13

　　The students tend to stick close to campus. There is nothing for them to do in Blacksmith proper, no natural haunt or attraction. They have their own food, movies, music, theater, sports, conversation and sex. This is a town of dry cleaning shops and opticians. Photos of looming Victorian homes decorate the windows of real estate firms. These pictures have not changed in years. The homes are sold or gone or stand in other towns in other states. This is a town of tag sales and yard sales, the failed possessions arrayed in driveways and tended by kids.

　　Babette called me at my office in Centenary Hall. She said Heinrich had been down at the river, wearing his camouflage cap and carrying an Instamatic, to watch them drag for the bodies, and while he was there word came that the Treadwells had been found alive but shaken in an abandoned cookie shack at the Mid-Village Mall, a vast shopping center out on the interstate. Apparently they'd been wandering through the mall for two days, lost, confused and frightened, before taking refuge in the littered kiosk. They spent two more days in the kiosk, the weak and faltering sister venturing out to scavenge food scraps from the cartoon-character disposal baskets with swinging doors. It was sheer luck that their stay at the mall coincided with a spell of mild weather. No one knew at this point why they didn't ask for help. It was probably just the vastness and strangeness of the place and their own advanced age that made them feel helpless and adrift in a landscape of remote and menacing figures. The Treadwells didn't get out much. In fact no one yet knew how they'd managed to get to the mall. Possibly their grandniece had dropped them off in her car and then forgotten to pick them up. The grandniece could not be reached, Babette said, for comment.

　　The day before the happy discovery, the police had called in a psychic to help them determine the Treadwells' whereabouts and fate. It was all over the local paper. The psychic was a woman who lived in a mobile home in a wooded area outside town. She wished to be known only as Adele T. According to the paper, she and the police chief, Hollis Wright, sat in the mobile home while she looked at photos of the Treadwells and smelled articles from their wardrobe. Then she asked the chief to leave her alone for an hour. She did exercises, ate some rice and dahl, proceeded to trance in. During this altered state, the report went on, she attempted to put a data trace on whatever distant physical systems she wished to locate, in this case Old Man Treadwell and his sister. When chief Wright re-entered the trailer, Adele T. told him to forget the river and to concentrate on dry land with a moonscape look about it, within a fifteen-mile radius of the Treadwell home. The police went at once to a gypsum processing operation ten miles down river, where they found an airline bag that contained a handgun and two kilos of uncut heroin.

　　The police had consulted Adele T. on a number of occasions and she had led them to two bludgeoned bodies, a Syrian in a refrigerator and a cache of marked bills totaling six hundred thousand dollars, although in each instance, the report concluded, the police had been looking for something else.

　　The American mystery deepens.

　　14

　　We crowded before the window in Steffie's small room, watching the spectacular sunset. Only Heinrich stayed away, either because he distrusted wholesome communal pleasures or because he believed there was something ominous in the modern sunset.

　　Later I sat up in bed in my bathrobe studying German. I muttered words to myself and wondered whether I'd be able to restrict my German-speaking at the spring conference to brief opening remarks or whether the other participants would expect the language to be used throughout, in lectures, at meals, in small talk, as a mark of our seriousness, our uniqueness in world scholarship.

　　The TV said: "And other trends that could dramatically impact your portfolio."

　　Denise came in and sprawled across the foot of the bed, her head resting on her folded arms, facing away from me. How many codes, countercodes, social histories were contained in this simple posture? A full minute passed.

　　"What are we going to do about Baba?" she said.

　　"What do you mean?"

　　"She can't remember anything."

　　"Did she ask you whether she's taking medication?"

　　"No."

　　"No she's not or no she didn't ask?"

　　"She didn't ask."

　　"She was supposed to," I said.

　　"Well she didn't."

　　"How do you know she's taking something?"

　　"I saw the bottle buried in the trash under the kitchen sink. A prescription bottle. It had her name and the name of the medication."

　　"What is the name of the medication?"

　　"Dylar. One every three days. Which sounds like it's dangerous or habit-forming or whatever."

　　"What does your drug reference say about Dylar?"

　　"It's not in there. I spent hours. There are four indexes."

　　"It must be recently marketed. Do you want me to double-check the book?"

　　"I already looked. I looked"

　　"We could always call her doctor. But I don't want to make too much of this. Everybody takes some kind of medication, everybody forgets things occasionally."

　　"Not like my mother."

　　"I forget things all the time."

　　"What do you take?"

　　"Blood pressure pills, stress pills, allergy pills, eye drops, aspirin. Run of the mill."

　　"I looked in the medicine chest in your bathroom."

　　"No Dylar?"

　　"I thought there might be a new bottle."

　　"The doctor prescribed thirty pills. That was it. Run of the mill. Everybody takes something."

　　"I still want to know," she said.

　　All this time she'd been turned away from me. There were plot potentials in this situation, chances for people to make devious maneuvers, secret plans. But now she shifted position, used an elbow to prop her upper body and watched me speculatively from the foot of the bed.

　　"Can I ask you something?"

　　"Sure," I said.

　　"You won't get mad?"

　　"You know what's in my medicine chest. What secrets are left?"

　　"Why did you name Heinrich Heinrich?"

　　"Fair question."

　　"You don't have to answer."

　　"Good question. No reason why you shouldn't ask."

　　"So why did you?"

　　"I thought it was a forceful name, a strong name. It has a kind of authority."

　　"Is he named after anyone?"

　　"No. He was born shortly after I started the department and I guess I wanted to acknowledge my good fortune. I wanted to do something German. I felt a gesture was called for."

　　"Heinrich Gerhardt Gladney?"

　　"I thought it had an authority that might cling to him. I thought it was forceful and impressive and I still do. I wanted to shield him, make him unafraid. People were naming their children Kim, Kelly and Tracy."

　　There was a long silence. She kept watching me. Her features, crowded somewhat in the center of her face, gave to her moments of concentration a puggish and half-belligerent look.

　　"Do you think I miscalculated?"

　　"It's not for me to say."

　　"There's something about German names, the German language, German things. I don't know what it is exactly. It's just there. In the middle of it all is Hitler, of course."

　　"He was on again last night."

　　"He's always on. We couldn't have television without him."

　　"They lost the war," she said. "How great could they be?"

　　"A valid point. But it's not a question of greatness. It's not a question of good and evil. I don't know what it is. Look at it this way. Some people always wear a favorite color. Some people carry a gun. Some people put on a uniform and feel bigger, stronger, safer. It's in this area that my obsessions dwell."

　　Steffie came in wearing Denise's green visor. I didn't know what this meant. She climbed up on the bed and all three of us went through my German-English dictionary, looking for words that sound about the same in both languages, like orgy and shoe.

　　Heinrich came running down the hall, burst into the room.

　　"Come on, hurry up, plane crash footage." Then he was out the door, the girls were off the bed, all three of them running along the hall to the TV set.

　　I sat in bed a little stunned. The swiftness and noise of their leaving had put the room in a state of molecular agitation. In the debris of invisible matter, the question seemed to be, What is happening here? By the time I got to the room at the end of the hall, there was only a puff of black smoke at the edge of the screen. But the crash was shown two more times, once in stop-action replay, as an analyst attempted to explain the reason for the plunge. A jet trainer in an air show in New Zealand.

　　We had two closet doors that opened by themselves.

　　That night, a Friday, we gathered in front of the set, as was the custom and the rule, with take-out Chinese. There were flopds, earthquakes, mud slides, erupting volcanoes. We'd never before been so attentive to our duty, our Friday assembly. Heinrich was not sullen, I was not bored. Steffie, brought close to tears by a sitcom husband arguing with his wife, appeared totally absorbed in these documentary clips of calamity and death. Babette tried to switch to a comedy series about a group of racially mixed kids who build their own communications satellite. She was startled by the force of our objection. We were otherwise silent, watching houses slide into the ocean, whole villages crackle and ignite in a mass of advancing lava. Every disaster made us wish for more, for something bigger, grander, more sweeping.

　　I walked into my office on Monday to find Murray sitting in the chair adjacent to the desk, like someone waiting for a nurse to arrive with a blood-pressure gauge. He'd been having trouble, he said, establishing an Elvis Presley power base in the department of American environments. The chairman, Alfonse Stompanato, seemed to feel that one of the other instructors, a three-hundred-pound former rock 'n' roll bodyguard named Dimitrios Cotsakis, had established prior right by having flown to Memphis when the King died, interviewed members of the King's entourage and family, been interviewed himself on local television as an Interpreter of the Phenomenon.

　　A more than middling coup, Murray conceded. I suggested that I might drop by his next lecture, informally, unannounced, simply to lend a note of consequence to the proceedings, to give him the benefit of whatever influence and prestige might reside in my office, my subject, my physical person. He nodded slowly, fingering the ends of his beard.

　　Later at lunch I spotted only one empty chair, at a table occupied by the New York émigrés. Alfonse sat at the head of the table, a commanding presence even in a campus lunchroom. He was large, sardonic, dark-staring, with scarred brows and a furious beard fringed in gray. It was the very beard I would have grown in 1969 if Janet Savory, my second wife, Heinrich's mother, hadn't argued against it. "Let them see that bland expanse," she said, in her tiny dry voice. "It is more effective than you think."

　　Alfonse invested everything he did with a sense of all-consuming purpose. He knew four languages, had a photographic memory, did complex mathematics in his head. He'd once told me that the art of getting ahead in New York was based on learning how to express dissatisfaction in an interesting way. The air was full of rage and complaint. People had no tolerance for your particular hardship unless you knew how to entertain them with it. Alfonse himself was occasionally entertaining in a pulverizing way. He had a manner that enabled him to absorb and destroy all opinions in conflict with his. When he talked about popular culture, he exercised the closed logic of a religious zealot, one who kills for his beliefs. His breathing grew heavy, arrhythmic, his brows seemed to lock. The other émigrés appeared to find his challenges and taunts a proper context for their endeavor. They used his office to pitch pennies to the wall.

　　I said to him, "Why is it, Alfonse, that decent, well-meaning and responsible people find themselves intrigued by catastrophe when they see it on television?"

　　I told him about the recent evening of lava, mud and raging water that the children and I had found so entertaining.

　　We wanted more, more.

　　"It's natural, it's normal," he said, with a reassuring nod. "It happens to everybody."

　　"Why?"

　　"Because we're suffering from brain fade. We need an occasional catastrophe to break up the incessant bombardment of information."

　　"It's obvious," Lasher said. A slight man with a taut face and slicked-back hair.

　　"The flow is constant," Alfonse said. "Words, pictures, numbers, facts, graphics, statistics, specks, waves, particles, motes. Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we need them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else. This is where California comes in. Mud slides, brush fires, coastal erosion, earthquakes, mass killings, et cetera. We can relax and enjoy these disasters because in our hearts we feel that California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom."

　　Cotsakis crushed a can of Diet Pepsi and threw it at a garbage pail.

　　"Japan is pretty good for disaster footage," Alfonse said. "India remains largely untapped. They have tremendous potential with their famines, monsoons, religious strife, train wrecks, boat sinkings, et cetera. But their disasters tend to go unrecorded. Three lines in the newspaper. No film footage, no satellite hookup. This is why California is so important. We not only enjoy seeing them punished for their relaxed life-style and progressive social ideas but we know we're not missing anything. The cameras are right there. They're standing by. Nothing terrible escapes their scrutiny."

　　"You're saying it's more or less universal, to be fascinated by TV disasters."

　　"For most people there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set. If a thing happens on television, we have every right to find it fascinating, whatever it is."

　　"I don't know whether to feel good or bad about learning that my experience is widely shared."

　　"Feel bad," he said.

　　"It's obvious," Lasher said. "We all feel bad. But we can enjoy it on that level."

　　Murray said, "This is what comes from the wrong kind of attentiveness. People get brain fade. This is because they've forgotten how to listen and look as children. They've forgotten how to collect data. In the psychic sense a forest fire on TV is on a lower plane than a ten-second spot for Automatic Dishwasher All. The commercial has deeper waves, deeper emanations. But we have reversed the relative significance of these things. This is why people's eyes, ears, brains and nervous systems have grown weary. It's a simple case of misuse."

　　Grappa casually tossed half a buttered roll at Lasher, hitting him on the shoulder. Grappa was pale and baby-fattish and the tossed roll was an attempt to get Lasher's attention.

　　Grappa said to him, "Did you ever brush your teeth with your finger?"

　　"I brushed my teeth with my finger the first time I stayed overnight at my wife's parents' house, before we were married, when her parents spent a weekend at Asbury Park. They were an Ipana family."

　　"Forgetting my toothbrush is a fetish with me," Cotsakis said. "I brushed my teeth with my finger at Woodstock, Altamont, Monterey, about a dozen other seminal events."

　　Grappa looked at Murray.

　　"I brushed my teeth with my finger after the Ali-Foreman fight in Zaire," Murray said. "That's the southernmost point I've ever brushed my teeth with my finger at."

　　Lasher looked at Grappa.

　　"Did you ever crap in a toilet bowl that had no seat?"

　　Grappa's response was semi-lyrical. "A great and funky men's room in an old Socony Mobil station on the Boston Post Road the first time my father took the car outside the city. The station with the flying red horse. You want the car? I can give you car details down to the last little option."

　　"These are the things they don't teach," Lasher said. "Bowls with no seats. Pissing in sinks. The culture of public toilets. All those great diners, movie houses, gas stations. The whole ethos of the road. I've pissed in sinks all through the American West. I've slipped across the border to piss in sinks in Manitoba and Alberta. This is what it's all about. The great western skies. The Best Western motels. The diners and drive-ins. The poetry of the road, the plains, the desert. The filthy stinking toilets. I pissed in a sink in Utah when it was twenty-two below. That's the coldest I've ever pissed in a sink in."

　　Alfonse Stompanato looked hard at Lasher.

　　"Where were you when James Dean died?" he said in a threatening voice.

　　"In my wife's parents' house before we were married, listening to 'Make Believe Ballroom' on the old Emerson table model. The Motorola with the glowing dial was already a thing of the past."

　　"You spent a lot of time in your wife's parents' house, it seems, screwing," Alfonse said.

　　"We were kids. It was too early in the cultural matrix for actual screwing."

　　"What were you doing?"

　　"She's my wife, Alfonse. You want me to tell a crowded table?"

　　"James Dean is dead and you're groping some twelve-year-old."

　　Alfonse glared at Dimitrios Cotsakis.

　　"Where were you when James Dean died?"

　　"In the back of my uncle's restaurant in Astoria, Queens, vacuuming with the Hoover."

　　Alfonse looked at Grappa.

　　"Where the hell were you?" he said, as if the thought had just occurred to him that the actor's death was not complete without some record of Grappa's whereabouts.

　　"I know exactly where I was, Alfonse. Let me think a minute."

　　"Where were you, you son of a bitch?"

　　"I always know these things down to the smallest detail. But I was a dreamy adolescent. I have these gaps in my life."

　　"You were busy jerking off. Is that what you mean?"

　　"Ask me Joan Crawford."

　　"September thirty, nineteen fifty-five. James Dean dies. Where is Nicholas Grappa and what is he doing?"

　　"Ask me Gable, ask me Monroe."

　　"The silver Porsche approaches an intersection, going like a streak. No time to brake for the Ford sedan. Glass shatters, metal screams. Jimmy Dean sits in the driver's seat with a broken neck, multiple fractures and lacerations. It is five forty-five in the afternoon, Pacific Coast Time. Where is Nicholas Grappa, the jerk-off king of the Bronx?"

　　"Ask me Jeff Chandler."

　　"You're a middle-aged man, Nicky, who trafficks in his own childhood. You have an obligation to produce."

　　"Ask me John Garfield, ask me Monty Clift."

　　Cotsakis was a monolith of thick and wadded flesh. He'd been Little Richard's personal bodyguard and had led security details at rock concerts before joining the faculty here.

　　Elliot Lasher threw a chunk of raw carrot at him, then asked, "Did you ever have a woman peel flaking skin from your back after a few days at the beach?"

　　"Cocoa Beach, Florida," Cotsakis said. "It was very tremendous. The second or third greatest experience of my life."

　　"Was she naked?" Lasher said.

　　"To the waist," Cotsakis said.

　　"From which direction?" Lasher said.

　　I watched Grappa throw a cracker at Murray. He skimmed it backhand like a Frisbee.

　　15

　　I put on my dark glasses, composed my face and walked into the room. There were twenty-five or thirty young men and women, many in fall colors, seated in armchairs and sofas and on the beige broadloom. Murray walked among them, speaking, his right hand trembling in a stylized way. When he saw me, he smiled sheepishly. I stood against the wall, attempting to loom, my arms folded under the black gown.

　　Murray was in the midst of a thoughtful monologue.

　　"Did his mother know that Elvis would die young? She talked about assassins. She talked about the life. The life of a star of this type and magnitude. Isn't the life structured to cut you down early? This is the point, isn't it? There are rules, guidelines. If you don't have the grace and wit to die early, you are forced to vanish, to hide as if in shame and apology. She worried about his sleepwalking. She thought he might go out a window. I have a feeling about mothers. Mothers really do know. The folklore is correct."

　　"Hitler adored his mother," I said.

　　A surge of attention, unspoken, identifiable only in a certain convergence of stillness, an inward tensing. Murray kept moving, of course, but a bit more deliberately, picking his way between the chairs, the people seated on the floor. I stood against the wall, arms folded.

　　"Elvis and Gladys liked to nuzzle and pet," he said. "They slept in the same bed until he began to approach physical maturity. They talked baby talk to each other all the time."

　　"Hitler was a lazy kid. His report card was full of unsatisfactorys. But Klara loved him, spoiled him, gave him the attention his father failed to give him. She was a quiet woman, modest and religious, and a good cook and housekeeper."

　　"Gladys walked Elvis to school and back every day. She defended him in little street rumbles, lashed out at any kid who tried to bully him."

　　"Hitler fantasized. He took piano lessons, made sketches of museums and villas. He sat around the house a lot. Klara tolerated this. He was the first of her children to survive infancy. Three others had died."

　　"Elvis confided in Gladys. He brought his girlfriends around to meet her."

　　"Hitler wrote a poem to his mother. His mother and his niece were the women with the greatest hold on his mind."

　　"When Elvis went into the army, Gladys became ill and depressed. She sensed something, maybe as much about herself as about him. Her psychic apparatus was flashing all the wrong signals. Foreboding and gloom."

　　"There's not much doubt that Hitler was what we call a mama's boy."

　　A note-taking young man murmured absently, "Mutter-s?hnchen." I regarded him warily. Then, on an impulse, I abandoned my stance at the wall and began to pace the room like Murray, occasionally pausing to gesture, to listen, to gaze out a window or up at the ceiling.

　　"Elvis could hardly bear to let Gladys out of his sight when her condition grew worse. He kept a vigil -at the hospital."

　　"When his mother became severely ill, Hitler put a bed in the kitchen to be closer to her. He cooked and cleaned."

　　"Elvis fell apart with grief when Gladys died. He fondled and petted her in the casket. He talked baby talk to her until she was in the ground."

　　"Klara's funeral cost three hundred and seventy kronen. Hitler wept at the grave and fell into a period of depression and self-pity. He felt an intense loneliness. He'd lost not only his beloved mother but also his sense of home and hearth."

　　"It seems fairly certain that Gladys's death caused a fundamental shift at the center of the King's world view. She'd been his anchor, his sense of security. He began to withdraw from the real world, to enter the state of his own dying."

　　"For the rest of his life, Hitler could not bear to be anywhere near Christmas decorations because his mother had died near a Christmas tree."

　　"Elvis made death threats, received death threats. He took mortuary tours and became interested in UFOs. He began to study the Bardo Th?dol, commonly known as The Tibetan Book of the Dead. This is a guide to dying and being reborn."

　　"Years later, in the grip of self-myth and deep remoteness, Hitler kept a portrait of his mother in his spartan quarters at Obersalzberg. He began to hear a buzzing in his left ear."

　　Murray and I passed each other near the center of the room, almost colliding. Alfonse Stompanato entered, followed by several students, drawn perhaps by some magnetic wave of excitation, some frenzy in the air. He settled his surly bulk in a chair as Murray and I circled each other and headed off in opposite directions, avoiding an exchange of looks.

　　"Elvis fulfilled the terms of the contract. Excess, deterioration, self-destructiveness, grotesque behavior, a physical bloating and a series of insults to the brain, self-delivered. His place in legend is secure. He bought off the skeptics by dying early, horribly, unnecessarily. No one could deny him now. His mother probably saw it all, as on a nineteen-inch screen, years before her own death."

　　Murray, happily deferring to me, went to a corner of the room and sat on the floor, leaving me to pace and gesture alone, secure in my professional aura of power, madness and death.

　　"Hitler called himself the lonely wanderer out of nothingness. He sucked on lozenges, spoke to people in endless monologues, free-associating, as if the language came from some vastness beyond the world and he was simply the medium of revelation. It's interesting to wonder if he looked back from the führerbunker, beneath the burning city, to the early days of his power. Did he think of the small groups of tourists who visited the little settlement where his mother was born and where he'd spent summers with his cousins, riding in ox carts and making kites? They came to honor the site, Klara's birthplace. They entered the farmhouse, poked around tentatively. Adolescent boys climbed on the roof. In time the numbers began to increase. They took pictures, slipped small items into their pockets. Then crowds came, mobs of people overrunning the courtyard and singing patriotic songs, painting swastikas on the walls, on the flanks of farm animals. Crowds came to his mountain villa, so many people he had to stay indoors. They picked up pebbles where he'd walked and took them home as souvenirs. Crowds came to hear him speak, crowds erotically charged, the masses he once called his only bride. He closed his eyes, clenched his fists as he spoke, twisted his sweat-drenched body, remade his voice as a thrilling weapon. 'Sex murders,' someone called these speeches. Crowds came to be hypnotized by the voice, the party anthems, the torchlight parades."

　　I stared at the carpet and counted silently to seven.

　　"But wait. How familiar this all seems, how close to ordinary. Crowds come, get worked up, touch and press—people eager to be transported. Isn't this ordinary? We know all this. There must have been something different about those crowds. What was it? Let me whisper the terrible word, from the Old English, from the Old German, from the Old Norse. Death. Many of those crowds were assembled in the name of death. They were there to attend tributes to the dead. Processions, songs, speeches, dialogues with the dead, recitations of the names of the dead. They were there to see pyres and flaming wheels, thousands of flags dipped in salute, thousands of uniformed mourners. There were ranks and squadrons, elaborate backdrops, blood banners and black dress uniforms. Crowds came to form a shield against their own dying. To become a crowd is to keep out death. To break off from the crowd is to risk death as an individual, to face dying alone. Crowds came for this reason above all others. They were there to be a crowd."

　　Murray sat across the room. His eyes showed a deep gratitude. I had been generous with the power and madness at my disposal, allowing my subject to be associated with an infinitely lesser figure, a fellow who sat in La-Z-Boy chairs and shot out TVs. It was not a small matter. We all had an aura to maintain, and in sharing mine with a friend I was risking the very things that made me untouchable.

　　People gathered round, students and staff, and in the mild din of half heard remarks and orbiting voices I realized we were now a crowd. Not that I needed a crowd around me now. Least of all now. Death was strictly a professional matter here. I was comfortable with it, I was on top of it. Murray made his way to my side and escorted me from the room, parting the crowd with his fluttering hand.

　　16

　　This was the day Wilder started crying at two in the afternoon. At six he was still crying, sitting on the kitchen floor and looking through the oven window, and we ate dinner quickly, moving around him or stepping over him to reach the stove and refrigerator. Babette watched him as she ate. She had a class to teach in sitting, standing and walking. It would start in an hour and a half. She looked at me in a drained and supplicating way. She'd spoken soothingly to him, hefted and caressed him, checked his teeth, given him a bath, examined him, tickled him, fed him, tried to get him to crawl into his vinyl play tunnel. Her old people would be waiting in the church basement.

　　It was rhythmic crying, a measured statement of short urgent pulses. At times it seemed he would break off into a whimper, an animal complaint, irregular and exhausted, but the rhythm held, the heightened beat, the washed pink sorrow in his face.

　　"We'll take him to the doctor," I said. "Then I'll drop you at the church."

　　"Would the doctor see a crying child? Besides, his doctor doesn't have hours now."

　　"What about your doctor?"

　　"I think he does. But a crying child, Jack. What can I say to the man? 'My child is crying.'"

　　"Is there a condition more basic?"

　　There'd been no sense of crisis until now. Just exasperation and despair. But once we decided to visit the doctor, we began to hurry, to fret. We looked for Wilder's jacket and shoes, tried to remember what he'd eaten in the last twenty-four hours, anticipated questions the doctor would ask and rehearsed our answers carefully. It seemed vital to agree on the answers even if we weren't sure they were correct. Doctors lose interest in people who contradict each other. This fear has long informed my relationship with doctors, that they would lose interest in me, instruct their receptionists to call other names before mine, take my dying for granted.

　　I waited in the car while Babette and Wilder went into the medical building at the end of Elm. Doctors' offices depress me even more than hospitals do because of their air of negative expectancy and because of the occasional patient who leaves with good news, shaking the doctor's antiseptic hand and laughing loudly, laughing at everything the doctor says, booming with laughter, with crude power, making a point of ignoring the other patients as he walks past the waiting room still laughing provocatively— he is already clear of them, no longer associated with their weekly gloom, their anxious inferior dying. I would rather visit an emergency ward, some urban well of trembling, where people come in gut-shot, slashed, sleepy-eyed with opium compounds, broken needles in their arms. These things have nothing to do with my own eventual death, nonviolent, small-town, thoughtful.

　　They came out of the small bright lobby onto the street. It was cold, empty and dark. The boy walked next to his mother, holding her hand, still crying, and they seemed a picture of such amateurish sadness and calamity that I nearly started laughing—laughing not at the sadness but at the picture they made of it, at the disparity between their grief and its appearances. My feelings of tenderness and pity were undermined by the sight of them crossing the sidewalk in their bundled clothing, the child determinedly weeping, his mother drooping as she walked, wild-haired, a wretched and pathetic pair. They were inadequate to the spoken grief, the great single-minded anguish. Does this explain the existence of professional mourners? They keep a wake from lapsing into comic pathos.

　　"What did the doctor say?"

　　"Give him an aspirin and put him to bed."

　　"That's what Denise said."

　　"I told him that. He said, 'Well, why didn't you do it?'"

　　"Why didn't we?"

　　"She's a child, not a doctor—that's why."

　　"Did you tell him that?"

　　"I don't know what I told him," she said, "I'm never in control of what I say to doctors, much less what they say to me. There's some kind of disturbance in the air."

　　"I know exactly what you mean."

　　"It's like having a conversation during a spacewalk, dangling in those heavy suits."

　　"Everything drifts and floats."

　　"I lie to doctors all the time."

　　"So do I."

　　"But why?" she said.

　　As I started the car I realized his crying had changed in pitch and quality. The rhythmic urgency had given way to a sustained, inarticulate and mournful sound. He was keening now. These were expressions of Mideastern lament, of an anguish so accessible that it rushes to overwhelm whatever immediately caused it. There was something permanent and soul-struck in this crying. It was a sound of inbred desolation.

　　"What do we do?"

　　"Think of something," she said.

　　'There's still fifteen minutes before your class is due to start. Let's take him to the hospital, to the emergency entrance. Just to see what they say."

　　"You can't take a child to an emergency ward because he's crying. If anything is not an emergency, this would be it."

　　"I'll wait in the car," I said.

　　"What do I tell them? 'My child is crying.' Do they even have an emergency ward?"

　　"Don't you remember? We took the Stovers this past summer."

　　"Why?"

　　"Their car was being repaired."

　　"Never mind."

　　"They inhaled the spray mist from some kind of stain remover."

　　"Take me to my class," she said.

　　Posture. When I pulled up in front of the church, some of her students were walking down the steps to the basement entrance. Babette looked at her son—a searching, pleading and desperate look. He was in the sixth hour of his crying. She ran along the sidewalk and into the building.

　　I thought of taking him to the hospital. But if a doctor who examined the boy thoroughly in his cozy office with paintings on the wall in elaborate gilded frames could find nothing wrong, then what could emergency technicians do, people trained to leap on chests and pound at static hearts?

　　I picked him up and set him against the steering wheel, facing me, his feet on my thighs. The huge lament continued, wave on wave. It was a sound so large and pure I could almost listen to it, try consciously to apprehend it, as one sets up a mental register in a concert hall or theater. He was not sniveling or blubbering. He was crying out, saying nameless things in a way that touched me with its depth and richness. This was an ancient dirge all the more impressive for its resolute monotony. Ululation. I held him upright with a hand under each arm. As the crying continued, a curious shift developed in my thinking. I found that I did not necessarily wish him to stop. It might not be so terrible, I thought, to have to sit and listen to this a while longer. We looked at each other. Behind that dopey countenance, a complex intelligence operated. I held him with one hand, using the other to count his fingers inside the mittens, aloud, in German. The inconsolable crying went on. I let it wash over me, like rain in sheets. I entered it, in a sense. I let it fall and tumble across my face and chest. I began to think he had disappeared inside this wailing noise and if I could join him in his lost and suspended place we might together perform some reckless wonder of intelligibility. I let it break across my body. It might not be so terrible, I thought, to have to sit here for four more hours, with the motor running and the heater on, listening to this uniform lament. It might be good, it might be strangely soothing. I entered it, fell into it, letting it enfold and cover me. He cried with his eyes open, his eyes closed, his hands in his pockets, his mittens on and off. I sat there nodding sagely.

　　On an impulse I turned him around, sat him on my lap and started up the car, letting Wilder steer. We'd done this once before, for a distance of twenty yards, at Sunday dusk, in August, our street deep in drowsy shadow. Again he responded, crying as he steered, as we turned corners, as I brought the car to a halt back at the Congregational church. I set him on my left leg, an arm around him, drawing him toward me, and let my mind drift toward near sleep. The sound moved into a fitful distance. Now and then a car went by. I leaned against the door, faintly aware of his breath on my thumb. Some time later Babette was knocking on the window and Wilder was crawling across the seat to lift the latch for her. She got in, adjusted his hat, picked a crumpled tissue off the floor.

　　We were halfway home when the crying stopped. It stopped suddenly, without a change in tone and intensity. Babette said nothing, I kept my eyes on the road. He sat between us, looking into the radio. I waited for Babette to glance at me behind his back, over his head, to show relief, happiness, hopeful suspense. I didn't know how I felt and wanted a clue. But she looked straight ahead as if fearful that any change in the sensitive texture of sound, movement, expression would cause the crying to break out again.

　　At the house no one spoke. They all moved quietly from room to room, watching him distantly, with sneaky and respectful looks. When he asked for some milk, Denise ran softly to the kitchen, barefoot, in her pajamas, sensing that by economy of movement and lightness of step she might keep from disturbing the grave and dramatic air he had brought with him into the house. He drank the milk down in a single powerful swallow, still fully dressed, a mitten pinned to his sleeve.

　　They watched him with something like awe. Nearly seven straight hours of serious crying. It was as though he'd just returned from a period of wandering in some remote and holy place, in sand barrens or snowy ranges—a place where things are said, sights are seen, distances reached which we in our ordinary toil can only regard with the mingled reverence and wonder we hold in reserve for feats of the most sublime and difficult dimensions.

　　17

　　Babette said to me in bed one night, "Isn't it great having all these kids around?"

　　'There'll be one more soon."

　　"Who?"

　　"Bee is coming in a couple of days."

　　"Good. Who else can we get?"

　　The next day Denise decided to confront her mother directly about the medication she was or was not taking, hoping to trick Babette into a confession, an admission or some minimal kind of flustered response. This was not a tactic the girl and I had discussed but I couldn't help admiring the boldness of her timing. All six of us were jammed into the car on our way to the Mid-Village Mall and Denise simply waited for a natural break in the conversation, directing her question toward the back of Babette's head, in a voice drained of inference.

　　"What do you know about Dylar?"

　　"Is that the black girl who's staying with the Stovers?"

　　"That's Dakar," Steffie said.

　　"Dakar isn't her name, it's where she's from," Denise said. "It's a country on the ivory coast of Africa."

　　"The capital is Lagos," Babette said. "I know that because of a surfer movie I saw once where they travel all over the world."

　　"The Perfect Wave" Heinrich said. "I saw it on TV."

　　"But what's the girl's name?" Steffie said.

　　"I don't know," Babette said, "but the movie wasn't called The Perfect Wave. The perfect wave is what they were looking for."

　　'They go to Hawaii," Denise told Steffie, "and wait for these tidal waves to come from Japan. They're called origamis."

　　"And the movie was called The Long Hot Summer," her mother said.

　　"The Long Hot Summer," Heinrich said, "happens to be a play by Tennessee Ernie Williams."

　　"It doesn't matter," Babette said, "because you can't copyright titles anyway."

　　"If she's an African," Steffie said, "I wonder if she ever rode a camel."

　　'Try an Audi Turbo."

　　"Try a Toyota Supra."

　　"What is it camels store in their humps?" Babette said. "Food or water? I could never get that straight."

　　"There are one-hump camels and two-hump camels," Heinrich told her. "So it depends which kind you're talking about."

　　"Are you telling me a two-hump camel stores food in one hump and water in the other?"

　　"The important thing about camels," he said, "is that camel meat is considered a delicacy."

　　"I thought that was alligator meat," Denise said.

　　"Who introduced the camel to America?" Babette said. "They had them out west for a while to carry supplies to coolies who were building the great railroads that met at Ogden, Utah. I remember my history exams."

　　"Are you sure you're not talking about llamas?" Heinrich said.

　　"The llama stayed in Peru," Denise said. "Peru has the llama, the vicu?a and one other animal. Bolivia has tin. Chile has copper and iron."

　　"I'll give anyone in this car five dollars," Heinrich said, "if they can name the population of Bolivia."

　　"Bolivians," my daughter said.

　　The family is the cradle of the world's misinformation. There must be something in family life that generates factual error. Over-closeness, the noise and heat of being. Perhaps something even deeper, like the need to survive. Murray says we are fragile creatures surrounded by a world of hostile facts. Facts threaten our happiness and security. The deeper we delve into the nature of things, the looser our structure may seem to become. The family process works toward sealing off the world. Small errors grow heads, fictions proliferate. I tell Murray that ignorance and confusion can't possibly be the driving forces behind family solidarity. What an idea, what a subversion. He asks me why the strongest family units exist in the least developed societies. Not to know is a weapon of survival, he says. Magic and superstition become entrenched as the powerful orthodoxy of the clan. The family is strongest where objective reality is most likely to be misinterpreted. What a heartless theory, I say. But Murray insists it's true.

　　In a huge hardware store at the mall I saw Eric Massingale, a former microchip sales engineer who changed his life by coming out here to join the teaching staff of the computer center at the Hill. He was slim and pale, with a dangerous grin.

　　"You're not wearing dark glasses, Jack."

　　"I only wear them on campus."

　　"I get it."

　　We went our separate ways into the store's deep interior. A great echoing din, as of the extinction of a species of beast, filled the vast space. People bought twenty-two-foot ladders, six kinds of sandpaper, power saws that could fell trees. The aisles were long and bright, filled with oversized brooms, massive sacks of peat and dung, huge Rubbermaid garbage cans. Rope hung like tropical fruit, beautifully braided strands, thick, brown, strong. What a great thing a coil of rope is to look at and feel. I bought fifty feet of Manila hemp just to have it around, show it to my son, talk about where it comes from, how it's made. People spoke English, Hindi, Vietnamese, related tongues.

　　I ran into Massingale again at the cash terminals.

　　"I've never seen you off campus, Jack. You look different without your glasses and gown. Where did you get that sweater? Is that a Turkish army sweater? Mail order, right?"

　　He looked me over, felt the material of the water-repellent jacket I was carrying draped across my arm. Then he backed up, altering his perspective, nodding a little, his grin beginning to take on a self-satisfied look, reflecting some inner calculation.

　　"I think I know those shoes," he said.

　　What did he mean, he knew these shoes?

　　"You're a different person altogether."

　　"Different in what way, Eric?"

　　"You won't take offense?" he said, the grin turning lascivious, rich with secret meaning.

　　"Of course not. Why would I?"

　　"Promise you won't take offense."

　　"I won't take offense."

　　"You look so harmless, Jack. A big, harmless, aging, indistinct sort of guy."

　　"Why would I take offense?" I said, paying for my rope and hurrying out the door.

　　The encounter put me in the mood to shop. I found the others and we walked across two parking lots to the main structure in the Mid-Village Mall, a ten-story building arranged around a center court of waterfalls, promenades and gardens. Babette and the kids followed me into the elevator, into the shops set along the tiers, through the emporiums and department stores, puzzled but excited by my desire to buy. When I could not decide between two shirt" they encouraged me to buy both. When I said I was hungry, they fed me pretzels, beer, souvlaki. The two girls scouted ahead, spotting things they thought I might want or need, running back to get me, to clutch my arms, plead with me to follow. They were my guides to endless well-being. People swarmed through the boutiques and gourmet shops. Organ music rose from the great court. We smelled chocolate, popcorn, cologne; we smelled rugs and furs, hanging salamis and deathly vinyl. My family gloried in the event. I was one of them, shopping, at last. They gave me advice, badgered clerks on my behalf. I kept seeing myself unexpectedly in some reflecting surface. We moved from store to store, rejecting not only items in certain departments, not only entire departments but whole stores, mammoth corporations that did not strike our fancy for one reason or another. There was always another store, three floors, eight floors, basement full of cheese graters and paring knives. I shopped with reckless abandon. I shopped for immediate needs and distant contingencies. I shopped for its own sake, looking and touching, inspecting merchandise I had no intention of buying, then buying it. I sent clerks into their fabric books and pattern books to search for elusive designs. I began to grow in value and self-regard. I filled myself out, found new aspects of myself, located a person I'd forgotten existed. Brightness settled around me. We crossed from furniture to men's wear, walking through cosmetics. Our images appeared on mirrored columns, in glassware and chrome, on TV monitors in security rooms. I traded money for goods. The more money I spent, the less important it seemed. I was bigger than these sums. These sums poured off my skin like so much rain. These sums in fact came back to me in the form of existential credit. I felt expansive, inclined to be sweepíngly generous, and told the kids to pick out their Christmas gifts here and now. I gestured in what I felt was an expansive manner. I could tell they were impressed. They fanned out across the area, each of them suddenly inclined to be private, shadowy, even secretive. Periodically one of them would return to register the name of an item with Babette, careful not to let the others know what it was. I myself was not to be bothered with tedious details. I was the benefactor, the one who dispenses gifts, bonuses, bribes, baksheesh. The children knew it was the nature of such things that I could not be expected to engage in technical discussions about the gifts themselves. We ate another meal. A band played live Muzak. Voices rose ten stories from the gardens and promenades, a roar that echoed and swirled through the vast gallery, mixing with noises from the tiers, with shuffling feet and chiming bells, the hum of escalators, the sound of people eating, the human buzz of some vivid and happy transaction.

　　We drove home in silence. We went to our respective rooms, wishing to be alone. A little later I watched Steffie in front of the TV set. She moved her lips, attempting to match the words as they were spoken.

　　18

　　It is the nature and pleasure of townspeople to distrust the city. All the guiding principles that might flow from a center of ideas and cultural energies are regarded as corrupt, one or another kind of pornography. This is how it is with towns.

　　But Blacksmith is nowhere near a large city. We don't feel threatened and aggrieved in quite the same way other towns do. We're not smack in the path of history and its contaminations. If our complaints have a focal point, it would have to be the TV set, where the outer torment lurks, causing fears and secret desires. Certainly little or no resentment attaches to the College-on-the-Hill as an emblem of ruinous influence. The school occupies an ever serene edge of the townscape, semidetached, more or less scenic, suspended in political calm. Not a place designed to aggravate suspicions.

　　In light snow I drove to the airport outside Iron City, a large town sunk in confusion, a center of abandonment and broken glass rather than a place of fully realized urban decay. Bee, my twelve-year-old, was due in on a flight from Washington, with two stops and one change of planes along the way. But it was her mother, Tweedy Browner, who showed up in the arrivals area, a small dusty third-world place in a state of halted renovation. For a moment I thought Bee was dead and Tweedy had come to tell me in person.

　　"Where is Bee?"

　　"She's flying in later today. That's why I'm here. To spend some time with her. I have to go to Boston tomorrow. Family business."

　　"But where is she?"

　　"With her father."

　　"I'm her father, Tweedy."

　　"Malcolm Hunt, stupid. My husband."

　　"He's your husband, he's not her father."

　　"Do you still love me, Tuck?" she said.

　　She called me Tuck, which is what her mother used to call her father. All the male Browners were called Tuck. When the line began to pale, producing a series of aesthetes and incompetents, they gave the name to any man who married into the family, within reason. I was the first of these and kept expecting to hear a note of overrefined irony in their voices when they called me by that name. I thought that when tradition becomes too flexible, irony enters the voice. Nasality, sarcasm, self-caricature and so on. They would punish me by mocking themselves. But they were sweet about it, entirely sincere, even grateful to me for allowing them to carry on.

　　She wore a Shetland sweater, tweed skirt, knee socks and penny loafers. There was a sense of Protestant disrepair about her, a collapsed aura in which her body struggled to survive. The fair and angular face, the slightly bulging eyes, the signs of strain and complaint that showed about the mouth and around the eyes, the pulsing at the temple, the raised veins in the hands and neck. Cigarette ash clung to the loose weave of her sweater.

　　"For the third time. Where is she?"

　　"Indonesia, more or less. Malcolm's working in deep cover, sponsoring a Communist revival. It's part of an elegant scheme designed to topple Castro. Let's get out of here, Tuck, before children come swarming around to beg."

　　"Is she coming alone?"

　　"Why wouldn't she be?"

　　"From the Far East to Iron City can't be that simple."

　　"Bee can cope when she has to. She wants to be a travel writer as a matter of actual fact. Sits a horse well."

　　She took a deep drag on her cigarette and exhaled smoke in rapid expert streams from nose and mouth, a routine she used when she wanted to express impatience with her immediate surroundings. There were no bars or restaurants at the airport—just a stand with prepackaged sandwiches, presided over by a man with sect marks on his face. We got Tweedy's luggage, went out to the car and drove through Iron City, past deserted factories, on mainly deserted avenues, a city of hills, occasional cobbled streets, fine old homes here and there, holiday wreaths in the windows.

　　"Tuck, I'm not happy."

　　"Why not?"

　　"I thought you'd love me forever, frankly. I depend on you for that. Malcolm's away so much."

　　"We get a divorce, you take all my money, you marry a well-to-do, well-connected, well-tailored diplomat who secretly runs agents in and out of sensitive and inaccessible areas."

　　"Malcolm has always been drawn to jungly places."

　　We were traveling parallel to railroad tracks. The weeds were full of Styrofoam cups, tossed from train windows or wind-blown north from the depot.

　　"Janet has been drawn to Montana, to an ashram," I said.

　　"Janet Savory? Good God, whatever for?"

　　"Her name is Mother Devi now. She operates the ashram's business activities. Investments, real estate, tax shelters. It's what Janet has always wanted. Peace of mind in a profit-oriented context."

　　"Marvelous bone structure, Janet."

　　"She had a talent for stealth."

　　"You say that with such bitterness. I've never known you to be bitter, Tuck."

　　"Stupid but not bitter."

　　"What do you mean by stealth? Was she covert, like Malcolm?"

　　"She wouldn't tell me how much money she made. I think she used to read my mail. Right after Heinrich was born, she got me involved in a complex investment scheme with a bunch of multilingual people. She said she had information."

　　"But she was wrong and you lost vast sums."

　　"We made vast sums. I was entangled, enmeshed. She was always maneuvering. My security was threatened. My sense of a long and uneventful life. She wanted to incorporate us. We got phone calls from Liechtenstein, the Hebrides. Fictional places, plot devices."

　　'That doesn't sound like the Janet Savory I spent a delightful half hour with. The Janet with the high cheekbones and wry voice."

　　"You all had high cheekbones. Every one of you. Marvelous bone structure. Thank God for Babette and her long fleshy face."

　　"Isn't there somewhere we can get a civilized meal?" Tweedy said. "A tableclothy place with icy pats of butter. Malcolm and I once took tea with Colonel Qaddafí。 A charming and ruthless man, one of the few terrorists we've met who lives up to his public billing."

　　The snow had stopped falling. We drove through a warehouse district, more deserted streets, a bleakness and anonymity that registered in the mind as a ghostly longing for something that was far beyond retrieval. There were lonely cafes, another stretch of track, freight cars paused at a siding. Tweedy chain-smoked extra-longs, shooting exasperated streams of smoke in every direction.

　　"God, Tuck, we were good together."

　　"Good at what?"

　　"Fool, you're supposed to look at me in a fond and nostalgic way, smiling ruefully."

　　"You wore gloves to bed."

　　"I still do."

　　"Gloves, eyeshades and socks."

　　"You know my flaws. You always did. I'm ultrasensitive to many things."

　　"Sunlight, air, food, water, sex."

　　"Carcinogenic, every one of them."

　　"What's the family business in Boston all about?"

　　"I have to reassure my mother that Malcolm isn't dead. She's taken quite a shine to him, for whatever reason."

　　"Why does she think he's dead?"

　　"When Malcolm goes into deep cover, it's as though he never existed. He disappears not only here and now but retroactively. No trace of the man remains. I sometimes wonder if the man I'm married to is in fact Malcolm Hunt or a completely different person who is himself operating under deep cover. It's frankly worrisome. I don't know which half of Malcolm's life is real, which half is intelligence. I'm hoping Bee can shed some light."

　　Traffic lights swayed on cables in a sudden gust. This was the city's main street, a series of discount stores, check-cashing places, wholesale outlets. A tall old Moorish movie theater, now remarkably a mosque. Blank structures called the Terminal Building, the Packer Building, the Commerce Building. How close this was to a classic photography of regret.

　　"A gray day in Iron City," I said. "We may as well go back to the airport."

　　"How is Hitler?'!

　　"Fine, solid, dependable."

　　"You look good, Tuck."

　　"I don't feel good."

　　"You never felt good. You're the old Tuck. You were always the old Tuck. We loved each other, didn't we? We told each other everything, within the limits of one's preoccupation with breeding and tact. Malcolm tells me nothing. Who is he? What does he do?"

　　She sat with her legs tucked under her, facing me, and flicked ashes into her shoes, which sat on the rubber mat.

　　"Wasn't it marvelous to grow up tall and straight, among geldings and mares, with a daddy who wore blue blazers and crisp gray flannels?"

　　"Don't ask me."

　　"Mother used to stand in the arbor with an armful of cut flowers. Just stand there, being what she was."

　　At the airport we waited in a mist of plaster dust, among exposed wires, mounds of rubble. Half an hour before Bee was due to arrive, the passengers from another flight began filing through a drafty tunnel into the arrivals area. They were gray and stricken, they were stooped over in weariness and shock, dragging their hand luggage across the floor. Twenty, thirty, forty people came out, without a word or look, keeping their eyes to the ground.

　　Some limped, some wept. More came through the tunnel, adults with whimpering children, old people trembling, a black minister with his collar askew, one shoe missing. Tweedy helped a woman with two small kids. I approached a young man, a stocky fellow with a mailman's cap and beer belly, wearing a down vest, and he looked at me as if I didn't belong in his space-time dimension but had crossed over illegally, made a rude incursion. I forced him to stop and face me, asked him what had happened up there. As people kept filing past, he exhaled wearily. Then he nodded, his eyes steady on mine, full of a gentle resignation.

　　The plane had lost power in all three engines, dropped from thirty-four thousand feet to twelve thousand feet. Something like four miles. When the steep glide began, people rose, fell, collided, swam in their seats. Then the serious screaming and moaning began. Almost immediately a voice from the flight deck was heard on the intercom: "We're falling out of the sky! We're going down! We're a silver gleaming death machine!" This outburst struck the passengers as an all but total breakdown of authority, competence and command presence and it brought on a round of fresh and desperate wailing.

　　Objects were rolling out of the galley, the aisles were full of drinking glasses, utensils, coats and blankets. A stewardess pinned to the bulkhead by the sharp angle of descent was trying to find the relevant passage in a handbook titled "Manual of Disasters." Then there was a second male voice from the flight deck, this one remarkably calm and precise, making the passengers believe there was someone in charge after all, an element of hope: "This is American two-one-three to the cockpit voice recorder. Now we know what it's like. It is worse than we'd ever imagined. They didn't prepare us for this at the death simulator in Denver. Our fear is pure, so totally stripped of distractions and pressures as to be a form of transcendental meditation. In less than three minutes we will touch down, so to speak. They will find our bodies in some smoking field, strewn about in the grisly attitudes of death. I love you, Lance." This time there was a brief pause before the mass wailing recommenced. Lance? What kind of people were in control of this aircraft? The crying took on a bitter and disillusioned tone.

　　As the man in the down vest told the story, passengers from the tunnel began gathering around us. No one spoke, interrupted, tried to embellish the account.

　　Aboard the gliding craft, a stewardess crawled down the aisle, over bodies and debris, telling people in each row to remove their shoes, remove sharp objects from their pockets, assume a fetal position. At the other end of the plane, someone was wrestling with a flotation device. Certain elements in the crew had decided to pretend that it was not a crash but a crash landing that was seconds away. After all, the difference between the two is only one word. Didn't this suggest that the two forms of flight termination were more or less interchangeable? How much could one word matter? An encouraging question under the circumstances, if you didn't think about it too long, and there was no time to think right now. The basic difference between a crash and a crash landing seemed to be that you could sensibly prepare for a crash landing, which is exactly what they were trying to do. The news spread through the plane, the term was repeated in row after row. "Crash landing, crash landing." They saw how easy it was, by adding one word, to maintain a grip on the future, to extend it in consciousness if not in actual fact. They patted themselves for ballpoint pens, went fetal in their seats.

　　By the time the narrator reached this point in his account, many people were crowded around, not only people who'd just emerged from the tunnel but also those who'd been among the first to disembark. They'd come back to listen. They were not yet ready to disperse, to reinhabit their earthbound bodies, but wanted to linger with their terror, keep it separate and intact for just a while longer. More people drifted toward us, milled about, close to the entire planeload. They were content to let the capped and vested man speak on their behalf. No one disputed his account or tried to add individual testimony. It was as though they were being told of an event they hadn't personally been involved in. They were interested in what he said, even curious, but also clearly detached. They trusted him to tell them what they'd said and felt.

　　It was at this point in the descent, as the term "crash landing" spread through the plane, with a pronounced vocal stress on the second word, that passengers in first class came scrambling and clawing through the curtains, literally climbing their way into the tourist section in order to avoid being the first to strike the ground. There were those in tourist who felt they ought to be made to go back. This sentiment was expressed not so much in words and actions as in terrible and inarticulate sounds, mainly cattle noises, an urgent and force-fed lowing. Suddenly the engines restarted. Just like that. Power, stability, control. The passengers, prepared for impact, were slow to adjust to the new wave of information. New sounds, a different flight path, a sense of being encased in solid tubing and not some polyurethane wrap. The smoking sign went on, an international hand with a cigarette. Stewardesses appeared with scented towelettes for cleaning blood and vomit. People slowly came out of their fetal positions, sat back limply. Four miles of prime-time terror. No one knew what to say. Being alive was a richness of sensation. Dozens of things, hundreds of things. The first officer walked down the aisle, smiling and chatting in an empty pleasant corporate way. His face had the rosy and confident polish that is familiar in handlers of large passenger aircraft. They looked at him and wondered why they'd been afraid.

　　I'd been pushed away from the narrator by people crowding in to listen, well over a hundred of them, dragging their shoulder bags and garment bags across the dusty floor. Just as I realized I was almost out of hearing range, I saw Bee standing next to me, her small face smooth and white in a mass of kinky hair. She jumped up into my embrace, smelling of jet exhaust.

　　"Where's the media?" she said.

　　"There is no media in Iron City."

　　'They went through all that for nothing?"

　　We found Tweedy and headed out to the car. There was a traffic jam on the outskirts of the city and we had to sit on a road outside an abandoned foundry. A thousand broken windows, street lights broken, darkness settling in. Bee sat in the middle of the rear seat in the lotus position. She seemed remarkably well rested after a journey that had spanned time zones, land masses, vast oceanic distances, days and nights, on large and small planes, in summer and winter, from Surabaya to Iron City. Now we sat waiting in the dark for a car to get towed or a drawbridge to close. Bee didn't think this familiar irony of modern travel was worth a comment. She just sat there listening to Tweedy explain to me why parents needn't worry about children taking such trips alone. Planes and terminals are the safest of places for the very young and very old. They are looked after, smiled upon, admired for their resourcefulness and pluck. People ask friendly questions, offer them blankets and sweets.

　　"Every child ought to have the opportunity to travel thousands of miles alone," Tweedy said, "for the sake of her self-esteem and independence of mind, with clothes and toiletries of her own choosing. The sooner we get them in the air, the better. Like swimming or ice skating. You have to start them young. It's one of the things I'm proudest to have accomplished with Bee. I sent her to Boston on Eastern when she was nine. I told Granny Browner not to meet her plane. Getting out of airports is every bit as important as the actual flight. Too many parents ignore this phase of a child's development. Bee is thoroughly bicoastal now. She flew her first jumbo at ten, changed planes at O'Hare, had a near miss in Los Angeles. Two weeks later she took the Concorde to London. Malcolm was waiting with a split of champagne."

　　Up ahead the taillights danced, the line began to move.

　　Barring mechanical failures, turbulent weather and terrorist acts, Tweedy said, an aircraft traveling at the speed of sound may be the last refuge of gracious living and civilized manners known to man.

　　19

　　Bee made us feel self-conscious at times, a punishment that visitors will unintentionally inflict on their complacent hosts. Her presence seemed to radiate a surgical light. We began to see ourselves as a group that acted without design, avoided making decisions, took turns being stupid and emotionally unstable, left wet towels everywhere, mislaid our youngest member. Whatever we did was suddenly a thing that seemed to need explaining. My wife was especially disconcerted. If Denise was a pint-sized commissar, nagging us to higher conscience, then Bee was a silent witness, calling the very meaning of our lives into question. I watched Babette stare into her cupped hands, aghast.

　　That chirping sound was just the radiator.

　　Bee was quietly disdainful of wisecracks, sarcasm and other family business. A year older than Denise, she was taller, thinner, paler, both worldly and ethereal, as though in her heart she was not a travel writer at all, as her mother had said she wished to be, but simply a traveler, the purer form, someone who collects impressions, dense anatomies of feeling, but does not care to record them.

　　She was self-possessed and thoughtful, had brought us hand-carved gifts from the jungles. She took taxis to school and dance class, spoke a little Chinese, had once wired money to a stranded friend. I admired her in a distant and uneasy way, sensing a nameless threat, as if she were not my child at all but the sophisticated and self-reliant friend of one of my children. Was Murray right? Were we a fragile unit surrounded by hostile facts? Would I promote ignorance, prejudice and superstition to protect my family from the world?

　　On Christmas Day, Bee sat by the fireplace in our seldom used living room, watching the turquoise flames. She wore a long loose khaki outfit that looked casually expensive. I sat in the armchair with three or four gift boxes in my lap, apparel and tissue paper hanging out. My dog-eared copy of Mein Kampf rested on the floor at the side of the chair. Some of the other people were in the kitchen preparing the meal, some had gone upstairs to investigate their gifts in private. The TV said: "This creature has developed a complicated stomach in keeping with its leafy diet."

　　"I don't like this business with Mother," Bee said in a voice of cultivated distress. "She looks keyed-up all the time. Like she's worried about something but she's not sure what it is. It's Malcolm, of course. He's got his jungle. What does she have? A huge airy kitchen with a stove that belongs in a three-star restaurant in the provinces. She put all her energy into that kitchen, but for what? It's not a kitchen at all. It's her life, her middle age. Baba could enjoy a kitchen like that. It would be a kitchen to her. To Mother it's like a weird symbol of getting through a crisis, except she hasn't gotten through it."

　　"Your mother is not sure exactly who her husband is."

　　"That's not the basic problem. The basic problem is that she doesn't know who she is. Malcolm is in the highlands living on tree bark and snake. That's who Malcolm is. He needs heat and humidity. He's got like how many degrees in foreign affairs and economics but all he wants to do is squat under a tree and watch tribal people pack mud all over their bodies. They're fun to watch. What does Mother do for fun?"

　　Bee was small-featured except for her eyes, which seemed to contain two forms of life, the subject matter and its hidden implications. She talked about Babette's effortless skills in making things work, the house, the kids, the flow of the routine universe, sounding a little like me, but there was a secondary sea-life moving deep in the iris of her eye. What did it mean, what was she really saying, why did she seem to expect me to respond in kind? She wanted to communicate in this secondary way, with optic fluids. She would have her suspicions confirmed, find out about me. But what suspicions did she harbor and what was there to find out? I began to worry. As the odor of burning toast filled the house, I tried to get her to talk about life in the seventh grade.

　　"Is the kitchen on fire?"

　　"That's Steffie burning toast. A thing she does from time to time."

　　"I could have prepared some kind of kimchi dish."

　　"Something from your Korean period."

　　"It's cabbage pickled with red pepper and a bunch of other things. Fiery hot. But I don't know about ingredients. They're hard enough to find in Washington."

　　"We're probably having something besides toast," I said.

　　The mild rebuke made her happy. She liked me best when I was dry, derisive and cutting, a natural talent she believed I'd forfeited through long association with children.

　　The TV said: "Now we will put the little feelers on the butterfly."

　　In bed two nights later I heard voices, put on my robe and went down the hall to see what was going on. Denise stood outside the bathroom door.

　　"Steffie's taking one of her baths."

　　"It's late," I said.

　　"She's just sitting in all that dirty water."

　　"It's my dirt," Steffie said from the other side of the door.

　　"It's still dirt."

　　"Well it's my dirt and I don't care."

　　"It's dirt," Denise said.

　　"It's my dirt."

　　"Dirt is dirt."

　　"Not when it's mine."

　　Bee appeared at the end of the hall wearing a silver and red kimono. Just stood there, distant and pale. There was a moment in which our locus of pettiness and shame seemed palpably to expand, a cartoon of self-awareness. Denise muttered something violent to Steffie through the crack in the door, then went quietly to her room.

　　In the morning I drove Bee to the airport. Rides to airports make me quiet and glum. We listened to news updates on the radio, curiously excited reports about firemen removing a burning sofa from a tenement in Watertown, delivered in a background clamor of ticker-tape machines. I realized Bee was watching me carefully, importantly. She sat with her back against the door, her knees up, held tightly together, arms enfolding them. The look was one of solemn compassion. It was a look I did not necessarily trust, believing it had little to do with pity or love or sadness. I recognized it in fact as something else completely. The adolescent female's tenderest form of condescension.

　　On the way back from the airport, I got off the expressway at the river road and parked the car at the edge of the woods. I walked up a steep path. There was an old picket fence with a sign.

　　THE OLD BURYING GROUND

　　Blacksmith Village

　　The headstones were small, tilted, pockmarked, spotted with fungus or moss, the names and dates barely legible. The ground was hard, with patches of ice. I walked among the stones, taking off my gloves to touch the rough marble. Embedded in the dirt before one of the markers was a narrow vase containing three small American flags, the only sign that someone had preceded me to this place in this century. I was able to make out some of the names, great strong simple names, suggesting a moral rigor. I stood and listened.

　　I was beyond the traffic noise, the intermittent stir of factories across the river. So at least in this they'd been correct, placing the graveyard here, a silence that had stood its ground. The air had a bite. I breathed deeply, remained in one spot, waiting to feel the peace that is supposed to descend upon the dead, waiting to see the light that hangs above the fields of the landscapist's lament.

　　I stood there, listening. The wind blew snow from the branches. Snow blew out of the woods in eddies and sweeping gusts. I raised my collar, put my gloves back on. When the air was still again, I walked among the stones, trying to read the names and dates, adjusting the flags to make them swing free. Then I stood and listened.

　　The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream.

　　May the days be aimless. Let the seasons drift. Do not advance the action according to a plan.

　　20

　　Mr. Treadwell's sister died. Her first name was Gladys. The doctor said she died of lingering dread, a result of the four days and nights she and her brother had spent in the Mid-Village Mall, lost and confused.

　　A man in Glassboro died when the rear wheel of his car separated from the axle. An idiosyncrasy of that particular model.

　　The lieutenant governor of the state died of undisclosed natural causes, after a long illness. We all know what that means.

　　A Mechanicsville man died outside Tokyo during a siege of the airport by ten thousand helmeted students.

　　When I read obituaries I always note the age of the deceased. Automatically I relate this figure to my own age. Four years to go, I think. Nine more years. Two years and I'm dead. The power of numbers is never more evident than when we use them to speculate on the time of our dying. Sometimes I bargain with myself. Would I be willing to accept sixty-five, Genghis Khan's age on dying? Suleiman the Magnificent made it to seventy-six. That sounds all right, especially the way I feel now, but how will it sound when I'm seventy-three?

　　It's hard to imagine these men feeling sad about death. Attila the Hun died young. He was still in his forties. Did he feel sorry for himself, succumb to self-pity and depression? He was the King of the Huns, the Invader of Europe, the Scourge of God. I want to believe he lay in his tent, wrapped in animal skins, as in some internationally financed movie epic, and said brave cruel things to his aides and retainers. No weakening of the spirit. No sense of the irony of human existence, that we are the highest form of life on earth and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die. Attila did not look through the opening in his tent and gesture at some lame dog standing at the edge of the fire waiting to be thrown a scrap of meat. He did not say, "That pathetic flea-ridden beast is better off than the greatest ruler of men. It doesn't know what we know, it doesn't feel what we feel, it can't be sad as we are sad."

　　I want to believe he was not afraid. He accepted death as an experience that flows naturally from life, a wild ride through the forest, as would befit someone known as the Scourge of God. This is how it ended for him, with his attendants cutting off their hair and disfiguring their own faces in barbarian tribute, as the camera pulls back out of the tent and pans across the night sky of the fifth century A.D., clear and uncontaminated, bright-banded with shimmering worlds.

　　Babette looked up from her eggs and hash browns and said to me with a quiet intensity, "Life is good, Jack."

　　"What brings this on?"

　　"I just think it ought to be said."

　　"Do you feel better now that you've said it?"

　　"I have terrible dreams," she murmured.

　　Who will die first? She says she wants to die first because she would feel unbearably lonely and sad without me, especially if the children were grown and living elsewhere. She is adamant about this. She sincerely wants to precede me. She discusses the subject with such argumentative force that it's obvious she thinks we have a choice in the matter. She also thinks nothing can happen to us as long as there are dependent children in the house. The kids are a guarantee of our relative longevity. We're safe as long as they're around. But once they get big and scatter, she wants to be the first to go. She sounds almost eager. She is afraid I will die unexpectedly, sneakily, slipping away in the night. It isn't that she doesn't cherish life; it's being left alone that frightens her. The emptiness, the sense of cosmic darkness.

　　MasterCard, Visa, American Express.

　　I tell her I want to die first. I've gotten so used to her that I would feel miserably incomplete. We are two views of the same person. I would spend the rest of my life turning to speak to her.

　　No one there, a hole in space and time. She claims my death would leave a bigger hole in her life than her death would leave in mine. This is the level of our discourse. The relative size of holes, abysses and gaps. We have serious arguments on this level. She says if her death is capable of leaving a large hole in my life, my death would leave an abyss in hers, a great yawning gulf. I counter with a profound depth or void. And so it goes into the night. These arguments never seem foolish at the time. Such is the dignifying power of our subject.

　　She put on a long glossy padded coat—it looked segmented, exoskeletal, designed for the ocean floor—and went out to teach her class in posture. Steffie moved soundlessly through the house carrying small plastic bags she used for lining the wicker baskets scattered about. She did this once or twice a week with the quiet and conscientious air of someone who does not want credit for saving lives. Murray came over to talk to the two girls and Wilder, something he did from time to time as part of his investigation into what he called the society of kids. He talked about the otherworldly babble of the American family. He seemed to think we were a visionary group, open to special forms of consciousness. There were huge amounts of data flowing through the house, waiting to be analyzed.

　　He went upstairs with the three kids to watch TV. Heinrich walked into the kitchen, sat at the table and gripped a fork tightly in each hand. The refrigerator throbbed massively. I flipped a switch and somewhere beneath the sink a grinding mechanism reduced parings, rinds and animal fats to tiny drainable fragments, with a motorized surge that made me retreat two paces. I took the forks out of my son's hands and put them in the dishwasher.

　　"Do you drink coffee yet?"

　　"No," he said.

　　"Baba likes a cup when she gets back from class."

　　"Make her tea instead."

　　"She doesn't like tea."

　　"She can learn, can't she?"

　　"The two things have completely different tastes."

　　"A habit's a habit."

　　"You have to acquire it first."

　　"That's what I'm saying. Make her tea."

　　"Her class is more demanding than it sounds. Coffee relaxes her."

　　'That's why it's dangerous," he said.