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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

　　"That's two topics."

　　"You're right, Jack."

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

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

　　We walked past small mounds of melting snow.

　　"How is your car crash seminar progressing?"

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

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

　　"What do you say to them?"

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

　　"A dream? How do your students reply?"

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

　　"What about it?" I said.

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

　　"What do you say to that?"

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

　　"Look past the violence."

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

　　29

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

　　"How do you feel?" she said.

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

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

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

　　"What did Dr. Chakravarty say?"

　　"What could he say?"

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

　　"Not as much as he loves to speak."

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

　　"We need some Class Plus."

　　"Don't leave me alone," she said.

　　"I'm just going to aisle five."

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

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

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

　　"Except for my eyes," I said.

　　"What do you mean?"

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

　　"Is it the colored spots again?"

　　"Yes."

　　"Stop wearing those dark glasses."

　　"I can't teach Hitler without them."

　　"Why not?"

　　"I need them, that's all."

　　"They're stupid, they're useless."

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

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

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

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

　　"What's that?" I said.

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

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

　　Babette listened to talk radio.

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

　　The gas meter made a particular noise.

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

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

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

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

　　30

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

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

　　"We have to talk," I said.

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

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

　　All she could do was moan, "No."

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

　　"Five more minutes. I need to sleep."

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

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

　　"There are rivulets here."

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

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

　　"He'll think you want to kill him."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

　　"How do I know you won't kill him?"

　　"You're my wife. Am I a killer?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

　　"I usually go to the highway overpass."

　　"Isn't this something?"

　　"It's beautiful all right."

　　"Makes me think. It really does."

　　"What do you think about?"

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

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

　　"It scares me. Boy, look at it."

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

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

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

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

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

　　"Remember the saucer-shaped pill?"

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

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

　　"But we still die."

　　"Everyone dies, yes."

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

　　"That's right."

　　"Interesting, I guess."

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

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

　　"What could be more important?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

　　"That's right, Jack."

　　"And death?" I said.

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

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

　　"I don't know."

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

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

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

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

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

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

　　She turned away, blushing.

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

　　She turned exceedingly red.

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

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

　　31

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

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

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

　　Steffie said quietly, "How do astronauts float?"

　　There was a pause like a missing tick in eternity.

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

　　We all stopped eating. A worried silence ensued.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

　　"What makes you think the sun is high?"

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

　　"What about at night?" he said.

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

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

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

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

　　"What is there?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

　　"What crazy weather?" I said.

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

　　"The weather's been normal."

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

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

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

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

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

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

　　"Why are the mountains upstate?" Steffie said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

　　"Yes."

　　"So do I."

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

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

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

　　"Why?"

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

　　32

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

　　"Your German is coming around?"

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

　　"You call him Howard?"

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

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

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

　　"He's flesh-colored," Murray said.

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

　　"Soft hands."

　　"Is that it?"

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

　　"What else?" I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

　　"But what?" I said. "But what?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

　　'That's the other phrase," he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

　　Panasonic.

　　33

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

　　"Was I asleep?" he said.

　　"What are you doing out here?"

　　"Didn't want to wake you folks."

　　"Did we know you were coming?"

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

　　"Babette will be happy to see you."

　　"I just bet."

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

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

　　"What are you doing these days?"

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

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

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

　　"What did she say to that?"

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

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

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

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

　　"That's the last thing I'd do."

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

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

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

　　"I don't know."

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

　　"Are you seriously thinking of getting married?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

　　"Where did I sleep last time?"

　　They both looked at me, trying to remember.

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

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

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

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

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

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

　　"What is he, a Jew?"

　　"What's that got to do with it?"

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

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

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

　　He liked to sit in his tortured hatchback, smoking.

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

　　He liked to mingle with shopping mall crowds.

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

　　"Tell you what?"

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

　　"The answer to what?"

　　"Were people this dumb before television?"

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

　　"What are you doing?" she said.

　　"Don't worry, it's only me."

　　"I know who it is."

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

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

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

　　I continued to rummage.

　　"What's the problem?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

　　"Up to a point."

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

　　"Isn't that a little stupid?"

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

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

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

　　"No, you didn't. Where?"

　　"I put it in the garbage compactor."

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

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

　　"Like a used car."

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

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

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

　　"I'm better off without it."

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

　　"You're still my friend," I said.

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

　　"Just the man I want to see."

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

　　"Let's go out to the car," he said.

　　"Are you serious?"

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

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

　　"They listen in their sleep," he said.

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

　　"I want you to have this, Jack."

　　"Have what?"

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

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

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

　　"No," I said.

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

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

　　"Take it, Jack."

　　"What is it?"

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

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

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

　　"Why would anyone want to trace it?"

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

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