"I'd ask you to visit my room but it's too small for two people unless they're prepared to be intimate."

　　Murray is able to produce a look that is sneaky and frank at the same time. It is a look that gives equal credence to disaster and lecherous success. He says that in the old days of his urban entanglements he believed there was only one way to seduce a woman, with clear and open desire. He took pains to avoid self-depreciation, self-mockery, ambiguity, irony, subtlety, vulnerability, a civilized world-weariness and a tragic sense of history— the very things, he says, that are most natural to him. Of these he has allowed only one element, vulnerability, to insert itself gradually into his program of straightforward lust. He is trying to develop a vulnerability that women will find attractive. He works at it consciously, like a man in a gym with weights and a mirror. But his efforts so far have produced only this half sneaky look, sheepish and wheedling.

　　He thanked us for the lift. We watched him walk toward the lopsided porch, propped with cinder blocks, where a man in a rocker stared into space.

　　6

　　Heinrich's hairline is beginning to recede. I wonder about this. Did his mother consume some kind of gene-piercing substance when she was pregnant? Am I at fault somehow? Have I raised him, unwittingly, in the vicinity of a chemical dump site, in the path of air currents that carry industrial wastes capable of producing scalp degeneration, glorious sunsets? （People say the sunsets around here were not nearly so stunning thirty or forty years ago.） Man's guilt in history and in the tides of his own blood has been complicated by technology, the daily seeping falsehearted death.

　　The boy is fourteen, often evasive and moody, at other times disturbingly compliant. I have a sense that his ready yielding to our wishes and demands is a private weapon of reproach. Babette is afraid he will end up in a barricaded room, spraying hundreds of rounds of automatic fire across an empty mall before the SWAT teams come for him with their heavy-barreled weapons, their bullhorns and body armor.

　　"It's going to rain tonight."

　　"It's raining now," I said.

　　"The radio said tonight."

　　I drove him to school on his first day back after a sore throat and fever. A woman in a yellow slicker held up traffic to let some children cross. I pictured her in a soup commercial taking off her oilskin hat as she entered the cheerful kitchen where her husband stood over a pot of smoky lobster bisque, a smallish man with six weeks to live.

　　"Look at the windshield," I said. "Is that rain or isn't it?"

　　"I'm only telling you what they said."

　　"Just because it's on the radio doesn't mean we have to suspend belief in the evidence of our senses."

　　"Our senses? Our senses are wrong a lot more often than they're right. This has been proved in the laboratory. Don't you know about all those theorems that say nothing is what it seems? There's no past, present or future outside our own mind. The so-called laws of motion are a big hoax. Even sound can trick the mind. Just because you don't hear a sound doesn't mean it's not out there. Dogs can hear it. Other animals. And I'm sure there are sounds even dogs can't hear. But they exist in the air, in waves. Maybe they never stop. High, high, high-pitched. Coming from somewhere."

　　"Is it raining," I said, "or isn't it?"

　　"I wouldn't want to have to say."

　　"What if someone held a gun to your head?"

　　"Who, you?"

　　"Someone. A man in a trenchcoat and smoky glasses. He holds a gun to your head and says, 'Is it raining or isn't it? All you have to do is tell the truth and I'll put away my gun and take the next flight out of here.'"

　　"What truth does he want? Does he want the truth of someone traveling at almost the speed of light in another galaxy? Does he want the truth of someone in orbit around a neutron star? Maybe if these people could see us through a telescope we might look like we were two feet two inches tall and it might be raining yesterday instead of today."

　　"He's holding the gun to your head. He wants your truth."

　　"What good is my truth? My truth means nothing. What if this guy with the gun comes from a planet in a whole different solar system? What we call rain he calls soap. What we call apples he calls rain. So what am I supposed to tell him?"

　　"His name is Frank J. Smalley and he comes from St. Louis."

　　"He wants to know if it's raining now, at this very minute?"

　　"Here and now. That's right."

　　"Is there such a thing as now? 'Now' comes and goes as soon as you say it. How can I say it's raining now if your so-called 'now' becomes 'then' as soon as I say it?"

　　"You said there was no past, present, or future."

　　"Only in our verbs. That's the only place we find it."

　　"Rain is a noun. Is there rain here, in this precise locality, at whatever time within the next two minutes that you choose to respond to the question?"

　　"If you want to talk about this precise locality while you're in a vehicle that's obviously moving, then I think that's the trouble with this discussion."

　　"Just give me an answer, okay, Heinrich?"

　　"The best I could do is make a guess."

　　"Either it's raining or it isn't," I said.

　　"Exactly. That's my whole point. You'd be guessing. Six of one, half dozen of the other."

　　"But you see it's raining."

　　"You see the sun moving across the sky. But is the sun moving across the sky or is the earth turning?"

　　"I don't accept the analogy."

　　"You're so sure that's rain. How do you know it's not sulfuric acid from factories across the river? How do you know it's not fallout from a war in China? You want an answer here and now. Can you prove, here and now, that this stuff is rain? How do I know that what you call rain is really rain? What is rain anyway?"

　　"It's the stuff that falls from the sky and gets you what is called wet."

　　"I'm not wet. Are you wet?"

　　"All right," I said. "Very good."

　　"No, seriously, are you wet?"

　　"First-rate," I told him. "A victory for uncertainty, randomness and chaos. Science's finest hour."

　　"Be sarcastic."

　　"The sophists and the hairsplitters enjoy their finest hour."

　　"Go ahead, be sarcastic, I don't care."

　　Heinrich's mother lives in an ashram now. She has taken the name Mother Devi and runs the business end of things. The ashram is located on the outskirts of the former copper-smelting town of Tubb, Montana, now called Dharamsalapur. The usual rumors abound of sexual freedom, sexual slavery, drugs, nudity, mind control, poor hygiene, tax evasion, monkey-worship, torture, prolonged and hideous death.

　　I watched him walk through the downpour to the school entrance. He moved with deliberate slowness, taking off his camouflage cap ten yards from the doorway. At such moments I find I love him with an animal desperation, a need to take him under my coat and crush him to my chest, keep him there, protect him. He seems to bring a danger to him. It collects in the air, follows him from room to room. Babette bakes his favorite cookies. We watch him at his desk, an unpainted table covered with books and magazines. He works well into the night, plotting chess moves in a game he plays by mail with a convicted killer in the penitentiary.

　　It was warm and bright the next day and students on the Hill sat on lawns and in dorm windows, playing their tapes, sunbathing. The air was a reverie of wistful summer things, the last languorous day, a chance to go bare-limbed once more, smell the mown clover. I went into the Arts Duplex, our newest building, a winged affair with a facade of anodized aluminum, sea-green, cloud-catching. On the lower level was the movie theater, a sloped and dark-carpeted space with two hundred plush seats. I sat in shallow light at the end of the first row and waited for my seniors to arrive.

　　They were all Hitler majors, members of the only class I still taught, Advanced Nazism, three hours a week, restricted to qualified seniors, a course of study designed to cultivate historical perspective, theoretical rigor and mature insight into the continuing mass appeal of fascist tyranny, with special emphasis on parades, rallies and uniforms, three credits, written reports.

　　Every semester I arranged for a screening of background footage. This consisted of propaganda films, scenes shot at party congresses, outtakes from mystical epics featuring parades of gymnasts and mountaineers—a collection I'd edited into an impressionistic eighty-minute documentary. Crowd scenes predominated. Close-up jostled shots of thousands of people outside a stadium after a Goebbels speech, people surging, massing, bursting through the traffic. Halls hung with swastika banners, with mortuary wreaths and death's-head insignia. Ranks of thousands of flagbearers arrayed before columns of frozen light, a hundred and thirty antiaircraft searchlights aimed straight up—a scene that resembled a geometric longing, the formal notation of some powerful mass desire. There was no narrative voice. Only chants, songs, arias, speeches, cries, cheers, accusations, shrieks.

　　I got to my feet and took up a position at the front of the theater, middle aisle, facing the entranceway.

　　They came in out of the sun in their poplin walk shorts and limited-edition T-shirts, in their easy-care knits, their polo styling and rugby stripes. I watched them take their seats, noting the subdued and reverent air, the uncertain anticipation. Some had notebooks and pencil lights; some carried lecture material in bright binders. There were whispers, rustling paper, the knocking sound of seats dropping as one by one the students settled in. I leaned against the front of the apron, waiting for the last few to enter, for someone to seal the doors against our voluptuous summer day.

　　Soon there was a hush. It was time for me to deliver the introductory remarks. I let the silence deepen for a moment, then cleared my arms from the folds of the academic robe in order to gesture freely.

　　When the showing ended, someone asked about the plot to kill Hitler. The discussion moved to plots in general. I found myself saying to the assembled heads, "All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers' plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children's games. We edge nearer death every time we plot. It is like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as those who are the targets of the plot."

　　Is this true? Why did I say it? What does it mean?

　　7

　　Two nights a week Babette goes to the Congregational church at the other end of town and lectures to adults in the basement on correct posture. Basically she is teaching them how to stand, sit and walk. Most of her students are old. It isn't clear to me why they want to improve their posture. We seem to believe it is possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming. Sometimes I go with my wife to the church basement and watch her stand, turn, assume various heroic poses, gesture gracefully. She makes references to yoga, kendo, trance-walking. She talks of Sufi dervishes, Sherpa mountaineers. The old folks nod and listen. Nothing is foreign, nothing too remote to apply. I am always surprised at their acceptance and trust, the sweetness of their belief. Nothing is too doubtful to be of use to them as they seek to redeem their bodies from a lifetime of bad posture. It is the end of skepticism. We walked home under a marigold moon. Our house looked old and wan at the end of the street, the porch light shining on a molded plastic tricycle, a stack of three-hour colored-flame sawdust and wax logs. Denise was doing her homework in the kitchen, keeping an eye on Wilder, who had wandered downstairs to sit on the floor and stare through the oven window. Silence in the halls, shadows on the sloping lawn. We closed the door and disrobed. The bed was a mess. Magazines, curtain rods, a child's sooty sock. Babette hummed something from a Broadway show, putting the rods in a corner. We embraced, fell sideways to the bed in a controlled way, then repositioned ourselves, bathing in each other's flesh, trying to kick the sheets off our ankles. Her body had a number of long hollows, places the hand might stop to solve in the dark, tempo-slowing places. We believed something lived in the basement.

　　"What do you want to do?" she said.

　　"Whatever you want to do."

　　"I want to do whatever's best for you."

　　"What's best for me is to please you," I said.

　　"I want to make you happy, Jack."

　　"I'm happy when I'm pleasing you."

　　"I just want to do what you want to do."

　　"I want to do whatever's best for you."

　　"But you please me by letting me please you," she said.

　　"As the male partner I think it's my responsibility to please."

　　"I'm not sure whether that's a sensitive caring statement or a sexist remark."

　　"Is it wrong for the man to be considerate toward his partner?"

　　"I'm your partner when we play tennis, which we ought to start doing again, by the way. Otherwise I'm your wife. Do you want me to read to you?"

　　"First-rate."

　　"I know you like me to read sexy stuff."

　　"I thought you liked it too."

　　"Isn't it basically the person being read to who derives the benefit and the satisfaction? When I read to Old Man Treadwell, it's not because I find those tabloids stimulating."

　　"Treadwell's blind, I'm not. I thought you liked to read erotic passages."

　　"If it pleases you, then I like to do it."

　　"But it has to please you too, Baba. Otherwise how would I feel?"

　　"It pleases me that you enjoy my reading."

　　"I get the feeling a burden is being shifted back and forth. The burden of being the one who is pleased."

　　"I want to read, Jack. Honestly."

　　"Are you totally and completely sure? Because if you're not, we absolutely won't."

　　Someone turned on the TV set at the end of the hall, and a woman's voice said: "If it breaks easily into pieces, it is called shale. When wet, it smells like clay."

　　We listened to the gently plummeting stream of nighttime traffic.

　　I said, "Pick your century. Do you want to read about Etruscan slave girls, Georgian rakes? I think we have some literature on flagellation brothels. What about the Middle Ages? We have incubi and succubi. Nuns galore."

　　"Whatever's best for you."

　　"I want you to choose. It's sexier that way."

　　"One person chooses, the other reads. Don't we want a balance, a sort of give-and-take? Isn't that what makes it sexy?"

　　"A tautness, a suspense. First-rate. I will choose."

　　"I will read," she said. "But I don't want you to choose anything that has men inside women, quote-quote, or men entering women. 'I entered her.' 'He entered me.' We're not lobbies or elevators. 'I wanted him inside me,' as if he could crawl completely in, sign the register, sleep, eat, so forth. Can we agree on that? I don't care what these people do as long as they don't enter or get entered."

　　"Agreed."

　　"'I entered her and began to thrust.'"

　　"I'm in total agreement," I said.

　　"'Enter me, enter me, yes, yes.'"

　　"Silly usage, absolutely."

　　"'Insert yourself, Rex. I want you inside me, entering hard, entering deep, yes, now, oh.'"

　　I began to feel an erection stirring. How stupid and out of context. Babette laughed at her own lines. The TV said: "Until Florida surgeons attached an artificial flipper."

　　Babette and I tell each other everything. I have told everything, such as it was at the time, to each of my wives. There is more to tell, of course, as marriages accumulate. But when I say I believe in complete disclosure I don't mean it cheaply, as anecdotal sport or shallow revelation. It is a form of self-renewal and a gesture of custodial trust. Love helps us develop an identity secure enough to allow itself to be placed in another's care and protection. Babette and I have turned our lives for each other's thoughtful regard, turned them in the moonlight in our pale hands, spoken deep into the night about fathers and mothers, childhood, friendships, awakenings, old loves, old fears （except fear of death）. No detail must be left out, not even a dog with ticks or a neighbor's boy who ate an insect on a dare. The smell of pantries, the sense of empty afternoons, the feel of things as they rained across our skin, things as facts and passions, the feel of pain, loss, disappointment, breathless delight. In these night recitations we create a space between things as we felt them at the time and as we speak them now. This is the space reserved for irony, sympathy and fond amusement, the means by which we rescue ourselves from the past.

　　I decided on the twentieth century. I put on my bathrobe and went down the hall to Heinrich's room to find a trashy magazine Babette might read from, the type that features letters from readers detailing their sexual experiences. This struck me as one of the few things the modern imagination has contributed to the history of erotic practices. There is a double fantasy at work in such letters. People write down imagined episodes and then see them published in a national magazine. Which is the greater stimulation?

　　Wilder was in there watching Heinrich do a physics experiment with steel balls and a salad bowl. Heinrich wore a terry cloth robe, a towel around his neck, another towel on his head. He told me to look downstairs.

　　In a stack of material I found some family photo albums, one or two of them at least fifty years old. I took them up to the bedroom. We spent hours going through them, sitting up in bed. Children wincing in the sun, women in sun hats, men shading their eyes from the glare as if the past possessed some quality of light we no longer experience, a Sunday dazzle that caused people in their churchgoing clothes to tighten their faces and stand at an angle to the future, somewhat averted it seemed, wearing fixed and finedrawn smiles, skeptical of something in the nature of the box camera.

　　Who will die first?

　　8

　　My struggle with the German tongue began in mid-October and lasted nearly the full academic year. As the most prominent figure in Hitler studies in North America, I had long tried to conceal the fact that I did not know German. I could not speak or read it, could not understand the spoken word or begin to put the simplest sentence on paper. The least of my Hitler colleagues knew some German; others were either fluent in the language or reasonably conversant. No one could major in Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill without a minimum of one year of German. I was living, in short, on the edge of a landscape of vast shame.

　　The German tongue. Fleshy, warped, spit-spraying, purplish and cruel. One eventually had to confront it. Wasn't Hitler's own struggle to express himself in German the crucial subtext of his massive ranting autobiography, dictated in a fortress prison in the Bavarian hills? Grammar and syntax. The man may have felt himself imprisoned in more ways than one.

　　I'd made several attempts to learn German, serious probes into origins, structures, roots. I sensed the deathly power of the language. I wanted to speak it well, use it as a charm, a protective device. The more I shrank from learning actual words, rules and pronunciation, the more important it seemed that I go forward. What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation. But the basic sounds defeated me, the harsh spurting northernness of the words and syllables, the command delivery. Something happened between the back of my tongue and the roof of my mouth that made a mockery of my attempts to sound German words.

　　I was determined to try again.

　　Because I'd achieved high professional standing, because my lectures were well attended and my articles printed in the major journals, because I wore an academic gown and dark glasses day and night whenever I was on campus, because I carried two hundred and thirty pounds on a six-foot three-inch frame and had big hands and feet, I knew my German lessons would have to be secret.

　　I contacted a man not affiliated with the college, someone Murray Jay Siskind had told me about. They were fellow boarders in the green-shingled house on Middlebrook. The man was in his fifties, a slight shuffle in his walk. He had thinning hair, a bland face and wore his shirtsleeves rolled up to his forearms, revealing thermal underwear beneath.

　　His complexion was of a tone I want to call flesh-colored. Howard Dunlop was his name. He said he was a former chiropractor but didn't offer a reason why he was no longer active and didn't say when he'd learned German, or why, and something in his manner kept me from asking.

　　We sat in his dark crowded room at the boarding house. An ironing board stood unfolded at the window. There were chipped enamel pots, trays of utensils set on a dresser. The furniture was vague, foundling. At the borders of the room were the elemental things. An exposed radiator, an army-blanketed cot. Dunlop sat at the edge of a straight chair, intoning generalities of grammar. When he switched from English to German, it was as though a cord had been twisted in his larynx. An abrupt emotion entered his voice, a scrape and gargle that sounded like the stirring of some beast's ambition. He gaped at me and gestured, he croaked, he verged on strangulation. Sounds came spewing from the base of his tongue, harsh noises damp with passion. He was only demonstrating certain basic pronunciation patterns but the transformation in his face and voice made me think he was making a passage between levels of being.

　　I sat there taking notes.

　　The hour went quickly. Dunlop managed a scant shrug when I asked him not to discuss the lessons with anyone. It occurred to me that he was the man Murray had described in his summary of fellow boarders as the one who never comes out of his room.

　　I stopped at Murray's room and asked him to come home with me for dinner. He put down his copy of American Transvestite and slipped into his corduroy jacket. We stopped on the porch long enough for Murray to tell the landlord, who was sitting there, about a dripping faucet in the second-floor bathroom. The landlord was a large florid man of such robust and bursting health that he seemed to be having a heart attack even as we looked on.

　　"He'll get around to fixing it," Murray said, as we set out on foot in the direction of Elm. "He fixes everything eventually. He's very good with all those little tools and fixtures and devices that people in cities never know the names of. The names of these things are only known in outlying communities, small towns and rural areas. Too bad he's such a bigot."

　　"How do you know he's a bigot?"

　　"People who can fix things are usually bigots."

　　"What do you mean?"

　　'Think of all the people who've ever come to your house to fix things. They were all bigots, weren't they?"

　　"I don't know."

　　"They drove panel trucks, didn't they, with an extension ladder on the roof and some kind of plastic charm dangling from the rearview mirror?"

　　"I don't know, Murray."

　　"It's obvious," he said.

　　He asked me why I'd chosen this year in particular to learn German, after so many years of slipping past the radar. I told him there was a Hitler conference scheduled for next spring at the College-on-the-Hill. Three days of lectures, workshops and panels. Hitler scholars from seventeen states and nine foreign countries. Actual Germans would be in attendance.

　　At home Denise placed a moist bag of garbage in the kitchen compactor. She started up the machine. The ram stroked downward with a dreadful wrenching sound, full of eerie feeling. Children walked in and out of the kitchen, water dripped in the sink, the washing machine heaved in the entranceway. Murray seemed engrossed in the incidental mesh. Whining metal, exploding bottles, plastic smashed flat. Denise listened carefully, making sure the mangling din contained the correct sonic elements, which meant the machine was operating properly.

　　Heinrich said to someone on the phone, "Animals commit incest all the time. So how unnatural can it be?"

　　Babette came in from running, her outfit soaked through. Murray walked across the kitchen to shake her hand. She fell into a chair, scanned the room for Wilder. I watched Denise make a mental comparison between her mother's running clothes and the wet bag she'd dumped in the compactor. I could see it in her eyes, a sardonic connection. It was these secondary levels of life, these extrasensory flashes and floating nuances of being, these pockets of rapport forming unexpectedly, that made me believe we were a magic act, adults and children together, sharing unaccountable things.

　　"We have to boil our water," Steffie said.

　　"Why?"

　　"It said on the radio."

　　"They're always saying boil your water," Babette said. "It's the new thing, like turn your wheel in the direction of the skid. Here comes Wilder now. I guess we can eat."

　　The small child moved in a swaying gait, great head wagging, and his mother made faces of delight, happy and outlandish masks, watching him approach.

　　"Neutrinos go right through the earth," Heinrich said into the telephone.

　　"Yes yes yes," said Babette.

　　9

　　They had to evacuate the grade school on Tuesday. Kids were getting headaches and eye irritations, tasting metal in their mouths. A teacher rolled on the floor and spoke foreign languages. No one knew what was wrong. Investigators said it could be the ventilating system, the paint or varnish, the foam insulation, the electrical insulation, the cafeteria food, the rays emitted by microcomputers, the asbestos fireproofing, the adhesive on shipping containers, the fumes from the chlorinated pool, or perhaps something deeper, finer-grained, more closely woven into the basic state of things.

　　Denise and Steffie stayed home that week as men in Mylex suits and respirator masks made systematic sweeps of the building with infrared detecting and measuring equipment. Because Mylex is itself a suspect material, the results tended to be ambiguous and a second round of more rigorous detection had to be scheduled.

　　The two girls and Babette, Wilder and I went to the supermarket. Minutes after we entered, we ran into Murray. This was the fourth or fifth time I'd seen him in the supermarket, which was roughly the number of times I'd seen him on campus. He clutched Babette by the left bicep and sidled around her, appearing to smell her hair.

　　"A lovely dinner," he said, standing directly behind her. "I like to cook myself, which doubles my appreciation of someone who does it well."

　　"Come any time," she said, turning in an effort to find him.

　　We moved together into the ultra-cool interior. Wilder sat in the shopping cart trying to grab items off the shelves as we went by. It occurred to me that he was too old and too big to be sitting in supermarket carts. I also wondered why his vocabulary seemed to be stalled at twenty-five words.

　　"I'm happy to be here," Murray said.

　　"In Blacksmith?"

　　"In Blacksmith, in the supermarket, in the rooming house, on the Hill. I feel I'm learning important things every day. Death, disease, afterlife, outer space. It's all much clearer here. I can think and see."

　　We moved into the generic food area and Murray paused with his plastic basket to probe among the white cartons and jars. I wasn't sure I understood what he was talking about. What did he mean, much clearer? He could think and see what?

　　Steffie took my hand and we walked past the fruit bins, an area that extended about forty-five yards along one wall. The bins were arranged diagonally and backed by mirrors that people accidentally punched when reaching for fruit in the upper rows. A voice on the loudspeaker said: "Kleenex Softique, your truck's blocking the entrance." Apples and lemons tumbled in twos and threes to the floor when someone took a fruit from certain places in the stacked array. There were six kinds of apples, there were exotic melons in several pastels. Everything seemed to be in season, sprayed, burnished, bright. People tore filmy bags off racks and tried to figure out which end opened. I realized the place was awash in noise. The toneless systems, the jangle and skid of carts, the loudspeaker and coffee-making machines, the cries of children. And over it all, or under it all, a dull and unlocatable roar, as of some form of swarming life just outside the range of human apprehension.

　　"Did you tell Denise you were sorry?"

　　"Maybe later," Steffie said. "Remind me."

　　"She's a sweet girl and she wants to be your older sister and your friend if you'll let her."

　　"I don't know about friend. She's a little bossy, don't you think?"

　　"Aside from telling her you're sorry, be sure to give her back her Physicians' Desk Reference."

　　"She reads that thing all the time. Don't you think that's weird?"

　　"At least she reads something."

　　"Sure, lists of drugs and medicines. And do you want to know why?"

　　"Why?"

　　"Because she's trying to find out the side effects of the stuff that Baba uses."

　　"What does Baba use?"

　　"Don't ask me. Ask Denise."

　　"How do you know she uses anything?"

　　"Ask Denise."

　　"Why don't I ask Baba?"

　　"Ask Baba," she said.

　　Murray came out of an aisle and walked alongside Babette, just ahead of us. He took a twin roll of paper towels out of her cart and smelled it. Denise had found some friends and they went up front to look at the paperback books in spindly racks, the books with shiny metallic print, raised letters, vivid illustrations of cult violence and windswept romance. Denise was wearing a green visor. I heard Babette tell Murray she'd been wearing it fourteen hours a day for three weeks now. She would not go out without it, would not even leave her room. She wore it in school, when there was school, wore it to the toilet, the dentist's chair, the dinner table. Something about the visor seemed to speak to her, to offer wholeness and identity.

　　"It's her interface with the world," Murray said.

　　He helped Babette push her loaded cart. I heard him say to her, "Tibetans believe there is a transitional state between death and rebirth. Death is a waiting period, basically. Soon a fresh womb will receive the soul. In the meantime the soul restores to itself some of the divinity lost at birth." He studied her profile as if to detect a reaction. "That's what I think of whenever I come in here. This place recharges us spiritually, it prepares us, it's a gateway or pathway. Look how bright. It's full of psychic data."

　　My wife smiled at him.

　　"Everything is concealed in symbolism, hidden by veils of mystery and layers of cultural material. But it is psychic data, absolutely. The large doors slide open, they close unbidden. Energy waves, incident radiation. All the letters and numbers are here, all the colors of the spectrum, all the voices and sounds, all the code words and ceremonial phrases. It is just a question of deciphering, rearranging, peeling off the layers of unspeakability. Not that we would want to, not that any useful purpose would be served. This is not Tibet. Even Tibet is not Tibet anymore."

　　He studied her profile. She put some yogurt in her cart.

　　"Tibetans try to see death for what it is. It is the end of attachment to things. This simple truth is hard to fathom. But once we stop denying death, we can proceed calmly to die and then go on to experience uterine rebirth or Judeo-Christian afterlife or out-of-body experience or a trip on a UFO or whatever we wish to call it. We can do so with clear vision, without awe or terror. We don't have to cling to life artificially, or to death for that matter. We simply walk toward the sliding doors. Waves and radiation. Look how well-lighted everything is. The place is sealed off, self-contained. It is timeless. Another reason why I think of Tibet. Dying is an art in Tibet. A priest walks in, sits down, tells the weeping relatives to get out and has the room sealed. Doors, windows sealed. He has serious business to see to. Chants, numerology, horoscopes, recitations. Here we don't die, we shop. But the difference is less marked than you think."

　　He was almost whispering now and I tried to get up closer without ramming my cart into Babette's. I wanted to hear everything.

　　"Supermarkets this large and clean and modern are a revelation to me. I spent my life in small steamy delicatessens with slanted display cabinets full of trays that hold soft wet lumpy matter in pale colors. High enough cabinets so you had to stand on tiptoes to give your order. Shouts, accents. In cities no one notices specific dying. Dying is a quality of the air. It's everywhere and nowhere. Men shout as they die, to be noticed, remembered for a second or two. To die in an apartment instead of a house can depress the soul, I would imagine, for several lives to come. In a town there are houses, plants in bay windows. People notice dying better. The dead have faces, automobiles. If you don't know a name, you know a street name, a dog's name. 'He drove an orange Mazda.'

　　You know a couple of useless things about a person that become major facts of identification and cosmic placement when he dies suddenly, after a short illness, in his own bed, with a comforter and matching pillows, on a rainy Wednesday afternoon, feverish, a little congested in the sinuses and chest, thinking about his dry cleaning."

　　Babette said, "Where is Wilder?" and turned to stare at me in a way that suggested ten minutes had passed since she'd last seen him. Other looks, less pensive and less guilty, indicated greater time spans, deeper seas of inattention. Like: "I didn't know whales were mammals." The greater the time span, the blanker the look, the more dangerous the situation. It was as if guilt were a luxury she allowed herself only when the danger was minimal.

　　"How could he get out of the cart without my noticing?"

　　The three adults each stood at the head of an aisle and peered into the traffic of carts and gliding bodies. Then we did three more aisles, heads set forward, weaving slightly as we changed our sightlines. I kept seeing colored spots off to the right but when I turned there was nothing there. I'd been seeing colored spots for years but never so many, so gaily animated. Murray saw Wilder in another woman's cart. The woman waved at Babette and headed toward us. She lived on our street with a teenage daughter and an Asian baby, Chun Duc. Everyone referred to the baby by name, almost in a tone of proud proprietorship, but no one knew who Chun belonged to or where he or she had come from.

　　"Kleenex Softique, Kleenex Softique."

　　Steffie was holding my hand in a way I'd come to realize, over a period of time, was not meant to be gently possessive, as I'd thought at first, but reassuring. I was a little astonished. A firm grip that would help me restore confidence in myself, keep me from becoming resigned to whatever melancholy moods she thought she detected hovering about my person.

　　Before Murray went to the express line he invited us to dinner, a week from Saturday.

　　"You don't have to let me know till the last minute."

　　"We'll be there," Babette said.

　　"I'm not preparing anything major, so just call beforehand and tell me if something else came up. You don't even have to call. If you don't show up, I'll know that something came up and you couldn't let me know."

　　"Murray, we'll be there."

　　"Bring the kids."

　　"No."

　　"Great. But if you decide to bring them, no problem. I don't want you to feel I'm holding you to something. Don't feel you've made an ironclad commitment. You'll show up or you won't. I have to eat anyway, so there's no major catastrophe if something comes up and you have to cancel. I just want you to know I'll be there if you decide to drop by, with or without kids. We have till next May or June to do this thing so there's no special mystique about a week from Saturday."

　　"Are you coming back next semester?" I said.

　　'They want me to teach a course in the cinema of car crashes."

　　"Do it."

　　"I will."

　　I rubbed against Babette in the checkout line. She backed into me and I reached around her and put my hands on her breasts. She rotated her hips and I nuzzled her hair and murmured, "Dirty blond." People wrote checks, tall boys bagged the merchandise. Not everyone spoke English at the cash terminals, or near the fruit bins and frozen foods, or out among the cars in the lot. More and more I heard languages I could not identify much less understand, although the tall boys were American-born and the checkout women as well, short, fattish in blue tunics, wearing stretch slacks and tiny white espadrilles. I tried to fit my hands into Babette's skirt, over her belly, as the slowly moving line edged toward the last purchase point, the breath mints and nasal inhalers.

　　It was out in the parking lot that we heard the first of the rumors about a man dying during the inspection of the grade school, one of the masked and Mylex-suited men, heavy-booted and bulky. Collapsed and died, went the story that was going around, in a classroom on the second floor.

　　10

　　Tuition at the College-on-the-Hill is fourteen thousand dollars, Sunday brunch included. I sense there is a connection between this powerful number and the way the students arrange themselves physically in the reading areas of the library. They sit on broad cushioned seats in various kinds of ungainly posture, clearly calculated to be the identifying signs of some kinship group or secret organization. They are fetal, splayed, knock-kneed, arched, square-knotted, sometimes almost upside-down. The positions are so studied they amount to a classical mime. There is an element of overrefinement and inbreeding. Sometimes I feel I've wandered into a Far Eastern dream, too remote to be interpreted. But it is only the language of economic class they are speaking, in one of its allowable outward forms, like the convocation of station wagons at the start of the year.

　　Denise watched her mother pull the little cellophane ribbon on a bonus pack of sixteen individually wrapped units of chewing gum. Her eyes narrowed as she turned back to the address books on the kitchen table before her. The eleven-year-old face was an expert mask of restrained exasperation.

　　She waited a long moment, then said evenly, "That stuff causes cancer in laboratory animals in case you didn't know."

　　"You wanted me to chew sugarless gum, Denise. It was your idea."

　　"There was no warning on the pack then. They put a warning, which I would have a hard time believing you didn't see."

　　She was transcribing names and phone numbers from an old book to a new one. There were no addresses. Her friends had phone numbers only, a race of people with a seven-bit analog consciousness.

　　"I'm happy to do it either way," Babette said. "It's totally up to you. Either I chew gum with sugar and artificial coloring or I chew sugarless and colorless gum that's harmful to rats."

　　Steffie got off the phone. "Don't chew at all," she said. "Did you ever think of that?"

　　Babette was breaking eggs into a wooden salad bowl. She gave me a look that wondered how the girl could talk on the phone and listen to us at the same time. I wanted to say because she finds us interesting.

　　Babette said to the girls, "Look, either I chew gum or I smoke. If you want me to start smoking again, take away my chewing gum and my Mentho-Lyptus."

　　"Why do you have to do one or the other?" Steffie said. "Why not do neither one?"

　　"Why not do both?" Denise said, the face carefully emptying itself of expression. "That's what you want, isn't it? We all get to do what we want, don't we? Except if we want to go to school tomorrow we can't because they're fumigating the place or whatever."

　　The phone rang; Steffie grabbed it.

　　"I'm not a criminal," Babette said. "All I want to do is chew a pathetic little tasteless chunk of gum now and then."

　　"Well it's not that simple," Denise said.

　　"It's not a crime either. I chew about two of those little chunks a day."

　　"Well you can't anymore."

　　"Well I can, Denise. I want to. Chewing happens to relax me. You're making a fuss over nothing."

　　Steffie managed to get our attention by the sheer pleading force of the look on her face. Her hand was over the mouthpiece of the phone. She did not speak but only formed the words.

　　The Stovers want to come over.

　　"Parents or children?" Babette said.

　　My daughter shrugged.

　　"We don't want them," Babette said.

　　"Keep them out," Denise said.

　　What do I say?

　　"Say anything you want."

　　"Just keep them out of here."

　　"They're boring."

　　"Tell them to stay home."

　　Steffie retreated with the phone, appearing to shield it with her body, her eyes full of fear and excitement.

　　"A little gum can't possibly hurt," Babette said.

　　"I guess you're right. Never mind. Just a warning on the pack."

　　Steffie hung up. "Just hazardous to your health," she said.

　　"Just rats," Denise said. "I guess you're right. Never mind."

　　"Maybe she thinks they died in their sleep."

　　"Just useless rodents, so what's the difference?"

　　"What's the difference, what's the fuss?" Steffie said.

　　"Plus I'd like to believe she chews only two pieces a day, the way she forgets things."

　　"What do I forget?" Babette said.

　　"It's all right," Denise said. "Never mind."

　　"What do I forget?"

　　"Go ahead and chew. Never mind the warning. I don't care."

　　I scooped Wilder off a chair and gave him a noisy kiss on the ear and he shrank away in delight. Then I put him on the counter and went upstairs to find Heinrich. He was in his room studying the deployment of plastic chessmen.

　　"Still playing with the fellow in prison? How's it going?"

　　"Pretty good. I think I got him cornered."

　　"What do you know about this fellow? I've been meaning to ask."

　　"Like who did he kill? That's the big thing today. Concern for the victim."

　　"You've been playing chess with the man for months. What do you know about him except that he's in jail for life, for murder? Is he young, old, black, white? Do you communicate at all except for chess moves?"

　　"We send notes sometimes."

　　"Who did he kill?"

　　"He was under pressure."

　　"And what happened?"

　　"It kept building and building."

　　"So he went out and shot someone. Who did he shoot?"

　　"Some people in Iron City."

　　"How many?"

　　"Five."

　　"Five people."

　　"Not counting the state trooper, which was later."

　　"Six people. Did he care for his weapons obsessively? Did he have an arsenal stashed in his shabby little room off a six-story concrete car park?"

　　"Some handguns and a bolt-action rifle with a scope."

　　"A telescopic sight. Did he fire from a highway overpass, a rented room? Did he walk into a bar, a washette, his former place of employment and start firing indiscriminately? People scattering, taking cover under tables. People out on the street thinking they heard firecrackers. 'I was just waiting for the bus when I heard this little popping noise like firecrackers going off.'"

　　"He went up to a roof."

　　"A rooftop sniper. Did he write in his diary before he went up to the roof? Did he make tapes of his voice, go to the movies, read books about other mass murderers to refresh his memory?"

　　"Made tapes."

　　"Made tapes. What did he do with them?"

　　"Sent them to people he loved, asking for forgiveness."

　　"'I can't help myself, folks.' Were the victims total strangers? Was it a grudge killing? Did he get fired from his job? Had he been hearing voices?"

　　'Total strangers."

　　"Had he been hearing voices?"

　　"On TV."

　　"Talking just to him? Singling him out?"

　　"Telling him to go down in history. He was twenty-seven, out of work, divorced, with his car up on blocks. Time was running out on him."

　　"Insistent pressuring voices. How did he deal with the media? Give lots of interviews, write letters to the editor of the local paper, try to make a book deal?"

　　"There is no media in Iron City. He didn't think of that till it was too late. He says if he had to do it all over again, he wouldn't do it as an ordinary murder, he would do it as an assassination."

　　"He would select more carefully, kill one famous person, get noticed, make it stick."

　　"He now knows he won't go down in history."

　　"Neither will I."

　　"But you've got Hitler."

　　"Yes, I have, haven't I?"

　　"What's Tommy Roy Foster got?"

　　"All right, he's told you all these things in the letters he sends. What do you say when you respond?"

　　"I'm losing my hair."

　　I looked at him. He wore a warmup suit, a towel around his neck, sweatbands on both wrists.

　　"You know what your mother would say about this chess by mail relationship."

　　"I know what you would say. You're saying it."

　　"How is your mother? Hear from her lately?"

　　"She wants me to go out to the ashram this summer."

　　"Do you want to go?"

　　"Who knows what I want to do? Who knows what anyone wants to do? How can you be sure about something like that? Isn't it all a question of brain chemistry, signals going back and forth, electrical energy in the cortex? How do you know whether something is really what you want to do or just some kind of nerve impulse in the brain? Some minor little activity takes place somewhere in this unimportant place in one of the brain hemispheres and suddenly I want to go to Montana or I don't want to go to Montana. How do I know I really want to go and it isn't just some neurons firing or something? Maybe it's just an accidental flash in the medulla and suddenly there I am in Montana and I find out I really didn't want to go there in the first place. I can't control what happens in my brain, so how can I be sure what I want to do ten seconds from now, much less Montana next summer? It's all this activity in the brain and you don't know what's you as a person and what's some neuron that just happens to fire or just happens to misfire. Isn't that why Tommy Roy killed those people?"

　　In the morning I walked to the bank. I went to the automated teller machine to check my balance. I inserted my card, entered my secret code, tapped out my request. The figure on the screen roughly corresponded to my independent estimate, feebly arrived at after long searches through documents, tormented arithmetic. Waves of relief and gratitude flowed over me. The system had blessed my life. I felt its support and approval. The system hardware, the mainframe sitting in a locked room in some distant city. What a pleasing interaction. I sensed that something of deep personal value, but not money, not that at all, had been authenticated and confirmed. A deranged person was escorted from the bank by two armed guards. The system was invisible, which made it all the more impressive, all the more disquieting to deal with. But we were in accord, at least for now. The networks, the circuits, the streams, the harmonies.

　　11

　　I woke in the grip of a death sweat. Defenseless against my own racking fears. A pause at the center of my being. I lacked the will and physical strength to get out of bed and move through the dark house, clutching walls and stair rails. To feel my way, reinhabit my body, re-enter the world. Sweat trickled down my ribs. The digital reading on the clock-radio was 3:51. Always odd numbers at times like this. What does it mean? Is death odd-numbered? Are there life-enhancing numbers, other numbers charged with menace? Babette murmured in her sleep and I moved close, breathing her heat.

　　Finally I slept, to be awakened by the smell of burning toast. That would be Steffie. She burns toast often, at any hour, intentionally. She loves the smell, she is addicted; it's her treasured scent. It satisfies her in ways wood smoke cannot, or snuffed candles, or the odor of explosive powder drifting down the street from firecrackers set off on the Fourth. She has evolved orders of preference. Burnt rye, burnt white, so on.

　　I put on my robe and went downstairs. I was always putting on a bathrobe and going somewhere to talk seriously to a child. Babette was with her in the kitchen. It startled me. I thought she was still in bed.

　　"Want some toast?" Steffie said.

　　"I'll be fifty-one next week."

　　"That's not old, is it?"

　　"I've felt the same for twenty-five years."

　　"Bad. How old is my mother?"

　　"She's still young. She was only twenty when we were married the first time."

　　"Is she younger than Baba?"

　　"About the same. Just so you don't think I'm one of those men who keeps finding younger women."

　　I wasn't sure whether my replies were meant for Steffie or Babette. This happens in the kitchen, where the levels of data are numerous and deep, as Murray might say.

　　"Is she still in the CIA?" Steffie said.

　　"We're not supposed to talk about that. She's just a contract agent anyway."

　　"What's that?"

　　"That's what people do today for a second income."

　　"What exactly does she do?" Babette said.

　　"She gets a phone call from Brazil. That activates her."

　　"Then what?"

　　"She carries money in a suitcase the length and breadth of Latin America."

　　"That's all? I could do that."

　　"Sometimes they send her books to review."

　　"Have I met her?" Babette said.

　　"No."

　　"Do I know her name?"

　　"Dana Breedlove."

　　Steffie's lips formed the words as I spoke them.

　　"You're not planning to eat that, are you?" I said to her.

　　"I always eat my toast."

　　The phone rang and I picked it up. A woman's voice delivered a high-performance hello. It said it was computer-generated, part of a marketing survey aimed at determining current levels of consumer desire. It said it would ask a series of questions, pausing after each to give me a chance to reply.

　　I gave the phone to Steffie. When it became clear that she was occupied with the synthesized voice, I spoke to Babette in low tones.

　　"She liked to plot."

　　"Who?"

　　"Dana. She liked to get me involved in things."

　　"What kind of things?"

　　"Factions. Playing certain friends against other friends. Household plots, faculty plots."

　　"Sounds like ordinary stuff."

　　"She spoke English to me, Spanish or Portuguese to the telephone."

　　Steffie twisted around, used her free hand to pull her sweater away from her body, enabling her to read the label.

　　"Virgin acrylic," she said into the phone.

　　Babette checked the label on her sweater. A soft rain began to fall.

　　"How does it feel being nearly fifty-one?" she said.

　　"No different from fifty."

　　"Except one is even, one is odd," she pointed out.

　　That night, in Murray's off-white room, after a spectacular meal of Cornish hen in the shape of a frog, prepared on a two-burner hot plate, we moved from our metal folding chairs to the bunk bed for coffee.

　　"When I was a sportswriter," Murray said, "I traveled constantly, lived in planes and hotels and stadium smoke, never got to feel at home in my own apartment. Now I have a place."

　　"You've done wonders," Babette said, her gaze sweeping desperately across the room.

　　"It's small, it's dark, it's plain," he said in a self-satisfied way. "A container for thought."

　　I gestured toward the old four-story building on several acres across the street. "Do you get any noise from the insane asylum?"

　　"You mean beatings and shrieks? It's interesting that people still call it the insane asylum. It must be the striking architecture, the high steep roof, the tall chimneys, the columns, the little flourishes here and there that are either quaint or sinister—I can't make up my mind. It doesn't look like a rest home or psychiatric facility. It looks like an insane asylum."

　　His trousers were going shiny at the knees.

　　"I'm sorry you didn't bring the kids. I want to get to know small kids. This is the society of kids. I tell my students they're already too old to Figure importantly in the making of society. Minute by minute they're beginning to diverge from each other. 'Even as we sit here,' I tell them, 'you are spinning out from the core, becoming less recognizable as a group, less targetable by advertisers and mass-producers of culture. Kids are a true universal. But you're well beyond that, already beginning to drift, to feel estranged from the products you consume. Who are they designed for? What is your place in the marketing scheme? Once you're out of school, it is only a matter of time before you experience the vast loneliness and dissatisfaction of consumers who have lost their group identity.' Then I tap my pencil on the table to indicate time passing ominously."

　　Because we were seated on the bed, Murray had to lean well forward, looking past the coffee cup poised in my hand, in order to address Babette.

　　"How many children do you have, all told?"

　　She appeared to pause.

　　"There's Wilder, of course. There's Denise."

　　Murray sipped his coffee, trying to look at her, sideways, with the cup at his lower lip.

　　'There's Eugene, who's living with his daddy this year in Western Australia. Eugene is eight. His daddy does research in the outback. His daddy is also Wilder's daddy."

　　"The boy is growing up without television," I said, "which may make him worth talking to, Murray, as a sort of wild child, a savage plucked from the bush, intelligent and literate but deprived of the deeper codes and messages that mark his species as unique."

　　"TV is a problem only if you've forgotten how to look and listen," Murray said. "My students and I discuss this all the time. They're beginning to feel they ought to turn against the medium, exactly as an earlier generation turned against their parents and their country. I tell them they have to learn to look as children again. Root out content. Find the codes and messages, to use your phrase, Jack."

　　"What do they say to that?"

　　"Television is just another name for junk mail. But I tell them I can't accept that. I tell them I've been sitting in this room for more than two months, watching TV into the early hours, listening carefully, taking notes. A great and humbling experience, let me tell you. Close to mystical."

　　"What's your conclusion?"

　　He crossed his legs primly and sat with the cup in his lap, smiling straight ahead.

　　"Waves and radiation," he said. "I've come to understand that the medium is a primal force in the American home. Sealed-off, timeless, self-contained, self-referring. It's like a myth being born right there in our living room, like something we know in a dreamlike and preconscious way. I'm very enthused, Jack."

　　He looked at me, still smiling in a half sneaky way.

　　"You have to learn how to look. You have to open yourself to the data. TV offers incredible amounts of psychic data. It opens ancient memories of world birth, it welcomes us into the grid, the network of little buzzing dots that make up the picture pattern. There is light, there is sound. I ask my students, 'What more do you want?' Look at the wealth of data concealed in the grid, in the bright packaging, the jingles, the slice-of-life commercials, the products hurtling out of darkness, the coded messages and endless repetitions, like chants, like mantras. 'Coke is it, Coke is it, Coke is it.' The medium practically overflows with sacred formulas if we can remember how to respond innocently and get past our irritation, weariness and disgust."

　　"But your students don't agree."

　　"Worse than junk mail. Television is the death throes of human consciousness, according to them. They're ashamed of their television past. They want to talk about movies."

　　He got up and refilled our cups.

　　"How do you know so much?" Babette said.

　　"I'm from New York."

　　"The more you talk, the sneakier you look, as if you're trying to put something over on us."

　　"The best talk is seductive."

　　"Have you ever been married?" she said.

　　"Once, briefly. I was covering the Jets, the Mets and the Nets.

　　How odd a figure I must seem to you now, a solitary crank who maroons himself with a TV set and dozens of stacks of dust-jacketed comic books. Don't think I wouldn't appreciate a dramatic visit between two and three in the morning," he told her, "from an intelligent woman in spike heels and a slit skirt, with high-impact accessories."

　　It was drizzling as we walked home, my arm around her waist. The streets were empty. Along Elm all the stores were dark, the two banks were dimly lit, the neon spectacles in the window of the optical shop cast a gimmicky light on the sidewalk.

　　Dacron, Orion, Lycra Spandex.

　　"I know I forget things," she said, "but I didn't know it was so obvious."

　　"It isn't."

　　"Did you hear Denise? When was it, last week?"

　　"Denise is smart and tough. No one else notices."

　　"I dial a number on the phone and forget who I'm calling. I go to the store and forget what to buy. Someone will tell me something, I'll forget it, they'll tell me again, I'll forget it, they'll tell me again, showing a funny-looking smile."

　　"We all forget," I said.

　　"I forget names, faces, phone numbers, addresses, appointments, instructions, directions."

　　"It's something that's just been happening, more or less to everyone."

　　"I forget that Steff?e doesn't like to be called Stephanie. Sometimes I call her Denise. I forget where I've parked the car and then for a long, long moment I forget what the car looks like."

　　"Forgetfulness has gotten into the air and water. It's entered the food chain."

　　"Maybe it's the gum I chew. Is that too farfetched?"

　　"Maybe it's something else."

　　"What do you mean?"

　　"You're taking something besides chewing gum."

　　"Where did you get that idea?"

　　"I got it secondhand from Steffie."

　　"Who did Steffie get it from?"

　　"Denise."

　　She paused, conceding the possibility that if Denise is the source of a rumor or theory, it could very well be true.

　　"What does Denise say I'm taking?"

　　"I wanted to ask you before I asked her."

　　"To the best of my knowledge, Jack, I'm not taking anything that could account for my memory lapses. On the other hand I'm not old, I haven't suffered an injury to the head and there's nothing in my family background except tipped uteruses."

　　"You're saying maybe Denise is right."

　　"We can't rule it out."

　　"You're saying maybe you're taking something that has the side effect of impairing memory."

　　"Either I'm taking something and I don't remember or I'm not taking something and I don't remember. My life is either/or. Either I chew regular gum or I chew sugarless gum. Either I chew gum or I smoke. Either I smoke or I gain weight. Either I gain weight or I run up the stadium steps."

　　"Sounds like a boring life."

　　"I hope it lasts forever," she said.

　　Soon the streets were covered with leaves. Leaves came tumbling and scraping down the pitched roofs. There were periods in every day when a stiff wind blew, baring the trees further, and retired men appeared in the backyards, on the small lawns out front, carrying rakes with curved teeth. Black bags were arrayed at the curbstone in lopsided rows.

　　A series of frightened children appeared at our door for their Halloween treats.

　　12

　　I went to German lessons twice a week, in the late afternoon, darkness crowding in earlier with each succeeding visit. It was Howard Dunlop's working rule that we sit facing each other during the full length of the lesson. He wanted me to study his tongue positions as he demonstrated the pronunciation of consonants, diphthongs, long and short vowels. He in turn would look closely into my mouth as I attempted to reproduce the unhappy sounds.

　　His was a mild and quiet face, an oval surface with no hint of distinctiveness until he started his vocal routines. Then the warping began. It was an eerie thing to see, shamefully fascinating, as a seizure might be if witnessed in a controlled environment. He tucked his head into his trunk, narrowed his eyes, made grimacing humanoid faces. When it was time for me to repeat the noises I did likewise, if only to please the teacher, twisting my mouth, shutting my eyes completely, conscious of an overarticulation so tortured it must have sounded like a sudden bending of the natural law, a stone or tree struggling to speak. When I opened my eyes he was only inches from my mouth, leaning in to peer. I used to wonder what he saw in there.

　　There were strained silences before and after each lesson. I tried to make small talk, get him to discuss his years as a chiropractor, his life before German. He would look off into the middle distance, not angry or bored or evasive—just detached, free of the connectedness of events, it seemed. When he did speak, about the other boarders or the landlord, there was something querulous in his voice, a drawn-out note of complaint. It was important for him to believe that he'd spent his life among people who kept missing the point.

　　"How many students do you have?"

　　"For German?"

　　"Yes."

　　"You're the only one I have for German. I used to have others. German has fallen off. These things go in cycles, like everything else."

　　"What else do you teach?"

　　"Greek, Latin, ocean sailing."

　　"People come here to learn ocean sailing?"

　　"Not so much anymore."

　　"It's amazing how many people teach these days," I said. "There is a teacher for every person. Everyone I know is either a teacher or a student. What do you think it means?"

　　He looked off toward a closet door.

　　"Do you teach anything else?" I said.

　　"Meteorology."

　　"Meteorology. How did that come about?"

　　"My mother's death had a terrible impact on me. I collapsed totally, lost my faith in God. I was inconsolable, withdrew completely into myself. Then one day by chance I saw a weather report on TV. A dynamic young man with a glowing pointer stood before a multicolored satellite photo, predicting the weather for the next five days. I sat there mesmerized by his self-assurance and skill. It was as though a message was being transmitted from the weather satellite through that young man and then to me in my canvas chair. I turned to meteorology for comfort. I read weather maps, collected books on weather, attended launchings of weather balloons. I realized weather was something I'd been looking for all my life. It brought me a sense of peace and security I'd never experienced. Dew, frost and fog. Snow flurries. The jet stream. I believe there is a grandeur in the jet stream. I began to come out of my shell, talk to people in the street. 'Nice day.' 'Looks like rain.' 'Hot enough for you?' Everyone notices the weather. First thing on rising, you go to the window, look at the weather. You do it, I do it. I made a list of goals I hoped to achieve in meteorology. I took a correspondence course, got a degree to teach the subject in buildings with a legal occupancy of less than one hundred.

　　I've taught meteorology in church basements, in trailer parks, in people's dens and living rooms. They came to hear me in Millers Creek, Lumberville, Watertown. Factory workers, housewives, merchants, members of the police and the fire. I saw something in their eyes. A hunger, a compelling need."

　　There were little holes in the cuffs of his thermal undershirt. We were standing in the middle of the room. I waited for him to go on. It was the time of year, the time of day, for a small insistent sadness to pass into the texture of things. Dusk, silence, iron chill. Something lonely in the bone.

　　When I got home, Bob Pardee was in the kitchen practicing his golf swing. Bob is Denise's father. He said he was driving through town on his way to Glassboro to make a presentation and thought he'd take us all to dinner.

　　He swung his locked hands in slow motion over his left shoulder, following through smoothly. Denise eyed him from a stool by the window. He wore a half shaggy cardigan with sleeves that draped over the cuffs.

　　"What kind of presentation?" she said.

　　"Oh, you know. Charts, arrows. Slap some colors on a wall. It's a basic outreach tool, sweetheart."

　　"Did you change jobs again?"

　　"I'm raising funds. Busy as hell, too, better believe."

　　"What kind of funds?"

　　"Just whatever's out there, you know? People want to give me food stamps, etchings. Hey, great, I don't mind."

　　He was bent over a putt. Babette leaned on the refrigerator door with her arms folded, watching him. Upstairs a British voice said: "There are forms of vertigo that do not include spinning."

　　"Funds for what?" Denise said.

　　"There's a little thing you might have had occasion to hear of, called the Nuclear Accident Readiness Foundation. Basically a legal defense fund for the industry. Just in case kind of thing."

　　"Just in case what?"

　　"Just in case I faint from hunger. Let's sneak up on some ribs, why don't we? You got your leg men, you got your breast men.

　　Babette, what do you say? I'm about semiprepared to slaughter my own animal."

　　"How many jobs is this anyway?"

　　"Don't pester me, Denise."

　　"Never mind, I don't care, do what you want."

　　Bob took the three older kids to the Wagon Wheel. I drove Babette to the river-edge house where she would read to Mr. Treadwell, the blind old man who lived there with his sister. Wilder sat between us, playing with the supermarket tabloids that Treadwell favored as reading matter. As a volunteer reader to the blind, Babette had some reservations about the old gent's appetite for the unspeakable and seamy, believing that the handicapped were morally bound to higher types of entertainment. If we couldn't look to them for victories of the human .spirit, who could we look to? They had an example to set just as she did as a reader and morale-booster. But she was professional in her duty, reading to him with high earnestness, as to a child, about dead men who leave messages on answering machines.

　　Wilder and I waited in the car. The plan was that after the reading the three of us would meet the Wagon Wheel group at the Dinky Donut, where they would have dessert and we would have dinner. I'd brought along a copy of Mein Kampf for that segment of the evening.

　　The Treadwell house was an old frame structure with rotting trellises along the porch. Less than five minutes after she'd entered, Babette came out, walked uncertainly to the far end of the porch and peered across the dim yard. Then she walked slowly toward the car.

　　"Door was open. I went in, nobody. I looked around, nothing, nobody. I went upstairs, no sign of life. There doesn't seem to be anything missing."

　　"What do you know about his sister?"

　　"She's older than he is and probably in worse shape if you disregard the fact that he's blind and she isn't."

　　The two nearest houses were dark, both up for sale, and no one at four other houses in the area knew anything about the Treadwells'

　　movements over the past few days. We drove to the state trooper barracks and talked to a female clerk who sat behind a computer console. She told us there was a disappearance every eleven seconds and taped everything we said.

　　At the Dinky Donut, outside town, Bob Pardee sat quietly as the family ate and talked. The soft pink golfer's face had begun to droop from his skull. His flesh seemed generally to sag, giving him the hangdog look of someone under strict orders to lose weight. His hair was expensively cut and layered, a certain amount of color combed in, a certain amount of technology brought to bear, but it seemed to need a more dynamic head. I realized Babette was looking at him carefully, trying to grasp the meaning of the four careening years they'd spent as man and wife. The panoramic carnage. He drank, gambled, drove his car down embankments, got fired, quit, retired, traveled in disguise to Coaltown where he paid a woman to speak Swedish to him as they screwed. It was the Swedish that enraged Babette, either that or his need to confess it, and she hit out at him—hit out with the backs of her hands, with her elbows and wrists. Old loves, old fears. Now she watched him with a tender sympathy, a reflectiveness that seemed deep and fond and generous enough to contain all the magical coun-terspells to his current run of woe, although I knew, of course, as I went back to my book, that it was only a passing affection, one of those kindnesses no one understands.

　　By noon the next day they were dragging the river.