. Can we get some drum?"

Dietz walked out of the crowd doing paradiddles on a fur-bound Indian tom.

"This isn't a fucking Krupa show," said Heinrich. "Slow it down."

Now Old Gold stepped out to the porch, shirtless, in festive pantaloons. He gripped his terrific knife. Bobby was there, if he was still Bobby, pulped a bit around the eyes, the Tenets open in his hands and him nearly davening as he recited: "Behold, subsequent diagnostic procedures proved it so, and subsequent forays into the abyss revealed these things to me: Your soul is made of deeds. Your thoughts, your fears, your whims, your doubts, are sand. Moreover, you can't make an omelet without perpetrating some serious fucking atrocities. Mama, Papa, Caca, Pee-Pee. You are you. Article Seven, Redemption Tip Number Five."

"Don't go off book," snapped Heinrich.

"I am book," said Trubate.

"I am me," shouted Old Gold. He bounded down to Beach, cut his cuffs away, chased the air with elegant swipes of his knife. He had the bearing of some highborn reaper, a cruel dandy. He caught a piece of Beach's face and Beach snatched his wrist, judo'd his arm around, bent it to some inhuman parameter that got Old Gold howling. Beach took the knife now, put the blade to Old Gold's neck. Was he awaiting thumbs from Caesar's skybox? What a soldier, sailor. A shot boomed down from the porch, spun Beach, put him on his knees. He pawed at the hole in his shoulder, the wet epaulette of blood blooming there.

Old Gold laid his boot on Beach's back.

"Look at my fucking demon now!" he said. "Little Sissy demon! I am a cloudwalker and I rain my rain of piss down on your meek inheritor ass!"

Old Gold took his cock out, pinched it down towards Beach's skull. We waited for a while.

"No flow," said Old Gold.

We heard another shot and tiny flecks of Old Gold's ass went twirling into the lights.

"For real?" he said, and fainted. Heinrich tucked his pistol in his dinner jacket, started down the steps.

"And the moral of the story," he said, "is never mock your demon. A corollary to that moral would be never postpone square dance night. Now let's put this fiasco behind us. Tend to the wounded. Beach will be our brother, if he so chooses."

Most of us made to leave.

"You," said Heinrich. "Come walk with me."

We walked out toward some power lines. Past the lit perimeter was a night of huge near stars. They were greening themselves up there like those stick-on galaxies my mother used to buy for my bedroom ceiling, those stars that came with charts I was too lazy to learn.

"That's okay," she'd said, "just use your imagination. Make your own constellations. Gods and animals. Heroes and bears."

I had no idea what she could mean. I scattered the decals around in a way I thought looked natural, random, skylike.

"Just want to stretch my legs a little," Heinrich said now.

We walked out past the last of the cabins to the treeline. A breeze blew over the field. I wanted to hear ghost voices on it, bog plaints, heath pleas. Please Note, Please Note. A serious fucking prizewinner, that. But Wendell was still dead. And I was still dying, wasn't I? Who would note? What had I ever noted? I'd taken my pleasures, of course, I'd eaten the foods of the world, drunk my wine, put this or that forbidden particulate in my nose until the room lit up like a festival town and all my friends, but just my friends, were seers. I'd seen the great cities, the great lakes, the oceans and the so-called seas, slept in soft beds and awakened to fresh juice and fluffy towels and terrific water pressure. I'd fucked in moonlight, sped through desolate interstate kingdoms of high broken beauty, met wise men, wise women, even a wise movie star. I'd lain on lawns that, cut, bore the scent of rare spice. I'd ridden dune buggies, foreign rails. I'd tasted forty-five kinds of coffee, not counting decaf.

I hadn't put things off, I'd done them, just done them blind. Steady rain of ruin. Steady dark. You see too much and you can't see anything at all. You lose your beautiful wife to your cousin, or the sun. You beget hooligans. Or maybe you're the old man in the hospital, giving thanks to the Elks, the Black Kids, pressing the button, pressing it, but the girl never comes.

All my pretty ones.

Fuckeroo'd.

"Have you changed your mind about leaving?" said Heinrich.

"No," I said.

"No, he says," said Heinrich.

I heard noises behind us. Someone was squeezing me to the dirt. Someone was stuffing my head into a sleeve.

"Wait," I heard Heinrich say.

Wires poked my neck, my ears.

"What are you doing?"

"Notty, look how funny he looks with the beard."

Naperton stood near me while I stripped.

"Wish we had a boilersuit," he said. "We used to have a boilersuit. I don't know where the hell it's got to now. Can you see through the hood? Be honest."

"No," I said.

Something cracked at the back of my knee.

"Can't fault your honesty."

I curled up to the thatch.

"Have you ever seen those pictures of Chet Guevara all shot up to shit?"

"Che," I said.

"What?"

"Che Guevara."

"I'm not talking about him."

"Is this part of the mothering process?"

"This would be idle chatter," said Naperton. "Get up."

He bent my arms around a pole, cinched my wrists. I heard the thatch swish, a new pair of boots in the room.

"I'll take it from here, Notty," said Heinrich. "Better get on the road, beat traffic."

"Right."

I hung there sucking hood, listened to Heinrich putter around the hut. He moved quietly, methodically, like some neighbor in the next apartment on a Sunday afternoon. Tin pots, the dull hammering of picture hooks. I heard Heinrich stab at the fire, spread something out in the dirt, a tarp, perhaps, lob what sounded like a sack of metal on it.

"They sure were big on gadgets back in the bubonic days," said Heinrich. "The Breast Ripper. Purpose self-evident, I guess. Or the Branks. A sort of pierced tongue brace for the nagging missus. The Pear. Goes up your ass like a piece of fruit, splits open in your prostate. What I wish we had is a Judas Cradle, but those are a bitch to rig."

"What are you going to do to me?" I said.

"Judas Cradle. Sounds like one of those rock bands."

"Don't," I said. "Please."

"Don't what?"

"Please," I said.

The hut was a furnace now.

"Falanga," Heinrich said. "I love that word. Falanga. The beating of the soles of the feet. Submarino is water torture, near drowning. Very big in Uruguay when I was down there. Fellow up at Harvard or someplace, he did a study, took regular people, housewives, students, told them to shock someone in the next room. He'd have actors in there pretending to be in agony. Most of them kept turning up the volts. Even with the screams, the pleas. What do you think of that?"

"Doctor's orders."

"That's right," said Heinrich. "But now it's all about deprivation. That's the thing nowadays. No light, no air, no sleep, no food, no water. Or just food. Dry food. Stale peanuts. Stale saltines. No water. Cotton mouth. Or kick a blindfolded man off a chopper. How could he possibly know he's only a few feet off the ground? The complex of emotions when he hits, that's what breaks him. These are the techniques. The state of the art. Make somebody stand for days. Fluids collect in the feet. Believe me, you can't conceive of the pain. You can't conceive of the fluids. It's not about violating the body anymore. It's about putting the subject in a situation whereby the subject's body violates him. Betrays him. Do you get this distinction? It's kind of subtle."

"It's not so subtle."

"You're a subtle man. How did you like tomorrow? I used to see that on billboards when we made cheese runs. Somebody wrote that crap, I always said."

"Me."

"Yes, you."

"So, that's the deal?"

"What's that?"

"Deprivation?"

"No," said Heinrich. "You've already been so deprived."

What he did to me now he did for a good long time. He did it maybe with some of the tools he'd talked about, the ones from the tarp, the grand antiques, the hooks and prongs and pincers I heard him pull from the fire. Sometimes he did it with his hands. The lulls were the worst part. Too much time to smell the cook stench.

I blacked out, came up into some throb of wakefulness. My hood was slipping and I saw pieces of the room. Heinrich knelt in the corner with an old Army-issue hand crank telephone. He clipped leads to it, ran the wires back to where I hung.

"Steve," he said, "I'm really thinking you've earned a phone privilege."

He went back to the corner and turned the crank.

I woke up next to the dead fire, my cuffs cut away. There was a note in one of my shoes: "Welcome to the World of Self-Born Men. P.S. Given your condition, you are relieved of kitchen duty for the rest of the week."

I stumbled out of the hut, fell a few times running down the hill trail, ripped my shins on roots and stones. My bones were making soft, sifting noises. I had to blow blood from my nose to breathe.

Old Gold stood at the gate. He'd gotten his knife out, and by his expression appeared to be already picturing some triumphal display of my pancreas.

"Come to keep me company?" he said.

"I'm walking through this gate, Gold."

"My job will be to stop you."

"Fair enough," I said. "But there's something you should keep in mind. I have nothing to lose. I'm a fucking terminal. Doesn't that resonate with you?"

"Folks who really got nothing to lose, they just go ahead and do the stuff they want to do, Steve. They sure as shit don't make speeches about it."

"All right," I said. "What if I forget about the gate? What if I go through the trees?"

"Trees is fine," said Old Gold. "My thing is here at the gate."

"Bless you for your thing," I said.

I cut back around the dining hall, hacked through some poison sumac to the road. Now I'd have rashes in my wounds. Well, sure, why not? What kind of hellishness stinted on rashes? I stood out past the gate, looked back towards the compound, the blunted cone of Mount Redemption rising up behind it. I'd never found out if it was the cure or the disease that would cure me of my disease. Fat chance I ever would. I watched Old Gold punch the gate post for a while. Ninety-seven. Ninety-eight.

He saw me, waved.

Pangburn Falls was a ghost of itself, a dead old barge town. I walked the main drag, boulevard of broken riverine hope, decrepit colonials, clapboard rot. Ancient porches slid down to junkyard lawns. Bent bicycles, rusted barbells, bladeless fans. All my father's owner's manual agon ended in this place. Here rested the gadget dead. I heard a whinny, a snort. Down the street a palomino drank from an inflatable kiddie pool.

There was a gas station up ahead, warm window neon, a lit sign spinning in the mist. They were advertising something called half-serve at the pumps. Some men stood near a tow rig with hot coffee and crullers.

"Hey, look," said one in coveralls. "It's a bust-out."

I readied for flight. I wondered if I had it in me for sustained fleeing. There was a shopping mall on the other side of the river. Parking lot, pink stucco, brick. What would I do if I got there? Hide behind a rack of sport coats? Beg the grill cooks for a fry boy hat?

One of the men by the tow rig made a hard fart.

"Dragon tail," he said, darted into the repair bay.

"How's the freak life, freak?" said a kid with long hair and T-shirt that read: I Skull-Fucked Your Dead Mother Today, What'd You Do?

Must share a mail-order club with Parish, I thought.

"I'm tired of the freak life, tell you the truth," I said.

I tried to coo it country.

"Where you from?" said the man in coveralls.

"South of here."

"South you mean the city?"

"Yeah."

"I got a daughter there."

"Doubt I know her."

"What, you think I'm some kind of moron?"

"No."

"I'm just letting you know that I sympathize."

"Sympathize?"

"Fish out of water," he said.

"Fish a-floppin'," said the kid with the T-shirt. "Ready for the blade de filet."

"Blade de what?" said the first man. "Don't mind Donald. He's stifled. My name's Steve."

"They call me that, too," I said.

Steve led me back through the repair bay.

"Take a load off. I'll get some coffee. Cream?"

"Thanks."

I fell asleep in the chair. Later someone was shaking me awake. Steve handed me a mug of coffee, leaned back on a gunmetal desk littered with invoice slips. I checked the cup for advertising slogans. Ancient reflex, I guess. Steve's Auto Repair, it said, Fixin' Since Nixon.

Rookies.

"We got one of you guys a few years ago," said Steve. "Looked like hell. Told us some crazy shit about how he'd failed to be a good mother, something like that. What's that about? It sounded somehow faggot-related. Like from the urban gay subculture."

"I'm not sure what it's about," I said.

"I'm not a homophobic, you know."

"I didn't know that," I said.

"Got a brother in the bi-lifestyle."

"Look," I said. "I'm not sure what it's all about. All I know is I've got to get back to the city."

"Reminds me of before. When old Heinrich had the prison camp. Better than a real prison, far as business around here went. Too bad he got all artsy fartsy. Though it looks like he's still getting his licks in. Boy, are you a sight. You know, my pops was on the march to Bataan."

"Can I use your phone?" I said.

"You know about Bataan?"

"I saw a movie."

"The movie captured about one percent of the horror, my friend."

"I got the idea, though."

"And about three percent of the idea."

"I'm sorry about Bataan. Tell your father I'm sorry about it."

"I will. That's kind of you. Guess I'll go over to the cemetery this afternoon and inform him of your concern. Want to come, asshole? Phone's right there."

I called Fiona.

"Daddy, where are you?"

"I'm in hell, baby," I said.

"Is there a bus?" said Fiona.

"Is there a bus?" I asked Steve.

"Of course there's a bus," he said.

Fiona put fifty-three dollars' worth of motor oil she would never need on her mother's credit card. Steve counted out the cash.

"If you'd been more knowledgeable about Jap atrocities," he said, "I just might have given you the dough for the ticket straight up. But you see my predicament."

The bus didn't leave for a few hours. I hitched a ride with Donald to the hospital.

"I'm going that way, anyway," he said. "You might want to get some stitches or something. Or a body cast."

"I like your T-shirt," I said.

"It's meant to be provocative," he said. "I'm not really such a bad guy. I'm just stifled."

Local needlepoint adorned the walls of the Pangburn Falls Medical Clinic like cheery exhortations to liver failure. Everything stank of Lysol and meaningless neighborly death. An enormous woman in stretch pants approached me with a wooden clipboard and a pencil with a fluffy feather on it.

"Name, insurance company, complaint," she said.

Then she looked up from her clipboard.

"Oh my fucking word," she said.

The needlepoint sampler on the far wall read "God's on Duty." I studied it for days, maybe more than days, that pale stitchwork, those fleeces of cloudbank at the corners. When I felt up to moving my eyes a bit I commenced analysis of the fiberboard panels in the ceiling-like snowflakes, no two chemical flecks were alike-and the tulips going to dead rot on the windowsill.

My head was halo'd, stilled with welds. The rest of me was set in traction, some kind of high-tech mold.

A woman walked into my room, laid her hand on my mold.

"A man's home is his cast," she said.

I said nothing.

"Don't say anything," said the woman. "My name is Dr. Cornwallis. You've been severely injured. You're lucky the shock got you here. Now did you understand that the first thing I said to you was a pun? Do you like puns?"

My eyes went tulipward.

"Don't shake your head," said Dr. Cornwallis. "Nobody really likes puns. Even the good ones grate. There's a theory that chronic punning is a neurological disorder. Blink if you find that hypothesis remotely intriguing. Blink if you wish me to speak in less mannered style."

I was mute for another month.

Then I said something, a word.

The night nurse said the word was Steve. She said this the next night. Steve was her dead son's name, and she wanted to know if he'd given me any kind of message to deliver before Jesus released me on my own recognizance, as he sometimes did, when someone dies but still has a job to do, like deliver a message.

"Steve said to say he loves you," I said.

"That's it?"

"He's sorry he didn't listen to you more. About drugs and stuff. You know, how you shouldn't do them until you fall in love."

I felt suddenly groggy.

"I feel suddenly groggy," I said.

"How did he look?" said the night nurse.

"Who?" I said.

"My boy."

"The light was too bright. All I saw was this bright light."

I noticed now I was out of the mold, could use my hands. I used them to shape the idea of light.

"How did he sound?" said the night nurse.

"Like heavenly-like."

"What else?"

"Wings," I said.

"Wings?"

"Wings," I said.

The night nurse wiped my halo with a fold of gauze.

"Golly," she said. "Your holes look infected."

She pushed the gauze through a flap in the wall.

"What do you mean?" I said.

She stood, rolled my tray away.

"What if I need to reach my tray?" I said.

"What if?" said the night nurse. She used her hands to make the shape of if, or maybe it was what.

I waited for the day nurse.

Dr. Cornwallis poked her head into my room.

"I'm just poking my head in," she said.

"Okay," I said.

"How are you feeling?"

"Not so hot," I said.

"I wouldn't think so," said Dr. Cornwallis. "I'd be hard pressed to believe you if you told me you were feeling hot. That's what I told Sally. I told Sally you've been traumatized, and as a result you've experienced severe trauma. I'm talking about the wings incident. May I extend an apology on your behalf?"

"Extend," I said.

"Excellent," said Dr. Cornwallis. "Is there anything else I can do for you?"

"My tray."

"I'll get someone to come push it closer," said Dr. Cornwallis.

"Can't you do it?"

"I wish I could."

"Maybe God could do it," I said. "He's on duty."

"That's a joke, right?" said Dr. Cornwallis.

"Yes," I said.

"No, I just wanted to make sure it wasn't a pun."

The day nurse was Donald, the stifled guy from the gas station. He walked in, winked, rolled my tray back to my bed. He had his hair up in pigtails, a pentagram pinned to his scrubs.

"Don't worry about the dead kid thing," said Donald. "Sally's all hung up on her dead kid."

"How'd he die?" I said.

"Kid-type thing. Chased a ball into the street. Me, I have children, they aren't getting any balls, that's for sure. No balls, no horseshoes, none of that shit."

"Do you remember me?" I said.

"Sure. From the Shell. You looked even worse then."

"How do I look now?"

"Like you chased a ball into the street."

"Can I see? Can you bring me a mirror?"

"I'd advise against it," said Donald. "Maybe down the road."

I pointed up at the pentagram.

"Satan?" I said.

"Donald," said Donald.

Dr. Cornwallis poked her head into my room.

"Just thought I'd poke my head in," she said.

"Poke away," I said.

"We need to talk."

"Let's talk," I said.

"It's about your finances, or lack thereof. Your coverage has expired."

"I've reached the maximum amount of maximum expenditure."

"That's what I've been given to understand by Ms. Kincaid."

"My old pen pal."

"You're going to have to leave, I'm afraid."

"You can't do that," I said.

"We do it all the time."

"What about your hypocritical oath?"

"Now that's a pun."

"Sorry," I said.

"I've fulfilled my oath. I've treated you for your injuries. I can't help it if you have a preexisting condition."

"Preexisting?" I said.

The doctor pulled a shiny book from her doctor pocket.

PREXIS: THE RACE AGAINST PERSONAL EXTINCTION

by Leon Goldfarb, M.D., and Vaughn Blackstone, D.D.S.

"Blackstone's a dentist?" I said.

"I know the cover looks a little gaudy," said Dr. Cornwallis, "but it's quite a good book. It was given to me by a man who works at the alternative healing outreach program here at the hospital. We're trying to widen the scope of our treatment. Maybe there's a place for you there. Wen said there might be a place for you there."

"Wen?"

"Wendell Tarr is his name."

"The Wanderer Wendell," I said.

"Oh, he pretty much stays around here. Anyway, the alternative program is really your only alternative, given your lack of coverage. We make exceptions in the alternative program with regard to coverage, whereas in the traditional-"

"Okay," I said.

"Wonderful," said Dr. Cornwallis. "Now get out of bed. Let's see if you can walk."

I could walk. Waddle, rather. I could bend a bit, swivel, squat. It hurt. Not like it hurt in the hut, but it hurt. I figured I'd shake out the pain for a minute, make a dash for it, the door.

I made a dash for the door. Dr. Cornwallis had to call Donald in from the hall. He picked me up, toweled me off where I'd pissed my gown.

"Thanks," I said.

"It's what I do," said Donald.

The next morning I had a visitor. He stood near the window for a while, sniffed the dead flowers, glanced up, glided over. There was something of the sea in him. A man who swam with dolphins, maybe, manatees. I could see us underwater near a reef. We weren't talking. We were squeaking. We were genius mammals of the sea. Then the gentleman started talking.

"Call me Wen," he said.

"The Wanderer Wendell," I said.

"Call me Wen," said the Wanderer.

"Wen," I said.

"You need to get well," he said. "In all ways. I'd like to escort you now to the Alternative Outreach Wing. But it's really inreach, really. I want to say that up front. Any questions?"

"Yes," I said. "Aren't you supposed to be dead?"

"Aren't you?"

"No, I mean they talk about you. Please note."

"You liked that," said Wen.

"Yeah."

"Mythology. Schoolyard stuff. Remember the kid who stuck his hand out the bus window?"

"Got lopped off."

"Did it?" said Wen.

He held up his hand at a squid-like tilt.

"It's right here," he said. "The motion it's making means come with me."

I followed him down some dingy corridors. We passed more needlepoint, doors ajar to sun-soaked rooms.

"Right up here," said Wen. He slapped his palm on a button on the wall. The button was palm-sized. A pair of glass doors parted.

"By the way, we don't use painkillers in this wing."

"What do you use?"

"For what?"

Wen took me to a room like my room in the other wing, but no needlepoint.

He said to get some rest. We'd begin that afternoon.

"Begin what?"

"That's your decision," said Wen.

"What do you suggest?"

"Well, you're dying. Maybe we should deal with that first."

"I'm not dying," I said.

"Au contraire, amigo," said Wen.

He flipped the PREXIS book onto my bed. The chrome type on his copy had a slightly different tint, a blurb emblazoned across the top-" 'Read it before your line dies out!'-Dr. Lauren Lovinger."

"Peruse at your leisure," said Wen.

I got into bed and started to leaf through the preface.

Not surprisingly, it was only after the results of the most routine of checkups for the most routine of men were faxed to us with some peculiar queries, that the hunt for PREXIS really began. . The subject had an admittedly rough time adjusting to the truth of his condition. . countless blind alleys and false starts later the race was on!. . Maybe I wasn't a circus caliber juggler, but I was good enough to dream. . Like the proverbial horse of proverb, you can lead a man to the laboratory, but you can't make him fully confront the implications of the data. . Nobody, of course, with our current technological capabilities, can really know what death feels like. .

I drifted off hearing Heinrich's voice.

"Falanga," it said. "Oh, dear Christ, sing it, Falanga!"

Lem Burke was at the window when I woke. He was squeezing whiteheads through his chin fuzz, putting the pus up to sunlight, making odd snorts I took for empirical glee.

"Breakthrough?" I said.

Lem flicked his pore goo at the window pane.

"Morning."

"Never thought I'd see you again," I said.

"How much did you think about it?"

"Are you here with your mother?"

"Figured she'd give Wendell a whirl," he said. "She's a guru addict, I guess."

"We all need love," I said.

"Bullshit," said Lem. "We all need bullshit."

I did have pity for the kid. Born in a bubble of babble, shuttled from one freak retreat to the next. So knowing, but what did he know? Estelle once claimed to have home-schooled him. I think that meant she gave him a couple of coloring books, left him alone to talk to himself.

"I'm supposed to take you to group."

Lem led me down to an airy dayroom. People in pajamas sat in slat-backed chairs. Wen was there, wearing a sweater with tiny felt animals sewn on it.

"My name is Wen," he said, "and I'm feeling what I'm feeling today."

I took a seat, looked around at all this pain, puff-eyed, in flame-retardant cotton.

There's an air hockey table in the dayroom, and when I'm not too busy feeling what I'm feeling, I'm taking Lem in three-out-of-fives for the day-old doughnuts Nurse Donald sneaks us from the cafeteria. Cudahy and I used to play on a table just like this one in his father's basement, until the Thornfield boys took a clawhammer to it. The world is full of sore losers. Some go on to win with great bitterness, too. Me, I've just always loved the sound of these babies warming up, all that air hockey air jetting up through holes.

Lem's nom de puck is The Wrist. I'm Rip Van Winkie, maybe on account of the new white shoots in my hair. Today there was a coconut flake on the line, but the game was called due to an unscheduled shame rap. Out came the chairs of sharing. The pajama zombies filed in.

"I'm feeling less than today," Wen said, picked at the fuzzy rhino on his sleeve. "My shame monster has woken from deep slumber."

A hard, thin pain slung through me as he spoke.

"Steve," said Wen. "Are you okay? You're shaking over there."

"I'm fine, Wen," I said.

"We all know what that means," said the woman beside me. Estelle Burke. Scorned ballerina. She tore at her thumb with her teeth.

"It doesn't mean anything," I said. "Do we have to do this now?"

"Wen's shame monster reared up," said Estelle. "You can't just pick and choose when that's going to happen."

"Thank you, Estelle," said Wen.

"Yes, thank you," I said, "for the blowjob Wen is about to receive."

"Whoa!" said Estelle. "I mean, from where?"

She spit some cuticle on my knee.

"It's okay," said Wen.

"Fuck okay," said Estelle. "I'm feeling very flanked."

"I understand the flanked feeling," said Wen. "And I understand Steve's rage. Though I can't condone it."

"I don't feel so good," I said.

"In what sense?" said Wen.

I had a fairly heady answer planned before I pitched off the chair.

"Steve?" said Wen.

"My name's not Steve," I said from the floor.

"What is it then?" said Lem.

"John Q. Fuckeroo."

"Is that Welsh?" said Estelle. "My first husband was Welsh."

"I'm the stewman," I said.

Everyone stared.

Wen walked me back to my door.

"You've got to stop collapsing," he said. "It's impeding your progress."

I found Lem down near the bed sifting through some dust balls.

"What's going on?" I said.

"Nothing," said Lem. "I dropped some Percodan."

"Where'd you get Percodan?"

"Your nurse buddy, Donald. Decent caring Donald."

"I'm going home, Lem," I said. "I'm going home to live or die but I'm going home."

"Probably die," said Lem.

"You're coming with me."

"I can't," said Lem. "I'm a country boy."

"You're a freak, Lem. A botched psychosocial experiment."

"I'm not that bad. I get the jokes on TV."

"We have to stick together now."

"I have to find the percs I dropped."

"You didn't drop them. No one ever drops anything."

"What's these, then?" said Lem.

We popped the pills, broke out some Bavarian creams. We rolled the TV in from the TV lounge.

"I've seen this," I said.

"Don't ruin it," said Lem.

Sandhogs ate their sandwiches and died by the score. The host stood inside the tiled tube, sobbed.

"The men were mealed," he said. "Until a granular quality obtained."

We took a bus down to the city with the motor oil money. We got a good movie on the bus. It was about airplanes falling out of the sky. Airplanes fell, boats sank, what could you do but get nervous? Buses swerved into ditches, mostly, or they tumbled from mountaintops in mountainous countries and only the chickens lived. But the chickens, they'd get buried in an avalanche. The avalanche would kick off a flood. Rivers would swell, whole villages would be wiped out. It was horrible, horrible. These goddamn countries were exporting horror and they had to be stopped. Maybe invaded, even.

I mentioned my concern to Lem.

"You're out of your fucking mind," he said. "It's the PREXIS. It's snacking on your faculty for reason."

"I'm in fine fettle," I said.

But I'd been feeling the shoots and shudders again. The organ-flutter, the vein ache. Lem had his perc stash in his fanny pack. I partook, feared more chicken visions.

We pulled into Port Authority at dusk. The home grime gladdened me. I led Lem through the throng.

"How about a peep show?"

"It's all kiddie stuff now," I said.

"Kiddie porn?"

"Kind of."

I shoved him onto a downtown train.

"Gibbering, jostling humanity," said Lem.

"Sit the fuck down," I said.

A man stood near us gripping the pole. He dropped his pants, groaned down into a squat.

"I have no place to shit tonight," he said. "Can you help me find a place to shit tonight?"

He started to pass a hat around.

"Have you ever really done it?" Lem asked the man.

"Done what?"

"Taken a dump on the train."

"That's disgusting," said the man.

It looked like they were doing some work on my old building. There were ladders outside, high bins full of stones. The neighborhood had been crumbling for some time. Every so often a gargoyle would topple off an edifice, crush a schoolgirl. It was good homegrown horror but people still preferred the imported kind. My old neighbor, an architect, wore a hard hat everywhere outside. He called us all cornice-bait.

Lem and I walked into the lobby and waited for the elevator.

"You're not going to believe this," said Lem, "but I've never been on one of these before."

"An elevator?"

"People fuck in them, right?"

"Constantly."

We got in with an old lady I used to bathe.

"Hilda," I said.

"Hilda's dead," said the woman. "I'm Hilda's mother."

My apartment door had been painted over. Someone was doing slap bass scales inside. I knocked and a woman in platinum-rimmed safety glasses answered the door. She had a jar of ointment with her. The label said Rad Balm. She daubed some of it on her lips.

"What?" she said.

"I live here," I said.

"Are you a time traveler?"

"I don't understand."

"Maybe you used to live here."

"That's very clever," I said. "How'd you get in?"

"Super gave me the key."

The Rad Balm girl disappeared, came back with a cardboard box. There was my Jews of Jazz calendar sticking out, Cudahy's track jacket, some spice vials bound in rubber band.

"Yours?"

"Yes."

"I had no real reason to save it. No law compelled me. And how many months does Benny Goodman get anyway?"

"Somebody gave me that calendar."

"Somebody gave me chlamydia. Stop making excuses. You'll be better off."

"I'd be better off if I hadn't been illegally evicted from my home."

"That I can't help you with. Just the emotional stuff."

"Thanks," I said. "See you around."

"Sure."

"You play beautifully," said Lem.

"It's not me," said the Rad Balm girl. "It's software for the fish."

"Fish?" said Lem.

"That's musician talk."

She shut the door.

We got some hot dogs and papaya juice, sat with the pigeons in a park. The park was mostly concrete. Stone benches, stone fountains, a brick chute for the kids. I threw a piece of wiener to the birds. They didn't mob it the way I'd hoped. A few made some listless pecks. It was a slowdown.

"Get hungry later," said Lem, "we can always eat one of those guys."

"Full of disease."

"Glass houses, pal."

Traffic was jammed up at the intersection. Stop-and-go all the way to the bridge. Families on the other side of the river were probably boiling their dinner pouches, cursing the tardiness of their pouch-winners. Surly sons punched down the channel changer for some late-afternoon bikini tit before Mom came home. Disaffected daughters carved Wiccan proverbs into their arms. Cats dozed on quilts, recovering traumatic memories in dream. Most cats were once mishandled kittens. This was all waiting for the men and women in the cars and they leaned on their horns as though they did not know they were already home.

I decided to die. I figured I owed it to myself, maybe to future personal extinction victims everywhere. Cleaved, sawed, prised open, my corpse would yield the secret to their salvation. Maybe it was fair penance for the damage I'd done.