White Noise

22

The supermarket is full of elderly people who look lost among the dazzling hedgerows. Some people are too small to reach the upper shelves; some people block the aisles with their carts; some are clumsy and slow to react; some are forgetful, some confused; some move about muttering with the wary look of people in institutional corridors.

I pushed my cart along the aisle. Wilder sat inside, on the collapsible shelf, trying to grab items whose shape and radiance excited his system of sensory analysis. There were two new developments in the supermarket, a butcher's corner and a bakery, and the oven aroma of bread and cake combined with the sight of a bloodstained man pounding at strips of living veal was pretty exciting for us all.

"Dristan Ultra, Dristan Ultra."

The other excitement was the snow. Heavy snow predicted, later today or tonight. It brought out the crowds, those who feared the roads would soon be impassable, those too old to walk safely in snow and ice, those who thought the storm would isolate them in their homes for days or weeks. Older people in particular were susceptible to news of impending calamity as it was forecast on TV by grave men standing before digital radar maps or pulsing photographs of the planet. Whipped into a frenzy, they hurried to the supermarket to stock up before the weather mass moved in. Snow watch, said the forecasters. Snow alert. Snowplows. Snow mixed with sleet and freezing rain. It was already snowing in the west. It was already moving to the east. They gripped this news like a pygmy skull. Snow showers. Snow flurries. Snow warnings. Driving snow. Blowing snow. Deep and drifting snow. Accumulations, devastations. The old people shopped in a panic. When TV didn't fill them with rage, it scared them half to death. They whispered to each other in the checkout lines. Traveler's advisory, zero visibility. When does it hit? How many inches? How many days? They became secretive, shifty, appeared to withhold the latest and worst news from others; appeared to blend a cunning with their haste, tried to hurry out before someone questioned the extent of their purchases. Hoarders in a war. Greedy, guilty.

I saw Murray in the generic food area, carrying a Teflon skillet. I stopped to watch him for a while. He talked to four or five people, occasionally pausing to scrawl some notes in a spiral book. He managed to write with the skillet wedged awkwardly under his arm.

Wilder called out to him, a tree-top screech, and I wheeled the cart over.

"How is that good woman of yours?"

"Fine," I said.

"Does this kid talk yet?"

"Now and then. He likes to pick his spots."

"You know that matter you helped me with? The Elvis Presley power struggle?"

"Sure. I came in and lectured."

"It turns out, tragically, that I would have won anyway."

"What happened?"

"Cotsakis, my rival, is no longer among the living."

"What does that mean?"

"It means he's dead."

"Dead?"

"Lost in the surf off Malibu. During the term break. I found out an hour ago. Came right here."

I was suddenly aware of the dense environmental texture. The automatic doors opened and closed, breathing abruptly. Colors and odors seemed sharper. The sound of gliding feet emerged from a dozen other noises, from the sublittoral drone of maintenance systems, from the rustle of newsprint as shoppers scanned their horoscopes in the tabloids up front, from the whispers of elderly women with talcumed faces, from the steady rattle of cars going over a loose manhole cover just outside the entrance. Gliding feet. I heard them clearly, a sad numb shuffle in every aisle.

"How are the girls?" Murray said.

"Fine."

"Back in school?"

"Yes."

"Now that the scare is over."

"Yes. Steffie no longer wears her protective mask."

"I want to buy some New York cuts," he said, gesturing toward the butcher.

The phrase seemed familiar, but what did it mean?

"Unpackaged meat, fresh bread," he went on. "Exotic fruits, rare cheeses. Products from twenty countries. It's like being at some crossroads of the ancient world, a Persian bazaar or boom town on the Tigris. How are you, Jack?"

What did he mean, how are you?

"Poor Cotsakis, lost in the surf," I said. "That enormous man."

"That's the one."

"I don't know what to say."

"He was big all right."

"Enormously so."

"I don't know what to say either. Except better him than me."

"He must have weighed three hundred pounds."

"Oh, easily."

"What do you think, two ninety, three hundred?"

"Three hundred easily."

"Dead. A big man like that.", "What can we say?"

"I thought I was big."

"He was on another level. You're big on your level."

"Not that I knew him. I didn't know him at all."

"It's better not knowing them when they die. It's better them than us."

"To be so enormous. Then to die."

"To be lost without a trace. To be swept away."

"I can picture him so clearly."

"It's strange in a way, isn't it," he said, "that we can picture the dead."

I took Wilder along the fruit bins. The fruit was gleaming and wet, hard-edged. There was a self-conscious quality about it. It looked carefully observed, like four-color fruit in a guide to photography. We veered right at the plastic jugs of spring water and headed for the checkout. I liked being with Wilder. The world was a series of fleeting gratifications. He took what he could, then immediately forgot it in the rush of a subsequent pleasure. It was this forgetfulness I envied and admired.

The woman at the terminal asked him a number of questions, providing her own replies in a babyish voice.

Some of the houses in town were showing signs of neglect. The park benches needed repair, the broken streets needed resurfacing. Signs of the times. But the supermarket did not change, except for the better. It was well-stocked, musical and bright. This was the key, it seemed to us. Everything was fine, would continue to be fine, would eventually get even better as long as the supermarket did not slip.

Early that evening I drove Babette to her class in posture. We stopped on the parkway overpass and got out to look at the sunset. Ever since the airborne toxic event, the sunsets had become almost unbearably beautiful. Not that there was a measurable connection. If the special character of Nyodene Derivative (added to the everyday drift of effluents, pollutants, contaminants and deliriants) had caused this aesthetic leap from already brilliant sunsets to broad towering ruddled visionary skyscapes, tinged with dread, no one had been able to prove it.

"What else can we believe?" Babette said. "How else can we explain?"

"I don't know."

"We're not at the edge of the ocean or desert. We ought to have timid winter sunsets. But look at the blazing sky. It's so beautiful and dramatic. Sunsets used to last five minutes. Now they last an hour."

"Why is that?"

"Why is that?" she said.

This spot on the overpass offered a broad prospect west. People had been coming here ever since the first of the new sunsets, parking their own cars, standing around in the bitter wind to chat nervously and look. There were four cars here already, others certain to come. The overpass had become a scenic lookout. The police were reluctant to enforce the parking ban. It was one of those situations, like the Olympics for the handicapped, that make all the restrictions seem petty.

Later I drove back to the Congregational church to pick her up. Denise and Wilder came along for the ride. Babette in jeans and legwarmers was a fine and stirring sight. Legwarmers lend a note of paramilitary poise, a hint of archaic warriorhood. When she shoveled snow, she wore a furry headband as well. It made me think of the fifth century A.D. Men standing around campfires speaking in subdued tones in their Turkic and Mongol dialects. Clear skies. The fearless exemplary death of Attila the Hun.

"How was class?" Denise said.

"It's going so well they want me to teach another course."

"In what?"

"Jack won't believe this."

"In what?" I said.

"Eating and drinking. It's called Eating and Drinking: Basic Parameters. Which, I admit, is a little more stupid than it absolutely has to be."

"What could you teach?" Denise said.

"That's just it. It's practically inexhaustible. Eat light foods in warm weather. Drink plenty of liquids."

"But everybody knows that."

"Knowledge changes every day. People like to have their beliefs reinforced. Don't lie down after eating a heavy meal. Don't drink liquor on an empty stomach. If you must swim, wait at least an hour after eating. The world is more complicated for adults than it is for children. We didn't grow up with all these shifting facts and attitudes. One day they just started appearing. So people need to be reassured by someone in a position of authority that a certain way to do something is the right way or the wrong way, at least for the time being. I'm the closest they could find, that's all."

A staticky piece of lint clung to the TV screen.

In bed we lay quietly, my head between her breasts, cushioned as if against some remorseless blow. I was determined not to tell her about the computer verdict. I knew she would be devastated to learn that my death would almost surely precede hers. Her body became the agency of my resolve, my silence. Nightly I moved toward her breasts, nuzzling into that designated space like a wounded sub into its repair dock. I drew courage from her breasts, her warm mouth, her browsing hands, from the skimming tips of her fingers on my back. The lighter the touch, the more determined I was to keep her from knowing. Only her own desperation could break my will.

Once I almost asked her to put on legwarmers before we made love. But it seemed a request more deeply rooted in pathos than in aberrant sexuality and I thought it might make her suspect that something was wrong.

23

1 asked my German teacher to add half an hour to each lesson. It seemed more urgent than ever that I learn the language. His room was cold. He wore foul weather gear and seemed gradually to be piling furniture against the windows.

We sat facing each other in the gloom. I did wonderfully well with vocabulary and rules of grammar. I could have passed a written test easily, made top grades. But I continued to have trouble pronouncing the words. Dunlop did not seem to mind. He enunciated for me over and over, scintillas of dry spit flying toward my face.

We advanced to three lessons a week. He seemed to shed his distracted manner, to become slightly more engaged. Furniture, newspapers, cardboard boxes, sheets of polyethylene continued to accumulate against the walls and windows-items scavenged from ravines. He stared into my mouth as I did my exercises in pronunciation. Once he reached in with his right hand to adjust my tongue. It was a strange and terrible moment, an act of haunting intimacy. No one had ever handled my tongue before.

German shepherds still patrolled the town, accompanied by men in Mylex suits. We welcomed the dogs, got used to them, fed and petted them, but did not adjust well to the sight of costumed men with padded boots, hoses attached to their masks. We associated these outfits with the source of our trouble and fear.

At dinner Denise said, "Why can't they dress in normal clothes?"

"This is what they wear on duty," Babette said. "It doesn't mean we're in danger. The dogs have sniffed out only a few traces of toxic material on the edge of town."

"That's what we're supposed to believe," Heinrich said. "If they released the true findings, there'd be billions of dollars in law suits. Not to mention demonstrations, panic, violence and social disorder."

He seemed to take pleasure in the prospect. Babette said, "That's a little extreme, isn't it?"

"What's extreme, what I said or what would happen?"

"Both. There's no reason to think the results aren't true as published."

"Do you really believe that?" he said.

"Why shouldn't I believe it?"

"Industry would collapse if the true results of any of these investigations were released."

"What investigations?"

"The ones that are going on all over the country."

'That's the point," she said. "Every day on the news there's another toxic spill. Cancerous solvents from storage tanks, arsenic from smokestacks, radioactive water from power plants. How serious can it be if it happens all the time? Isn't the definition of a serious event based on the fact that it's not an everyday occurrence?"

The two girls looked at Heinrich, anticipating a surgically deft rejoinder.

"Forget these spills," he said. "These spills are nothing."

This wasn't the direction any of us had expected him to take. Babette watched him carefully. He cut a lettuce leaf on his salad plate into two equal pieces.

"I wouldn't say they were nothing," she said cautiously. "They're small everyday seepages. They're controllable. But they're not nothing. We have to watch them."

"The sooner we forget these spills, the sooner we can come to grips with the real issue."

"What's the real issue?" I said.

He spoke with his mouth full of lettuce and cucumber.

"The real issue is the kind of radiation that surrounds us every day. Your radio, your TV, your microwave oven, your power lines just outside the door, your radar speed-trap on the highway. For years they told us these low doses weren't dangerous."

"And now?" Babette said.

We watched him use his spoon to mold the mashed potatoes on his plate into the shape of a volcanic mountain. He poured gravy ever so carefully into the opening at the top. Then he set to work ridding his steak of fat, veins and other imperfections. It occurred to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain.

"This is the big new worry," he said. "Forget spills, fallouts, leakages. It's the things right around you in your own house that'll get you sooner or later. It's the electrical and magnetic fields. Who in this room would believe me if I said that the suicide rate hits an all-time record among people who live near high-voltage power lines? What makes these people so sad and depressed? Just the sight of ugly wires and utility poles? Or does something happen to their brain cells from being exposed to constant rays?"

He immersed a piece of steak in the gravy that sat in the volcanic depression, then put it in his mouth. But he did not begin chewing until he'd scooped some potatoes from the lower slopes and added it to the meat. A tension seemed to be building around the question of whether he could finish the gravy before the potatoes collapsed.

"Forget headaches and fatigue," he said as he chewed. "What about nerve disorders, strange and violent behavior in the home? There are scientific findings. Where do you think all the deformed babies are coming from? Radio and TV, that's where."

The girls looked at him. admiringly. I wanted to argue with him. I wanted to ask him why I should believe these scientific findings but not the results that indicated we were safe from Nyodene contamination. But what could I say, considering my condition? I wanted to tell him that statistical evidence of the kind he was quoting from was by nature inconclusive and misleading. I wanted to say that he would learn to regard all such catastrophic findings with equanimity as he matured, grew out of his confining literalism, developed a spirit of informed and skeptical inquiry, advanced in wisdom and rounded judgment, got old, declined, died.

But I only said, "Terrifying data is now an industry in itself. Different firms compete to see how badly they can scare us."

"I've got news for you," he said. "The brain of a white rat releases calcium ions when it's exposed to radio-frequency waves. Does anyone at this table know what that means?"

Denise looked at her mother.

"Is this what they teach in school today?" Babette said. "What happened to civics, how a bill becomes a law? The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the two sides. I still remember my theorems. The battle of Bunker Hill was really fought on Breed's Hill. Here's one. Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania."

"Was it the Monitor or the Merrimac that got sunk?" I said.

"I don't know but it was Tippecanoe and Tyler too."

"What was that?" Steffie said.

"I want to say he was an Indian running for office. Here's one. Who invented the mechanical reaper and how did it change the face of American agriculture?"

"I'm trying to remember the three kinds of rock," I said. "Igneous, sedimentary and something else."

"What about your logarithms? What about the causes of economic discontent leading up to the Great Grash? Here's one. Who won the Lincoln-Douglas debates? Careful. It's not as obvious as it seems."

"Anthracite and bituminous," I said. "Isosceles and scalene."

The mysterious words came back to me in a rush of confused schoolroom images.

"Here's one. Angles, Saxons and Jutes."

Déjà vu was still a problem in the area. A toll-free hotline had been set up. There were counselors on duty around the clock to talk to people who were troubled by recurring episodes. Perhaps déjà vu and other tics of the mind and body were the durable products of the airborne toxic event. But over a period of time it became possible to interpret such things as signs of a deep-reaching isolation we were beginning to feel. There was no large city with a vaster torment we might use to see our own dilemma in some soothing perspective. No large city to blame for our sense of victimization. No city to hate and fear. No panting megacenter to absorb our woe, to distract us from our unremitting sense of time-

time as the agent of our particular ruin, our chromosome breaks, hysterically multiplying tissue.

"Baba," I whispered between her breasts, that night in bed.

Although we are for a small town remarkably free of resentment, the absence of a polestar metropolis leaves us feeling in our private moments a little lonely.

24

It was the following night that I discovered the Dylar. An amber bottle of lightweight plastic. It was taped to the underside of the radiator cover in the bathroom. I found it when the radiator began knocking and I removed the cover to study the valve in an earnest and methodical way, trying to disguise to myself the helplessness I felt.

I went at once to find Denise. She was in bed watching TV. When I told her what I'd found we went quietly into the bathroom and looked at the bottle together. It was easy to see the word Dylar through the transparent tape. Neither of us touched a thing, so great was our surprise at finding the medication concealed in this manner. We regarded the little tablets with solemn concern. Then we exchanged a look fraught with implication.

Without a word we replaced the radiator cover, bottle intact, and went back to Denise's room. The voice at the end of the bed said: "Meanwhile here is a quick and attractive lemon garnish suitable for any sea food."

Denise sat on the bed, looking past me, past the TV set, past the posters and souvenirs. Her eyes were narrowed, her face set in a thoughtful scowl.

"We say nothing to Baba."

"All right," I said.

"She'll only say she doesn't remember why she put it there."

"What is Dylar? That's what I want to know. There are only three or four places she could have gone to get the prescription filled, within a reasonable distance. A pharmacist can tell us what the stuff is for. I'll get in the car first thing in the morning."

"I already did that," she said.

"When?"

"Around Christmas. I went to three drugstores and talked to the Indians behind the counters in the back."

"I think they're Pakistanis."

"Whatever."

"What did they tell you about Dylar?"

"Never heard of it."

"Did you ask them to look it up? They must have lists of the most recent medications. Supplements, updates."

"They looked. It's not on any list."

"Unlisted," I said.

"We'll have to call her doctor."

"I'll call him now. I'll call him at home."

"Surprise him," she said, with a certain ruthlessness.

"If I get him at home, he won't be screened by an answering service, a receptionist, a nurse, the young and good-humored doctor who shares his suite of offices and whose role in life is to treat the established doctor's rejects. Once you're shunted from the older doctor to the younger doctor, it means that you and your disease are second-rate."

"Call him at home," she said. "Wake him up. Trick him into telling us what we want to know."

The only phone was in the kitchen. I ambled down the hall, glancing into our bedroom to make sure Babette was still there, ironing blouses and listening to a call-in show on the radio, a form of entertainment she'd recently become addicted to. I went down to the kitchen, found the doctor's name in the phone book and dialed his home number.

The doctor's name was Hookstratten. It sounded sort of German. I'd met him once-a stooped man with a bird-wattled face and deep voice. Denise had said to trick him but the only way to do that was within a context of honesty and truthfulness. If I pretended to be a stranger seeking information about Dylar, he would either hang up or tell me to come into the office.

He answered on the fourth or fifth ring. I told him who I was and said I was concerned about Babette. Concerned enough to call him at home-an admittedly rash act but one I hoped he'd be able to understand. I said I was fairly sure it was the medication he'd prescribed for her that was causing the problem.

"What problem?"

"Memory lapse."

"You would call a doctor at home to talk about memory lapse. If everyone with memory lapse called a doctor at home, what would we have? The ripple effect would be tremendous."

I told him the lapses were frequent.

"Frequent. I know your wife. This is the wife who came to me one night with a crying child. 'My child is crying.' She would come to a medical doctor who is a private corporation and ask him to treat a child for crying. Now I pick up the phone and it's the husband. You would call a doctor in his home after ten o'clock at night. You would say to him, 'Memory lapse.' Why not tell me she has gas? Call me at home for gas?"

"Frequent and prolonged, doctor. It has to be the medication."

"What medication?"

"Dylar."

"Never heard of it."

"A small white tablet. Comes in an amber bottle."

"You would describe a tablet as small and white and expect a doctor to respond, at home, after ten at night. Why not tell me it is round? This is crucial to our case."

"It's an unlisted drug."

"I never saw it. I certainly never prescribed it for your wife. She's a very healthy woman so far as it's within my ability to ascertain such things, being subject as I am to the same human failings as the next fellow."

This sounded like a malpractice disclaimer. Maybe he was reading it from a printed card like a detective informing a suspect of his constitutional rights. I thanked him, hung up, called my own doctor at home. He answered on the seventh ring, said he thought Dylar was an island in the Persian Gulf, one of those oil terminals crucial to the survival of the West. A woman did the weather in the background.

I went upstairs and told Denise not to worry. I would take a tablet from the bottle and have it analyzed by someone in the chemistry department at the college. I waited for her to tell me she'd already done that. But she just nodded grimly and I headed down the hall, stopping in Heinrich's room to say goodnight. He was doing chinning exercises in the closet, using a bar clamped to the doorway.

"Where did you get that?"

"It's Mercator's."

"Who's that?"

"He's this senior I hang around with now. He's almost nineteen and he's still in high school. To give you some idea."

"Some idea of what?"

"How big he is. He bench-presses these awesome amounts."

"Why do you want to chin? What does chinning accomplish?" What does anything accomplish? Maybe I just want to build up my body to compensate for other things."

"What other things?"

"My hairline's getting worse, to name just one."

"It's not getting worse. Ask Baba if you don't believe me. She has a sharp eye for things like that."

"My mother told me to see a dermatologist."

"I don't think that's necessary at this stage."

"I already went."

"What did he say?"

"It was a she. My mother told me to go to a woman."

"What did she say?"

"She said I have a dense donor site."

"What does that mean?"

"She can take hair from other parts of my head and surgically implant it where it's needed. Not that it makes any difference. I'd. just as soon be bald. I can easily see myself totally bald. There are kids my age with cancer. Their hair falls out from chemotherapy. Why should I be different?"

He was standing in the closet peering out at me. I decided to change the subject.

"If you really think chinning helps, why don't you stand outside the closet and do your exercises facing in? Why stand in that dark musty space?"

"If you think this is strange, you ought to see what Mercator's doing."

"What's he doing?"

"He's training to break the world endurance record for sitting in a cage full of poisonous snakes, for the Guinness Book of Records. He goes to Glassboro three times a week where they have this exotic pet shop. The owner lets him feed the mamba and the puff adder. To get him accustomed. Totally forget your North American rattlesnake. The puff adder is the most venomous snake in the world."

"Every time I see newsfilm of someone in his fourth week of sitting in a cage full of snakes, I find myself wishing he'd get bitten."

"So do I," Heinrich said.

"Why is that?"

"He's asking for it."

"That's right. Most of us spend our lives avoiding danger. Who do these people think they are?"

"They ask for it. Let them get it."

I paused a while, savoring the rare moment of agreement.

"What else does your friend do to train?"

"He sits for long periods in one place, getting his bladder accustomed. He's down to two meals a day. He sleeps sitting up, two hours at a time. He wants to train himself to wake up gradually, without sudden movements, which could startle a mamba."

"It seems a strange ambition."

"Mambas are sensitive."

"But if it makes him happy."

"He thinks he's happy but it's just a nerve cell in his brain that's getting too much stimulation or too little stimulation."

I got out of bed in the middle of the night and went to the small room at the end of the hall to watch Steffie and Wilder sleep. I remained at this task, motionless, for nearly an hour, feeling refreshed and expanded in unnameable ways.

I was surprised, entering our bedroom, to find Babette standing at a window looking out into the steely night. She gave no sign that she'd noticed my absence from the bed and did not seem to hear when I climbed back in, burying myself beneath the covers.

25

Our newspaper is delivered by a middle-aged Iranian driving a Nissan Sentra. Something about the car makes me uneasy- the car waiting with its headlights on, at dawn, as the man places the newspaper on the front steps. I tell myself I have reached an age, the age of unreliable menace. The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities.

I sat at my desk in the office staring down at the white tablet. It was more or less flying-saucer-shaped, a streamlined disk with the tiniest of holes at one end. It was only after moments of intense scrutiny that I'd been able to spot the hole.

The tablet was not chalky like aspirin and not exactly capsule-slick either. It felt strange in the hand, curiously sensitive to the touch but at the same time giving the impression that it was synthetic, insoluble, elaborately engineered.

I walked over to a small domed building known as the Observatory and gave the tablet to Winnie Richards, a" young research neurochemist whose work was said to be brilliant. She was a tall gawky furtive woman who blushed when someone said something funny. Some of the New York émigrés liked to visit her cubicle and deliver rapid-fire one-liners, just to see her face turn red.

I watched her sit at the cluttered desk for two or three minutes, slowly rotating the tablet between her thumb and index finger. She licked it and shrugged.

"Certainly doesn't taste like much."

"How long will it take to analyze the contents?"

"There's a dolphin's brain in my in-box but come see me in forty-eight hours."

Winnie was well-known on the Hill for moving from place to place without being seen. No one knew how she managed this or why she found it necessary. Maybe she was self-conscious about her awkward frame, her craning look and odd lope. Maybe she had a phobia concerning open spaces, although the spaces at the college were mainly snug and quaint. Perhaps the world of people and things had such an impact on her, struck her with the force of some rough and naked body-made her blush in fact-that she found it easier to avoid frequent contact. Maybe she was tired of being called brilliant. In any case I had trouble locating her all the rest of that week. She was not to be seen on the lawns and walks, was absent from her cubicle whenever I looked in.

At home Denise made it a point not to bring up the subject of Dylar. She did not want to put pressure on me and even avoided eye contact, as if an exchange of significant looks was more than our secret knowledge could bear. Babette, for her part, could not seem to produce a look that wasn't significant. In the middle of conversations she turned to gaze at snowfalls, sunsets or parked cars in a sculptured and eternal way. These contemplations began to worry me. She'd always been an outward-looking woman with a bracing sense of particularity, a trust in the tangible and real. This private gazing was a form of estrangement not only from those of us around her but from the very things she watched so endlessly.

We sat at the breakfast table after the older kids were gone.

"Have you seen the Stovers' new dog?"

"No," I said.

'They think it's a space alien. Only they're not joking. I was there yesterday. The animal is strange."

"Has something been bothering you?"

"I'm fine," she said.

"I wish you'd tell me. We tell each other everything. We always have."

"Jack, what could be bothering me?"

"You stare out of windows. You're different somehow. You don't quite see things and react to things the way you used to."

"That's what their dog does. He stares out of windows. But not just any window. He goes upstairs to the attic and puts his paws up on the sill to look out the highest window. They think he's waiting for instructions."

"Denise would kill me if she knew I was going to say this."

"What?"

"I found the Dylar."

"What Dylar?"

"It was taped to the radiator cover."

"Why would I tape something to the radiator cover?"

'That's exactly what Denise predicted you would say."

"She's usually right."

"I talked to Hookstratten, your doctor."

"I'm in super shape, really."

"That's what he said."

"Do you know what these cold gray leaden days make me want to do?"

"What?"

"Crawl into bed with a good-looking man. I'll put Wilder in his play tunnel. You go shave and brush your teeth. Meet you in the bedroom in ten minutes."

That afternoon I saw Winnie Richards slip out a side door of the Observatory and go loping down a small lawn toward the new buildings. I hurried out of my office and went after her. She kept close to walls, moving in a long-gaited stride. I felt I had made an important sighting of an endangered animal or some phenomenal subhuman like a yeti or sasquatch. It was cold and still leaden. I found I could not gain on her without breaking into a trot. She hurried around the back of Faculty House and I picked up the pace, fearing I was on the verge of losing her. It felt strange to be running. I hadn't run in many years and didn't recognize my body in this new format, didn't recognize the world beneath my feet, hard-surfaced and abrupt. I turned a corner and picked up speed, aware of floating bulk. Up, down, life, death. My robe flew behind me.

I caught up to her in the empty corridor of a one-story building that smelled of embalming fluids. She stood against the wall in a pale green tunic and tennis sneakers. I was too winded to speak and raised my right arm, requesting a delay. Winnie led me to a table in a small room full of bottled brains. The table was fitted with a sink and covered with note pads and lab instruments. She gave me water in a paper cup. I tried to dissociate the taste of the tap water from the sight of the brains and the general odor of preservatives and disinfectants.

"Have you been hiding from me?" I said. "I've left notes, phone messages."

"Not from you, Jack, or anyone in particular."

"Then why have you been so hard to find?"

"Isn't this what the twentieth century is all about?"

"What?"

"People go into hiding even when no one is looking for them."

"Do you really think that's true?"

"It's obvious," she said.

"What about the tablet?"

"An interesting piece of technology. What's it called?"

"Dylar."

"Never heard of it," she said.

"What can you tell me about it? Try not to be too brilliant. I haven't eaten lunch yet."

I watched her blush.

"It's not a tablet in the old sense," she said. "It's a drug delivery system. It doesn't dissolve right away or release its ingredients right away. The medication in Dylar is encased in a polymer membrane. Water from your gastrointestinal tract seeps through the membrane at a carefully controlled rate."

"What does the water do?"

"It dissolves the medication encased in the membrane. Slowly, gradually, precisely. The medicine then passes out of the polymer tablet through a single small hole. Once again the rate is carefully controlled."

"It took me a while to spot the hole."

"That's because it's laser-drilled. It's not only tiny but stunningly precise in its dimensions."

"Lasers, polymers."

"I'm not an expert in any of this, Jack, but I can tell you it's a wonderful little system."

"What's the point of all this precision?"

"I would think the controlled dosage is meant to eliminate the hit-or-miss effect of pills and capsules. The drug is delivered at specified rates for extended periods. You avoid the classic pattern of overdosage followed by underdosage. You don't get a burst of medication followed by the merest trickle. No upset stomach, queasiness, vomiting, muscle cramps, et cetera. This system is efficient."

"I'm impressed. I'm even dazzled. But what happens to the polymer tablet after the medication is pumped out of it?"

"It self-destructs. It implodes minutely of its own massive gravitation. We've entered the realm of physics. Once the plastic membrane is reduced to microscopic particles, it passes harmlessly out of the body in the time-honored way."

"Fantastic. Now tell me what the medication is designed to do? What is Dylar? What are the chemical components?"

"I don't know," she said.

"Of course you know. You're brilliant. Everyone says so."

"What else can they say? I do neurochemistry. No one knows what that is."

"Other scientists have some idea. They must. And they say you're brilliant."

"We're all brilliant. Isn't that the understanding around here? You call me brilliant, I call you brilliant. It's a form of communal ego."

"No one calls me brilliant. They call me shrewd. They say I latched on to something big. I filled an opening no one knew existed."

"There are openings for brilliance too. It's my turn, that's all. Besides, I'm built funny and walk funny. If they couldn't call me brilliant, they would be forced to say cruel things about me. How awful for everyone."

She clutched some files to her chest.

"Jack, all I can tell you for certain is that the substance contained in Dylar is some kind of psychopharmaceutical. It's probably designed to interact with a distant part of the human cortex. Look around you. Brains everywhere. Sharks, whales, dolphins, great apes. None of them remotely matches the human brain in complexity. The human brain is not my field. I have only a bare working knowledge of the human brain but it's enough to make me proud to be an American. Your brain has a trillion neurons and every neuron has ten thousand little dendrites. The system of intercommunication is awe-inspiring. It's like a galaxy that you can hold in your hand, only more complex, more mysterious."

"Why does this make you proud to be an American?"

"The infant's brain develops in response to stimuli. We still lead the world in stimuli."

I sipped my water.

"I wish I knew more," she said. "But the precise nature of the medication eludes me. I can tell you one thing. It is not on the market."

"But I found it in an ordinary prescription vial."

"I don't care where you found it. I'm pretty sure I'd recognize the ingredients of a known brain-receptor drug. This one is unknown."

She began to shoot quick looks toward the door. Her eyes were bright and fearful. I realized there were noises in the corridor. Voices, shuffling feet. I watched Winnie back toward a rear door. I decided I wanted to see her blush one more time. She put an arm behind her, unlatched the door, turned quickly and went running into the gray afternoon. I tried to think of something funny to say.

26

Isat up in bed with my notes on German grammar. Babette lay on her side staring into the clock-radio, listening to a call-in show. I heard a woman say: "In 1977 I looked in the mirror and saw the person I was becoming. I couldn't or wouldn't get out of bed. Figures moved at the edge of my vision, like with scurrying steps. I was getting phone calls from a Pershing missile base. I needed to talk to others who shared these experiences. I needed a support program, something to enroll in."

I leaned across my wife's body and turned off the radio. She kept on staring. I kissed her lightly on the head.

" Murray says you have important hair."

She smiled in a pale and depleted way. I put down my notes and eased her around slightly so that she looked straight up as I spoke.

"It's time for a major dialogue. You know it, I know it. You'll tell me all about Dylar. If not for my sake, then for your little girl's. She's been worried-worried sick. Besides, you have no more room to maneuver. We've backed you against the wall. Denise and I. I found the concealed bottle, removed a tablet, had it analyzed by an expert. Those little white disks are superbly engineered. Laser technology, advanced plastics. Dylar is almost as ingenious as the microorganisms that ate the billowing cloud. Who would have believed in the existence of a little white pill that works as a pressure pump in the human body to provide medication safely and effectively, and self-destructs as well? I am struck by the beauty of this. We know something else, something crucially damaging to your case. We know Dylar is not available to the general public. This fact alone justifies our demands for an explanation. There's really very little left for you to say. Just tell us the nature of the drag. As you well know, I don't have the temperament to hound people. But Denise is a different kind of person. I've been doing all I can to restrain her. If you don't tell me what I want to know, I'll unleash your little girl. She'll come at you with everything she has. She won't waste time trying to make you feel guilty. Denise believes in a frontal attack. She'll hammer you right into the ground. You know I'm right, Babette."

About five minutes passed. She lay there, staring into the ceiling.

"Just let me tell it in my own way," she said in a small voice.

"Would you like a liqueur?"

"No, thank you."

"Take your time," I said. "We've got all night. If there's anything you want or need, just say so. You have only to ask. I'll be right here for as long as it takes."

Another moment passed.

"I don't know exactly when it started. Maybe a year and a half ago. I thought I was going through a phase, some kind of watermark period in my life."

"Landmark," I said. "Or watershed."

"A kind of settling-in-period, I thought. Middle age. Something like that. The condition would go away and I'd forget all about it. But it didn't go away. I began to think it never would."

"What condition?"

"Never mind that for now."

"You've been depressed lately. I've never seen you like this. This is the whole point of Babette. She's a joyous person. She doesn't succumb to gloom or self-pity."

"Let me tell it, Jack."

"All right."

"You know how I am. I think everything is correctible. Given the right attitude and the proper effort, a person can change a harmful condition by reducing it to its simplest parts. You can make lists, invent categories, devise charts and graphs. This is how I am able to teach my students how to stand, sit and walk, even though I know you think these subjects are too obvious and nebulous and generalized to be reduced to component parts. I'm not a very ingenious person but I know how to break things down, how to separate and classify. We can analyze posture, we can analyze eating, drinking and even breathing. How else do you understand the world, is my way of looking at it."

"I'm right here," I said. "If there's anything you want or need, only say the word."

"When I realized this condition was not about to go away, I set out to understand it better by reducing it to its parts. First I had to find out if it had any parts. I went to libraries and bookstores, read magazines and technical journals, watched cable TV, made lists and diagrams, made multicolored charts, made phone calls to technical writers and scientists, talked to a Sikh holy man in Iron City and even studied the occult, hiding the books in the attic so you and Denise wouldn't find them and wonder what was going on."

"All this without my knowing. The whole point of Babette is that she speaks to me, she reveals and confides."

"This is not a story about your disappointment at my silence. The theme of this story is my pain and my attempts to end it."

"I'll make some hot chocolate. Would you like that?"

"Stay. This is a crucial part. All this energy, this research, study and concealment, but I was getting nowhere. The condition would not yield. It hung over my life, gave me no rest. Then one day I was reading to Mr. Treadwell from the National Examiner. An ad caught my eye. Never mind exactly what it said. Volunteers wanted for secret research. This is all you have to know."

"I thought it was my former wives who practiced guile. Sweet deceivers. Tense, breathy, high-cheekboned, bilingual."

"I answered the ad and was interviewed by a small firm doing research in psychobiology. Do you know what that is?"

"No."

"Do you know how complex the human brain is?"

"I have some idea."

"No, you don't. Let's call the company Gray Research, although that's not the true name. Let's call my contact Mr. Gray. Mr. Gray is a composite. I was eventually in touch with three or four or more people at the firm."

"One of those long low pale brick buildings with electrified fencing and low-profile shrubbery."

"I never saw their headquarters. Never mind why. The point is I took test after test. Emotional, psychological, motor response, brain activity. Mr. Gray said there were three finalists and I was one of them."

"Finalists for what?"

"We were to be test subjects in the development of a super experimental and top secret drug, code-name Dylar, that he'd been working on for years. He'd found a Dylar receptor in the human brain and was putting the finishing touches on the tablet itself. But he also told me there were dangers in running tests on a human. I could die. I could live but my brain could die. The left side of my brain cquld die but the right side could live. This would mean that the left side of my body would live but the right side would die. There were many grim specters. I could walk sideways but not forward. I could not distinguish words from things, so that if someone said 'speeding bullet,' I would fall to the floor and take cover. Mr. Gray wanted me to know the risks. There were releases and other documents for me to sign. The firm had lawyers, priests."

"They let you go ahead, a human test animal."

"No, they didn't. They said it was way too risky-legally, ethically and so forth. They went to work designing computer molecules and computer brains. I refused to accept this. I'd come so far, come so close. I want you to try to understand what happened next. If I'm going to tell you the story at all, I have to include this aspect of it, this grubby little corner of the human heart. You say Babette reveals and confides."

"This is the point of Babette."

"Good. I will reveal and confide. Mr. Gray and I made a private arrangement. Forget the priests, the lawyers, the psychobiologists. We would conduct the experiments on our own. I would be cured of my condition, he would be acclaimed for a wonderful medical breakthrough."

"What's so grubby about this?"

"It involved an indiscretion. This was the only way I could get Mr. Gray to let me use the drug. It was my last resort, my last hope. First I'd offered him my mind. Now I offered my body."

I felt a sensation of warmth creeping up my back and radiating outward across my shoulders. Babette looked straight up. I was propped on an elbow, facing her, studying her features. When I spoke finally it was in a reasonable and inquiring voice-the voice of a man who seeks genuinely to understand some timeless human riddle.

"How do you offer your body to a composite of three or more people? This is a compound person. He is like a police sketch of one person's eyebrows, another person's nose. Let's concentrate on the genitals. How many sets are we talking about?"

"Just one person's, Jack. A key person, the project manager."

"So we are no longer referring to the Mr. Gray who is a composite."

"He is now one person. We went to a grubby little motel room. Never mind where or when. It had the TV up near the ceiling. This is all I remember. Grubby, tacky. I was heartsick. But so, so desperate."

"You call this an indiscretion, as if we haven't had a revolution in frank and bold language. Call it what it was, describe it honestly, give it the credit it deserves. You entered a motel room, excited by its impersonality, the functionalism and bad taste of the furnishings. You walked barefoot on the fïre-retardant carpet. Mr. Gray went around opening doors, looking for a full-length mirror. He watched you undress. You lay on the bed, embracing. Then he entered you."

"Don't use that term. You know how I feel about that usage."

"He effected what is called entry. In other words he inserted himself. One minute he was fully dressed, putting the car rental keys on the dresser. The next minute he was inside you."

"No one was inside anyone. That is stupid usage. I did what I had to do. I was remote. I was operating outside myself. It was a capitalist transaction. You cherish the wife who tells you everything. 1 am doing my best to be that person.

"All right, I'm only trying to understand. How many times did you go to this motel?"

"More or less on a continuing basis for some months. That was the agreement."

I felt heat rising along the back of my neck. I watched her carefully. A sadness showed in her eyes. I lay back and looked at the ceiling. The radio came on. She began to cry softly.

"There's some Jell-O with banana slices," I said. "Steffie made it."

"She's a good girl."

"I can easily get you some."

"No, thank you."

"Why did the radio come on?"

"The auto-timer is broken. I'll take it to the shop tomorrow."

"I'll take it."

"it's all right," she said. "It's no trouble. I can easily take it."

"Did you enjoy having sex with him?"

"I only remember the TV up near the ceiling, aimed down at us."

"Did he have a sense of humor? I know women appreciate men who can joke about sex. I can't, unfortunately, and after this I don't think there's much chance I'll be able to learn."

"It's better if you know him as Mr. Gray. That's all. He's not tall, short, young or old. He doesn't laugh or cry. It's for your own good."

"I have a question. Why didn't Gray Research run tests on animals? Animals must be better than computers in some respects."

'That's just the point. No animal has this condition. This is a human condition. Animals fear many things, Mr. Gray said. But their brains aren't sophisticated enough to accommodate this particular state of mind."

For the first time I began to get an inkling of what she'd been talking about all along. My body went cold. I felt hollow inside. I rose from my supine position, once again propping myself on an elbow to look down at her. She started to cry again.

"You have to tell me, Babette. You've taken me this far, put me through this much. I have to know. What's the condition?"

The longer she wept, the more certain I became that I knew what she was going to say. I felt an impulse to get dressed and leave, take a room somewhere until this whole thing blew over. Babette raised her face to me, sorrowing and pale, her eyes showing a helpless desolation. We faced each other, propped on elbows, like a sculpture of lounging philosophers in a classical academy. The radio turned itself off.

"I'm afraid to die," she said. "I think about it all the time. It won't go away."

"Don't tell me this. This is terrible."

"I can't help it. How can I help it?"

"I don't want to know. Save it for our old age. You're still young, you get plenty of exercise. This is not a reasonable fear."

"It haunts me, Jack. I can't get it off my mind. I know I'm not supposed to experience such a fear so consciously and so steadily. What can I do? It's just there. That's why I was so quick to notice Mr. Gray's ad in the tabloid I was reading aloud. The headline hit home. FEAR OF DEATH, it said. I think about it all the time. You're disappointed. I can tell."

"Disappointed?"

"You thought the condition would be more specific. I wish it was. But a person doesn't search for months and months to corner the solution to some daily little ailment."

I tried to talk her out of it.

"How can you be sure it is death you fear? Death is so vague. No one knows what it is, what it feels like or looks like. Maybe you just have a personal problem that surfaces in the form of a great universal subject."

"What problem?"

"Something you're hiding from yourself. Your weight maybe."

"I've lost weight. What about my height?"

"I know you've lost weight. That's just my point. You practically ooze good health. You reek of it. Hookstratten confirms this, your own doctor. There must be something else, an underlying problem."

"What could be more underlying than death?"

I tried to persuade her it was not as serious as she thought.

"Baba, everyone fears death. Why should you be different? You yourself said earlier it is a human condition. There's no one who has lived past the age of seven who hasn't worried about dying."

"At some level everyone fears death. I fear it right up front. I don't know how or why it happened. But I can't be the only one or why would Gray Research spend millions on a pill?"

"That's what I said. You're not the only one. There are hundreds of thousands of people. Isn't it reassuring to know that? You're like the woman on the radio who got phone calls from a missile base. She wanted to find others whose own psychotic experiences would make her feel less isolated."

"But Mr. Gray said I was extra sensitive to the terror of death. He gave me a battery of tests. That's why he was eager to use me."

'This is what I find odd. You concealed your terror for so long. If you're able to conceal such a thing from a husband and children, maybe it is not so severe."

'This is not the story of a wife's deception. You can't sidestep the true story, Jack. It is too big."

I kept my voice calm. I spoke to her as one of those reclining philosophers might address a younger member of the academy, someone whose work is promising and fitfully brilliant but perhaps too heavily dependent on the scholarship of the senior fellow.

"Baba, I am the one in this family who is obsessed by death. I have always been the one."

"You never said."

'To protect you from worry. To keep you animated, vital and happy. You are the happy one. I am the doomed fool. That's what I can't forgive you for. Telling me you're not the woman I believed you were. I'm hurt, I'm devastated."

"I always thought of you as someone who might muse on death. You might take walks and muse. But all those times we talked about who will die first, you never said you were afraid."

"The same goes for you. 'As soon as the kids are grown.' You made it sound like a trip to Spain."

"I do want to die first," she said, "but that doesn't mean I'm not afraid. I'm terribly afraid. I'm afraid all the time."

"I've been afraid for more than half my life."

"What do you want me to say? Your fear is older and wiser than mine?"

"I wake up sweating. I break out in killer sweats."

"I chew gum because my throat constricts."

"I have no body. I'm only a mind or a self, alone in a vast space."

"I seize up," she said.

"I'm too weak to move. I lack all sense of resolve, determination."

"I thought about my mother dying. Then she died."

"I think about everyone dying. Not just myself. I lapse into terrible reveries."

"I felt so guilty. I thought her death was connected to my thinking about it. I feel the same way about my own death. The more I think about it, the sooner it will happen."

"How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn't they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it? Wear the same disguise."

"What if death is nothing but sound?"

"Electrical noise."

"You hear it forever. Sound all around. How awful."

"Uniform, white."

"Sometimes it sweeps over me," she said. "Sometimes it insinuates itself into my mind, little by little. I try to talk to it. Not now, Death.'"

"I lie in the dark looking at the clock. Always odd numbers. One thirty-seven in the morning. Three fifty-nine in the morning."

"Death is odd-numbered. That's what the Sikh told me. The holy man in Iron City."

"You're my strength, my life-force. How can I persuade you that this is a terrible mistake? I've watched you bathe Wilder, iron my gown. These deep and simple pleasures are lost to me now. Don't you see the enormity of what you've done?"

"Sometimes it hits me like a blow," she said. "I almost physically want to reel."

– "Is this why I married Babette? So she would conceal the truth from me, conceal objects from me, join in a sexual conspiracy at my expense? All plots move in one direction," I told her grimly.

We held each other tightly for a long time, our bodies clenched in an embrace that included elements of love, grief, tenderness, sex and struggle. How subtly we shifted emotions, found shadings, using the scantest movement of our arms, our loins, the slightest intake of breath, to reach agreement on our fear, to advance our competition, to assert our root desires against the chaos in our souls.

Leaded, unleaded, super unleaded.

We lay naked after love, wet and gleaming. I pulled the covers up over us. We spoke in drowsv whispers for a while. The radio came on.

"I'm right here," I said. "Whatever you want or need, however difficult, tell me and it's done."

"A drink of water."

"Of course."

"I'll go with you," she said.

"Stay, rest."

"I don't want to be alone."

We put on our robes, went to the bathroom for water. She drank while I pissed. On our way back to the bedroom I put my arm around her and we walked half toppling toward each other, like adolescents on a beach. I waited by the side of the bed as she rearranged the sheets neatly, put the pillows in place. She curled up immediately for sleep but there were still things I wanted to know, things I had to say.

"Precisely what was accomplished by the people at Gray Research?"

"They isolated the fear-of-death part of the brain. Dylar speeds relief to that sector."

"Incredible."

"It's not just a powerful tranquilizer. The drug specifically interacts with neurotransmitters in the brain that are related to the fear of death. Every emotion or sensation has its own neurotransmitters. Mr. Gray found fear of death and then went to worl on finding the chemicals that would induce the brain to make its own inhibitors."

"Amazing and frightening."

"Everything that goes on in your whole life is a result of molecules rushing around somewhere in your brain."

"Heinrich's brain theories. They're all true. We're the sum of our chemical impulses. Don't tell me this. It's unbearable to think about."

"They can trace everything you say, do and feel to the number of molecules in a certain region."

"What happens to good and evil in this system? Passion, envy and hate? Do they become a tangle of neurons? Are you telling me that a whole tradition of human failings is now at an end, that cowardice, sadism, molestation are meaningless terms? Are we being asked to regard these things nostalgically? What about murderous rage? A murderer used to have a certain fearsome size to him. His crime was large. What happens when we reduce it to cells and molecules? My son plays chess with a murderer. He told me all this. I didn't want to listen."

"Can I sleep now?"

"Wait. If Dylar speeds relief, why have you been so sad these past days, staring into space?"

"Simple. The drug's not working."

Her voice broke when she said these words. She raised the comforter over her head. I could only stare at the hilly terrain. A man on talk radio said: "I was getting mixed messages about my sexuality." I stroked her head and body over the quilted bedspread.

"Can you elaborate, Baba? I'm right here. I want to help."

"Mr. Gray gave me sixty tablets in two bottles. This would be more than enough, he said. One tablet every seventy-two hours. The discharge of medication is so gradual and precise that there's no overlapping from one pill to the next. I finished the first bottle sometime in late November, early December."

"Denise found it."

"She did?"

"She's been on your trail ever since."

"Where did I leave it?"

"In the kitchen trash."

"Why did I do that? That was careless."

"What about the second bottle?" I said.

"You found the second bottle."

"I know. I'm asking how many tablets you've taken."

"I've now taken twenty-five from that bottle. That's fifty-five all told. Five left."

"Four left. I had one analyzed."

"Did you tell me that?"

"Yes. And has there been any change at all in your condition.

She allowed the top of her head to emerge.

"At first I thought so. The very beginning was the most hopeful time. Since then no improvement. I've grown more and more discouraged. Let me sleep now, Jack."

"Remember we had dinner at Murray 's one night? On the way home we talked about your memory lapses. You said you weren't sure whether or not you were taking medication. You couldn't remember, you said. This was a lie, of course."

"I guess so," she said.

"But you weren't lying about memory lapses in general. Denise and I assumed your forgetfulness was a side effect of whatever drug you were taking."

The whole head emerged.

"Totally wrong," she said. "It wasn't a side effect of the drug. It was a side effect of the condition. Mr. Gray said my loss of memory is a desperate attempt to counteract my fear of death. It's like a war of neurons. I am able to forget many things but I fail when it comes to death. And now Mr. Gray has failed as well."

"Does he know that?"

"I left a message on his answering machine."

"What did; he say when he called back?"

"He sent me a tape in the mail, which I took over to the Stovers to play. He said he was literally sorry, whatever that means. He said I was not the right subject after all. He is sure it will work someday, soon, with someone, somewhere. He said he made a mistake with me. It was too random. He was too eager."

It was the middle of the night. We were both exhausted. But we'd come so far, said so much, that I knew we couldn't stop just yet. I took a deep breath. Then I lay back, staring into the ceiling. Babette leaned across my body to turn off the lamp. Then she pressed a button on the radio, killing the voices. A thousand other nights had ended more or less like this. I felt her sink into the bed.

'There's something I promised myself I wouldn't tell you."

"Can it wait until morning?" she said.

"I'm tentatively scheduled to die. It won't happen tomorrow or the next day. But it is in the works."

I went on to tell her about my exposure to Nyodene D., speaking matter-of-factly, tonelessly, in short declarative sentences. I told her about the computer technician, the way he'd tapped into my history to produce a pessimistic massive tally. We are the sum total of our data, I told her, just as we are the sum total of our chemical impulses. I tried to explain how hard I'd struggled to keep the news from her. But after her own revelations, this seemed the wrong kind of secret to be keeping.

"So -we are no longer talking about fear and floating terror," I said. "This is the hard and heavy thing, the fact itself."

Slowly she emerged from beneath the covers. She climbed on top of me, sobbing. I felt her fingers clawing at my shoulders and neck. The warm tears fell on my lips. She beat me on the chest, seized my left hand and bit the flesh between the thumb and index finger. Her sobs became a grunting sound, full of terrible desperate effort. She took my head in her hands, gently and yet fiercely, and rocked it to and fro on the pillow, an act I could not connect to anything she'd ever done, anything she seemed to be.

Later, after she'd fallen off my body and into a restless sleep, I kept on staring into the dark. The radio came on. I threw off the covers and went into the bathroom. Denise's scenic paperweights sat on a dusty shelf by the door. I ran water over my hands and wrists. I splashed cold water on my face. The only towel around was a small pink handcloth with a tic-tac-toe design. I dried myself slowly and carefully. Then I tilted the radiator cover away from the wall and stuck my hand underneath. The bottle of Dylar was gone.

27

I had my second medical checkup since the toxic event. No startling numbers on the printout. This death was still too deep to be glimpsed. My doctor, Sundar Chakravarty, asked me about the sudden flurry of checkups. In the past I'd always been afraid to know.

1 told him I was still afraid. He smiled broadly, waiting for the punch line. I shook his hand and headed out the door.

On the way home I drove down Elm intending to make a quick stop at the supermarket. The street was full of emergency vehicles. Farther down I saw bodies scattered about. A man with an armband blew a. whistle at me and stepped in front of my car. I glimpsed other men in Mylex suits. Stretcher-bearers ran across the street. When the man with the whistle drew closer, I was able to make out the letters on his armband: SIMUVAC.

"Back it out," he said. "Street's closed."

"Are you people sure you're ready for a simulation? You may want to wait for one more massive spill. Get your timing down."

"Move it out, get it out. You're in the exposure swath."

"What's that mean?"

"It means you're dead," he told me.

I backed out of the street and parked the car. Then I walked slowly back down Elm, trying to look as though I belonged. I kept close to storefronts, mingled with technicians and marshals, with uniformed personnel. There were buses, police cars, ambulettes. People with electronic equipment appeared to be trying to detect radiation or toxic fallout. In time I approached the volunteer victims. There were twenty or so, prone, supine, draped over curbstones, sitting in the street with woozy looks.

I was startled to see my daughter among them. She lay in the middle of the street, on her back, one arm flung out, her head tilted the other way. I could hardly bear to look. Is this how she thinks of herself at the age of nine-already a victim, trying to polish her skills? How natural she looked, how deeply imbued with the idea of a sweeping disaster. Is this the future she envisions?

I walked over there and squatted down.

"Steffie? Is that you?"

She opened her eyes.

"You're not supposed to be here unless you're a victim," she said.

"I just want to be sure you're okay."

"I'll get in trouble if they see you."

"It's cold. You'll get sick. Does Baba know you're here?"

"I signed up in school an hour ago."

"They at least should hand out blankets," I said.

She closed her eyes. I spoke to her a while longer but she wouldn't answer. There was no trace of irritation or dismissal in her silence. Just conscientiousness. She had a history of being devout in her victimhood.

I went back to the sidewalk. A man's amplified voice boomed across the street from somewhere inside the supermarket.

"I want to welcome all of you on behalf of Advanced Disaster Management, a private consulting firm that conceives and operates simulated evacuations. We are interfacing with twenty-two state bodies in carrying out this advanced disaster drill. The first, I trust, of many. The more we rehearse disaster, the safer we'll be from the real thing. Life seems to work that way, doesn't it? You take your umbrella to the office seventeen straight days, not a drop of rain. The first day you leave it at home, record-breaking downpour. Never fails, does it? This is the mechanism we hope to employ, among others. O-right, on to business. When the siren sounds three long blasts, thousands of hand-picked evacuees will leave their homes and places of employment, get into their vehicles and head for well-equipped emergency shelters. Traffic directors will race to their computerized stations. Updated instructions will be issued on the SIMUVAC broadcast system. Air-sampling people will deploy along the cloud exposure swath. Dairy samplers will test milk and randomized foodstuffs over the next three days along the ingestion swath. We are not simulating a particular spillage today. This is an all-purpose leak or spill. It could be radioactive steam, chemical cloudlets, a haze of unknown origin. The important thing is movement. Get those people out of the swath. We learned a lot during the night of the billowing cloud. But there is no substitute for a planned simulation. If reality intrudes in the form of a car crash or a victim falling off a stretcher, it is important to remember that we are not here to mend broken bones or put out real fires. We are here to simulate. Interruptions can cost lives in a real emergency. If we learn to work around interruptions now, we'll be able to work around them later when it counts. O-right. When the siren sounds two melancholy wails, street captains will make house-to-house searches for those who may have been inadvertently left behind. Birds, goldfish, elderly people, handicapped people, invalids, shut-ins, whatever. Five minutes, victims. All you rescue personnel, remember this is not a blast simulation. Your victims are overcome but not traumatized. Save your tender loving care for the nuclear fireball in June. We're at four minutes and counting. Victims, go limp. And remember you're not here to scream or thrash about. We like a low-profile victim. This isn't New York or L.A. Soft moans will suffice."

I decided I didn't want to watch. I went back to the car and headed home. The sirens emitted the first three blasts as I pulled up in front of the house. Heinrich was sitting on the front steps, wearing a reflector vest and his camouflage cap. With him was an older boy. He had a powerful compact body of uncertain pigmentation. No one on our street seemed to be evacuating. Heinrich consulted a clipboard.

"What's going on?"

"I'm a street captain," he said.

"Did you know Steffie was a victim?"

"She said she might be."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"So they pick her up and put her in an ambulance. What's the problem?"

"I don't know what the problem is."

"If she wants to do it, she should do it."

"She seems so well-adjusted to the role."

"It could save her life someday," he said.

"How can pretending to be injured or dead save a person's life?"

"If she does it now, she might not have to do it later. The more you practice something, the less likely it is to actually happen."

'That's what the consultant said."

"It's a gimmick but it works."

"Who's this?"

"This is Orest Mercator. He's going to help me check for leftovers."

"You're the one who wants to sit in a cage full of deadly snakes. Can you tell me why?"

"Because I'm going for the record," Orest said.

"Why would you want to get killed going for a record?"

"What killed? Who said anything about killed?"

"You'll be surrounded by rare and deadly reptiles."

"They're the best at what they do. I want to be the best at what I do."

"What do you do?"

"I sit in a cage for sixty-seven days. That's what it takes to break the record."

"Do you understand that you are risking death for a couple of lines in a paperback book?"

He looked searchingly at Heinrich, obviously holding the boy responsible for this idiotic line of questioning.

"They will bite you," I went on.

"They won't bite me."

"How do you know?"

"Because I know."

"These are real snakes, Orest. One bite, that's it."

"One bite if they bite. But they won't bite."

"They are real. You are real. People get bitten all the time. The venom is deadly."

"People get bitten. But I won't."

I found myself saying, "You will, you will. These snakes don't know you find death inconceivable. They don't know you're young and strong and you think death applies to everyone but you. They will bite and you will die."

I paused, shamed by the passion of my argument. I was surprised to see him look at me with a certain interest, a certain grudging respect. Perhaps the unbecoming force of my outburst brought home to him the gravity of his task, filled him with intimations of an unwieldy fate.

'They want to bite, they bite," he said. "At least I go right away. These snakes are the best, the quickest. A puff adder bites me, I die in seconds."

"What's your hurry? You're nineteen years old. You'll find hundreds of ways to die that are better than snakes."

What kind of name is Orest? I studied his features. He might have been Hispanic, Middle Eastern, Central Asian, a dark-skinned Eastern European, a light-skinned black. Did he have an accent? I wasn't sure. Was he a Samoan, a native North American, a Sephardic Jew? It was getting hard to know what you couldn't say to people.

He said to me, "How many pounds can you bench-press?"

"I don't know. Not very many."

"Did you ever punch somebody in the face?"

"Maybe a glancing blow, once, a long time ago."

"I'm looking to punch somebody in the face. Bare-fisted. Hard as I can. To find out what it feels like."

Heinrich grinned like a stool pigeon in the movies. The siren began to sound-two melancholy blasts. I went inside as the two boys checked the clipboard for house numbers. Babette was in the kitchen giving Wilder some lunch.

"He's wearing a reflector vest," I said.

"It's in case there's haze, he won't get hit by fleeing vehicles."

"I don't think anyone's bothered to flee. How do you feel?"

"Better," she said.

"So do I."

"I think it's being with Wilder that picks me up."

"I know what you mean. I always feel good when I'm with Wilder. Is it because pleasures don't cling to him? He is selfish without being grasping, selfish in a totally unbounded and natural way. There's something wonderful about the way he drops one thing, grabs for another. I get annoyed when the other kids don't fully appreciate special moments or occasions. They let things slide away that should be kept and savored. But when Wilder does it, I see the spirit of genius at work."

"That may be true but there's something else about him that gives me a lift. Something bigger, grander, that I can't quite put my finger on."

"Remind me to ask Murray," I said.

She spooned soup into the child's mouth, creating facial expressions for him to mimic and saying, "Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes."

"One thing I have to ask. Where is the Dylar?"

"Forget it, Jack. Fool's gold or whatever the appropriate term."

"A cruel illusion. I know. But I'd like to keep the tablets in a safe place, if only as physical evidence that Dylar exists. If your left brain should decide to die, I want to be able to sue someone. There are four tablets left. Where are they?"

"Are you telling me they're not behind the radiator cover?"

"That's right."

"I didn't move them, honest."

"Is it possible you threw them away in an angry or depressed moment? I only want them for the sake of historical accuracy. Like White House tapes. They go into the archives."

"You haven't been pretested," she said. "Even one pill can be dangerous to ingest."

"I don't want to ingest."

"Yes, you do."

"We are being coaxed out of the ingestion swath. Where is Mr. Gray? I may want to sue him as a matter of principle."

"We made a pact, he and I."

"Tuesdays and Fridays. The Grayview Motel."

"That's not what I mean. I promised not to reveal his true identity to anyone. Considering what you're after, that promise goes double. It's more for your good than his. I'm not telling, Jack. Let's just resume our lives. Let's tell each other we'll do the best we can. Yes yes yes yes yes."

I drove to the grade school and parked across the street from the main entrance. Twenty minutes later they came surging out, about three hundred kids, babbling, gleeful, casually amuck. They called brilliant insults, informed and spacious obscenities, hit each other with bookbags, knit caps. I sat in the driver's seat scanning the mass of faces, feeling like a dope dealer or pervert.

When I spotted Denise I blew the horn and she came over. This was the first time I'd ever picked her up at school and she gave me a wary and hard-eyed look as she passed in front of the car- a look that indicated she was in no mood for news of a separation or divorce. I took the river road home. She scrutinized my profile.

"It's about Dylar," I said. "The medication has nothing to do with Baba's memory problems. In fact just the opposite. She takes Dylar to improve her memory."

"I don't believe you."

"Why not?"

"Because you wouldn't come and get me at school just to tell me that. Because we already found out you can't get it with a prescription. Because I talked to her doctor and he never heard of it."

"You called him at home?"

"At the office."

"Dylar is a little too special for a G.P."

"Is my mother a drug addict?"

"You're smarter than that," I said.

"No, I'm not."

"We'd like to know what you did with the bottle. There were some tablets left."

"How do you know I took them?"

1 know it, you know it.

"If somebody wants to tell me what Dylar really is, maybe we'll get somewhere."

"There's something you don't know," I said. "Your mother no longer takes the medication. Whatever your reason for holding the bottle, it's just not valid anymore."

We'd looped around to the west and were now driving through the college campus. Automatically I reached into my jacket for the dark glasses and put them on.

"Then I'll throw it away," she said.

Over the next few days I tried an assortment of arguments, some nearly breathtaking in their delicate webby texture. I even enlisted Babette, convincing her that the bottle belonged in adult hands. But the girl's will was supremely resistant. Her life as a legal entity had been shaped by other people's bargaining and haggling and she was determined to follow a code too rigid to allow for the trade-off, the settlement. She would keep the object hidden until we told her its secret.

It was probably just as well. The drug could be dangerous, after all. And I was not a believer in easy solutions, something to swallow that would rid my soul of an ancient fear. But I could not help thinking about that saucer-shaped tablet. Would it ever work, could it work for some but not others? It was the benign counterpart of the Nyodene menace. Tumbling from the back of my tongue down into my stomach. The drug core dissolving, releasing benevolent chemicals into my bloodstream, flooding the fear-of-death part of my brain. The pill itself silently self-destructing in a tiny inward burst, a polymer implosion, discreet and precise and considerate.

Technology with a human face.

28

Wilder sat on a tall stool in front of the stove, watching water boil in a small enamel pot. He seemed fascinated by the process. I wondered if he'd uncovered some splendid connection between things he'd always thought of as separate. The kitchen is routinely rich in such moments, perhaps for me as much as for him.

Steffie walked in saying, "I'm the only person I know who likes Wednesdays." Wilder's absorption seemed to interest her. She went and stood next to him, trying to figure out what attracted him to the agitated water. She leaned over the pot, looking for an egg.

A jingle for a product called Ray-Ban Wayfarer began running through my head.

"How did the evacuation go?"

"A lot of people never showed up. We waited around, moaning."

"They show up for the real ones," I said.

"Then it's too late."

The light was bright and cool, making objects glow. Steffie was dressed for the outdoors, a schoolday morning, but remained at the stove, looking from Wilder to the pot and back, trying to intersect the lines of his curiosity and wonder.

"Baba says you got a letter."

"My mother wants me to visit at Easter."

"Good. Do you want to go? Of course you do. You like your mother. She's in Mexico City now, isn't she?"

"Who'll take me?"

"I'll take you to the airport. Your mother will pick you up at the other end. It's easy. Bee does it all the time. You like Bee."

The enormity of the mission, of flying to a foreign country at nearly supersonic speed, at thirty thousand feet, alone, in a humped container of titanium and steel, caused her to grow momentarily silent. We watched the water boil.

"I signed up to be a victim again. It's just before Easter. So I think I have to stay here."

"Another evacuation? What's the occasion this time?"

"A funny smell."

"You mean some chemical from a plant across the river?"

"I guess so."

"What do you do as the victim of a smell?"

"They have to tell us yet."

"I'm sure they won't mind excusing you just this once. I'll write a note," I said.

My first and fourth marriages were to Dana Breedlove, who is Steffie's mother. The first marriage worked well enough to encourage us to try again as soon as it became mutually convenient. When we did, after the melancholy epochs of Janet Savory and Tweedy Browner, things proceeded to fall apart. But not before Stephanie Rose was conceived, a star-hung night in Barbados. Dana was there to bribe an official.

She told me very little about her intelligence work. I knew she reviewed fiction for the CIA, mainly long serious novels with coded structures. The work left her tired and irritable, rarely able to enjoy food, sex or conversation. She spoke Spanish to someone on the telephone, was a hyperactive mother, shining with an eerie stormlight intensity. The long novels kept arriving in the mail.

It was curious how I kept stumbling into the company of lives in intelligence. Dana worked part-time as a spy. Tweedy came from a distinguished old family that had a long tradition of spying and counterspying and she was now married to a high-level jungle operative. Janet, before retiring to the ashram, was a foreign-currency analyst who did research for a secret group of advanced theorists connected to some controversial think-tank. All she told me is that they never met in the same place twice.

Some of my adoration of Babette must have been sheer relief. She was not a keeper of secrets, at least not until her death fears drove her into a frenzy of clandestine research and erotic deception. I thought of Mr. Gray and his pendulous member. The image was hazy, unfinished. The man was literally gray, giving off a visual buzz.

The water progressed to a rolling boil. Steffie helped the boy down from his perch. I ran into 6abette on my way to the front door. We exchanged the simple but deeply sincere question we'd been asking each other two or three times a day since the night of the Dylar revelations. "How do you feel?" Asking the question, hearing it asked, made us both feel better. I bounded upstairs to find my glasses.

The National Cancer Quiz was on TV.

In the lunchroom in Centenary Hall, I watched Murray sniff his utensils. There was a special pallor in the faces of the New York émigrés. Lasher and Grappa in particular. They had the wanness of obsession, of powerful appetites confined to small spaces. Murray said that Elliot Lasher had a film noir face. His features were sharply defined, his hair perfumed with some oily extract. I had the curious thought that these men were nostalgic for black-and-white, their longings dominated by achromatic values, personal extremes of postwar urban gray.

Alfonse Stompanato sat down, radiating aggression and threat. He seemed to be watching me, one department head measuring the aura of another. There was a Brooklyn Dodger emblem sewed to the front of his gown.

Lasher wadded up a paper napkin and tossed it at someone two tables away. Then he stared at Grappa.

"Who was the greatest influence on your life?" he said in a hostile tone.

"Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death. When Richard Widmark pushed that old lady in that wheelchair down that flight of stairs, it was like a personal breakthrough for me. It resolved a number of conflicts. I copied Richard Widmark's sadistic laugh and used it for ten years. It got me through some tough emotional periods. Richard Widmark as Tommy Udo in Henry Hathaway's Kiss of Death. Remember that creepy laugh? Hyena-faced. A ghoulish titter. It clarified a number of things in my life. Helped me become a person."

"Did you ever spit in your soda bottle so you wouldn't have to share your drink with the other kids?"

"It was an automatic thing. Some guys even spit in their sandwiches. After we pitched pennies to the wall, we'd buy stuff to eat and drink. There was always a flurry of spitting. Guys spit on their fudge pops, their charlotte russes."

"How old were you when you first realized your father was a jerk?"

"Twelve and a half," Grappa said. "I was sitting in the balcony at the Loew's Fairmont watching Fritz Lang's Clash by Night with Barbara Stanwyck as Mae Doyle, Paul Douglas as Jerry d'Amato and the great Robert Ryan as Earl Pfeiffer. Featuring J. Carroll Naish, Keith Andes and the early Marilyn Monroe. Shot in thirty-two days. Black and white."

"Did you ever get an erection from a dental hygienist rubbing against your arm while she cleaned your teeth?"

"More times than I can count."

"When you bite dead skin off your thumb, do you eat it or spit it out?"

"Chew it briefly, then propel it swiftly from the end of the tongue."

"Do you ever close your eyes," Lasher said, "while you're driving on a highway?"

"I closed my eyes on 95 North for eight full seconds. Eight seconds is my personal best. I've closed my eyes for up to six seconds on winding country roads but that's only doing thirty or thirty-five. On multilane highways I usually hover at seventy before I close my eyes. You do this on straightaways. I've closed my eyes for up to five seconds on straightaways driving with other people in the car. You wait till they're drowsy is how you do it."

Grappa had a round moist worried face. There was something in it of a sweet boy betrayed. I watched him light up a cigarette, shake out the match and toss it into Murray 's salad.

"How much pleasure did you take as a kid," Lasher said, "in imagining yourself dead?"

"Never mind as a kid," Grappa said. "I still do it all the time. Whenever I'm upset over something, I imagine all my friends, relatives and colleagues gathered at my bier. They are very, very sorry they weren't nicer to me while I lived. Self-pity is something I've worked very hard to maintain. Why abandon it just because you grow up? Self-pity is something that children are very good at, which must mean it is natural and important. Imagining yourself dead is the cheapest, sleaziest, most satisfying form of childish self-pity. How sad and remorseful and guilty all those people are, standing by your great bronze coffin. They can't even look each other in the eye because they know that the death of this decent and compassionate man is the result of a conspiracy they all took part in. The coffin is banked with flowers and lined with a napped fabric in salmon or peach. What wonderful cross-currents of self-pity and self-esteem you are able to wallow in, seeing yourself laid out in a dark suit and tie, looking tanned, fit and rested, as they say of presidents after vacations. But there is something even more childish and satisfying than self-pity, something that explains why I try to see myself dead on a regular basis, a great fellow surrounded by sniveling mourners. It is my way of punishing people for thinking their own lives are more important than mine."

Lasher said to Murray, "We ought to have an official Day of the Dead. Like the Mexicans."

"We do. It's called Super Bowl Week."

I didn't want to listen to this. I had my own dying to dwell upon, independent of fantasies. Not that I thought Grappa's remarks were ill-founded. His sense of conspiracy aroused in me a particular ripple of response. This is what we forgive on our deathbeds, not lovelessness or greed. We forgive them for their ability to put themselves at a distance, to scheme in silence against us, do us, effectively, in.

I watched Alfonse reassert his bearish presence with a shoulder-rolling gesture. I took this as a sign that he was wanning up to speak. I wanted to bolt, make off suddenly, run.

"In New York," he said, looking directly at me, "people ask if you have a good internist. This is where true power lies. The inner organs. Liver, kidneys, stomach, intestines, pancreas. Internal medicine is the magic brew. You acquire strength and charisma from a good internist totally aside from the treatment he provides. People ask about tax lawyers, estate planners, dope dealers. But it's the internist who really matters. 'Who's your internist?' someone will say in a challenging tone. The question implies that if your internist's name is unfamiliar, you are certain to die of a mushroom-shaped tumor on your pancreas. You are meant to feel inferior and doomed not just because your inner organs may be trickling blood but because you don't know who to see about it, how to make contacts, how to make your way in the world. Never mind the military-industrial complex. The real power is wielded every day, in these little challenges and intimidations, by people just like us."

I gulped down my dessert and slipped away from the table. Outside I waited for Murray. When he emerged I held his arm just-above the elbow and we walked across campus like a pair of European senior citizens, heads bowed in conversation.

"How do you listen to that?" I said. "Death and disease. Do they talk like that all the time?"

"When I covered sports, I used to get together with the other writers on the road. Hotel rooms, planes, taxis, restaurants. There was only one topic of conversation. Sex and death."

"That's two topics."

"You're right, Jack."

"I would hate to believe they are inextricably linked."

"It's just that on the road everything is linked. Everything and nothing, to be precise."

We walked past small mounds of melting snow.

"How is your car crash seminar progressing?"

"We've looked at hundreds of crash sequences. Cars with cars. Cars with trucks. Trucks with buses. Motorcycles with cars. Cars with helicopters. Trucks with trucks. My students think these movies are prophetic. They mark the suicide wish of technology.

The drive to suicide, the hurtling rush to suicide."

"What do you say to them?"

"These are mainly B-movies, TV movies, rural drive-in movies. I tell my students not to look for apocalypse in such places. I see these car crashes as part of a long tradition of American optimism. They are positive events, full of the old 'can-do' spirit. Each car crash is meant to be better than the last. There is a constant upgrading of tools and skills, a meeting of challenges. A director says, 'I need this flatbed truck to do a midair double somersault that produces an orange ball of fire with a thirty-six-foot diameter, which the cinematographer will use to light the scene.' I tell my students if they want to bring technology into it, they have to take this into account, this tendency toward grandiose deeds, toward pursuing a dream."

"A dream? How do your students reply?"

"Just the way you did. 'A dream?' All that blood and glass, that screeching rubber. What about the sheer waste, the sense of a civilization in a state of decay?"

"What about it?" I said.

"I tell them it's not decay they are seeing but innocence. The movie breaks away from complicated human passions to show us something elemental, something fiery and loud and head-on. It's a conservative wish-fulfillment, a yearning for naïveté. We want to be artless again. We want to reverse the flow of experience, of worldliness and its responsibilities. My students say, 'Look at the crushed bodies, the severed limbs. What kind of innocence is this?'"

"What do you say to that?"

"I tell them they can't think of a car crash in a movie as a violent act. It's a celebration. A reaffïrmation of traditional values and beliefs. I connect car crashes to holidays like Thanksgiving and the Fourth. We don't mourn the dead or rejoice in miracles. These are days of secular optimism, of self-celebration. We will improve, prosper, perfect ourselves. Watch any car crash in any American movie. It is a high-spirited moment like old-fashioned stunt flying, walking on wings. The people who stage these crashes are able to capture a lightheartedness, a carefree enjoyment that car crashes in foreign movies can never approach."

"Look past the violence."

"Exactly. Look past the violence, Jack. There is a wonderful brimming spirit of innocence and fun."

29

Babette and I moved down the wide aisle, each with a gleaming cart. We passed a family shopping in sign language. I kept seeing colored lights.

"How do you feel?" she said.

"I'm fine. I feel good. How are you?"

"Why don't you have a checkup? Wouldn't you feel better if you found out nothing was there?"

"I've had two checkups. Nothing is there."

"What did Dr. Chakravarty say?"

"What could he say?"

"He speaks English beautifully. I love to hear him speak."

"Not as much as he loves to speak."

"What do you mean he loves to speak? Do you mean he takes every possible opportunity to speak? He's a doctor. He has to speak. In a very real sense you are paying him to speak. Do you mean he flaunts his beautiful English? He rubs your face in it?"

"We need some Class Plus."

"Don't leave me alone," she said.

"I'm just going to aisle five."

"I don't want to be alone, Jack. I believe you know that."

"We're going to come through this thing all right," I said. "Maybe stronger than ever. We're determined to be well. Babette is not a neurotic person. She is strong, healthy, outgoing, affirmative. She says yes to things. This is the point of Babette."

We stayed together in the aisles and at the checkout. Babette bought three tabloids for her next session with Old Man Treadwell. We read them together as we waited on line. Then we went together to the car, loaded the merchandise, sat very close to each other as I drove home.

"Except for my eyes," I said.

"What do you mean?"

"Chakravarty thinks I ought to see an eye man."

"Is it the colored spots again?"

"Yes."

"Stop wearing those dark glasses."

"I can't teach Hitler without them."

"Why not?"

"I need them, that's all."

"They're stupid, they're useless."

"I've built a career," I said. "I may not understand all the elements involved but this is all the more reason not to tamper."

The déjà vu crisis centers closed down. The hotline was quietly discontinued. People seemed on the verge of forgetting. I could hardly blame them even if I felt abandoned to a certain extent, left holding the bag.

I went faithfully to German lessons. I began to work with my teacher on things I might say in welcoming delegates to the Hitler conference, still a number of weeks off. The windows were totally blocked by furniture and debris. Howard Dunlop sat in the middle of the room, his oval face floating in sixty watts of dusty light. I began to suspect I was the only person he ever talked to. I also began to suspect he needed me more than I needed him. A disconcerting and terrible thought.

There was a German-language book on a ruined table near the door. The title was lettered in black in a thick heavy ominous typeface: Das Aegyptische Todtenbuch.

"What's that?" I said.

"The Egyptian Book of the Dead," he whispered. "A best-seller in Germany."

Every so often, when Denise wasn't home, I wandered into her room. I picked up things, put them down, looked behind a curtain, glanced into an open drawer, stuck my foot under the bed and felt around. Absentminded browsing.

Babette listened to talk radio.

I started throwing things away. Things in the top and bottom of my closet, things in boxes in the basement and attic. I threw away correspondence, old paperbacks, magazines I'd been saving to read, pencils that needed sharpening. I threw away tennis shoes, sweat socks, gloves with ragged fingers, old belts and neckties. I came upon stacks of student reports, broken rods for the seats of director's chairs. I threw these away. I threw away every aerosol can that didn't have a top.

The gas meter made a particular noise.

That night on TV I saw newsfilm of policemen carrying a body bag out of someone's backyard in Bakersville. The reporter said two bodies had been found, more were believed buried in the same yard. Perhaps many more. Perhaps twenty bodies, thirty bodies- no one knew for sure. He swept an arm across the area. It was a big backyard.

The reporter was a middle-aged man who spoke clearly and strongly and yet with some degree of intimacy, conveying a sense of frequent contact with his audience, of shared interests and mutual trust. Digging would continue through the night, he said, and the station would cut back to the scene as soon as developments warranted. He made it sound like a lover's promise.

Three nights later I wandered into Heinrich's room, where the TV set was temporarily located. He sat on the floor in a hooded sweatshirt, watching live coverage of the same scene. The backyard was floodlit, men with picks and shovels worked amid mounds of dirt. In the foreground stood the reporter, bareheaded, in a sheepskin coat, in a light snow, giving an update. The police said they had solid information, the diggers were methodical and skilled, the work had been going on for over seventy-two hours. But no more bodies had been found.

The sense of failed expectations was total. A sadness and emptiness hung over the scene. A dejection, a sorry gloom. We felt it ourselves, my son and I, quietly watching. It was in the room, seeping into the air from pulsing streams of electrons. The reporter seemed at first merely apologetic. But as he continued to discuss the absense of mass graves, he grew increasingly forlorn, gesturing at the diggers, shaking his head, almost ready to plead with us for sympathy and understanding. I tried not to feel disappointed.

30

In the dark the mind runs on like a devouring machine, the only thing awake in the universe. I tried to make out the walls, the dresser in the corner. It was the old defenseless feeling. Small, weak, deathbound, alone. Panic, the god of woods and wilderness, half goat. I moved my head to the right, remembering the clock-radio. I watched the numbers change, the progression of digital minutes, odd to even. They glowed green in the dark.

After a while I woke up Babette. Warm air came rising from her body as she shifted toward me. Contented air. A mixture of forgetfulness and sleep. Where am I, who are you, what was I dreaming?

"We have to talk," I said.

She mumbled things, seemed to fend off some hovering presence. When I reached for the lamp, she gave me a backhand punch in the arm. The light went on. She retreated toward the radio, covering her head and moaning.

"You can't get away. There are things we have to talk about. I want access to Mr. Gray. I want the real name of Gray Research."

All she could do was moan, "No."

"I'm reasonable about this. I have a sense of perspective. No huge hopes or expectations. I only want to check it out, give it a try. I don't believe in magical objects. I only say, 'Let me try, let me see.' I've been lying here for hours practically paralyzed. I'm drenched in sweat. Feel my chest, Babette."

"Five more minutes. I need to sleep."

"Feel. Give me your hand. See how wet."

"We all sweat," she said. "What is sweat?"

"There are rivulets here."

"You want to ingest. No good, Jack."

"All I ask is a few minutes alone with Mr. Gray, to find out if I qualify."

"He'll think you want to kill him."

"But that's crazy. I'd be crazy. How can I kill him?"

"He'll know I told you about the motel."

"The motel is over and done. I can't change the motel. Do I kill the only man who can relieve my pain? Feel under my arms if you don't believe me."

"He'll think you're a husband with a grudge."

"The motel is frankly small grief. Do I kill him and feel better? He doesn't have to know who I am. I make up an identity, I invent a context. Help me, please."

"Don't tell me you sweat. What is sweat? I gave the man my word."

In the morning we sat at the kitchen table. The clothes dryer was running in the entranceway. I listened to the tapping sound of buttons and zippers as they struck the surface of the drum.

"I already know what I want to say to him. I'll be descriptive, clinical. No philosophy or theology. I'll appeal to the pragmatist in him. He's bound to be impressed by the fact that I'm actually scheduled to die. This is frankly more than you could claim. My need is intense. I believe he'll respond to this. Besides, he'll want another crack at a live subject. That's the way these people are."

"How do I know you won't kill him?"

"You're my wife. Am I a killer?"

"You're a man, Jack. We all know about men and their insane rage. This is something men are very good at. Insane and violent jealousy. Homicidal rage. When people are good at something, it's only natural that they look for a chance to do this thing. If I were good at it, I would do it. It happens I'm not. So instead of going into homicidal rages, I read to the blind. In other words I know my limits. I am willing to settle for less."

"What did I do to deserve this? This is not like you. Sarcastic, mocking."

"Leave it alone," she said. "Dylar was my mistake. I won't let you make it yours as well."

We listened to the tap and scratch of buttons and zipper tabs. It was time for me to leave for school. The voice upstairs remarked: "A California think-tank says the next world war may be fought over salt."

All afternoon I stood by the window in my office, watching the Observatory. It was growing dark when Winnie Richards appeared at the side door, looked both ways, then began moving in a wolf-trot along the sloping turf. I hurried out of my office and down the stairs. In seconds I was out on a cobbled path, running. Almost at once I experienced a strange elation, the kind of bracing thrill that marks the recovery of a lost pleasure. I saw her turn a corner in a controlled skid before she disappeared behind a maintenance building. I ran as fast as I could, cutting loose, cutting into the wind, running chest out, head high, my arms pumping hard. She reappeared at the edge of the library, an alert and stealthy figure moving beneath the arched windows, nearly lost to the dusk. When she drew near the steps she suddenly accelerated, going full tilt from what was almost a standing start. This was a deft and lovely maneuver that I was able to appreciate even as it put me at a disadvantage. I decided to cut behind the library and pick her up on the long straight approach to the chemistry labs. Briefly I ran alongside the members of the lacrosse team as they charged off a field after practice. We ran step for step, the players waving their sticks in a ritualized manner and chanting something I couldn't understand. When I reached the broad path I was gasping for breath. Winnie was nowhere in sight. I ran through the faculty parking lot, past the starkly modern chapel, around the administration building. The wind was audible now, creaking in the high bare branches. I ran to the east, changed my mind, stood looking around, removed my glasses to peer. I wanted to run, I was willing to run. I would run as far as I could, run through the night, run to forget why I was running. After some moments I saw a figure loping up a hill at the edge of the campus. It had to be her. I started running again, knowing she was too far away, would disappear over the crest of the hill, would not resurface for weeks. I put everything I had into a final climbing burst, charging over concrete, grass, then gravel, lungs burning in my chest, a heaviness in my legs that seemed the very pull of the earth, its most intimate and telling judgment, the law of falling bodies.

How surprised I was, nearing the top of the hill, to see that she had stopped. She wore a Gore-Tex jacket puffed up with insulation and she was looking to the west. I walked slowly toward her. When I cleared a row of private homes I saw what it was that had made her pause. The edge of the earth trembled in a darkish haze. Upon it lay the sun, going down like a ship in a burning sea. Another postmodern sunset, rich in romantic imagery. Why try to describe it? It's enough to sáy that everything in our field of vision seemed to exist in order to gather the light of this event. Not that this was one of the stronger sunsets. There had been more dynamic colors, a deeper sense of narrative sweep.

"Hi, Jack. I didn't know you came up here."

"I usually go to the highway overpass."

"Isn't this something?"

"It's beautiful all right."

"Makes me think. It really does."

"What do you think about?"

"What can you think about in the face of this kind of beauty? I get scared, I know that."

"This isn't one of the scarier ones."

"It scares me. Boy, look at it."

"Did you see last Tuesday? A powerful and stunning sunset. I rate this one average. Maybe they're beginning to wind down."

"I hope not," she said. "I'd miss them."

"Could be the toxic residue in the atmosphere is diminishing."

"There's a school of thought that says it's not residue from the cloud that causes the sunsets. It's residue from the microorganisms that ate the cloud."

We stood there watching a surge of florid light, like a heart pumping in a documentary on color TV.

"Remember the saucer-shaped pill?"

"Of course," she said. "A super piece of engineering."

"I found out what it's designed to do. It's designed to solve an ancient problem. Fear of death. It encourages the brain to produce fear-of-death inhibitors."

"But we still die."

"Everyone dies, yes."

"We just won't be afraid," she said.

"That's right."

"Interesting, I guess."

"Dylar was designed by a secret research group. I believe some of these people are psychobiologists. I wonder if you've heard rumors of a group working secretly on fear of death."

"I'd be the last to hear. No one can ever find me. When they do find me, it's to tell me something important."

"What could be more important?"

"You're talking about gossip, rumors. This is thin stuff, Jack. Who are these people, where is their base?"

"That's why I've been chasing you. I thought you'd know something about them. I don't even know what a psychobiologist is."

"It's a catchall sort of thing. Interdisciplinary. The real work is in the pits."

"Isn't there anything you can tell me?"

Something in my voice made her turn to look at me. Winnie was barely into her thirties but she had a sane and practiced eye for the half-concealed disasters that constitute a life. A narrow face partly hidden by wispy brown ringlets, eyes bright and excited. She had the beaky and hollow-boned look of a great wading creature. Small prim mouth. A smile that was permanently in conflict with some inner stricture against the seductiveness of humor. Murray told me once he had a crush on her, found her physical awkwardness a sign of an intelligence developing almost too rapidly, and I thought I knew what he meant. She was poking and snatching at the world around, overrunning it at times.

"I don't know what your personal involvement is with this substance," she said, "but I think it's a mistake to lose one's sense of death, even one's fear of death. Isn't death the boundary we need? Doesn't it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit."

I watch light climb into the rounded summits of high-altitude clouds. Clorets, Velamints, Freedent.

"People think I'm spacey," she said. "I have a spacey theory about human fear, sure enough. Picture yourself, Jack, a confirmed homebody, a sedentary fellow who finds himself walking in a deep wood. You spot something out of the corner of your eye. Before you know anything else, you know that this thing is very large and that it has no place in your ordinary frame of reference. A flaw in the world picture. Either it shouldn't be here or you shouldn't. Now the thing comes into full view. It is a grizzly bear, enormous, shiny brown, swaggering, dripping slime from its bared fangs. Jack, you have never seen a large animal in the wild. The sight of this grizzer is so electrifyingly strange that it gives you a renewed sense of yourself, a fresh awareness of the self-the self in terms of a unique and horrific situation. You see yourself in a new and intense way. You rediscover yourself. You are lit up for your own imminent dismemberment. The beast on hind legs has enabled you to see who you are as if for the first time, outside familiar surroundings, alone, distinct, whole. The name we give to this complicated process is fear."

"Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level."

"That's right, Jack."

"And death?" I said.

"Self, self, self. If death can be seen as less strange and unreferenced, your sense of self in relation to death will diminish, and so will your fear."

"What do I do to make death less strange? How do I go about it?"

"I don't know."

"Do I risk death by driving fast around curves? Am I supposed to go rock climbing on weekends?"

"I don't know," she said. "I wish I knew."

"Do I scale the sheer facade of a ninety-story building, wearing a clip-on belt? What do I do, Winnie? Do I sit in a cage full of African snakes like my son's best friend? This is what people do today."

"I think what you do, Jack, is forget the medicine in that tablet. There is no medicine, obviously."

She was right. They were all right. Gp on with my life, raise my kids, teach my students. Try not to think of that staticky figure in the Grayview Motel putting his unfinished hands on my wife.

"I'm still sad, Winnie, but you've given my sadness a richness and depth it has never known before."

She turned away, blushing.

I said, "You're more than a fair-weather friend-you're a true enemy."

She turned exceedingly red.

I said, "Brilliant people never think of the lives they smash, being brilliant."

I watched her blush. She used both hands to pull her knit cap down over her ears. We took a last look at the sky and started walking down the hill.

31

DID YOU REMEMBER: 1) to make out your check to Waveform Dynamics? 2) to write your account number on your check? 3) to sign your check? 4) to send payment in full, as we do not accept partial payment? 5) to enclose your original payment document, not a reproduced copy? 6) to enclose your document in such a way that the address appears in the window? 7) to detach the green portion of your document along the dotted line to retain for your records? 8) to supply your correct address and zip code? 9) to inform us at least three weeks before you plan to move? 10) to secure the envelope flap? 11) to place a stamp on the envelope, as the post office will not deliver without postage? 12) to mail the envelope at least three days before the date entered in the blue box?

CABLE HEALTH, CABLE WEATHER, CABLE NEWS, CABLE NATURE.

No one wanted to cook that night. We all got in the car and went out to the commercial strip in the no man's land beyond the town boundary. The never-ending neon. I pulled in at a place that specialized in chicken parts and brownies. We decided to eat in the car. The car was sufficient for our needs. We wanted to eat, not look around at other people. We wanted to fill our stomachs and get it over with. We didn't need light and space. We certainly didn't need to face each other across a table as we ate, building a subtle and complex cross-network of signals and codes. We were content to eat facing in the same direction, looking only inches past our hands. There was a kind of rigor in this. Denise brought the food out to the car and distributed paper napkins. We settled in to eat. We ate fully dressed, in hats and heavy coats, without speaking, ripping into chicken parts with our hands and teeth. There was a mood of intense concentration, minds converging on a single compelling idea. I was surprised to find I was enormously hungry. I chewed and ate, looking only inches past my hands. This is how hunger shrinks the world. This is the edge of the observable universe of food. Steffie tore off the crisp skin of a breast and gave it to Heinrich. She never ate the skin. Babette sucked a bone. Heinrich traded wings with Denise, a large for a small. He thought small wings were tastier. People gave Babette their bones to clean and suck. I fought off an image of Mr. Cray lazing naked on a motel bed, an unresolved picture collapsing at the edges. We sent Denise to get more food, waiting for her in silence. Then we started in again, half stunned by the dimensions of our pleasure.

Steffie said quietly, "How do astronauts float?"

There was a pause like a missing tick in eternity.

Denise stopped eating to say, 'They're lighter than air."

We all stopped eating. A worried silence ensued.

"There is no air," Heinrich said finally. "They can't be lighter than something that isn't there. Space is a vacuum except for heavy molecules."

"I thought space was cold," Babette said. "If there's no air, how can it be cold? What makes warm or cold? Air, or so I thought. If there's no air, there should be no cold. Like a nothing kind of day."

"How can there be nothing?" Denise said. "There has to be something."

'There is something," Heinrich said in exasperation. 'There's heavy molecules."

"Do-I-need-a-sweater kind of day," Babette said.

There was another pause. We waited to learn if the dialogue was over. Then we set to eating again. We traded unwanted parts in silence, stuck our hands in cartons of rippled fries. Wilder liked the soft white fries and people picked these out and gave them to him. Denise distributed ketchup in little watery pouches.

The interior of the car smelled of grease and licked flesh. We traded parts and gnawed.

Steffie said in a small voice, "How cold is space?"

We all waited once more. Then Heinrich said, "It depends on how high you go. The higher you go, the colder it gets."

"Wait a minute," Babette said. "The higher you go, the closer you get to the sun. So the warmer it gets."

"What makes you think the sun is high?"

"How can the sun be low? You have to look up to see the sun."

"What about at night?" he said.

"It's on the other side of the earth. But people still look up."

"The whole point of Sir Albert Einstein," he said, "is how can the sun be up if you're standing on the sun?"

"The sun is a great molten ball," she said. "It's impossible to stand on the sun."

"He was just saying 'if.' Basically there is no up or down, hot or cold, day or night."

"What is there?"

"Heavy molecules. The whole point of space is to give molecules a chance to cool down after they come shooting off the surface of giant stars."

"If there's no hot or cold, how can molecules cool down?"

"Hot and cold are words. Think of them as words. We have to use words. We can't just grunt."

"It's called the sun's corolla," Denise said to Steffie in a separate discussion. "We saw it the other night on the weather network."

"I thought Corolla was a car," Steffie said.

"Everything's a car," Heinrich said. "The thing you have to understand about giant stars is that they have actual nuclear explosions deep inside the core. Totally forget these Russian IBMs that are supposed to be so awesome. We're talking about a hundred million times bigger explosions."

There was a long pause. No one spoke. We went back to eating for as long as it took to bite off and chew a single mouthful of food.

"It's supposed to be Russian psychics who are causing this crazy weather," Babette said.

"What crazy weather?" I said.

Heinrich said, "We have psychics, they have psychics, supposedly. They want to disrupt our crops by influencing the weather."

"The weather's been normal."

"For Jthis time of year," Denise put in smartly.

This was the week a policeman saw a body thrown from a UFO. It happened while he was on routine patrol on the outskirts of Classboro. The rain-soaked corpse of an unidentified male was found later that night, fully clothed. An autopsy disclosed that death was due to multiple fractures and heart failure-the result, perhaps, of a ghastly shock. Under hypnosis, the policeman, Jerry Tee Walker, relived in detail the baffling sight of the neon-bright object that resembled an enormous spinning top as it hovered eighty feet above a field. Officer Walker, a Vietnam vet, said the bizarre scene reminded him of helicopter crews throwing Vietcong suspects out the door. Incredibly, as he watched a hatch come open and the body plummet to the ground, Walker sensed an eerie message being psychically transmitted to his brain. Police hypnotists plan to intensify their sessions in an attempt to uncover the message.

There were sightings all over the area. An energizing mental current, a snaky glow, seemed to pass from town to town. It didn't matter whether you believed in these things or not. They were an excitement, a wave, a tremor. Some voice or noise would crack across the sky and we would be lifted out of death. People drove speculatively to the edges of towns, where some would turn back, some decide to venture toward remoter areas which seemed in these past days to exist under a spell, a hallowed expectation. The air grew soft and mild. A neighbor's dog barked through the night.

In the fast food parking lot we ate our brownies. Crumbs stuck to the heels of our hands. We inhaled the crumbs, we licked the fingers. As we got close to finishing, the physical extent of our awareness began to expand. Food's borders yielded to the wider world. We looked past our hands. We looked through the windows, at the cars and lights. We looked at the people leaving the restaurant, men, women and children carrying cartons of food, leaning into the wind. An impatience began to flow from the three bodies in the rear seat. They wanted to be home, not here. They wanted to blink an eye and find themselves in their rooms, with their things, not sitting in a cramped car on this windswept concrete plain. Journeys home were always a test. I started up the car, knowing it was only a matter of seconds before the massed restlessness took on elements of threat. We could feel it coming, Babette and I. A sulky menace brewed back there. They would attack us, using the classic strategy of fighting among themselves. But attack us for what reason? For not getting them home faster? For being older and bigger and somewhat steadier of mood than they were? Would they attack us for our status as protectors- protectors who must sooner or later fail? Or was it simply who we were that they attacked, our voices, features, gestures, ways of walking and laughing, our eye color, hair color, skin tone, our chromosomes and cells?

As if to head them off, as if she could not bear the implications of their threat, Babette said pleasantly, "Why is it these UFOs are mostly seen upstate? The best sightings are upstate. People get abducted and taken aboard. Fanners see burn marks where saucers landed. A woman gives birth to a UFO baby, so she says. Always upstate."

"That's where the mountains are," Denise said. "Spaceships can hide from radar or whatever."

"Why are the mountains upstate?" Steffie said.

"Mountains are always upstate," Denise told her. "This way the snow melts as planned in the spring and flows downhill to the reservoirs near the cities, which are kept in the lower end of the state for exactly this reason."

I thought, momentarily, she might be right. It made a curious kind of sense. Or did it? Or was it totally crazy? There had to be large cities in the northern part of some states. Or were they just north of the border in the southern part of states just to the north? What she s.aid could not be true and yet I had trouble, momentarily, disproving it. I could not name cities or mountains to disprove it. There had to be mountains in the southern part of some states. Or did they tend to be below the state line, in the northern part of states to the south? I tried to name state capitals, governors. How could there be a north below a south? Is this what I found confusing? Was this the crux of Denise's error? Or was she somehow, eerily, right?

The radio said: "Excesses of salt, phosphorus, magnesium."

Later that night Babette and I sat drinking cocoa. On the kitchen table, among the coupons, the foot-long supermarket receipts, the mail-order catalogs, was a postcard from Mary Alice, my oldest. She is the golden issue of my first marriage to Dana Breedlove, the spy, and is therefore Steffie's full sister, although ten years and two marriages fell between. Mary Alice is nineteen now and lives in Hawaii, where she works with whales.

Babette picked up a tabloid someone had left on the table.

"Mouse cries have been measured at forty thousand cycles per second. Surgeons use high-frequency tapes of mouse cries to destroy tumors in the human body. Do you believe that?"

"Yes."

"So do I."

She put down the newspaper. After a while she said to me urgently, "How do you feel, Jack?"

"I'm all right. I feel fine. Honest. What about you?"

"I wish I hadn't told you about my condition."

"Why?"

"Then you wouldn't have told me you're going to die first. Here are the two things I want most in the world. Jack not to die first. And Wilder to stay the way he is forever."

32

Murray and I walked across campus in our European manner, a serenely reflective pace, heads lowered as we conversed. Sometimes one of us gripped the other near the elbow, a gesture of intimacy and physical support. Other times we walked slightly apart, Murray 's hands clasped behind his back, Gladney's folded monkishly at the abdomen, a somewhat worried touch.

"Your German is coming around?"

"I still speak it badly. The words give me trouble. Howard and I are working on opening remarks for the conference."

"You call him Howard?"

"Not to his face. I don't call him anything to his face and he doesn't call me anything to my face. It's that kind of relationship. Do you see him at all? You live under the same roof, after all."

"Fleeting glimpses. The other boarders seem to prefer it that way. He barely exists, we feel."

"There's something about him. I'm not sure what it is exactly."

"He's flesh-colored," Murray said.

"True. But that's not what makes me uneasy."

"Soft hands."

"Is that it?"

"Soft hands in a man give me pause. Soft skin in general. Baby skin. I don't think he shaves."

"What else?" I said.

"Flecks of dry spittle at the corners of his mouth."

"You're right," I said excitedly. "Dry spit. I feel it hit me in the face when he leans forward to articulate. What else?"

"And a way of looking over a person's shoulder."

"You see all this in fleeting glimpses. Remarkable. What else?" I demanded.

"And a rigid carriage that seems at odds with his shuffling walk."

"Yes, he walks without moving his arms. What else, what else?"

"And something else, something above and beyond all this, something eerie and terrible."

"Exactly. But what is it? Something I can't quite identify."

"There's a strange air about him, a certain mood, a sense, a presence, an emanation."

"But what?" I said, surprised to find myself deeply and personally concerned, colored dots dancing at the edge of my vision.

We'd walked thirty paces when Murray began to nod. I watched his face as we walked. He nodded crossing the street and kept nodding all the way past the music library. I walked with him step for step, clutching his elbow, watching his face, waiting for him to speak, not interested in the fact that he'd taken me completely out of my way, and he was still nodding as we approached the entrance to Wilmot Grange, a restored nineteenth-century building at the edge of the campus.

"But what?" I said. "But what?"

It wasn't until four days later that he called me at home, at one in the morning, to whisper helpfully in my ear, "He looks like a man who finds dead bodies erotic."

I went to one last lesson. The walls and windows were obscured by accumulated objects, which seemed now to be edging toward the middle of the room. The bland-faced man before me closed his eyes and spoke, reciting useful tourist phrases. "Where am I?" "Can you help me?" "It is night and I am lost." I could hardly bear to sit there. Murray 's remark fixed him forever to a plausible identity. What had been elusive about Howard Dunlop was now pinned down. What had been strange and half creepy was now diseased. A grim lasciviousness escaped his body and seemed to circulate through the barricaded room.

In truth I would miss the lessons. I would also miss the dogs, the German shepherds. One day they were simply gone. Needed elsewhere perhaps or sent back to the desert to sharpen their skills. The men in Mylex suits were still around, however, carrying instruments to measure and probe, riding through town in teams of six or eight in chunky peglike vehicles that resembled Lego toys.

I stood by Wilder's bed watching him sleep. The voice next door said: "In the four-hundred-thousand-dollar Nabisco Dinah Shore."

This was the night the insane asylum burned down. Heinrich and I got in the car and went to watch. There were other men at the scene with their adolescent boys. Evidently fathers and sons seek fellowship at such events. Fires help draw them closer, provide a conversational wedge. There is equipment to appraise, the technique of firemen to discuss and criticize. The manliness of firefighting-the virility of fires, one might say-suits the kind of laconic dialogue that fathers and sons can undertake without awkwardness or embarrassment.

"Most of these fires in old buildings start in the electrical wiring," Heinrich said. "Faulty wiring. That's one phrase you can't hang around for long without hearing."

"Most people don't burn to death," I said. 'They die of smoke inhalation."

'That's the other phrase," he said.

Flames roared through the dormers. We stood across the street watching part of the roof give way, a tall chimney slowly fold and sink. Pumper trucks kept arriving from other towns, the men descending heavily in their rubber boots and old-fashioned hats. Hoses were manned and trained, a figure rose above the shimmering roof in the grip of a telescopic ladder. We watched the portico begin to go, a far column leaning. A woman in a fiery nightgown walked across the lawn. We gasped, almost in appreciation. She was white-haired and slight, fringed in burning air, and we could see she was mad, so lost to dreams and furies that the fire around her head seemed almost incidental. No one said a word. In all the heat and noise of detonating wood, she brought a silence to her. How powerful and real. How deep a thing was madness. A fire captain hurried toward her, then circled out slightly, disconcerted, as if she were not the person, after all, he had expected to meet here. She went down in a white burst, like a teacup breaking. Four men were around her now, batting at the flames with helmets and caps.

The great work of containing the blaze went on, a labor that seemed as old and lost as cathedral-building, the men driven by a spirit of lofty communal craft. A Dalmatian sat in the cab of a hook-and-ladder truck.

"It's funny how you can look at it and look at it," Heinrich said. "Just like a fire in a fireplace."

"Are you saying the two kinds of fire are equally compelling?"

"I'm just saying you can look and look."

"'Man has always been fascinated by fire.' Is that what you're saying?"

"This is my first burning building. Give me a chance," he said.

The fathers and sons crowded the sidewalk, pointing at one or another part of the half gutted structure. Murray, whose rooming house was just yards away, sidled up to us and shook our hands without a word. Windows blew out. We watched another chimney slip through the roof, a few loose bricks tumbling to the lawn. Murray shook our hands again, then disappeared.

Soon there was a smell of acrid matter. It could have been insulation burning-polystyrene sheathing for pipes and wires- or one or more of a dozen other substances. A sharp and bitter stink filled the air, overpowering the odor of smoke and charred stone. It changed the mood of the people on the sidewalk. Some put hankies to their faces, others left abruptly in disgust. Whatever caused the odor, I sensed that it made people feel betrayed. An ancient, spacious and terrible drama was being compromised by something unnatural, some small and nasty intrusion. Our eyes began to burn. The crowd broke up. It was as though we'd been forced to recognize the existence of a second kind of death. One was real, the other synthetic. The odor drove us away but beneath it and far worse was the sense that death came two ways, sometimes at once, and how death entered your mouth and nose, how death smelled, could somehow make a difference to your soul.

We hurried to our cars, thinking of the homeless, the mad, the dead, but also of ourselves now. This is what the odor of that burning material did. It complicated our sadness, brought us closer to the secret of our own eventual end.

At home I fixed warm milk for us both. I was surprised to see him drink it. He gripped the mug with both hands, talked about the noise of the conflagration, the air-fed wallop of combustion, like a ramjet thrusting. I almost expected him to thank me for the nice fire. We sat there drinking our milk. After a while he went into his closet to chin.

I sat up late thinking of Mr. Gray. Gray-bodied, staticky, unfinished. The picture wobbled and rolled, the edges of his body flared with random distortion. Lately I'd found myself thinking of him often. Sometimes as Mr. Gray the composite. Four or more grayish figures engaged in a pioneering work. Scientists, visionaries. Their wavy bodies passing through each other, mingling, blending, fusing. A little like extraterrestrials. Smarter than the rest of us, selfless, sexless, determined to engineer us out of our fear. But when the bodies fused 1 was left with a single figure, the project manager, a hazy gray seducer moving in ripples across a motel room. Bedward, plotward. I saw my wife reclining on her side, voluptuously rounded, the eternal waiting nude. I saw her as he did. Dependent, submissive, emotionally captive. I felt his mastery and control. The dominance of his postion. He was taking over my mind, this man I'd never seen, this half image, the barest smidge of brainlight. His bleak hands enfolded a rose-white breast. How vivid and living it was, what a tactile delight, dusted with russet freckles about the tip. I experienced aural torment. Heard them in their purling foreplay, the love babble and buzzing flesh. Heard the sloppings and smackings, the swash of wet mouths, bedsprings sinking in. An interval of mumbled adjustments. Then gloom moved in around the gray-sheeted bed, a circle slowly closing.

Panasonic.

33

What time was it when I opened my eyes, sensing someone or something nearby? Was it an odd-numbered hour? The room was soft and webby. I stretched my legs, blinked- slowly focused on a familiar object. It was Wilder, standing two feet from the bed, gazing into my face. We spent a long moment in mutual contemplation. His great round head, set as it was on a small-limbed and squattish body, gave him the look of a primitive clay figurine, some household idol of obscure and cultic derivation. I had the feeling he wanted to show me something. As I slipped quietly out of bed, he walked in his quilted booties out of the room. I followed him into the hall and toward the window that looks out on our backyard. I was barefoot and robeless and felt a chill pass through the Hong Kong polyester of my pajamas. Wilder stood looking out the window, his chin about an inch above the sill. It seemed I'd spent my life in lopsided pajamas, the shirt buttons inserted in mismatching slits, the fly undone and drooping. Was it dawn already? Were those crows I heard screaming in the trees?

There was someone sitting in the backyard. A white-haired man sitting erect in the old wicker chair, a figure of eerie stillness and composure. At first, dazed and sleepy, I didn't know what to make of the sight. It seemed to need a more careful interpretation than I was able to provide at the moment. I thought one thing, that he'd been inserted there for some purpose. Then fear began to enter, palpable and overwhelming, a fist clenching repeatedly in my chest. Who was he, what was happening here? I realized Wilder was no longer next to me. I reached the doorway to his room just in time to see his head sink into the pillow. By the time I got to the bed, he was fast asleep. I didn't know what to do. I felt cold, white. I worked my way back to the window, gripping a doorknob, a handrail, as if to remind myself of the nature and being of real things. He was still out there, gazing into the hedges. I saw him in profile in the uncertain light, motionless and knowing. Was he as old as I'd first thought-or was the white hair purely emblematic, part of his allegorical force? That was it, of course. He would be Death, or Death's errand-runner, a hollow-eyed technician from the plague era, from the era of inquisitions, endless wars, of bedlams and leprosariums. He would be an aphorist of last things, giving me the barest glance-civilized, ironic-as he spoke his deft and stylish line about my journey out. I watched for a long time, waiting for him to move a hand. His stillness was commanding. I felt myself getting whiter by the second. What does it mean to become white? How does it feel to see Death in the flesh, come to gather you in? I was scared to the marrow. I was cold and hot, dry and wet, myself and someone else. The fist clenched in my chest. I went to the staircase and sat on the top step, looking into my hands. So much remained. Every word and thing a bead-work of bright creation. My own plain hand, crosshatched and whorled in a mesh of expressive lines, a life terrain, might itself be the object of a person's study and wonder for years. A cosmology against the void.

I got to my feet and went back to the window. He was still there. I went into the bathroom to hide. I closed the toilet lid and sat there a while, wondering what to do next. I didn't want him in the house.

I paced for a time. I ran cold water over my hands and wrists, splashed it in my face. I felt light and heavy, muddled and alert. I took a scenic paperweight from the shelf by the door. Inside the plastic disk floated a 3-D picture of the Grand Canyon, the colors zooming and receding as I turned the object in the light. Fluctuating planes. I liked this phrase. It seemed the very music of existence. If only one could see death as just another surface one inhabits for a time. Another facet of cosmic reason. A zoom down Bright Angel Trail.

í turned to immediate things. If I wanted to keep him out of the house, the thing to do was go outside. First 1 would look in on the smaller children. I moved quietly through the rooms on bare white feet. I looked for a blanket to adjust, a toy to remove from a child's warm grasp, feeling I'd wandered into a TV moment. All was still and well. Would they regard a parent's death as just another form of divorce?

I looked in on Heinrich. He occupied the top left corner of the bed, his body tightly wound like the kind of trick device that uncoils abruptly when it's touched. I stood in the doorway nodding.

I looked in on Babette. She was many levels down, a girl again, a figure running in a dream. I kissed her head, smelling the warm musty air that carried up from sleep. I spotted my copy of Mein Kampf in a pile of books and journals. The radio came on. I hurried out of the room, fearing that some call-in voice, some stranger's soul-lament, would be the last thing I heard in this world.

I went down to the kitchen. I looked through the window. He was there in the wicker armchair on the wet grass. I opened the inner door and then the storm door. I went outside, the copy of Mein Kampf clutched to my stomach. When the storm door banged shut, the man's head jerked and his legs came uncrossed. He got to his feet and turned in my direction. The sense of eerie and invincible stillness washed off, the aura of knowingness, the feeling he conveyed of an ancient and terrible secret. A second figure began to emerge from the numinous ruins of the first, began to assume effective form, develop in the crisp light as a set of movements, lines and features, a contour, a living person whose distinctive physical traits seemed more and more familiar as I watched them come into existence, a little amazed.

It was not Death that stood before me but only Vernon Dickey, my father-in-law.

"Was I asleep?" he said.

"What are you doing out here?"

"Didn't want to wake you folks."

"Did we know you were coming?"

"I didn't know it myself till yesterday afternoon. Drove straight through. Fourteen hours."

"Babette will be happy to see you."

"I just bet."

We went inside. I put the coffee pot on the stove. Vernon sat at the table in his battered denim jacket, playing with the lid of an old Zippo. He had the look of a ladies' man in the crash-dive of his career. His silvery hair had a wan tinge to it, a yellowish discolor, and he combed it back in a ducktail. He wore about four days' stubble. His chronic cough had taken on a jagged edge, an element of irresponsibility. Babette worried less about his condition than about the fact that he took such sardonic pleasure in his own hackings and spasms, as if there were something fatefully attractive in this terrible noise. He still wore a garrison belt with a longhorn buckle.

"So what the hell. Here I am. Big deal."

"What are you doing these days?"

"Shingling here, rustproofing there. I moonlight, except there's nothing I'm moonlighting from. Moonlight is all that's out there."

I noticed his hands. Scarred, busted, notched, permanently seamed with grease and mud. He glanced around the room, trying to spot something that needed replacing or repair. Such flaws were mainly an occasion for discourse. It put Vernon at an advantage to talk about gaskets and washers, about grouting, caulking, spackling. There were times when he seemed to attack me with terms like ratchet drill and whipsaw. He saw my shaki-ness in such matters as a sign of some deeper incompetence or stupidity. These were the things that built the world. Not to know or care about them was a betrayal of fundamental principles, a betrayal of gender, of species. What could be more useless than a man who couldn't fix a dripping faucet-fundamentally useless, dead to history, to the messages in his genes? I wasn't sure I disagreed.

"I was saying to Babette the other day. 'If there's one thing your father doesn't resemble, it's a widower.'"

"What did she say to that?"

"She thinks you're a danger to yourself. 'He'll fall asleep smoking. He'll die in a burning bed with a missing woman at his side.

An official missing person. Some poor lost unidentified multi-divorced woman.'"

Vernon coughed in appreciation of the insight. A series of pulmonary gasps. I could hear the stringy mucus whipping back and forth in his chest. I poured his coffee and waited.

"Just so you know where I'm at, Jack, there's a woman that wants to marry my ass. She goes to church in a mobile home. Don't tell Babette."

"That's the last thing I'd do."

"She'd get real exercised. Start in with the discount calls."

"She thinks you've gotten too lawless for marriage."

"The thing about marriage today is you don't have to go outside the home to get those little extras. You can get whatever you want in the recesses of the American home. These are the times we live in, for better or worse. Wives will do things. They want to do things. You don't have to drop little looks. It used to be the only thing available in the American home was the basic natural act. Now you get the options too. The action is thick, let me tell you. It's an amazing comment on our times that the more options you get in the home, the more prostitutes you see in the streets. How do you figure it, Jack? You're the professor. What does it mean?"

"I don't know."

"Wives wear edible panties. They know the words, the usages. Meanwhile the prostitutes are standing in the streets in all kinds of weather, day and night. Who are they waiting for? Tourists? Businessmen? Men who've been turned into stalkers of flesh? It's like the lid's blown off. Didn't I read somewhere the Japanese go to Singapore? Whole planeloads of males. A remarkable people."

"Are you seriously thinking of getting married?"

"I'd have to be crazy to marry a woman that worships in a mobile home."

There was an astuteness about Vernon, a deadpan quality of alert and searching intelligence, a shrewdness waiting for a shapely occasion. This made Babette nervous. She'd seen him sidle up to women in public places to ask some delving question in his blank-faced canny way. She refused to go into restaurants with him, fearing his offhand remarks to waitresses, intimate remarks, technically accomplished asides and observations, delivered in the late-night voice of some radio ancient. He'd given her some jittery moments, periods of anger and embarrassment, in a number of leatherette booths.

She came in now, wearing her sweatsuit, ready for an early morning dash up the stadium steps. When she saw her father at the table, her body seemed to lose its motive force. She stood there bent at the knees. Nothing remained but her ability to gape. She appeared to be doing an imitation of a gaping person. She was the picture of gapingness, the bright ideal, no less confused and alarmed than I had been when I saw him sitting in the yard, deathly still. I watched her face fill to the brim with numb wonder.

"Did we know you were coming?" she said. "Why didn't you call? You never call."

"Here I am. Big deal. Toot the horn."

She remained bent at the knees, trying to absorb his raw presence, the wiry body and drawn look. What an epic force he must have seemed to her, taking shape in her kitchen this way, a parent, a father with all the grist of years on him, the whole dense history of associations and connections, come to remind her who she was, to remove her disguise, grab hold of her maundering life for a time, without warning.

"I could have had things ready. You look awful. Where will you sleep?"

"Where did I sleep last time?"

They both looked at me, trying to remember.

As we fixed and ate breakfast, as the kids came down and warily approached Vernon for kisses and hair-mussings, as the hours passed and Babette became accustomed to the sight of the ambling figure in patched jeans, I began to notice the pleasure she took in hovering nearby, doing little things for him, being there to listen. A delight contained in routine gestures and automatic rhythms. At times she had to remind Vernon which foods were his favorites, how he liked them cooked and seasoned, which jokes he told best, which figures from the past were the plain fools, which the comic heroes. Gleanings from another life poured out of her. The cadences of her speech changed, took on a rural tang. The words changed, the references. This was a girl who'd helped her father sand and finish old oak, heave radiators up from the floorboards. His carpenter years, his fling with motorcycles, his biceps tattoo.

"You're getting string-beany, daddy. Finish those potatoes. There's more on the stove."

And Vernon would say to me, "Her mother made the worst french fries you could ever hope to eat. Like french fries in a state park." And then he'd turn to her and say, "Jack knows the problem I have with state parks. They don't move the heart."

We moved Heinrich down to the sofa and gave Vernon his room. It was unnerving to find him in the kitchen at seven in the morning, at six, at whatever grayish hour Babette or I went down to make coffee. He gave the impression he was intent on outfoxing us, working on our guilt, showing us that no matter how little sleep we got, he got less.

"Tell you what, Jack. You get old, you find out you're ready for something but you don't know what it is. You're always getting prepared. You're combing your hair, standing by the window looking out. I feel like there's some little fussy person whisking around me all the time. That's why I jumped in the car and drove headlong all this way."

"To break the spell," I said. "To get away from routine things. Routine things can be deadly, Vern, carried to extremes. I have a friend who says that's why people take vacations. Not to relax or find excitement or see new places. To escape the death that exists in routine things."

"What is he, a Jew?"

"What's that got to do with it?"

"Your roof gutter's sagging," he told me. "You know how to fix that, don't you?"

Vernon liked to hang around outside the house, waiting for garbagemen, telephone repairmen, the mail carrier, the afternoon newsboy. Someone to talk to about techniques and procedures. Sets of special methods. Routes, time spans, equipment. It tightened his grip on things, learning how work was done in areas outside his range.

He liked to tease the kids in his deadpan way. They answered his bantering remarks reluctantly. They were suspicious of all relatives. Relatives were a sensitive issue, part of the murky and complex past, the divided lives, the memories that could be refloated by a word or a name.

He liked to sit in his tortured hatchback, smoking.

Babette would watch from a window, managing to express love, worry, exasperation and despair, hope and gloom, more or less simultaneously. Vernon had only to shift his weight to arouse in her a series of extreme emotions.

He liked to mingle with shopping mall crowds.

"I'm counting on you to tell me, Jack."

"Tell you what?"

"You're the only person I know that's educated enough to give me the answer."

"The answer to what?"

"Were people this dumb before television?"

One night I heard a voice and thought he was moaning in his sleep. I put on my robe, went into the hall, realized the sound came from the TV set in Denise's room. I went in and turned off the set. She was asleep in a drift of blankets, books and clothes. On an impulse I went quietly to the open closet, pulled the light cord and peered inside, looking for the Dylar tablets. I closed the door against my body, which was half in, half out of the closet. I saw a great array of fabrics, shoes, toys, games and other objects. I poked around, catching an occasional trace of some childhood redolence. Clay, sneakers, pencil shavings. The bottle might be in an abandoned shoe, the pocket of some old shirt wadded in a corner. I heard her stir. I went still, held my breath.

"What are you doing?" she said.

"Don't worry, it's only me."

"I know who it is."

I kept on looking through the closet, thinking this would make me appear less guilty.

"I know what you're looking for, too."

"Denise, I've had a recent scare. I thought something awful was about to happen. It turned out I was wrong, thank goodness. But there are lingering effects. I need the Dylar. It may help me solve a problem."

I continued to rummage.

"What's the problem?"

"Isn't it enough for you to know that a problem exists? I wouldn't be here otherwise. Don't you want to be my friend?"

"I am your friend. I just don't want to be tricked."

'There's no question of tricking. I just need to try the medication. There are four tablets left. I'll take them and that'll be the end of it."

The more casual the voice, the better my chances of reaching her.

"You won't take them. You'll give them to my mother."

"Let's be clear about one thing," I said like a high government official. "Your mother is not a drug addict. Dylar is not that kind of medication."

"What is it then? Just tell me what it is."

Something in her voice or in my heart or in the absurdity of the moment allowed me to consider the possibility of answering her question. A breakthrough. Why not simply tell her? She was responsible, able to gauge the implications of serious things. I realized Babette and I had been foolish all along, keeping the truth from her. The girl would embrace the truth, know us better, love us more deeply in our weakness and fear.

I went and sat at the end of the bed. She watched me carefully. I told her the basic story, leaving out the tears, the passions, the terror, the horror, my exposure to Nyodene D., Babette's sexual arrangement with Mr. Gray, our argument over which of us feared death more. I concentrated on the medication itself, told her everything I knew about its life in the gastrointestinal tract and the brain.

The first thing she mentioned was the side effects. Every drug has side effects. A drug that could eliminate fear of death would have awesome side effects, especially if it is still in a trial stage. She was right, of course. Babette had spoken of outright death, brain death, left brain death, partial paralysis, other cruel and bizarre conditions of the body and mind.

I told Denise the power of suggestion could be more important than side effects.

"Remember how you heard on the radio that the billowing cloud caused sweaty palms? Your palms got sweaty, didn't they? The power of suggestion makes some people sick, others well, it may not matter how strong or weak Dylar is. If I think it will help me, it will help me."

"Up to a point."

"We are talking about death," I whispered. "In a very real sense it doesn't matter what is in those tablets. It could be sugar, it could be spice. I am eager to be humored, to be fooled."

"Isn't that a little stupid?"

"This is what happens, Denise, to desperate people."

There was a silence. I waited for her to ask me if this desperation was inevitable, if she would one day experience the same fear, undergo the same ordeal.

Instead she said, "Strong or weak doesn't matter. I threw the bottle away."

"No, you didn't. Where?"

"I put it in the garbage compactor."

"I don't believe you. When was this?"

"About a week ago. I thought Baba might sneak through my room and find it. So I decided to just get it over with. Nobody wanted to tell me what it was, did they? So I threw it in with all the cans and bottles and other junk. Then I compacted it."

"Like a used car."

"Nobody would tell me. That's all they had to do. I was right here all the time."

"It's all right. Don't worry. You did me a favor."

"About eight words was all they needed to say."

"I'm better off without it."

"It wouldn't have been the first time they tricked me."

"You're still my friend," I said.

I kissed her on the head and went to the door. I realized I was extremely hungry. I went downstairs to find something to eat. The kitchen light was on. Vernon was sitting at the table, fully dressed, smoking and coughing. The ash on his cigarette was an inch long, beginning to lean. It was a habit of his, letting the ash dangle. Babette thought he did it to induce feelings of suspense and anxiety in others. It was part of the reckless weather in which he moved.

"Just the man I want to see."

"Vern, it's the middle of the night. Don't you ever sleep?"

"Let's go out to the car," he said.

"Are you serious?"

"What we have here is a situation we ought to conduct in private. This house is full of women. Or am I wrong?"

"We're alone here. What is it you want to talk about?"

"They listen in their sleep," he said.

We went out the back door to keep from waking Heinrich. I followed him along the pathway at the side of the house and down the steps to the driveway. His little car sat in the dark. He got behind the wheel and I slid in next to him, gathering up my bathrobe and feeling trapped in the limited space. The car held a smell like some dangerous vapor in the depths of a body-and-fender shop, a mixture of exhausted metal, flammable rags and scorched rubber. The upholstery was torn. In the glow of a street-lamp I saw wires dangling from the dash and the overhead fixture.

"I want you to have this, Jack."

"Have what?"

"I've had it for years. Now I want you to have it. Who knows if I'll ever see you folks again? What the hell. Who cares. Big deal."

You're giving me the car? I don't want the car. It's a terrible car."

"In your whole life as a man in today's world, have you ever owned a firearm?"

"No," I said.

"I figured. I said to myself here's the last man in America who doesn't own the means to defend himself."

He reached into a hole in the rear seat, coming out with a small dark object. He held it in the palm of his right hand.

"Take it, Jack."

"What is it?"

"Heft it around. Get the feel. It's loaded."

He passed it to me. Stupidly I said again, "What is it?" There was something unreal about the experience of holding a gun. I kept staring at it, wondering what Vernon 's motive might be. Was he Death's dark messenger after all? A loaded weapon. How quickly it worked a change in me, numbing my hand even as I sat staring at the thing, not wishing to give it a name. Did Vernon mean to provoke thought, provide my life with a fresh design, a scheme, a shapeliness? I wanted to give it back.

"It's a little bitty thing but it shoots real bullets, which is all a man in your position can rightly ask of a firearm. Don't worry, Jack. It can't be traced."

"Why would anyone want to trace it?"

"I feel like if you give someone a loaded gun, you ought to supply the particulars. This here is a 25-caliber Zumwalt automatic. German-made. It doesn't have the stopping power of a heavy-barreled weapon but you're not going out there to face down a rhino, are you?"

"That's the point. What am I going out there to face down? Why do I need this thing?"

"Don't call it a thing. Respect it, Jack. It's a well-designed weapon. Practical, lightweight, easy to conceal. Get to know your handgun. It's only a question of time as to when you'll want to use it."

"When will I want to use it?"

"Do we live on the same planet? What century is this? Look how easy I got into your backyard. I pry open a window and I'm in the house. I could have been a professional burglar, an escaped con, one of those drifters with a skimpy beard. A wandering killer type that follows the sun. A weekend mass murderer with an office job. Take your choice."

"Maybe you need a gun where you live. Take it back. We don't want it."

"I got myself a combat magnum parked near my bed. I hate to tell you what mischief it can cause with the placement of a man's features."

He gave me a canny look. I resumed staring at the gun. It occurred to me that this was the ultimate device for determining one's competence in the world. I bounced it in the palm of my hand, sniffed the steely muzzle. What does it mean to a person, beyond his sense of competence and well-being and personal worth, to carry a lethal weapon, to handle it well, be ready and willing to use it? A concealed lethal weapon. It was a secret, it was a second life, a second self, a dream, a spell, a plot, a delirium.

German-made.

"Don't tell Babette. She'd get real put out if she knew you were harboring a firearm."

"I don't want it, Vern. Take it back."

"Don't put it just anywhere neither. A kid gets ahold of it, you have an immediate situation. Be smart. Think about where to put it so it'll be right there at the time. Figure out your field of fire beforehand. If you have an intruder situation, where will he enter, how will he approach the valuables? If you have a mental, where is he going to come at you from? Mentals are unpredictable because they don't know themselves what they're doing. They approach from wherever, from a tree limb, a branch. Think about putting jagged glass on your window ledges. Learn dropping to the floor fast."

"We don't want guns in our little town."

"Be smart for once in your life," he told me in the dark car. "It's not what you want that matters."

Early the next day a crew came to fix the street. Vernon was out there at once, watching them jackhammer and haul the asphalt, staying close to them as they leveled the smoking pitch. When the workmen left, his visit seemed to end, collapsed into its own lading momentum. We began to see a blank space where Vernon stood. He regarded us from a prudent distance, as if we were strangers with secret resentments. An indefinable fatigue collected around our efforts to converse.

Out on the sidewalk, Babette held him and wept. For his departure he'd shaved, washed the car, put a blue bandanna around his neck. She could not seem to get enough of crying. She looked into his face and cried. She cried embracing him. She gave him a Styrofoam hamper full of sandwiches, chicken and coffee, and she cried as he set it down amid the gouged-out seat stuffing and slashed upholstery.

''She's a good girl," he told me grimly.

In the driver's seat he ran his fingers through his ducktail, checking himself in the rearview mirror. Then he coughed a while, giving us one more episode of lashing phlegm. Babette wept anew. We leaned toward the window on the passenger's side, watching him hunch around into his driving posture, setting himself casually between the door and the seat, his left arm hanging out the window.

"Don't worry about me," he said. "The little limp means nothing. People my age limp. A limp is a natural thing at a certain age. Forget the cough. It's healthy to cough. You move the stuff around. The stuff can't harm you as long as it doesn't settle in one spot and stay there for years. So the cough's all right. So is the insomnia. The insomnia's all right. What do I gain by sleeping? You reach an age when every minute of sleep is one less minute to do useful things. To cough or limp. Never mind the women. The women are all right. We rent a cassette and have some sex. It pumps blood to the heart. Forget the cigarettes. I like to tell myself I'm getting away with something. Let the Mormons quit smoking. They'll die of something just as bad. The money's no problem. I'm all set incomewise. Zero pensions, zero savings, zero stocks and bonds. So you don't have to worry about that. That's all taken care of. Never mind the teeth. The teeth are all right. The looser they are, the more you can wobble them with your tongue. It gives the tongue something to do. Don't worry about the shakes. Everybody gets the shakes now and then. It's only the left hand anyway. The way to enjoy the shakes is pretend it's somebody else's hand. Never mind the sudden and unexplained weight loss. There's no point eating what you can't see. Don't worry about the eyes. The eyes can't get any worse than they are now. Forget the mind completely. The mind goes before the body. That's the way it's supposed to be. So don't worry about the mind. The mind is all right. Worry about the car. The steering's all awry. The brakes were recalled three times. The hood shoots up on pothole terrain."

Deadpan. Babette thought this last part was funny. The part about the car. I stood there amazed, watching her walk in little circles of hilarity, weak-kneed, shambling, all her fears and defenses adrift in the sly history of his voice.

34

The time of spiders arrived. Spiders in high corners of rooms. Cocoons wrapped in spiderwork. Silvery dancing strands that seemed the pure play of light, light as evanescent news, ideas borne on light. The voice upstairs said: "Now watch this. Joanie is trying to snap Ralph's patella with a bushido stun kick. She makes contact, he crumples, she runs."

Denise passed word to Babette that Steffie was routinely examining her chest for lumps. Babette told me.

Murray and I extended the range of our contemplative walks. In town one day he went into small embarrassed raptures over diagonal parking. There was a charm and a native sense to the rows of slanted vehicles. This form of parking was an indispensable part of the American townscape, even when the cars were foreign-made. The arrangement was not only practical but avoided confrontation, the sexual assault motif of front-to-back parking in teeming city streets.

Murray says it is possible to be homesick for a place even when you are there.

The two-story world of an ordinary main street. Modest, sensible, commercial in an unhurried way, a prewar way, with prewar traces of architectural detail surviving in the upper stories, in copper cornices and leaded windows, in the amphora frieze above the dime-store entrance.

It made me think of the Law of Ruins.

I told Murray that Albert Speer wanted to build structures that would decay gloriously, impressively, like Roman ruins. No rusty hulks or gnarled steel slums. He knew that Hitler would be in favor of anything that might astonish posterity. He did a drawing of a Reich structure that was to be built of special materials, allowing it to crumble romantically-a drawing of fallen walls, half columns furled in wisteria. The ruin is built into the creation, I said, which shows a certain nostalgia behind the power principle, or a tendency to organize the longings of future generations.

Murray said, "I don't trust anybody's nostalgia but my own. Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It's a settling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come to violence. War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country."

A humid spell of weather. I opened the refrigerator, peered into the freezer compartment. A strange crackling sound came off the plastic food wrap, the snug covering for half eaten things, the Ziploc sacks of livers and ribs, all gleaming with sleety crystals. A cold dry sizzle. A sound like some element breaking down, resolving itself into Freon vapors. An eerie static, insistent but near subliminal, that made me think of wintering souls, some form of dormant life approaching the threshold of perception.

No one was around. I walked across the kitchen, opened the compactor drawer and looked inside the trash bag. An oozing cube of semi-mangled cans, clothes hangers, animal bones and other refuse. The bottles were broken, the cartons flat. Product colors were undiminished in brightness and intensity. Fats, juices and heavy sludges seeped through layers of pressed vegetable matter. I felt like an archaeologist about to sift through a finding of tool fragments and assorted cave trash. It was about ten days since Denise had compacted the Dylar. That particular round of garbage had almost certainly been taken outside and collected by now. Even if it hadn't, the tablets had surely been demolished by the compactor ram.

These facts were helpful in my efforts to believe that I was merely passing time, casually thumbing through the garbage.

I unfolded the bag cuffs, released the latch and lifted out the bag. The full stench hit me with shocking force. Was this ours? Did it belong to us? Had we created it? I took the bag out to the garage and emptied it. The compressed bulk sat there like an ironic modern sculpture, massive, squat, mocking. I jabbed at it with the butt end of a rake and then spread the material over the concrete floor. I picked through it item by item, mass by shapeless mass, wondering why I felt guilty, a violator of privacy, uncovering intimate and perhaps shameful secrets. It was hard not to be distracted by some of the things they'd chosen to submit to the Juggernaut appliance. But why did I feel like a household spy? Is garbage so private? Does it glow at the core with personal heat, with signs of one's deepest nature, clues to secret yearnings, humiliating flaws? What habits, fetishes, addictions, inclinations? What solitary acts, behavioral ruts? I found crayon drawings of a figure with full breasts and male genitals. There was a long piece of twine that contained a series of knots and loops. It seemed at first a random construction. Looking more closely I thought I detected a complex relationship between the size of the loops, the degree of the knots (single or double) and the intervals between knots with loops and freestanding knots. Some kind of occult geometry or symbolic festoon of obsessions. I found a banana skin with a tampon inside. Was this the dark underside of consumer consciousness? I came across a horrible clotted mass of hair, soap, ear swabs, crushed roaches, flip-top rings, sterile pads smeared with pus and bacon fat, strands of frayed dental floss, fragments of ballpoint refills, toothpicks still displaying bits of impaled food. There was a pair of shredded undershorts with lipstick markings, perhaps a memento of the Grayview Motel.

But no sign anywhere of a shattered amber vial or the remains of those saucer-shaped tablets. It didn't matter. I would face whatever had to be faced without chemical assistance. Babette had said Dylar was fool's gold. She was right, Winnie Richards was right, Denise was right. They were my friends and they were right.

I decided to take another physical. When the results were in, I went to see Dr. Chakravarty in his little office in the medical building. He sat there reading the printout, a man with a puffy face and shadowy eyes, his long hands set flat on the desk, his head wagging slightly.

"Here you are again, Mr. Gladney. We see you so often these days. How nice it is to find a patient who regards his status seriously."

"What status?"

"His status as a patient. People tend to forget they are patients. Once they leave the doctor's office or the hospital, they simply put it out of their minds. But you are all permanent patients, like it or not. I am the doctor, you the patient. Doctor doesn't cease being doctor at close of day. Neither should patient. People expect doctor to go about things with the utmost seriousness, skill and experience. But what about patient? How professional is he?"

He did not look up from the printout as he said these things in his meticulous singsong.

"I don't think I like your potassium very much at all," he went on. "Look here. A bracketed number with computerized stars."

"What does that mean?"

"There's no point your knowing at this stage."

"How was my potassium last time?"

"Quite average in fact. But perhaps this is a false elevation. We are dealing with whole blood. There is the question of a gel barrier. Do you know what this means?" '"No."

"There isn't time to explain. We have true elevation and false elevations. This is all you have to know."

"Exactly how elevated is my potassium?"

"It has gone through the roof, evidently."

"What might this be a sign of?"

"It could mean nothing, it could mean a very great deal indeed."

"How great?"

"Now we are getting into semantics," he said.

"What I'm trying to get at is could this potassium be an indication of some condition just beginning to manifest itself, some condition caused perhaps by an ingestion, an exposure, an involuntary spillage-intake, some substance in the air or the rain?"

"Have you in fact come into contact with such a substance?"

"No," I said.

"Are you sure?"

Positive. Why, do the numbers show some sign of possible exposure?"

"If you haven't been exposed, then they couldn't very well show a sign, could they?"

'Then we agree," I said.

"Tell me this, Mr. Gladney, in all honesty. How do you feel?"

"To the best of my knowledge, I feel very well. First-rate. I feel better than I have in years, relatively speaking."

"What do you mean, relatively speaking?"

"Given the fact I'm older now."

He looked at me carefully. He seemed to be trying to stare me down. Then he made a note on my record. I might have been a child facing the school principal over a series of unexcused absences.

I said, "How can we tell whether the elevation is true or false?"

"I will send you to Glassboro for further tests. Would you like that? There is a brand-new facility called Autumn Harvest Farms. They have gleaming new equipment. You won't be disappointed, wait and see. It gleams, absolutely."

"All right. But is potassium the only thing we have to watch?"

"The less you know, the better. Go to Glassboro. Tell them to delve thoroughly. No stone unturned. Tell them to send you back to me with sealed results. I will analyze them down to the smallest detail. I will absolutely pick them apart. They have the know-how at Harvest Farms, the most delicate of instruments, I promise you. The best of third-world technicians, the latest procedures."

His bright smile hung there like a peach on a tree.

"Together, as doctor and patient, we can do things that neither of us could do separately. There is not enough emphasis on prevention. An ounce of prevention, goes the saying. Is this a proverb or a maxim? Surely professor can tell us."

"I'll need time to think about it."

"In any case, prevention is the thing, isn't it? I've just seen the latest issue of American Mortician. Quite a shocking picture. The industry is barely adequate to accommodating the vast numbers of dead."

Babette was right. He spoke English beautifully. I went home and started throwing things away. I threw away fishing lures, dead tennis balls, torn luggage. I ransacked the attic for old furniture, discarded lampshades, warped screens, bent curtain rods. I threw away picture frames, shoe trees, umbrella stands, wall brackets, highchairs and cribs, collapsible TV trays, beanbag chairs, broken turntables. I threw away shelf paper, faded stationery, manuscripts of articles I'd written, galley proofs of the same articles, the journals in which the articles were printed. The more things I threw away, the more I found. The house was a sepia maze of old and tired things. There was an immensity of things, an overburdening weight, a connection, a mortality. I stalked the rooms, flinging things into cardboard boxes. Plastic electric fans, burnt-out toasters, Star Trek needlepoints. It took well over an hour to get everything down to the sidewalk. No one helped me. I didn't want help or company or human understanding. I just wanted to get the stuff out of the house. I sat on the front steps alone, waiting for a sense of ease and peace to settle in the air around me.

A woman passing on the street said, "A decongestant, an antihistamine, a cough suppressant, a pain reliever."

35

Babette could not get enough of talk radio. "I hate my face," a woman said. 'This is an ongoing problem with me for years. Of all the faces you could have given me, lookswise, this one has got to be the worst. But how can I not look? Even if you took all my mirrors away, I would still find a way to look. How can I not look on the one hand? But I hate it on the other. In other words I still look. Because whose face is it, obviously? What do I do, forget it's there, pretend it's someone else's? What I'm trying to do with this call, Mel, is find other people who have a problem accepting their face. Here are some questions to get us started. What did you look like before you were born? What will you look like in the afterlife, regardless of race or color?"

Babette wore her sweatsuit almost all the time. It was a plain gray outfit, loose and drooping. She cooked in it, drove the kids to school, wore it to the hardware store and the stationer's. I thought about it for a while, decided there was nothing excessively odd in this, nothing to worry about, no reason to believe she was sinking into apathy and despair.

"How do you feel?" I said. 'Tell the truth."

"What is the truth? I'm spending more time with Wilder. Wilder helps me get by."

"I depend on you to be the healthy outgoing former Babette. I need this as badly as you do, if not more."

"What is need? We all need. Where is the uniqueness in this?"

"Are you feeling basically the same?"

"You mean am I sick unto death? The fear hasn't gone, Jack."

"We have to stay active."

"Active helps but Wilder helps more."

"Is it my imagination," I said, "or is he talking less than ever?"

'There's enough talk. What is talk? I don't want him to talk. The less he talks, the better."

"Denise worries about you."

"Who?"

"Denise."

"Talk is radio," she said.

Denise would not let her mother go running unless she promised to apply layers of sunscreen gel. The girl would follow her out of the house to dash a final glob of lotion across the back of Babette's neck, then stand on her toes to stroke it evenly in. She tried to cover every exposed spot. The brows, the lids. They had bitter arguments about the need for this. Denise said the sun was a risk to a fair-skinned person. Her mother claimed the whole business was publicity for disease.

"Besides, I'm a runner," she said. "A runner by definition is less likely to be struck by damaging rays than a standing or walking figure."

Denise spun in my direction, arms flung out, her body beseeching me to set the woman straight.

'The worst rays are direct," Babette said. "This means the faster a person is moving, the more likely she is to receive only partial hits, glancing rays, deflections."

Denise let her mouth fall open, bent her body at the knees. In truth I wasn't sure her mother was wrong.

"It is all a corporate tie-in," Babette said in summary. 'The sunscreen, the marketing, the fear, the disease. You can't have one without the other."

I took Heinrich and his snake-handling buddy, Orest Mercator, out to the commercial strip for dinner. It was four in the afternoon, the time of day when Orest's training schedule called for his main meal. At his request we went to Vincent's Casa Mario, a blockhouse structure with slit windows that seemed part of some coastal defense system.

I'd found myself thinking of Orest and his snakes and wanted a chance to talk to him further.

We sat in a blood-red booth. Orest gripped the tasseled menu with his chunky hands. His shoulders seemed broader than ever, the serious head partly submerged between them.

"How's the training going?" I said.

"I'm slowing it down a little. I don't want to peak too soon. I know how to take care of my body."

"Heinrich told me you sleep sitting up, to prepare for the cage."

"I perfected that. I'm doing different stuff now."

"Like what?"

"Loading up on carbohydrates."

"That's why we came here," Heinrich said.

"I load up a little more each day."

"It's because of the huge energy he'll be burning up in the cage, being alert, tensing himself when a mamba approaches, whatever."

We ordered pasta and water.

'Tell me, Orest. As you get closer and closer to the time, are you beginning to feel anxious?"

"What anxious? I just want to get in the cage. Sooner the better. This is what Orest Mercator is all about."

"You're not nervous? You don't think about what might happen?"

"He likes to be positive," Heinrich said. "This is the thing today with athletes. You don't dwell on the negative."

"Tell me this, then. What is the negative? What do you think of when you think of the negative?"

"Here's what I think. I'm nothing without the snakes. That's the only negative. The negative is if it doesn't come off, if the humane society doesn't let me in the cage. How can I be the best at what I do if they don't let me do it?"

I liked to watch Orest eat. He inhaled food according to aerodynamic principles. Pressure differences, intake velocities. He went at it silently and purposefully, loading up, centering himself, appearing to grow more self-important with each clump of starch that slid over his tongue.

"You know you can get bitten. We talked about it last time. Do you think about what happens after the fangs close on your wrist? Do you think about dying? This is what I want to know. Does death scare you? Does it haunt your thoughts? Let me put my cards on the table, Orest. Are you afraid to die? Do you experience fear? Does fear make you tremble or sweat? Do you feel a shadow fall across the room when you think of the cage, the snakes, the fangs?"

"What did I read just the other day? There are more people dead today than in the rest of world history put together. What's one extra? I'd just as soon die while I'm trying to put Orest Mercator's name in the record book."

I looked at my son. I said, "Is he trying to tell us there are more people dying in this twenty-four-hour period than in the rest of human history up to now?"

"He's saying the dead are greater today than ever before, combined."

"What dead? Define the dead."

"He's saying people now dead."

"What do you mean, now dead? Everybody who's dead is now dead."

"He's saying people in graves. The known dead. Those you can count."

I was listening intently, trying to grasp what they meant. A second plate of food came for Orest.

"But people sometimes stay in graves for hundreds of years. Is he saying there are more dead people in graves than anywhere else?"

"It depends on what you mean by anywhere else."

"I don't know what I mean. The drowned. The blown-to-bits."

"There are more dead now than ever before. That's all he's saying."

I looked at him a while longer. Then I turned to Orest.

"You are intentionally facing death. You are setting out to do exactly what people spend their lives trying not to do. Die. I want to know why."

"My trainer says, 'Breathe, don't think.' He says, 'Be a snake and you'll know the stillness of a snake.'"

"He has a trainer now," Heinrich said.

"He's a Sunny Moslem," Orest said.

" Iron City has some Sunnies out near the airport."

"The Sunnies are mostly Korean. Except mine's an Arab, I think."

I said, "Don't you mean the Moonies are mostly Korean?"

"He's a Sunny," Orest said.

"But it's the Moonies who are mostly Korean. Except they're not, of course. It's only the leadership."

They thought about this. I watched Orest eat. I watched him pitchfork the spaghetti down his gullet. The serious head sat motionless, an entryway for the food. that flew off the mechanical fork. What purpose he conveyed, what sense of a fixed course of action pursued absolutely. If each of us is the center of his or her existence, Orest seemed intent on enlarging the center, making it everything. Is this what athletes do, occupy the self more fully? It's possible we envy them for a prowess that has little to do with sport. In building toward a danger, they escape it in some deeper sense, they dwell in some angelic scan, able to leap free of everyday dying. But was Orest an athlete? He would do nothing but sit- sit for sixty-seven days in a glass cage, waiting to be publicly bitten.

"You will not be able to defend yourself," I said. "Not only that but you will be in a cage with the most slimy, feared and repulsive creatures on earth. Snakes. People have nightmares about snakes. Crawling slithering cold-blooded egg-laying vertebrates. People go to psychiatrists. Snakes have a special slimy place in our collective unconscious. And you are voluntarily getting into an enclosed space with thirty or forty of the most venomous snakes in the world."

"What slimy? They're not slimy."

"The famous sliminess is a myth," Heinrich said. "He's getting into a cage with Gaboon vipers with two-inch fangs. Maybe a dozen mambas. The mamba happens to be the fastest-moving land snake in the world. Isn't sliminess a little besides the point?"

"That's my argument exactly. Fangs. Snakebite. Fifty thousand people a year die of snakebite. It was on television last night."

"Everything was on television last night," Orest said.

I admired the reply. I guess I admired him too. He was creating an imperial self out of some tabloid aspiration. He would train relentlessly, speak of himself in the third person, load up on carbohydrates. His trainer was always there, his friends drawn to the aura of inspired risk. He would grow in life-strength as he neared the time.

"His trainer is teaching him how to breathe in the old way, the Sunny Moslem way. A snake is one thing. A person can be a thousand things."

"Be a snake," Orest said.

"People are getting interested," Heinrich said. "It's like it's starting to build. Like he's really going to do it. Like they believe him now. The total package."

If the self is death, how can it also be stronger than death?

I called for the check. Extraneous flashes of Mr. Gray. A drizzling image in gray shorts and socks. I lifted several bills from my wallet, rubbing hard with my fingers to make sure there weren't others stuck to them. In the motel mirror was my full-length wife, white-bodied, full-bosomed, pink-kneed, stub-toed, wearing only peppermint legwarmers, like a sophomore leading cheers at an orgy.

When we got home, I found her ironing in the bedroom.

"What are you doing?" I said.

"Listening to the radio. Except it just went off."

"If you thought we were finished with Mr. Gray, it's time to bring you up to date."

"Are we talking about Mr. Gray the composite or Mr. Gray the individual? It makes all the difference."

"It certainly does. Denise compacted the pills."

"Does that mean we're all through with the composite?"

"I don't know what it means."

"Does it mean you've turned your male attention to the individual in the motel?"

"I didn't say that."

"You don't have to say it. You're a male. A male follows the path of homicidal rage. It is the biological path. The path of plain dumb blind male biology."

"How smug, ironing handkerchiefs."

"Jack, when you die, I will just fall to the floor and stay there. Eventually, maybe, after a very long time, they will find me crouching in the dark, a woman without speech or gesture. But in the meantime I will not help you find this man or his medication."

'The eternal wisdom of those who iron and sew."

"Ask yourself what it is you want more, to ease your ancient fear or to revenge your childish dopey injured male pride."

I went down the hall to help Steffie finish packing. A sports announcer said: "They're not booing-they're saying, 'Bruce, Bruce.'" Denise and Wilder were in there with her. I gathered from the veiled atmosphere that Denise had been giving confidential advice on visits to distant parents. Steffie's flight would originate in Boston and make two stops between Iron City and Mexico City but she wouldn't have to change planes, so the situation seemed manageable.

"How do I know I'll recognize my mother?"

"You saw her last year," I said. "You liked her."

"What if she refuses to send me back?"

"We have Denise to thank for that idea, don't we? Thank you, Denise. Don't worry. She'll send you back."

"What if she doesn't?" Denise said. "It happens, you know."

"It won't happen this time."

"You'll have to kidnap her back."

"That won't be necessary."

"What if it is?" Steffie said.

"Would you do it?" Denise said.

"It won't happen in a million years."

"It happens all the time," she said. "One parent takes the child, the other parent hires kidnappers to get her back."

"What if she keeps me?" Steffie said. "What will you do?"

"He'll have to send people to Mexico. That's the only thing he can do."

"But will he do it?" she said.

"Your mother knows she can't keep you," I said. "She travels all the time. It's out of the question."

"Don't worry," Denise told her. "No matter what he says now, he'll get you back when the time comes."

Steffie looked at me with deep interest and curiosity. I told her I would travel to Mexico myself and do whatever had to be done to get her back here. She looked at Denise.

"It's better to hire people," the older girl said helpfully. "That way you have someone who's done it before."

Babette came in and picked up Wilder.

'There you are," she said. "We're going to the airport with Steffie. Yes we are. Yes yes."

"Bruce, Bruce."

The next day there was an evacuation for noxious odor. SIMUVAC vehicles were everywhere. Men in Mylex suits patrolled the streets, many of them carrying instruments to measure harm. The consulting firm that conceived the evacuation gathered a small group of computer-screened volunteers in a police van in the supermarket parking lot. There was half an hour of self-induced gagging and vomiting. The episode was recorded on videotape and sent somewhere for analysis.

Three days later an actual noxious odor drifted across the river. A pause, a careful thoughtfulness, seemed to settle on the town. Traffic moved more slowly, drivers were exceedingly polite. There was no sign of official action, no jitneys or ambulettes painted in primary colors. People avoided looking at each other directly. An irritating sting in the nostrils, a taste of copper on the tongue. As time passed, the will to do nothing seemed to deepen, to fix itself firmly. There were those who denied they smelled anything at all. It is always that way with odors. There were those who professed not to see the irony of their inaction. They'd taken part in the SIMUVAC exercise but were reluctant to flee now. There were those who wondered what caused the odor, those who looked worried, those who said the absence of technical personnel meant there was nothing to worry about. Our eyes began to water.

About three hours after we'd first become aware of it, the vapor suddenly lifted, saving us from our formal deliberations.

36

Now and then I thought of the Zumwalt automatic hidden in the bedroom.

The time of dangling insects arrived. White houses with caterpillars dangling from the eaves. White stones in driveways. You can walk at night down the middle of the street and hear women talking on the telephone. Wanner weather produces voices in the dark. They are talking about their adolescent sons. How big, how fast. The sons are almost frightening. The quantities they eat. The way they loom in doorways. These are the days that are full of wormy bugs. They are in the grass, stuck to the siding, hanging in the air, hanging from the trees and eaves, stuck to the window screens. The women talk long-distance to the grandparents of the growing boys. They share the Trimline phone, beamish old folks in hand-knit sweaters on fixed incomes.

What happens to them when the commercial ends?

I got a call myself one night. The operator said, 'There's a Mother Devi that wishes to talk collect to a Jack Gladney. Do you accept?"

"Hello, Janet. What do you want?"

"Just to say hello. To ask how you are. We haven't talked in ages."

"Talked?"

"Swami wants to know if our son is coming to the ashram this summer."

"Our son?"

"Yours, mine and his. Swami regards the children of his followers as his children."

"I sent a daughter to Mexico last week. When she gets back, I'll be ready to talk about the son."

"Swami says Montana will be good for the boy. He will grow out, fill out. These are his touchy years."

"Why are you calling? Seriously."

"Just to greet you, Jack. We greet each other here."

"Is he one of those whimsical swamis with a snow-white beard? Sort of fun to look at?"

"We're serious people here. The cycle of history has but four ages. We happen to be in the last of these. There is little time for whimsy."

Her tiny piping voice bounced down to me from a hollow ball in geosynchronous orbit.

"If Heinrich wants to visit you this summer, it's all right with me. Let him ride horses, fish for trout. But í don't want him getting involved in something personal and intense, like religion. There's already been some kidnap talk around here. People are edgy."

"The last age is the Age of Darkness."

"Fine. Now tell me what you want."

"Nothing. I have everything. Peace of mind, purpose, true fellowship. I only wish to greet you. I greet you, Jack. I miss you. I miss your voice. I only wish to talk a while, pass a moment or two in friendly reminiscence."

I hung up and went for a walk. The women were in their lighted homes, talking on the phone. Did swami have twinkling eyes? Would he be able to answer the boy's questions where I had failed, provide assurances where I had incited bickering and debate? How final is the Age of Darkness? Does it mean supreme destruction, a night that swallows existence so completely that I am cured of my own lonely dying? I listened to the women talk. All sound, all souls.

When I got home I found Babette in her sweatsuit by the bedroom window, staring into the night.

Delegates to the Hitler conference began arriving. About ninety Hitler scholars would spend the three days of the conference attending lectures, appearing on panels, going to movies. They would wander the campus with their names lettered in gothic type on laminated tags pinned to their lapels. They would exchange Hitler gossip, spread the usual sensational rumors about the last days in the führerbunker.

It was interesting to see how closely they resembled each other despite the wide diversity of national and regional backgrounds. They were cheerful and eager, given to spitting when they laughed, given to outdated dress, homeliness, punctuality. They seemed to have a taste for sweets.

I welcomed them in the starkly modern chapel. I spoke in German, from notes, for five minutes. I talked mainly about Hitler's mother, brother and dog. His dog's name was Wolf. This word is the same in English and German. Most of the words I used in my address were the same or nearly the same in both languages. I'd spent days with the dictionary, compiling lists of such words. My remarks were necessarily disjointed and odd. I made many references to Wolf, many more to the mother and the brother, a few to shoes and socks, a few to jazz, beer and baseball. Of course there was Hitler himself. I spoke the name often, hoping it would overpower my insecure sentence structure.

The rest of the time I tried to avoid the Germans in the group. Even in my black gown and dark glasses, with my name in Nazi typeface over my heart, I felt feeble in their presence, death-prone, listening to them produce their guttural sounds, their words, their heavy metal. They told Hitler jokes and played pinochle. All I could do was mutter a random monosyllable, rock with empty laughter. I spent a lot of time in my office, hiding.

Whenever I remembered the gun, lurking in a stack of undershirts like a tropical insect, I felt a small intense sensation pass through me. Whether pleasurable or fearful I wasn't sure. I knew it mainly as a childhood moment, the profound stir of secret-keeping.

What a sly device a handgun is. One so small in particular. An intimate and cunning thing, a secret history of the man who owns it. I recalled how I'd felt some days earlier, trying to find the Dylar. Like someone spying on the family garbage. Was I immersing myself, little by little, in a secret life? Did I think it was my last defense against the ruin worked out for me so casually by the force or nonforce, the principle or power or chaos that determines such things? Perhaps I was beginning to understand my ex-wives and their ties to intelligence.

The Hitler scholars assembled, wandered, ate voraciously, laughed through oversized teeth. I sat at my desk in the dark, thinking of secrets. Are secrets a tunnel to a dreamworld where you control events?

In the evening I sped out to the airport to meet my daughter's plane. She was excited and happy, wore Mexican things. She said the people who sent her mother books to review wouldn't leave her alone. Dana was getting big thick novels every day, writing reviews which she microfilmed and sent to a secret archive. She complained of jangled nerves, periods of deep spiritual fatigue. She told Steffie she was thinking of coming in from the cold.

In the morning I sped out to Glassboro to take the further tests my doctor had advised, at Autumn Harvest Farms. The seriousness of such an occasion is directly proportionate to the number of bodily emissions you are asked to cull for analysis. I carried with me several specimen bottles, each containing some melancholy waste or secretion. Alone in the glove compartment rode an ominous plastic locket, which I'd reverently enclosed in three interlocking Baggies, successively twist-tied. Here was a daub of the most solemn waste of all, certain to be looked upon by the technicians on duty with the mingled deference, awe and dread we have come to associate with exotic religions of the world.

But first I had to find the place. It turned out to be a functional pale brick building, one story, with slab floors and bright lighting. Why would such a place be called Autumn Harvest Farms? Was this an attempt to balance the heartlessness of their gleaming precision equipment? Would a quaint name fool us into thinking we live in pre-cancerous times? What kind of condition might we expect to have diagnosed in a facility called Autumn Harvest Farms? Whooping cough, croup? A touch of the grippe? Familiar old farmhouse miseries calling for bed rest, a deep chest massage with soothing Vicks VapoRub. Would someone read to us from David Copperfield?

I had misgivings. They took my samples away, sat me down at a computer console. In response to questions on the screen I tapped out the story of my life and death, little by little, each response eliciting further questions in an unforgiving progression of sets and subsets. I lied three times. They gave me a loose-fitting garment and a wristband ID. They sent me down narrow corridors for measuring and weighing, for blood-testing, brain-graphing, the recording of currents traversing my heart. They scanned and probed in room after room, each cubicle appearing slightly smaller than the one before it, more harshly lighted, emptier of human furnishings. Always a new technician. Always faceless fellow patients in the mazelike halls, crossing from room to room, identically gowned. No one said hello. They attached me to a seesaw device, turned me upside down and let me hang for sixty seconds. A printout emerged from a device nearby. They put me on a treadmill and told me to run, run. Instruments were strapped to my thighs, electrodes planted on my chest. They inserted me in an imaging block, some kind of computerized scanner. Someone sat typing at a console, transmitting a message to the machine that would make my body transparent. I heard magnetic winds, saw flashes of northern light. People crossed the hall like wandering souls, holding their urine aloft in pale beakers. I stood in a room the size of a closet. They told me to hold one finger in front of my face, close my left eye. The panel slid shut, a white light flashed. They were trying to help me, to save me.

Eventually, dressed again, I sat across a desk from a nervous young man in a white smock. He studied my file, mumbling something about being new at this. I was surprised to find that this fact did not upset me. I think I was even relieved.

"How long before the results are in?"

"The results are in," he said.

"I thought we were here for a general discussion. The human part. What the machines can't detect. In two or three days the actual numbers would be ready." "The numbers are ready."

"I'm not sure I'm ready. All those gleaming devices are a little unsettling. I could easily imagine a perfectly healthy person being made ill just taking these tests."

"Why should anyone be made ill? These are the most accurate test devices anywhere. We have sophisticated computers to analyze the data. This equipment saves lives. Believe me, I've seen it happen. We have equipment that works better than the latest X-ray machine or CAT scanner. We can see more deeply, more accurately."

He seemed to be gaining confidence. He was a mild-eyed fellow with a poor complexion and reminded me of the boys at the supermarket who stand at the end of the checkout counter bagging merchandise.

"Here's how we usually start," he said. "I ask questions based on the printout and then you answer to the best of your ability. When we're all finished, I give you the printout in a sealed envelope and you take it to your doctor for a paid visit."

"Good."

"Good. We usually start by asking how do you feel."

"Based on the printout?"

"Just how do you feel," he said in a mild voice.

"In my own mind, in real terms, I feel relatively sound, pending confirmation."

"We usually go on to tired. Have you recently been feeling tired?"

"What do people usually say?"

"Mild fatigue is a popular answer."

"I could say exactly that and be convinced in my own mind it's a fair and accurate description."

He seemed satisfied with the reply and made a bold notation on the page in front of him.

"What about appetite?" he said.

"I could go either way on that."

'That's more or less how I could go, based on the printout."

"In other words you're saying sometimes I have appetitive reinforcement, sometimes I don't."

"Are you telling me or asking me?"

"It depends on what the numbers say."

"Then we agree."

"Good."

"Good," he said. "Now what about sleep? We usually do sleep before we ask the person if they'd like some decaf or tea. We don't provide sugar."

"Do you get a lot of people who have trouble sleeping?"

"Only in the last stages."

"The last stages of sleep? Do you mean they wake up early in the morning and can't get back to sleep?"

'The last stages of life."

'That's what I thought. Good. The only thing I have is some low threshold animation."

"Good."

"I get a little restless. Who doesn't?"

'Toss and turn?"

'Toss," I said.

"Good."

"Good."

He made some notes. It seemed to be going well. I was heartened to see how well it was going. I turned down his offer of tea, which seemed to please him. We were moving right along.

"Here's where we ask about smoking."

'That's easy. The answer is no. And it's not a matter of having stopped five or ten years ago. I've never smoked. Even when I was a teenager. Never tried it. Never saw the need."

'That's always a plus."

I felt tremendously reassured and grateful.

"We're moving right along, aren't we?"

"Some people like to drag it out," he said. 'They get interested in their own condition. It becomes almost like a hobby."

"Who needs nicotine? Not only that, I rarely drink coffee and certainly never with caffeine. Can't understand what people see in all this artificial stimulation. I get high just walking in the woods."

"No caffeine always helps."

Yes, I thought. Reward my virture. Give me life.

"Then there's milk," I said. "People aren't happy with the caffeine and the sugar. They want the milk too. All those fatty acids. Haven't touched milk since I was a kid. Haven't touched heavy cream. Eat bland foods. Rarely touch hard liquor. Never knew what the fuss was all about. Water. That's my beverage. A man can trust a glass of water."

I waited for him to tell me I was adding years to my life.

"Speaking of water," he said, "have you ever been exposed to industrial contaminants?"

"What?"

"Toxic material in the air or water."

"Is this what you usually ask after the cigarettes?"

"It's not a scheduled question."

"You mean do I work with a substance like asbestos? Absolutely not. I'm a teacher. Teaching is my life. I've spent my life on a college campus. Where does asbestos fit into this?"

"Have you ever heard of Nyodene Derivative?"

"Should I have, based on the printout?"

"There are traces in your bloodstream."

"How can that be if I've never heard of it?"

"The magnetic scanner says it's there. I'm looking at bracketed numbers with little stars."

"Are you saying the printout shows the first ambiguous signs of a barely perceptible condition deriving from minimal acceptable spillage exposure?"

Why was I speaking in this stilted fashion?

"The magnetic scanner is pretty clear," he said.

What had happened to our tacit agreement to advance smartly through the program without time-consuming and controversial delving?

"What happens when someone has traces of this material in his or her blood?"

"They get a nebulous mass," he said.

"But I thought no one knew for sure what Nyodene D. did to humans. Rats, yes."

"You just told me you'd never heard of it. How do you know what it does or doesn't do?"

He had me there. I felt I'd been tricked, carried along, taken for a fool.

"Knowledge changes every day," he said. "We have some conflicting data that says exposure to this substance can definitely lead to a mass."

His confidence was soaring.

"Good. Let's get on to the next topic. I'm in something of a hurry."

"This is where I hand over the sealed envelope."

"Is exercise next? The answer is none. Hate it, refuse to do it."

"Good. I am handing over the envelope."

"What is a nebulous mass, just out of idle curiosity?"

"A possible growth in the body."

"And it's called nebulous because you can't get a clear picture of it."

"We get very clear pictures. The imaging block takes the clearest pictures humanly possible. It's called a nebulous mass because it has no definite shape, form or limits."

"What can it do in terms of worst-case scenario contingencies?"

"Cause a person to die."

"Speak English, for God's sake. I despise this modern jargon."

He took insults well. The angrier I got, the better he liked it. He radiated energy and health.

"Now is where I tell you to pay in the outer office."

"What about potassium? I came here in the first place because my potassium was way above normal limits."

"We don't do potassium."

"Good."

"Good. The last thing I'm supposed to tell you is take the envelope to your doctor. Your doctor knows the symbols."

"So that's it then. Good."

"Good," he said.

I found myself shaking his hand warmly. Minutes later I was out on the street. A boy walked splay-footed across a public lawn, nudging a soccer ball before him. A second kid sat on the grass, taking off his socks by grabbing the heels and yanking. How literary, I thought peevishly. Streets thick with the details of impulsive life as the hero ponders the latest phase in his dying. It was a partially cloudy day with winds diminishing toward sunset.

That night I walked the streets of Blacksmith. The glow of blue-eyed TVs. The voices on the touch-tone phones. Far away the grandparents huddle in a chair, eagerly sharing the receiver as carrier waves modulate into audible signals. It is the voice of their grandson, the growing boy whose face appears in the snapshots set around the phone. Joy rushes to their eyes but it is misted over, infused with a sad and complex knowing. What is the young- • ster saying to them? His wretched complexion makes him unhappy? He wants to leave school and work full-time at Foodland, bagging groceries? He tells them he likes to bag groceries. It is the one thing in life he finds satisfying. Put the gallon jugs in first, square off the six-packs, double-bag the heavy merch. He does it well, he has the knack, he sees the items arranged in the bag before he touches a thing. It's like Zen, gramma. I snap out two bags, fit one inside the other. Don't bruise the fruit, watch the eggs, put the ice cream in a freezer bag. A thousand people pass me every day but no one ever sees me. I like it, gramma, it's totally un-threatening, it's how I want to spend my life. And so they listen sadly, loving him all the more, their faces pressed against the sleek Trimline, the white Princess in the bedroom, the plain brown Rotary in granddad's paneled basement hideaway. The old gentleman runs a hand through his thatch of white hair, the woman holds her folded specs against her face. Clouds race across the westering moon, the seasons change in somber montage, going deeper into winter stillness, a landscape of silence and ice. Your doctor knows the symbols.

37

The long walk started at noon. I didn't know it would turn into a long walk. I thought it would be a miscellaneous meditation, Murray and Jack, half an hour's campus meander. But it became a major afternoon, a serious looping Socratic walk, with practical consequences.

I met Murray after his car crash seminar and we wandered along the fringes of the campus, past the cedar-shingled condominiums set in the trees in their familiar defensive posture-a cluster of dwellings blending so well with the environment that birds kept flying into the plate-glass windows.

"You're smoking a pipe," I said.

Murray smiled sneakily.

"It looks good. I like it. It works."

He lowered his eyes, smiling. The pipe had a long narrow stem and cubical bowl. It was pale brown and resembled a highly disciplined household implement, perhaps an Amish or Shaker antique. I wondered if he'd chosen it to match his somewhat severe chin whiskers. A tradition of stern virtue seemed to hover about his gestures and expressions.

"Why can't we be intelligent about death?" I said.

"It's obvious."

"It is?"

"Ivan Ilyich screamed for three days. That's about as intelligent as we get. Tolstoy himself struggled to understand. He feared it terribly."

"It's almost as though our fear is what brings it on. If we could learn not to be afraid, we could live forever."

"We talk ourselves into it. Is that what you mean?"

"I don't know what I mean. I only know I'm just going through the motions of living. I'm technically dead. My body is growing a nebulous mass. They track these things like satellites. All this as a result of a byproduct of insecticide. There's something artificial about my death. It's shallow, unfulfilling. I don't belong to the earth or sky. They ought to carve an aerosol can on my tombstone."

"Well said."

What did he mean, well said? I vanted him to argue with me, raise my dying to a higher level, make me feel better.

"Do you think it's unfair?" he said.

"Of course I do. Or is that a trite answer?"

He seemed to shrug.

"Look how I've lived. Has my life been a mad dash for pleasure? Have I been hellbent on self-destruction, using illegal drugs, driving fast cars, drinking to excess? A little dry sherry at faculty parties. I eat bland foods."

"No, you don't."

He puffed seriously on his pipe, his cheeks going hollow. We walked in silence for a while.

"Do you think your death is premature?" he said.

"Every death is premature. There's no scientific reason why we can't live a hundred and fifty years. Some people actually do it, according to a headline I saw at the supermarket."

"Do you think it's a sense of incompleteness that causes you the deepest regret? There are things you still hope to accomplish. Work to be done, intellectual challenges to be faced."

"The deepest regret is death. The only thing to face is death. This is all I think about. There's only one issue here. I want to live."

"From the Robert Wise film of the same name, with Susan Hayward as Barbara Graham, a convicted murderess. Aggressive jazz score by Johnny Mandel."

I looked at him.

"So you're saying, Jack, that death would be just as threatening even if you'd accomplished all you'd ever hoped to accomplish in your life and work."

"Are you crazy? Of course. That's an elitist idea. Would you ask a man who bags groceries if he fears death not because it is death but because there are still some interesting groceries he would like to bag?"

"Well said."

"This is death. I don't want it to tarry awhile so I can write a monograph. I want it to go away for seventy or eighty years."

"Your status as a doomed man lends your words a certain prestige and authority. I like that. As the time nears, I think you'll find that people will be eager to hear what you have to say. They will seek you out."

"Are you saying this is a wonderful opportunity for me to win friends?"

"I'm saying you can't let down the living by slipping into self-pity and despair. People will depend on you to be brave. What people look for in a dying friend is a stubborn kind of gravel-voiced nobility, a refusal to give in, with moments of indomitable humor. You're growing in prestige even as we speak. You're creating a hazy light about your own body. I have to like it."

We walked down the middle of a steep and winding street. There was no one around. The houses here were old and looming, set above narrow stone stairways in partial disrepair.

"Do you believe love is stronger than death?"

"Not in a million years."

"Good," he said. "Nothing is stronger than death. Do you believe the only people who fear death are those who are afraid of life?"

"That's crazy. Completely stupid."

"Right. We all fear death to some extent. Those who claim otherwise are lying to themselves. Shallow people."

"People with their nicknames on their license plates."

"Excellent, Jack. Do you believe life without death is somehow incomplete?"

"How could it be incomplete? Death is what makes it incomplete."

"Doesn't our knowledge of death make life more precious?"

"What good is a preciousness based on fear and anxiety? It's an anxious quivering thing."

'True. The most deeply precious things are those we feel secure about. A wife, a child. Does the specter of death make a child more precious?"

"No."

"No. There is no reason to believe life is more precious because it is fleeting. Here is a statement. A person has to be told he is going to die before he can begin to live life to the fullest. True or false?"

"False. Once your death is established, it becomes impossible to live a satisfying life."

"Would you prefer to know the exact date and time of your death?"

"Absolutely not. It's bad enough to fear the unknown. Faced with the unknown, we can pretend it isn't there. Exact dates would drive many to suicide, if only to beat the system."

We crossed an old highway bridge, screened in, littered with sad and faded objects. We followed a footpath along a creek, approached the edge of the high school playing field. Women brought small children here to play in the long-jump pits.

"How do I get around it?" I said.

"You could put your faith in technology. It got you here, it can get you out. This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature."

"It is?"

"It's what we invented to conceal the terrible secret of our decaying bodies. But it's also life, isn't it? It prolongs life, it provides new organs for those that wear out. New devices, new techniques every day. Lasers, masers, ultrasound. Give yourself up to it, Jack. Believe in it. They'll insert you in a gleaming tube, irradiate your body with the basic stuff of the universe. Light, energy, dreams. God's own goodness."

"I don't think I want to see any doctors for a while, Murray, thanks."

"In that case you can always get around death by concentrating on the life beyond."

"How do I do that?"

"It's obvious. Read up on reincarnation, transmigration, hyperspace, the resurrection of the dead and so on. Some gorgeous systems have evolved from these beliefs. Study them."

"Do you believe in any of these things?"

"Millions of people have believed for thousands of years. Throw in with them. Belief in a second birth, a second life, is practically universal. This must mean something."

"But these gorgeous systems are all so different."

"Pick one you like."

"But you make it sound like a convenient fantasy, the worst kind of self-delusion."

Again he seemed to shrug. 'Think of the great poetry, the music and dance and ritual that spring forth from our aspiring to a life beyond death. Maybe these things are justification enough for our hopes and dreams, although I wouldn't say that to a dying man."

He poked me with an elbow. We walked toward the commercial part of town. Murray paused, raised one foot behind him, reached back to knock some ashes from his pipe. Then he pocketed the thing expertly, inserting it bowl-first in his corduroy jacket.

"Seriously, you can find a great deal of long-range solace in the idea of an afterlife."

"But don't I have to believe? Don't I have to feel in my heart that there is something, genuinely, beyond this life, out there, looming, in the dark?"

"What do you think the afterlife is, a body of facts just waiting to be uncovered? Do you think the U.S. Air Force is secretly gathering data on the afterlife and keeping it under wraps because we're not mature enough to accept the findings? The findings would cause panic? No. I'll tell you what the afterlife is. It's a sweet and terribly touching idea. You can take it or leave it. In the meantime what you have to do is survive an assassination attempt. That would be an instant tonic. You would feel specially favored, you would grow in charisma."

"You said earlier that death was making me grow in charisma. Besides, who would want to kill me?"

Once more he shrugged. Survive a train wreck in which a hundred die. Get thrown clear when your single-engine Cessna crashes on a golf course after striking a power line in heavy rain just minutes after takeoff. It doesn't have to be assassination. The point is you're standing at the edge of a smoldering ruin where others lie inert and twisted. This can counteract the effect of any number of nebulous masses, at least for a time."

We window-shopped a while, then went into a shoe store. Murray looked at Weejüns, Wallabees, Hush Puppies. We wandered out into the sun. Children in strollers squinted up at us, appearing to think we were something strange.

"Has your German helped?"

"I can't say it has."

"Has it ever helped?"

"I can't say. I don't know. Who knows these things?"

"What have you been trying to do all these years?"

"Put myself under a spell, I guess."

"Correct. Nothing to be ashamed of, Jack. It's only your fear that makes you act this way."

"Only my fear? Only my death?"

"We shouldn't be surprised at your lack of success. How powerful did the Germans prove to be? They lost the war, after all."

"That's what Denise said."

"You've discussed this with the children?"

"Superficially."

"Helpless and fearful people are drawn to magical figures, mythic figures, epic men who intimidate and darkly loom."

"You're talking about Hitler, I take it."

"Some people are larger than life. Hitler is larger than death. You thought he would protect you. I understand completely."

"Do you? Because I wish I did."

"It's totally obvious. You wanted to be helped and sheltered. The overwhelming horror would leave no room for your own death. 'Submerge me,' you said. 'Absorb my fear.' On one level you wanted to conceal yourself in Hitler and his works. On another level you wanted to use him to grow in significance and strength.

I sense a confusion of means. Not that I'm criticizing. It was a daring thing you did, a daring thrust. To use him. I can admire the attempt even as I see how totally dumb it was, although no dumber than wearing a charm or knocking wood. Six hundred million Hindus stay home from work if the signs are not favorable that morning. So I'm not singling you out." 'The vast and terrible depth." "Of course," he said. "The inexhaustibility." "I understand."

'The whole huge nameless thing." "Yes, absolutely." "The massive darkness." "Certainly, certainly." 'The whole terrible endless hugeness." "I know exactly what you mean."

He tapped the fender of a diagonally parked car, half smiling. "Why have you failed, Jack?" "A confusion of means."

"Correct. There are numerous ways to get around death. You tried to employ two of them at once. You stood out on the one hand and tried to hide on the other. What is the name we give to this attempt?" "Dumb."

I followed him into the supermarket. Blasts of color, layers of oceanic sound. We walked under a bright banner announcing a raffle to raise money for some incurable disease. The wording seemed to indicate that the winner would get the disease. Murray likened the banner to a Tibetan prayer flag.

"Why have I had this fear so long, so consistently?" "It's obvious. You don't know how to repress. We're all aware there's no escape from death. How do we deal with this crushing knowledge? We repress, we disguise, we bury, we exclude. Some people do it better than others, that's all." "How can I improve?" "You can't. Some people just don't have the unconscious tools to perform the necessary disguising operations."

"How do we know repression exists if the tools are unconscious and the thing we're repressing is so cleverly disguised?"

"Freud said so. Speaking of looming figures."

He picked up a box of Handi-Wrap II, reading the display type, studying the colors. He smelled a packet of dehydrated soup. The data was strong today.

"Do you think I'm somehow healthier because I don't know how to repress? Is it possible that constant fear is the natural state of man and that by living close to my fear I am actually doing something heroic, Murray?"

"Do you feel heroic?"

"No."

'Then you probably aren't."

"But isn't repression unnatural?"

"Fear is unnatural. Lightning and thunder are unnatural. Pain, death, reality, these are all unnatural. We can't bear these things as they are. We know too much. So we resort to repression, compromise and disguise. This is how we survive in the universe. This is the natural language of the species."

I looked at him carefully.

"I exercise. I take care of my body."

"No, you don't," he said.

He helped an old man read the date on a loaf of raisin bread. Children sailed by in silver carts.

"Tegrin, Denorex, Selsun Blue."

Murray wrote something in his little book. I watched him step deftly around a dozen fallen eggs oozing yolky matter from a busted carton.

"Why do I feel so good when I'm with Wilder? It's not like being with the other kids," I said.

"You sense his total ego, his freedom from limits."

"In what way is he free from limits?"

"He doesn't know he's going to die. He doesn't know death at all. You cherish this simpleton blessing of his, this exemption from harm. You want to get close to him, touch him, look at him, breathe him in. How lucky he is. A cloud of unknowing, an omnipotent little person. The child is everything, the adult nothing. Think about it. A person's entire life is the unraveling of this conflict. No wonder we're bewildered, staggered, shattered."

"Aren't you going too far?"

"I'm from New York."

"We create beautiful and lasting things, build vast civilizations."

"Gorgeous evasions," he said. "Great escapes."

The doors parted photoelectronically. We went outside, walking past the dry cleaner, the hairstylist, the optician. Murray relighted his pipe, sucking impressively at the mouthpiece.

"We have talked about ways to get around death," he said. "We have discussed how you've already tried two such ways, each cancelling the other. We have mentioned technology, train wrecks, belief in an afterlife. There are other methods as well and I would like to talk about one such approach."

We crossed the street.

"I believe, Jack, there are two kinds of people in the world. Killers and diers. Most of us are diers. We don't have the disposition, the rage or whatever it takes to be a killer. We let death happen. We lie down and die. But think what it's like to be a killer. Think how exciting it is, in theory, to kill a person in direct confrontation. If he dies, you cannot. To kill him is to gain life-credit. The more people you kill, the more credit you store up. It explains any number of massacres, wars, executions."

"Are you saying that men have tried throughout history to cure themselves of death by killing others?"

"It's obvious."

"And you call this exciting?"

"I'm talking theory. In theory, violence is a form of rebirth. The dier passively succumbs. The killer lives on. What a marvelous equation. As a marauding band amasses dead bodies, it gathers strength. Strength accumulates like a favor from the gods."

"What does this have to do with me?"

"This is theory. We're a couple of academics taking a walk. But imagine the visceral jolt, seeing your opponent bleeding in the dust."

"You think it adds to a person's store of credit, like a bank transaction."

"Nothingness is staring you in the face. Utter and permanent oblivion. You will cease to be. To be, Jack. The dier accepts this and dies. The killer, in theory, attempts to defeat his own death by killing others. He buys time, he buys life. Watch others squirm. See the blood trickle in the dust."

I looked at him, amazed. He drew contentedly on his pipe, making hollow sounds.

"It's a way of controlling death. A way of gaining the ultimate upper hand. Be the killer for a change. Let someone else be the dier. Let him replace you, theoretically, in that role. You can't die if he does. He dies, you live. See how marvelously simple."

"You say this is what people have been doing for centuries."

'They're still doing it. They do it on a small intimate scale, they do it in groups and crowds and masses. Kill to live."

"Sounds pretty awful."

He seemed to shrug. "Slaughter is never random. The more people you kill, the more power you gain over your own death. There is a secret precision at work in the most savage and indiscriminate killings. To speak about this is not to do public relations for murder. We're two academics in an intellectual environment. It's our duty to examine currents of thought, investigate the meaning of human behavior. But think how exciting, to come out a winner in a deathly struggle, to watch the bastard bleed."

"Plot a murder, you're saying. But every plot is a murder in effect. To plot is to die, whether we know it or not."

'To plot is to live," he said.

I looked at him. I studied his face, his hands.

"We start our lives in chaos, in babble. As we surge up into the world, we try to devise a shape, a plan. There is dignity in this. Your whole life is a plot, a scheme, a diagram. It is a failed scheme but that's not the point. To plot is to affirm life, to seek shape and control. Even after death, most particularly after death, the search continues. Burial rites are an attempt to complete the scheme, in ritual. Picture a state funeral, Jack. It is all precision, detail, order, design. The nation holds its breath. The efforts of a huge and powerful government are brought to bear on a ceremony that will shed the last trace of chaos. If all goes well, if they bring it off, some natural law of perfection is obeyed. The nation is delivered from anxiety, the deceased's life is redeemed, life itself is strengthened, reaffirmed."

"Are you sure?" I said.

"To plot, to take aim at something, to shape time and space. This is how we advance the art of human consciousness."

We moved in a wide arc back toward campus. Streets in deep and soundless shade, garbage bags set out for collection. We crossed the sunset overpass, pausing briefly to watch the cars shoot by. Sunlight bouncing off the glass and chrome.

"Are you a killer or a dier, Jack?"

"You know the answer to that. I've been a dier all my life."

"What can you do about it?"

"What can any dier do? Isn't it implicit in his makeup that he can't cross over?"

"Let's think about that. Let's examine the nature of the beast, so to speak. The male animal. Isn't there a fund, a pool, a reservoir of potential violence in the male psyche?"

"In theory I suppose there is."

"We're talking theory. That's exactly what we're talking. Two friends on a tree-shaded street. What else but theory? Isn't there a deep field, a sort of crude oil deposit that one might tap if and when the occasion warrants? A great dark lake of male rage."

'That's what Babette says. Homicidal rage. You sound like her."

"Amazing lady. Is she right or wrong?"

"In theory? She's probably right."

"Isn't there a sludgy region you'd rather not know about? A remnant of some prehistoric period when dinosaurs roamed the earth and men fought with flint tools? When to kill was to live?"

"Babette talks about male biology. Is it biology or geology?"

"Does it matter, Jack? We only want to know whether it is there, buried in the most prudent and unassuming soul."

"I suppose so. It can be. It depends."

"Is it or isn't it there?"

"It's there, Murray. So what?"

"I only want to hear you say it. That's all. I only want to elicit truths you already possess, truths you've always known at some basic level."

"Are you saying a dier can become a killer?"

"I'm only a visiting lecturer. I theorize, I take walks, I admire the trees and houses. I have my students, my rented room, my TV set. I pick out a word here, an image there. I admire the lawns, the porches. What a wonderful thing a porch is. How did I live a life without a porch to sit on, up till now? I speculate, I reflect, I take constant notes. I am here to think, to see. Let me warn you, Jack. I won't let up."

We passed my street and walked up the hill to the campus.

"Who's your doctor?"

"Chakravarty," I said.

"Is he good?"

"How would I know?"

"My shoulder separates. An old sexual injury."

"I'm afraid to see him. I put the printout of my death in the bottom drawer of a dresser."

"I know how you feel. But the tough part is yet to come. You've said good-bye to everyone but yourself. How does a person say good-bye to himself? It's a juicy existential dilemma."

"It certainly is."

We walked past the administration building.

"I hate to be the one who says it, Jack, but there's something that has to be said."

"What?"

"Better you than me."

I nodded gravely. "Why does this have to be said?"

"Because friends have to be brutally honest with each other.

I'd feel terrible if I didn't tell you what I was thinking, especially at a time like this."

"I appreciate it, Murray. I really do."

"Besides, it's part of the universal experience of dying. Whether you think about it consciously or not, you're aware at some level that people are walking around saying to themselves, 'Better him than me.' It's only natural. You can't blame them or wish them ill."

"Everyone but my wife. She wants to die first."

"Don't be so sure," he said.

We shook hands in front of the library. I thanked him for his honesty.

"That's what it all comes down to in the end," he said. "A person spends his life saying good-bye to other people. How does he say good-bye to himself?"

I threw away picture-frame wire, metal book ends, cork coasters, plastic key tags, dusty bottles of Mercurochrome and Vaseline, crusted paintbrushes, caked shoe brushes, clotted correction fluid. I threw away candle stubs, laminated placemats, frayed pot holders. I went after the padded clothes hangers, the magnetic memo clipboards. I was in a vengeful and near savage state. I bore a personal grudge against these things. Somehow they'd put me in this fix. They'd dragged me down, made escape impossible. The two girls followed me around, observing a respectful silence. I threw away my battered khaki canteen, my ridiculous hip boots. I threw away diplomas, certificates, awards and citations. When the girls stopped me, I was working the bathrooms, discarding used bars of soap, damp towels, shampoo bottles with streaked labels and missing caps.

PLEASE NOTE. In several days, your new automated banking card will arrive in the mail. If it is a red card with a silver stripe, your secret code will be the same as it is now. If it is a green card with a gray stripe, you must appear at your branch, with your card, to devise a new secret code. Codes based on birthdays are popular. WARNING. Do not write down your code.

Do not carry your code on your person. REMEMBER. You cannot access your account unless your code is entered properly. Know your code. Reveal your code to no one. Only your code allows you to enter the system.

38

My head was between her breasts, where it seemed to be spending a lot of time lately. She stroked my shoulder.

"Murray says the problem is that we don't repress our fear."

"Repress it?"

"Some people have the gift, some don't."

"The gift? I thought repression was outdated. They've been telling us for years not to repress our fears and desires. Repression causes tension, anxiety, unhappiness, a hundred diseases and conditions. I thought the last thing we were supposed to do was repress something. They've been telling us to talk about our fears, get in touch with our feelings."

"Getting in touch with death is not what they had in mind. Death is so strong that we have to repress, those of us who know how."

"But repression is totally false and mechanical. Everybody knows that. We're not supposed to deny our nature."

"It's natural to deny our nature, according to Murray. It's the whole point of being different from animals."

"But that's crazy."

"It's the only way to survive," I said from her breasts.

She stroked my shoulder, thinking about this. Cray flashes of a staticky man standing near a double bed. His body distorted, rippling, unfinished. I didn't have to imagine his motel companion. Our bodies were one surface, hers and mine, but the delectations of touch were preempted by Mr. Gray. It was his pleasure I experienced, his hold over Babette, his cheap and sleazy power. Down the hall an eager voice said: "If you keep misplacing your ball of string, cage it in a Barney basket, attach some organizer clips to your kitchen corkboard, fasten the basket to the clips. Simple!"

The next day I started carrying the Zumwalt automatic to school. It was in the flap pocket of my jacket when I lectured, it was in the top drawer of my desk when I received visitors in the office. The gun created a second reality for me to inhabit. The air was bright, swirling around my head. Nameless feelings pressed thrillingly on my chest. It was a reality I could control, secretly dominate.

How stupid these people were, coming into my office unarmed.

Late one afternoon I took the gun out of my desk and examined it carefully. Only three bullets remained in the magazine. I wondered how Vernon Dickey had used the missing ammo (or whatever bullets are called by people familiar with firearms). Four Dylar tablets, three Zumwalt bullets. Why was I surprised to find that the bullets were so unmistakably bullet-shaped? I guess I thought new names and shapes had been given to just about everything in the decades since I first became aware of objects and their functions. The weapon was gun-shaped, the little pointed projectiles reassuringly bullet-shaped. They were like childhood things you might come across after forty years, seeing their genius for the first time.

That evening I heard Heinrich in his room, moodily singing "The Streets of Laredo." I stopped in to ask whether Orest had entered the cage yet.

"They said it was not humane. There was no place that would let him do it officially. He had to go underground."

"Where is underground?"

"Watertown. Orest and his trainer. They found a public notary there who said he would certify a document that said that Orest Mercator spent so many days incarcerated with these venomous reptiles blah blah blah."

"Where would they find a large glass cage in Watertown?"

"They wouldn't."

"What would they find?"

"A room in the only hotel. Plus there were only three snakes. And he got bit in four minutes."

"You mean the hotel let them place poisonous snakes in the room?"

"The hotel didn't know. The man who arranged the snakes carried them up in an airline bag. It was a whole massive deception except the man showed up with three snakes instead of the agreed twenty-seven."

"In other words he told them he had access to twenty-seven snakes."

"Venomous. Except they weren't. So Orest got bit for nothing. The jerk."

"Suddenly he's a jerk."

'They had all this antivenom which they couldn't even use. The first four minutes."

"How does he feel?"

"How would you feel if you were a jerk?"

"Glad to be alive," I said.

"Not Orest. He dropped out of sight. He went into complete seclusion. Nobody's seen him since it happened. He doesn't answer the door, he doesn't answer the phone, he doesn't show up at school. The total package."

I decided to wander over to my office and glance at some final exams. Most of the students had already departed, eager to begin the routine hedonism of another bare-limbed summer. The campus was dark and empty. There was a trembling mist. Passing a line of trees, I thought I sensed someone edge in behind me, maybe thirty yards away. When I looked, the path was clear. Was it the gun that was making me jumpy? Does a gun draw violence to it, attract other guns to its surrounding field of force? I walked on quickly toward Centenary Hall. I heard footsteps on gravel, a conspicuous crunch. Someone was out there, on the edge of the parking area, in the trees and the mist. If I had a gun, why was I scared? If I was scared, why didn't I run? I counted off five paces, looked quickly left, saw a figure moving parallel to the path, in and out of deep shadow. I broke into a shambling trot, my gun hand in my pocket, clutching the automatic. When I looked again, he wasn't there. I slowed down warily, crossed a broad lawn, heard running, the meter of bounding feet. He was coming from the right this time, all-out, closing fast. I broke into a weaving run, hoping I'd make an elusive target for someone firing at my back. I'd never run in a weave before. I kept my head down, swerved sharply and unpredictably. It was an interesting way to run. I was surprised at the range of possibilities, the number of combinations I could put together within a framework of left and right swerves. I did a tight left, widened it, cut sharply right, faked left, went left, went wide right. About twenty yards from the end of the open area, I broke off the weave pattern and ran as fast and straight as I could for a red oak. I stuck out my left arm, went skidding around the tree in a headlong cranking countermotion, simultaneously using my right hand to pluck the Zumwalt from my jacket pocket, so that I now faced the person I'd been fleeing, protected by a tree trunk, my gun at the ready.

This was about as deft a thing as I'd ever done. I looked into the heavy mist as my attacker approached in little thudding footfalls. When I saw the familiar odd loping stride, I put the gun back in my pocket. It was Winnie Richards, of course.

"Hi, Jack. At first I didn't know who it was, so I used evasive tactics. When I realized it was you, I said to myself that's just the person I want to see."

"How come?"

"Remember that time you asked me about a secret research group? Working on fear of death? Trying to perfect a medication?"

"Sure-Dylar."

"There was a journal lying around the office yesterday. American Psychobiologist. Curious story in there. Such a group definitely existed. Supported by a multinational giant. Operating in the deepest secrecy in an unmarked building just outside Iron City."

"Why deepest secrecy?"

"It's obvious. To prevent espionage by competitive giants. The point is they came very close to achieving their objective."

"What happened?"

"A lot of things. The resident organizational genius, one of the forces behind the whole project, was a fellow named Willie Mink. He turns out to be a controversial fellow. He does some very, very controversial things."

"I'll bet I know the first thing he does. He runs an ad in a gossip tabloid asking for volunteers for a hazardous experiment. FEAR OF DEATH, it says."

"Very good, Jack. A little ad in some rinky-dink newspaper. He interviews the respondents in a motel room, testing them for emotional integration and about a dozen other things in an attempt to work up a death profile for each person. Interviews in a motel. When the scientists and the lawyers find out about this, they go slightly berserk, they reprimand Mink, they put all their resources into computer testing. Berserk official reaction." "But that's not the end of it."

"How right you are. Despite the fact that Mink is now a carefully observed person, one of the volunteers manages to slip through the screen of watchfulness and begins a program of more or less unsupervised human experimentation, using a drug that is totally unknown, untested and unapproved, with side effects that could beach a whale. Ah unsupervised well-built human."

"Female," I said.

"Very correct. She periodically reports to Mink in the very motel where he originally did his interviewing, sometimes arriving in a taxi, sometimes on foot from the shabby and depressing bus terminal. What is she wearing, Jack?"

"I don't know."

"A ski mask. She is the woman in the ski mask. When the others find out about Mink's latest caper, there is a period of prolonged controversy, animosity, litigation and disgrace. Pharmaceutical giants have their code of ethics, just like you and me. The project manager is kicked out, the project goes on without him."

"Did the article say what happened to him?"

"The reporter tracked him down. He is living in the same motel where all the controversy took place."

"Where is the motel?"

"In Germantown."

"Where's that?" I said.

"Iron City. It's the old German section. Behind the foundry."

"I didn't know there was a section in Iron City called Germantown."

'The Germans are gone, of course."

I went straight home. Denise was making check marks in a paperback book called Directory of Toll-Free Numbers. I found Babette sitting by Wilder's bed, reading him a story.

"I don't mind running clothes as such," I said. "A sweatsuit is a practical thing to wear at times. But I wish you wouldn't wear it when you read bedtime stories to Wilder or braid Steffie's hair. There's something touching about such moments that is jeopardized by running clothes."

"Maybe I'm wearing running clothes for a reason." "Like what?"

"I'm going running," she said. "Is that a good idea? At night?"

"What is night? It happens seven times a week. Where is the uniqueness in this?" "It's dark, it's wet."

"Do we live in a blinding desert glare? What is wet? We live with wet."

"Babette doesn't speak like this."

"Does life have to stop because our half of the earth is dark? Is there something about the night that physically resists a runner? I need to pant and gasp. What is dark? It's just another name for light."

"No one will convince me that the person I know as Babette actually wants to run up the stadium steps at ten o'clock at night."

"It's not what I want, it's what I need. My life is no longer in the realm of want. I do what I have to do. I pant, I gasp. Every runner understands the need for this."

"Why do you have to run up steps? You're not a professional athlete trying to rebuild a shattered knee. Run on plain land. Don't make a major involvement out of it. Everything is a major involvement today."

"It's my life. I tend to be involved." "It's not your life. It's only exercise."

"A runner needs," she said.

"I also need and tonight I need the car. Don't wait up for me. Who knows when I'll be back."

I waited for her to ask what mysterious mission would require me to get in the car and drive through the rain-streaked night, time of return unknown.

She said, "I can't walk to the stadium, run up the steps five or six times and then walk all the way back home. You can drive me there, wait for me, drive me back. The car is then yours."

"I don't want it. What do you think of that? You want the car. you take it. The streets are slippery. You know what that means, don't you?"

"What does it mean?"

"Fasten your seat belt. There's also a chill in the air. You know what a chill in the air means."

"What does it mean?"

"Wear your ski mask," I told her.

The thermostat began to buzz.

I put on a jacket and went outside. Ever since the airborne toxic event, our neighbors, the Stovers, had been keeping their car in the driveway instead of the garage, keeping it facing the street, keeping the key in the ignition. I walked up the driveway and got in the car. There were trash caddies fixed to the dashboard and seat-backs, dangling plastic bags full of gum wrappers, ticket stubs, lipstick-smeared tissues, crumpled soda cans, crumpled circulars and receipts, ashtray debris, popsicle sticks and french fries, crumpled coupons and paper napkins, pocket combs with missing teeth. Thus familiarized, I started up the engine, turned on the lights and drove off.

I ran a red light when I crossed Middlebrook. Reaching the end of the expressway ramp, I did not yield. All the way to Iron City, I felt a sense of dreaminess, release, unreality. I slowed down at the toll gate but did not bother tossing a quarter into the basket. An alarm went off but no one pursued. What's another quarter to a state that is billions in debt? What's twenty-five cents when we are talking about a nine-thousand-dollar stolen car? This must be how people escape the pull of the earth, the gravitational leaf-flutter that brings us hourly closer to dying. Simply stop obeying. Steal instead of buy, shoot instead of talk. I ran two more lights on the rainy approach roads to Iron City. The outlying buildings were long and low, fish and produce markets, meat terminals with old wooden canopies. I entered the city and turned on the radio, needing company not on the lonely highway but here on the cobbled streets, in the sodium vapor lights, where the emptiness clings. Every city has its districts. I drove past the abandoned car district, the uncollected garbage district, the sniper-fire district, the districts of smoldering sofas and broken glass. Ground glass crunched under the tires. I headed toward the foundry.

Random Access Memory, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, Mutual Assured Destruction.

I still felt extraordinarily light-lighter than air, colorless, odorless, invisible. But around the lightness and dreaminess, something else was building, an emotion of a different order. A surge, a will, an agitation of the passions. I reached into my pocket, rubbed my knuckles across the grainy stainless steel of the Zumwalt barrel. The man on the radio said: "Void where prohibited."

39

I drove twice around the foundry, looking for signs of some erstwhile German presence. I drove past the row houses. They were set on a steep hill, narrow-fronted frame houses, a climbing line of pitched roofs. I drove past the bus terminal, through the beating rain. It took a while to find the motel, a one-story building set against the concrete pier of an elevated roadway. It was called the Roadway Motel.

Transient pleasures, drastic measures.

The area was deserted, a spray-painted district of warehouses and light industry. The motel had nine or ten rooms, all dark, no cars out front. I drove past three times, studying the scene, and parked half a block away, in the rubble under the roadway. Then I walked back to the motel. Those were the first three elements in my plan.

Here is my plan. Drive past the scene several times, park some distance from the scene, go back on foot, locate Mr. Gray under his real name or an alias, shoot him three times in the viscera for maximum pain, clear the weapon of prints, place the weapon in the victim's staticky hand, find a crayon or lipstick tube and scrawl a cryptic suicide note on the full-length mirror, take the victim's supply of Dylar tablets, slip back to the car, proceed to the expressway entrance, head east toward Blacksmith, get off at the old river road, park Stover's car in Old Man Treadwell's garage, shut the garage door, walk home in the rain and the fog.

Elegant. My airy mood returned. I was advancing in consciousness. I watched myself take each separate step. With each separate step, I became aware of processes, components, things relating to other things. Water fell to earth in drops. I saw things new.

There was an aluminum awning over the office door. On the door itself were little plastic letters arranged in slots to spell out a message. The message was: NU MISH BOOT ZUP KO.

Gibberish but high-quality gibberish. I made my way along the wall, looking through the windows. My plan was this. Stand at the edges of windows with my back to the wall, swivel my head to look peripherally into rooms. Some windows were bare, some had blinds or dusty shades. I could make out the rough outlines of chairs or beds in the dark rooms. Trucks rumbled overhead. In the next to last unit, there was the scantest flicker of light. I stood at the edge of the window, listening. I swiveled my head, looked into the room out of the corner of my right eye. A figure sat in a low armchair looking up at the flickering light. I sensed I was part of a network of structures and channels. I knew the precise nature of events. I was moving closer to things in their actual state as I approached a violence, a smashing intensity. Water fell in drops, surfaces gleamed.

It occurred to me that I did not have to knock. The door would be open. I gripped the knob, eased the door open, slipped into the room. Stealth. It was easy. Everything would be easy. I stood inside the room, sensing things, noting the room tone, the dense air. Information rushed toward me, rushed slowly, incrementally. The figure was male, of course, and sat sprawled in the short-legged chair. He wore a Hawaiian shirt and Budweiser shorts. Plastic sandals dangled from his feet. The dumpy chair, the rumpled bed, the industrial carpet, the shabby dresser, the sad green walls and ceiling cracks. The TV floating in the air, in a metal brace, pointing down at him.

He spoke first, without taking his eyes from the flickering screen.

"Are you heartsick or soulsick?"

I stood against the door.

"You're Mink," I said.

In time he looked at me, looked at the large friendly figure with the slumped shoulders and forgettable face.

"What kind of name is Willie Mink?" I said.

"It's a first name and a last name. Same as anybody."

Did he speak with an accent? His face was odd, concave, forehead and chin jutting. He was watching TV without the sound.

"Some of these sure-footed bighorns have been equipped with radio transmitters," he said.

I could feel the pressure and density of things. So much was happening. I sensed molecules active in my brain, moving along neural pathways.

"You're here for some Dylar, of course."

"Of course. What else?"

"What else? Rid the fear."

"Rid the fear. Clear the grid."

"Clear the grid. That's why they come to me."

This was my plan. Enter unannounced, gain his confidence, wait for an unguarded moment, take out the Zumwalt, shoot him three times in the viscera for maximum slowness of agony, put the gun in his hand to suggest a lonely man's suicide, write semi-coherent things on the mirror, leave Stover's car in Treadwell's garage.

"By coming in here, you agree to a certain behavior," Mink said.

"What behavior?"

"Room behavior. The point of rooms is that they're inside. No one should go into a room unless he understands this. People behave one way in rooms, another way in streets, parks and airports. To enter a room is to agree to a certain kind of behavior. It follows that this would be the kind of behavior that takes place in rooms. This is the standard, as opposed to parking lots and beaches. It is the point of rooms. No one should enter a room not knowing the point. There is an unwritten agreement between the person who enters a room and the person whose room had been entered, as opposed to open-air theaters, outdoor pools. The purpose of a room derives from the special nature of a room. A room is inside. This is what people in rooms have to agree on, as differentiated from lawns, meadows, fields, orchards."

I agreed completely. It made perfect sense. What was I here for if not to define, fix in my sights, take aim at? I heard a noise, faint, monotonous, white.

"To begin your project sweater," he said, "first ask yourself what type sleeve will meet your needs."

His nose was flat, his skin the color of a Planter's peanut. What is the geography of a spoon-shaped face? Was he Melanesian, Polynesian, Indonesian, Nepalese, Surinamese, Dutch-Chinese? Was he a composite? How many people came here for Dylar? Where was Surinam? How was my plan progressing?

I studied the palm-studded print of his loose shirt, the Budweiser pattern repeated on the surface of his Bermuda shorts. The shorts were too big. The eyes were half closed. The hair was long and spiky-. He was sprawled in the attitude of a stranded air traveler, someone long since defeated by the stale waiting, the airport babble. I began to feel sorry for Babette. This had been her last hope for refuge and serenity, this weary pulse of a man, a common pusher now, spiky-haired, going mad in a dead motel.

Auditory scraps, tatters, whirling specks. A heightened reality. A denseness that was also a transparency. Surfaces gleamed. Water struck the roof in spherical masses, globules, splashing drams. Close to a violence, close to a death.

"The pet under stress may need a prescription diet," he said.

Of course he hadn't always been like this. He'd been a project manager, dynamic, hard-driving. Even now I could see in his face and eyes the faltering remains of an enterprising shrewdness and intelligence. He reached into his pocket, took a handful of white tablets, tossed them in the direction of his mouth. Some entered, some flew past. The saucer-shaped pills. The end of fear.

"Where are you from originally, if I can call you Willie?"

He lapsed into thought, trying to recall. I wanted to put him at ease, get him to talk about himself, about Dylar. Part and parcel of my plan. My plan was this. Swivel my head to look into rooms, put him at his ease, wait for an unguarded moment, blast him in the gut three times for maximum efficiency of pain, take his Dylar, get off at the river road, shut the garage door, walk home in the rain and the fog.

"I wasn't always as you see me now."

"That's exactly what I was thinking."

"I was doing important work. I envied myself. I was literally embarked. Death without fear is an everyday thing. You can live with it. I learned English watching American TV. I had American sex the first time in Port-O-San, Texas. Everything they said was true. I wish I could remember."

"You're saying there is no death as we know it without the element of fear. People would adjust to it, accept its inevitability."

"Dylar failed, reluctantly. But it will definitely come. Maybe now, maybe never. The heat from your hand will actually make the gold-leafing stick to the wax paper."

"There will eventually be an effective medication, you're saying. A remedy for fear."

"Followed by a greater death. More effective, productwise. This is what the scientists don't understand, scrubbing their smocks with Woolite. Not that I have anything personal against death from our vantage point high atop Metropolitan County Stadium."

"Are you saying death adapts? It eludes our attempts to reason with it?"

This was similar to something Murray had once said. Murray had also said, "Imagine the visceral jolt, watching your opponent bleed in the dust. He dies, you live."

Close to a death, close to the slam of metal projectiles on flesh, the visceral jolt. I watched Mink ingest more pills, throwing them at his face, sucking them like sweets, his eyes on the flickering screen. Waves, rays, coherent beams. I saw things new.

"Just between you and I," he said, "I eat this stuff like candy."

"I was just thinking that."

"How much do you want to buy?"

"How much do I need?"

"I see you as a heavyset white man about fifty. Does this describe your anguish? I see you as a person in a gray jacket and light brown pants. Tell me how correct I am. To convert Fahrenheit to Celsius, this is what you do."

There was a silence. Things began to glow. The dumpy chair, the shabby dresser, the rumpled bed. The bed was equipped with casters. I thought, This is the grayish figure of my torment, the man who took my wife. Did she wheel him around the room as he sat on the bed popping pills? Did each lie prone along one side of the bed, reaching an arm down to paddle? Did they make the bed spin with their lovemaking, a froth of pillows and sheets above the small wheels on swivels? Look at him now, glowing in the dark, showing a senile grin.

"I barely forget the times I had in this room," he said, "before I became misplaced. There was a woman in a ski mask, which her name escapes me at the moment. American sex, let me tell you, this is how I learned my English."

The air was rich with extrasensory material. Nearer to death, nearer to second sight. A smashing intensity. I advanced two steps toward the middle of the room. My plan was elegant. Advance gradually, gain his confidence, take out the Zumwalt, fire three bullets at his midsection for maximum visceral agony, clear the weapon of prints, write suicidal cult messages on the mirrors and walls, take his supply of Dylar, slip back to the car, drive to the expressway entrance, head east toward Blacksmith, leave Stover's car in Treadwell's garage, walk home in the rain and the fog.

He gobbled more pills, flung others down the front of his Budweiser shorts. I advanced one step. There were cracked Dylar tablets all over the fire-retardant carpet. Trod upon, stomped. He tossed some tablets at the screen. The set had a walnut veneer with silvery hardware. The picture rolled badly.

"Now I am picking up my metallic gold tube," he said. "Using my palette knife and my odorless turp, I will thicken the paint on my palette."

I recalled Babette's remarks about the side effects of the medication. I said, as a test, "Falling plane."

He looked at me, gripping the arms of the chair, the first signs of panic building in his eyes.

"Plunging aircraft," I said, pronouncing the words crisply, authoritatively.

He kicked off his sandals, folded himself over into the recommended crash position, head well forward, hands clasped behind his knees. He performed the maneuver automatically, with a double-jointed collapsible dexterity, throwing himself into it, like a child or a mime. Interesting. The drug not only caused the user to confuse words with the things they referred to; it made him act in a somewhat stylized way. I watched him slumped there, trembling. This was my plan. Look peripherally into rooms, enter unannounced, reduce him to trembling, gut-shoot him maximally three times, get off at the river road, shut the garage door.

I took another step toward the middle of the room. As the TV picture jumped, wobbled, caught itself in snarls, Mink appeared to grow more vivid. The precise nature of events. Things in their actual state. Eventually he worked himself out of the deep fold, rising nicely, sharply outlined against the busy air. White noise everywhere.

"Containing iron, niacin and riboflavin. I learned my English in airplanes. It's the international language of aviation. Why are you here, white man?" "To buy."

"You are very white, you know that?" "It's because I'm dying." "This stuff fix you up." "I'll still die."

"But it won't matter, which comes to the same thing. Some of these playful dolphins have been equipped with radio transmitters. Their far-flung wanderings may tell us things."

I continued to advance in consciousness. Things glowed, a secret life rising out of them. Water struck the roof in elongated orbs, splashing drams. I knew for the first time what rain really was. I knew what wet was. I understood the neurochemistry of my brain, the meaning of dreams (the waste material of premonitions). Great stuff everywhere, racing through the room, racing slowly. A richness, a density. I believed everything. I was a Buddhist, a Jain, a Duck River Baptist. My only sadness was Babette, having to kiss a scooped-out face.

"She wore the ski mask so as not to kiss my face, which she said was un-American. I told her a room is inside. Do not enter a room not agreeing to this. This is the point, as opposed to emerging coastlines, continental plates. Or you can eat natural grains, vegetables, eggs, no fish, no fruit. Or fruit, vegetables, animal proteins, no grains, no milk. Or lots of soybean milk for B-12 and lots of vegetables to regulate insulin release but no meat, no fish, no fruit. Or white meat but no red meat. Or B-12 but no eggs. Or eggs but no grains. There are endless workable combinations."

I was ready to kill him now. But I didn't want to compromise the plan. The plan was elaborate. Drive past the scene several times, approach the motel on foot, swivel my head to look peripherally into rooms, locate Mr. Gray under his real name, enter unannounced, gain his confidence, advance gradually, reduce him to trembling, wait for an unguarded moment, take out the.25-caliber Zumwalt automatic, fire three bullets into his viscera for maximum slowness, depth and intensity of pain, wipe the weapon clear of prints, place the weapon in the victim's hand to suggest the trite and predictable suicide of a motel recluse, smear crude words on the walls in the victim's own blood as evidence of his final cult-related frenzy, take his supply of Dylar, slip back to the car, take the expressway to Blacksmith, leave Stover's car in Treadwell's garage, shut the garage door, walk home in the rain and the fog.

I advanced into the area of flickering light, out of the shadows, seeking to loom. I put my hand in my pocket, gripped the firearm. Mink watched the screen. I said to him gently, "Hail of bullets." Keeping my hand in my pocket.

He hit the floor, began crawling toward the bathroom, looking back over his shoulder, childlike, miming, using principles of heightened design but showing real terror, brilliant cringing fear. I followed him into the toilet, passing the full-length mirror where he'd undoubtedly posed with Babette, his shaggy member dangling like a ruminant's.

"Fusillade," I whispered.

He tried to wriggle behind the bowl, both arms over his head, his legs tight together. I loomed in the doorway, conscious of looming, seeing myself from Mink's viewpoint, magnified, threatening. It was time to tell him who I was. This was part of my plan. My plan was this. Tell him who I am, let him know the reason for his slow and agonizing death. I revealed my name, explained my relationship with the woman in the ski mask.

He put his hands over his crotch, tried to fit himself under the toilet tank, behind the bowl. The intensity of the noise in the room was the same at all frequencies. Sound all around. I took out the Zumwalt. Great and nameless emotions thudded on my chest. I knew who 1 was in the network of meanings. Water fell to earth in drops, causing surfaces to gleam. I saw things new.

Mink took one hand from his crotch, grabbed more tablets from his pocket, hurled them toward his open mouth. His face appeared at the end of the white room, a white buzz, the inner surface of a sphere. He sat up, tearing open his shirt pocket to find more pills. His fear was beautiful. He said to me, "Did you ever wonder why, out of thirty-two teeth, these four cause so much trouble? I'll be back with the answer in a minute."

I fired the gun, the weapon, the pistol, the firearm, the automatic. The sound snowballed in the white room, adding on reflected waves. I watched blood squirt from the victim's midsection. A delicate arc. I marveled at the rich color, sensed the color-causing action of nonnucleated cells. The flow diminished to a trickle, spread across the tile floor. I saw beyond words. I knew what red was, saw it in terms of dominant wavelength, luminance, purity. Mink's pain was beautiful, intense.

I fired a second shot just to fire it, relive the experience, hear the sonic waves layering through the room, feel the jolt travel up my arm. The bullet struck him just inside the right hipbone. A claret stain appeared on his shorts and shirt. I paused to notice him. He sat wedged between the toilet bowl and wall, one sandal missing, eyes totally white. I tried to see myself from Mink's viewpoint. Looming, dominant, gaining life-power, storing up life-credit. But he was too far gone to have a viewpoint.

It was going well. I was pleased to see how well it was going. The trucks rumbled overhead. The shower curtain smelled of mildewed vinyl. A richness, a smashing intensity. I approached the sitting figure, careful not to step in blood, leave revealing prints. I took out my handkerchief, wiped the weapon clean, placed it in Mink's hand, cautiously removing the handkerchief, painstakingly wrapping his bony fingers, one by one, around the stock, delicately working his index finger through the trigger guard. He was foaming, a little, at the mouth. I stepped back to survey the remains of the shattering moment, the scene of squalid violence and lonely death at the shadowy fringes of society. This was my plan. Step back, regard the squalor, make sure things were correctly placed.

Mink's eyes dropped out of his skull. They gleamed, briefly. He raised his hand and pulled the trigger, shooting me in the wrist.

The world collapsed inward, all those vivid textures and connections buried in mounds of ordinary stuff. I was disappointed. Hurt, stunned and disappointed. What had happened to the higher plane of energy in which I'd carried out my scheme? The pain was searing. Blood covered my forearm, wrist and hand. I staggered back, moaning, watching blood drip from the tips of my fingers. I was. troubled and confused. Colored dots appeared at the edge of my field of vision. Familiar little dancing specks. The extra dimensions, the super perceptions, were reduced to visual clutter, a whirling miscellany, meaningless.

"And this could represent the leading edge of some warmer air," Mink said.

I looked at him. Alive. His lap a puddle of blood. With the restoration of the normal order of matter and sensation, I felt I was seeing him for the first time as a person. The old human muddles and quirks were set flowing again. Compassion, remorse, mercy. But before I could help Mink, I had to do some basic repair work on myself. Once again I took out my handkerchief, managed with my right hand and my teeth to tie it firmly just above the bullet hole in my left wrist, or between the wound and the heart. Then I sucked at the wound briefly, not knowing quite why, and spat out the resulting blood and pulp. The bullet had made a shallow penetration and deflected away. Using my good hand, I grabbed Mink by his bare foot and dragged him across the blood-dappled tile, the gun still clutched in his fist. There was something redemptive here. Dragging him foot-first across the tile, across the medicated carpet, through the door and into the night. Something large and grand and scenic. Is it better to commit evil and attempt to balance it with an exalted act than to live a resolutely neutral life? I know I felt virtuous, I felt blood-stained and stately, dragging the badly wounded man through the dark and empty street.

The rain had stopped. I was shocked at the amount of blood we were leaving behind. His, mainly. The sidewalk was striped. An interesting cultural deposit. He reached up feebly, dropped more Dylar down his throat. The gun hand dragged.

We reached the car. Mink kicked free, involuntarily, his body flopping and spinning, a little fishlike. He made spent and gasping noises, short of oxygen. I decided to attempt mouth-to-mouth. I leaned over him, used my thumb and index finger to clothes-pin his nose and then tried to work my face down into his. The awkwardness and grim intimacy of the act made it seem all the more dignified under the circumstances. All the larger, more generous. I kept trying to reach his mouth in order to breathe powerful gusts of air into his lungs. My lips were gathered, ready to funnel. His eyes followed me down. Perhaps he thought he was about to be kissed. I savored the irony.

His mouth was awash in regurgitated Dylar foam, half chewed tablets, flyspeck shards of polymer. I felt large and selfless, above resentment. This was the key to selflessness, or so it seemed to me as I knelt over the wounded man, exhaling rhythmically in the littered street beneath the roadway. Get past disgust. Forgive the foul body. Embrace it whole. After some minutes of this, I felt him come around, take regular breaths. I continued to hover just above him, our mouths almost touching.

"Who shot me?" he said.

"You did."

"Who shot you?"

"You did. The gun is in your hand."

"What was the point I was trying to make?"

"You were out of control. You weren't responsible. I forgive you."

"Who are you, literally?"

"A passerby. A friend. It doesn't matter."

"Some millipedes have eyes, some do not."

With much effort, many false starts, I got him into the back of the car, where he stretched out moaning. It was no longer possible to tell whether the blood on my hands and clothes was his or mine. My humanity soared. I started up the car. The pain in my arm was a throb, less fiery now. I drove one-handed through the empty streets, looking for a hospital. Iron City Lying-in. Mother of Mercy. Commiseration and Rapport. I would take whatever they had, even an emergency ward in the worst part of town. This is where we belonged, after all, with the multiple slash wounds, the entry and exit wounds, the blunt instrument wounds, the traumas, overdoses, acute deliriums. The only traffic was a milk van, a bakery van, some heavy trucks. The sky began to lighten. We came to a place with a neon cross over the entrance. It was a three-story building that might have been a Pentecostal church, a day-care center, world headquarters for some movement of regimented youth.

There was a wheelchair ramp, which meant I could drag Mink to the front door without banging his head on the concrete steps. I got him out of the car, clutched his sleek foot and moved up the ramp. He held one hand at his midsection to stanch the flow. The gun hand dragged behind. Dawn. There was a spaciousness to this moment, an epic pity and compassion. Having shot him, having led him to believe he'd shot himself, I felt I did honor to both of us, to all of us, by merging our fortunes, physically leading him to safety. I took long slow strides, pulling his weight. It hadn't occurred to me that a man's attempts to redeem himself might prolong the elation he felt when he committed the crime he now sought to make up for.

I rang the bell. In a matter of seconds, someone appeared at the door. An old woman, a nun, black-habited, black-veiled, leaning on a cane.

"We're shot," I said, lifting my wrist in the air.

"We see a lot of that here," she answered matter-of-factly, in an accented voice, turning to go back inside.

I dragged Mink across the entranceway. The place appeared to be a clinic. There were waiting rooms, screened cubicles, doors marked X-Ray, Eye Test. We followed the old nun to the trauma room. Two orderlies showed up, great squat men with sumo physiques. They lifted Mink onto a table and tore away his clothes in neat short practiced strokes.

"Inflated-adjusted real income," he said.

More nuns arrived, rustling, ancient, speaking German to each other. They carried transfusion equipment, wheeled in trays of glinting implements. The original nun approached Mink to remove the gun from his hand. I watched her toss it in a desk drawer that held about ten other handguns and half a dozen knives. There was a picture on the wall of Jack Kennedy holding hands with Pope John XXIII in heaven. Heaven was a partly cloudy place.

The doctor arrived, an elderly man in a shabby three-piece suit. He spoke German to the nuns and studied Mink's body, which was now partly clad in sheets.

"No one knows why the sea birds come to San Miguel," Willie said.

I was growing fond of him. The original nun took me into a cubicle to work on my wound. I started to give her a version of the shootings but she showed no interest. I told her it was an old gun with feeble bullets.

"Such a violent country."

"Have you been in Germantown long?" I said.

"We are the last of the Germans."

"Who lives here now, mostly?"

"Mostly no one," she said.

More nuns walked by, heavy rosaries swinging from their belts. I found them a merry sight, the kind of homogeneous presence that makes people smile at airports.

I asked my nun her name. Sister Hermann Marie. I told her I knew some German, trying to gain her favor, as I always did with medical personnel of any kind, at least in the early stages, before my fear and distrust overwhelmed any hope I might have had in maneuvering for advantage.

"Gut, besser, best," I said.

A smile appeared on her seamed face. I counted for her, pointed to objects and gave their names. She nodded happily, cleaning out the wound and wrapping the wrist in sterile pads. She said I would not need a splint and told me the doctor would write a prescription for antibiotics. We counted to ten together.

Two more nuns appeared, wizened and creaky. My nun said something to them and soon all four of us were charmingly engaged in a childlike dialogue. We did colors, items of clothing, parts of the body. I felt much more at ease in this German-speaking company than I had with the Hitler scholars. Is there something so innocent in the recitation of names that Cod is pleased?

Sister Hermann Marie applied finishing touches to the bullet wound. From my chair I had a clear view of the picture of Kennedy and the Pope in heaven. I had a sneaking admiration for the picture. It made me feel good, sentimentally refreshed. The President still vigorous after death. The Pope's homeliness a kind of radiance. Why shouldn't it be true? Why shouldn't they meet somewhere, advanced in time, against a layer of fluffy cumulus, to clasp hands? Why shouldn't we all meet, as in some epic of protean gods and ordinary people, aloft, well-formed, shining?

I said to my nun, "What does the Church say about heaven today? Is it still the old heaven, like that, in the sky?"

She turned to glance at the picture.

"Do you think we are stupid?" she said.

I was surprised by the force of her reply.

'Then what is heaven, according to the Church, if it isn't the abode of God and the angels and the souls of those who are saved?"

"Saved? What is saved? This is a dumb head, who would come in here to talk about angels. Show me an angel. Please. I want to see."

"But you're a nun. Nuns believe these things. When we see a nun, it cheers us up, it's cute and amusing, being reminded that someone still believes in angels, in saints, all the traditional things."

"You would have a head so dumb to believe this?"

"It's not what I believe that counts. It's what you believe."

"This is true," she said. "The nonbelievers need the believers. They are desperate to have someone believe. But show me a saint. Give me one hair from the body of a saint."

She leaned toward me, her stark face framed in the black veil. I began to worry.

"We are here to take care of sick and injured. Only this. You would talk about heaven, you must find another place."

"Other nuns wear dresses," I said reasonably. "Here you still wear the old uniform. The habit, the veil, the clunky shoes. You must believe in tradition. The old heaven and hell, the Latin mass. The Pope is infallible, God created the world in six days. The great old beliefs. Hell is burning lakes, winged demons."

"You would come in bleeding from the street and tell me six days it took to make a universe?"

"On the seventh He rested."

"You would talk of angels? Here?"

"Of course here. Where else?"

I was frustrated and puzzled, close to shouting.

"Why not armies that would fight in the sky at the end of the world?"

"Why not? Why are you a nun anyway? Why do you have that picture on the wall?"

She drew back, her eyes filled with contemptuous pleasure.

"It is for others. Not for us."

"But that's ridiculous. What others?"

"All the others. The others who spend their lives believing that we still believe. It is our task in the world to believe things no one else takes seriously. To abandon such beliefs completely, the human race would die. This is why we are here. A tiny minority. To embody old things, old beliefs. The devil, the angels, heaven, hell. If we did not pretend to believe these things, the world would collapse."

"Pretend?"

"Of course pretend. Do you think we are stupid? Get out from here."

"You don't believe in heaven? A nun?"

"If you don't, why should I?"

"If you did, maybe I would."

"If I did, you would not have to."

"All the old muddles and quirks," I said. "Faith, religion, life everlasting. The great old human gullibilities. Are you saying you don't take them seriously? Your dedication is a pretense?"

"Our pretense is a dedication. Someone must appear to believe. Our lives are no less serious than if we professed real faith, real belief. As belief shrinks from the world, people find it more necessary than ever that someone believe. Wild-eyed men in caves. Nuns in black. Monks who do not speak. We are left to believe. Fools, children. Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us. They are sure that they are right not to believe but they know belief must not fade completely. Hell is when no one believes. There must always be believers. Fools, idiots, those who hear voices, those who speak in tongues. We are your lunatics. We surrender our lives to make your nonbelief possible. You are sure that you are right but you don't want everyone to think as you do. There is no truth without fools. We are your fools, your madwomen, rising at dawn to pray, lighting candles, asking statues for good health, long life."

"You've had long life. Maybe it works."

She rattled out a laugh, showing teeth so old they were nearly transparent.

"Soon no more. You will lose your believers."

"You've been praying for nothing all these years?"

"For the world, dumb head."

"And nothing survives? Death is the end?"

"Do you want to know what I believe or what I pretend to believe?"

"I don't want to hear this. This is terrible."

"But true."

"You're a nun. Act like one."

"We take vows. Poverty, chastity, obedience. Serious vows. A serious life. You could not survive without us."

"There must be some of you who aren't pretending, who truly believe. I know there are. Centuries of belief don't just peter out in a few years. There were whole fields of study devoted to these subjects. Angelology. A branch of theology just for angels. A science of angels. Great minds debated these things. There are great minds today. They still debate, they still believe."

"You would come in from the street dragging a body by the foot and talk about angels who live in the sky. Get out from here."

She said something in German. I failed to understand. She spoke again, at some length, pressing her face toward mine, the words growing harsher, wetter, more guttural. Her eyes showed a terrible delight in my incomprehension. She was spraying me with German. A storm of words. She grew more animated as the speech went on. A gleeful vehemence entered her voice. She spoke faster, more expressively. Blood vessels flared in her eyes and face. I began to detect a cadence, a measured beat. She was reciting something, I decided. Litanies, hymns, catechisms. The mysteries of the rosary perhaps. Taunting me with scornful prayer.

The odd thing is I found it beautiful.

When her voice grew weak, I left the cubicle and wandered around until I found the old doctor. "Herr Doktor," I called, feeling like someone in a movie. He activated his hearing aid. I got my prescription, asked if Willie Mink would be all right. He wouldn't, at least not for a while. But he wouldn't die either, which gave him the edge on me.

The drive home was uneventful. I left the car in Stover's driveway. The rear seat was covered with blood. There was blood on the steering wheel, more blood on the dashboard and door handles. The scientific study of the cultural behavior and development of man. Anthropology.

I went upstairs and watched the kids a while. All asleep, fumbling through their dreams, eyes rapidly moving beneath closed lids. I got into bed next to Babette, fully dressed except for my shoes, somehow knowing she wouldn't think it strange. But my mind kept racing, I couldn't sleep. After a while I went down to the kitchen to sit with a cup of coffee, feel the pain in my wrist, the heightened pulse.

There was nothing to do but wait for the next sunset, when the sky would ring like bronze.

40

This was the day Wilder got on his plastic tricycle, rode it around the block, turned right onto a dead end street and pedaled noisily to the dead end. He walked the tricycle around the guard rail and then rode along a paved walkway that went winding past some overgrown lots to a set of twenty concrete steps. The plastic wheels rumbled and screeched. Here our reconstruction yields to the awe-struck account of two elderly women watching from the second-story back porch of a tall house in the trees. He walked the tricycle down the steps, guiding it with a duteous and unsentimental hand, letting it bump right along, as if it were an odd-shaped little sibling, not necessarily cherished. He remounted, rode across the street, rode across the sidewalk, proceeded onto the grassy slope that bordered the expressway. Here the women began to call. Hey, hey, they said, a little tentative at first, not ready to accept the implications of the process unfolding before them. The boy pedaled diagonally down the slope, shrewdly reducing the angle of descent, then paused on the bottom to aim his three-wheeler at the point on the opposite side which seemed to represent the shortest distance across. Hey, sonny, no. Waving their arms, looking frantically for some able-bodied pedestrian to appear on the scene. Wilder, meanwhile, ignoring their cries or not hearing them in the serial whoosh of dashing hatchbacks and vans, began to pedal across the highway, mystically charged. The women could only look, empty-mouthed, each with an arm in the air, a plea for the scene to reverse, the boy to pedal backwards on his faded blue and yellow toy like a cartoon figure on morning TV. The drivers could not quite comprehend. In their knotted posture, belted in, they knew this picture did not belong to the hurtling consciousness of the highway, the broad-ribboned modernist stream. In speed there was sense. In signs, in patterns, in split-second lives. What did it mean, this little rotary blur? Some force in the world had gone awry. They veered, braked, sounded their horns down the long afternoon, an animal lament. The child would not even look at them, pedaled straight for the median strip, a narrow patch of pale grass. He was pumped up, chesty, his arms appearing to move as rapidly as his legs, the round head wagging in a jig of lame-brained determination. He had to slow down to get onto the raised median, rearing up to let the front wheel edge over, extremely deliberate in his movements, following some numbered scheme, and the cars went wailing past, horns blowing belatedly, drivers' eyes searching the rearview mirror. He walked the tricycle across the grass. The women watched him regain a firm placement on the seat. Stay, they called. Do not go. No, no. Like fpreigners reduced to simple phrases. The cars kept coming, whipping into the straightaway, endless streaking traffic. He set off to cross the last three lanes, dropping off the median like a bouncing ball, front wheel, rear wheels. Then the head-wagging race to the other side. Cars dodged, strayed, climbed the curbstone, astonished heads appearing in the side windows. The furiously pedaling boy could not know how slow he seemed to be moving from the vantage point of the women on the porch. The women were silent by now, outside the event, suddenly tired. How slow he moved, how mistaken he was in thinking he was breezing right along. It made them tired. The horns kept blowing, sound waves mixing in the air, flattening, calling back from vanished cars, scolding. He reached the other side, briefly rode parallel to the traffic, seemed to lose his balance, fall away, going down the embankment in a multicolored tumble. When he reappeared a second later, he was sitting in a water furrow, part of the intermittent creek that accompanies the highway. Stunned, he made the decision to cry. It took him a moment, mud and water everywhere, the tricycle on its side. The women began to call once more, each raising an arm to revoke the action. Boy in the water, they said. Look, help, drown. And he seemed, on his seat in the creek, profoundly howling, to have heard them for the first time, looking up over the earthen mound and into the trees across the expressway. This frightened them all the more. They called and waved, were approaching the early phases of uncontrollable terror when a passing motorist, as such people are called, alertly pulled over, got out of the car, skidded down the embankment and lifted the boy from the murky shallows, holding him aloft for the clamoring elders to see.

We go to the overpass all the time. Babette, Wilder and I. We take a thermos of iced tea, park the car, watch the setting sun. Clouds are no deterrent. Clouds intensify the drama, trap and shape the light. Heavy overcasts have little effect. Light bursts through, tracers and smoky arcs. Overcasts enhance the mood. We find little to say to each other. More cars arrive, parking in a line that extends down to the residential zone. People walk up the incline and onto the overpass, carrying fruit and nuts, cool drinks, mainly the middle-aged, the elderly, some with webbed beach chairs which they set out on the sidewalk, but younger couples also, arm in arm at the rail, looking west. The sky takes on content, feeling, an exalted narrative life. The bands of color reach so high, seem at times to separate into their constituent parts. There are turreted skies, light storms, softly falling streamers. It is hard to know how we should feel about this. Some people are scared by the sunsets, some determined to be elated, but most of us don't know how to feel, are ready to go either way. Rain is no deterrent. Rain brings on graded displays, wonderful running hues. More cars arrive, people come trudging up the incline. The spirit of these warm evenings is hard to describe. There is anticipation in the air but it is not the expectant midsummer hum of a shirtsleeve crowd, a sandlot game, with coherent precedents, a history of secure response. This waiting is introverted, uneven, almost backward and shy, tending toward silence. What else do we feel? Certainly there is awe, it is all awe, it transcends previous categories of awe, but we don't know whether we are watching in wonder or dread, we don't know what we are watching or what it means, we don't know whether it is permanent, a level of experience to which we will gradually adjust, into which our uncertainty will eventually be absorbed, or just some atmospheric weirdness, soon to pass. The collapsible chairs are yanked open, the old people sit. What is there to say? The sunsets linger and so do we. The sky is under a spell, powerful and storied. Now and then a car actually crosses the overpass, moving slowly, deferentially. People keep coming up the incline, some in wheelchairs, twisted by disease, those who attend them bending low to push against the grade. I didn't know how many handicapped and helpless people there were in town until the warm nights brought crowds to the overpass. Cars speed beneath us, coming from the west, from out of the towering light, and we watch them as if for a sign, as if they carry on their painted surfaces some residue of the sunset, a barely detectable luster or film of telltale dust. No one plays a radio or speaks in a voice that is much above a whisper. Something golden falls, a softness delivered to the air. There are people walking dogs, there are kids on bikes, a man with a camera and long lens, waiting for his moment. It is not until some time after dark has fallen, the insects screaming in the heat, that we slowly begin to disperse, shyly, politely, car after car, restored to our separate and defensible selves.

The men in Mylex suits are still in the area, yellow-snouted, gathering their terrible data, aiming their infrared devices at the earth and sky.

Dr. Chakravarty wants to talk to me but I am making it a point to stay away. He is eager to see how my death is progressing. An interesting case perhaps. He wants to insert me once more in the imaging block, where charged particles collide, high winds blow. But I am afraid of the imaging block. Afraid of its magnetic fields, its computerized nuclear pulse. Afraid of what it knows about me.

I am taking no calls.

The supermarket shelves have been rearranged. It happened one day without warning. There is agitation and panic in the aisles, dismay in the faces of older shoppers. They walk in a fragmented trance, stop and go, clusters of well-dressed figures frozen in the aisles, trying to figure out the pattern, discern the underlying logic, trying to remember where they'd seen the Cream of Wheat. They see no reason for it, find no sense in it. The scouring pads are with the hand soap now, the condiments are scattered. The older the man or woman, the more carefully dressed and groomed. Men in Sansabelt slacks and bright knit shirts. Women with a powdered and fussy look, a self-conscious air, prepared for some anxious event. They turn into the wrong aisle, peer along the shelves, sometimes stop abruptly, causing other carts to run into them. Only the generic food is where it was, white packages plainly labeled. The men consult lists, the women do not. There is a sense of wandering now, an aimless and haunted mood, sweet-tempered people taken to the edge. They scrutinize the small print on packages, wary of a second level of betrayal. The men scan for stamped dates, the women for ingredients. Many have trouble making out the words. Smeared print, ghost images. In the altered shelves, the ambient roar, in the plain and heartless fact of their decline, they try to work their way through confusion. But in the end it doesn't matter what they see or think they see. The terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly. This is the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living. And this is where we wait together, regardless of age, our carts stocked with brightly colored goods. A slowly moving line, satisfying, giving us time to glance at the tabloids in the racks. Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks. The tales of the supernatural and the extraterrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity. The cults of the famous and the dead.