'And so. No different, maybe,' Scht.i.tt concedes, sitting up straight on a waffle-seated aluminum chair with Mario beneath an askew umbrella that makes the flimsy little table it's rooted to shake and clank in the sidewalk's breeze. 'Maybe no different, so,' biting hard into his tricolored cone. He feels at the side of his white jaw, where there's some sort of red welt, it looks like. 'Not different' - looking out into the Ave.'s raised median at the Green Line train rattling past downhill - 'except the chance to play.' He brightens in preparation to laugh in his startling German roar, saying 'No? Yes? The chance to play, yes?' And Mario loses a dollop of chocolate down his chin, because he has this involuntary thing where he laughs whenever anyone else does, and Scht.i.tt is finding what he has just said very amusing indeed.

YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.

There is no jolly irony in Tiny Ewell's name. He is tiny, an elf-sized U.S. male. His feet barely reach the floor of the taxi. He is seated, being driven east into the grim three-decker districts of East Watertown, west of Boston proper. A rehabilitative staffer wearing custodial whites under a bombardier's jacket sits beside Tiny Ewell, big arms crossed and staring placid as a cow at the intricately creased back of the cabbie's neck. The window Tiny is next to has a sticker that thanks him in advance for not smoking. Tiny Ewell wears no winter gear over a jacket and tie that don't quite go together and stares out his window with unplacid intensity at the same district he grew up in. He normally takes involved routes to avoid Watertown. His jacket a 26S, his slacks a 26/24, his shirt one of the shirts his wife had so considerately packed for him to bring into the hospital detox and hang on hangers that won't leave the rod. As with all Tiny Ewell's business shirts, only the front and cuffs are ironed. He wears size 6 Florsheim wingtips that gleam nicely except for one big incongruous scuff-mark of white from where he'd kicked at his front door when he'd returned home just before dawn from an extremely important get-together with potential clients to find that his wife had had the locks changed and filed a restraining order and would communicate with him only by notes pa.s.sed through the mail-slot below the white door's black bra.s.s (the bra.s.s had been painted black) knocker. When Tiny leans down and wipes at the scuff-mark with a slim thumb it only pales and smears. It is Tiny's first time out of Happy Slippers since his second day at the detox. They took away his Florsheims after 24 abstinent hours had pa.s.sed and he started to perhaps D.T. a little. He'd kept noticing mice scurrying around his room, mice as in rodents, vermin, and when he lodged a complaint and demanded the room be fumigated at once and then began running around hunched and pounding with the heel of a hand-held Florsheim at the mice as they continued to ooze through the room's electrical outlets and scurry repulsively about, eventually a gentle-faced nurse flanked by large men in custodial whites negotiated a trade of shoes for Librium, predicting that the mild sedative would fumigate what really needed to be fumigated. They gave him slippers of green foam-rubber with smiley-faces embossed on the tops. The detox's in-patients are encouraged to call these Happy Slippers. The staff refer to the footwear in private as 'p.i.s.scatchers.' It is Tiny Ewell's first day out of rubber slippers and a.s.s-exposing detox pajamas and striped cotton robe in two weeks. The early-November day is foggy and colorless. The sky and the street are the same color. The trees look skeletal. There is bright wet wadded litter all along the seams of street and curb. The houses are skinny three-deckers, mashed together, wharf-gray w/ salt-white trim, madonnas in the yards, bowlegged dogs hurling themselves against the fencing. Some schoolboys in knee-pads and skallycaps are playing street hockey on a pa.s.sing school's cement playground. Except none of the boys seems to be moving. The trees' bony fingers make spell-casting gestures in the wind as they pa.s.s. East Watertown is the obvious straight-line eas.e.m.e.nt between St. Mel's detox and the halfway house's Enfield, and Ewell's insurance is paying for the cab. With his small round shape and bit of white goatee and a violent flush that could pa.s.s for health of some jolly sort, Tiny Ewell looks like a radically downscaled Burl Ives, the late Burl Ives as an impossible bearded child. Tiny looks out the window at the rose window of the church next to the school playground where the boys are playing/not playing. The rose window is not illuminated from either side.

The man who for the last three days has been Tiny Ewell's roommate at St. Mel's Hospital's detoxification unit sits in a blue plastic straight-back chair in front of his and Ewell's room's window's air conditioner, watching it. The air conditioner hums and gushes, and the man gazes with rapt intensity into its screen of horizontal vents. The air conditioner's cord is thick and white and leads into a three-p.r.o.ng outlet with black heel-marks on the wall all around it. The November room is around 12 C. The man turns the air conditioner's dial from setting #4 to setting #5. The curtains above it shake and billow around the window. The man's face falls into and out of amused expressions as he watches the air conditioner. He sits in the blue chair with a trembling Styrofoam cup of coffee and a paper plate of brownies into which he taps ashes from the cigarettes whose smoke the air conditioner blows straight back over his head. The cigarette smoke is starting to pile up against the wall behind him, and to ooze and run chilled down the wall and form a sort of cloud-bank near the floor. The man's raptly amused profile appears in the mirror on the wall beside the dresser the two in-patients share. The man, like Tiny Ewell, has the rouged-corpse look that attends detox from late-stage alcoholism. The man is in addition a burnt-yellow beneath his flush, from chronic hepat.i.tis. The mirror he appears in is treated with shatterproof Lucite polymers. The man leans carefully forward with the plate of brownies in his lap and changes the setting on the air conditioner from 5 to 3 and then to 7, then 8, scanning the screen of gushing vents. He finally turns the selector's dial all the way around to 9. The air conditioner roars and blows his long hair straight back, and his beard blows back over his shoulder, ashes fly and swirl around from his plate of brownies, plus crumbs, and his rodney's tip glows cherry and gives sparks. He is deeply engaged by whatever he sees on 9. He gives Tiny Ewell the screaming meemies, Ewell has complained. He wears p.i.s.scatchers, a striped cotton St. Mel's robe, and a pair of gla.s.ses missing one lens. He has been watching the air conditioner all day. His face produces the little smiles and grimaces of a person who's being thoroughly entertained.

When the big black rehabilitative staffer placed Tiny Ewell in the taxi and then squeezed in and told the cabbie they wanted Unit #6 in the Enfield Marine VA Hospital Complex just off Commonwealth Ave. in Enfield, the cabbie, whose photo was on the Ma.s.s. Livery License taped to the glove compartment, the cabbie, looking back and down at little Tiny Ewell's neat white beard and ruddy complexion and sharp threads, had scratched under his skallycap and asked if he was sick or something.

Tiny Ewell had said, 'So it would seem.'

By mid-afternoon on 2 April Y.D.A.U.: the Near Eastern medical attache; his devout wife; the Saudi Prince Q --- 's personal physician's personal a.s.sistant, who'd been sent over to see why the medical attache hadn't appeared at the Back Bay Hilton in the A.M A.M. and then hadn't answered his beeper's page; the personal physician himself, who'd come to see why his personal a.s.sistant hadn't come back; two Emba.s.sy security guards w/ sidearms, who'd been dispatched by a candidiatic, heartily p.i.s.sed-off Prince Q ---; and two neatly groomed Seventh Day Adventist pamphleteers who'd seen human heads through the living room window and found the front door unlocked and come in with all good spiritual intentions - all were watching the recursive loop the medical attache had rigged on the TP's viewer the night before, sitting and standing there very still and attentive, looking not one bit distressed or in any way displeased, even though the room smelled very bad indeed.

30 APRIL - YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

He sat alone above the desert, redly backlit and framed in shale, watching very yellow payloaders crawl over the beaten dirt of some U.S.A. construction site several km. to the southeast. The outcropping's height allowed him, Marathe, to look out over most of U.S.A. area code 6026. His shadow did not yet reach the downtown regions of the city Tucson; not yet quite. Of sounds in the arid hush were only a faint and occasional hot wind, the blurred sound of the wings of sometimes an insect, some tentative trickling of loosened grit and small stones moving farther down the upslope behind.

And as well the sunset over the foothills and mountains behind him: such a difference from the watery and somehow sad spring sunsets of southwestern Quebec's Papineau regions, where his wife had need of care. This (the sunset) more resembled an explosion. It took place above and behind him, and he turned some of the time to regard it: it (the sunset) was swollen and perfectly round, and large, radiating knives of light when he squinted. It hung and trembled slightly like a viscous drop about to fall. It hung just above the peaks of the Tortolita foothills behind him (Marathe), and slowly was sinking.

Marathe sat alone and blanket-lapped in his customized fauteuil de rollent fauteuil de rollent37 on a kind of outcropping or shelf about halfway up, waiting, amusing himself with his shadow. As the lowering light from behind came at an angle more and more acute, Goethe's well-known ' on a kind of outcropping or shelf about halfway up, waiting, amusing himself with his shadow. As the lowering light from behind came at an angle more and more acute, Goethe's well-known 'Brockengespenst' phenomenon 38 38 enlarged and distended his seated shadow far out overland, so that the spokes of his chair's rear wheels cast over two whole counties below gigantic asterisk-shadows, whose fine black radial lines he could cause to move by playing slightly with the wheels' rubber rims; and his head's shadow brought to much of the suburb West Tucson a premature dusk. enlarged and distended his seated shadow far out overland, so that the spokes of his chair's rear wheels cast over two whole counties below gigantic asterisk-shadows, whose fine black radial lines he could cause to move by playing slightly with the wheels' rubber rims; and his head's shadow brought to much of the suburb West Tucson a premature dusk.

He appeared to remain concentrated on his huge shadow-play as gravel and then also breath sounded from the steep hillside back above him, grit and dirty stones cascading onto the outcropping and gushing past his chair and off the front lip, and then the unmistakable yelp of an individual's impact with a cactus somewhere up behind. But Marathe, he had all the time without turning watched the other man's clumsy sliding descent's own mammoth shadow, cast as far east as the Rincon range just past the city Tucson, and could see the shadow rush in west toward his own as Unspecified Services' M. Hugh Steeply descended, falling twice and cursing in U.S.A. English, until the shadow collapsed nearly into Marathe's monstrous own. Another yelp took place as the Unspecified Services field-operative's fall and slide the last several meters carried him upon his bottom down onto the outcropping and then nearly all the way out and off it, Marathe having to release the machine pistol under his blanket to grab Steeply's bare arm and halt this sliding. Steeply's skirt was pulled obscenely up and his hosiery full of runs and stubs of thorns. The operative sat at Marathe's feet, glowing redly in the backlight, legs hanging over the shelf's edge, breathing with difficulty.

Marathe smiled and released the operative's arm. 'Stealth becomes you,' he said.

'Go s.h.i.t in your chapeau,' Steeply wheezed, bring up his legs to survey the hosiery's damage.

They spoke for the most part U.S.A. English when they met like this, covertly, in the field. M. Fortier 39 39 had wished Marathe to require that they interface always in Quebecois French, as for a small symbolic concession to the A.F.R. on the part of the Office of Unspecified Services, which the Quebecois Seperatiste Left referred to always as B.S.S., the ' had wished Marathe to require that they interface always in Quebecois French, as for a small symbolic concession to the A.F.R. on the part of the Office of Unspecified Services, which the Quebecois Seperatiste Left referred to always as B.S.S., the 'Bureau des Services sans Specificite.'

Marathe watched a column of shadow spread again out east over the desert's floor as Steeply got a hand under himself and rose, a huge and well-fed figure tottering on heels. The two men sent together a strange Brockengespenst Brockengespenst-shadow out toward the city Tucson, a shadow round and radial at the base and jagged at the top, from Steeply's wig becoming un-combed in his descent. Steeply's gigantic prosthetic b.r.e.a.s.t.s pointed in wildly different directions now, one nearly at the empty sky. The matte curtain of sunset's true dusk-shadow was moving itself very slowly in across the Rincons and Sonora desert east of the city Tucson, still many km. from obscuring their own large shadow.

But once Marathe had committed not just to pretend to betray his a.s.sa.s.sins des Fauteuils Rollents a.s.sa.s.sins des Fauteuils Rollents in order to secure advanced medical care for the medical needs of his wife, but to in truth do this - betray, perfidiously: now pretending only to M. Fortier and his A.F.R. superiors that he was merely pretending to feed some betraying information to B.S.S. in order to secure advanced medical care for the medical needs of his wife, but to in truth do this - betray, perfidiously: now pretending only to M. Fortier and his A.F.R. superiors that he was merely pretending to feed some betraying information to B.S.S. 40 40 - once this decision, Marathe was without all power, served now at the pleasures of the power of Steeply and the B.S.S. of Hugh Steeply: and now they spoke mostly the U.S.A. English of Steeply's preference. - once this decision, Marathe was without all power, served now at the pleasures of the power of Steeply and the B.S.S. of Hugh Steeply: and now they spoke mostly the U.S.A. English of Steeply's preference.

In fact, Steeply's Quebecois was better than Marathe's English, but c'etait la guerre, as one says.

Marathe sniffed slightly. 'Thus, so, we now are both here.' He wore a windbreaker and did not perspire.

Steeply's eyes were luridly made up. The rear area of his dress was dirty. Some of his makeup had started to run. He was forming a type of salute to shade his eyes and looking upward behind them at what remained of the explosive and trembling sun. 'How in G.o.d's name did you get up here?'

Marathe slowly shrugged. As usual, he appeared to Steeply as if he were half-asleep. He ignored the question and said only, shrugging, 'My time is finite.'

Steeply had also with him a woman's handbag or purse. 'And the wife?' he said, gazing upward as yet. 'How's the wife doing?'

'Holding her own weight, thank you,' Marathe said. His tone of his voice betrayed nothing. 'And so thus what is it your Offices believe they wish to know?'

Steeply tottered on a leg as he removed one shoe and poured from it grit. 'Nothing terribly surprising. A bit of razzle-dazzle up northeast in your so-called Ops-area, certainly you heard.'

Marathe sniffed. A large odor of inexpensive and high-alcohol perfume came not from Steeply's person but from his handbag, which failed to complement his shoes. Marathe said, 'Dazzle?'

'As in a civilian-type individual receives a certain item. Don't tell me this is news to you guys. Not on InterLace pulse, this item. Arrives via normal physical mail. We're sure you heard, Remy. A cartridge-copy of a certain let's call it between ourselves "the Entertainment." As in in the mail, without warning or motive. Out of the blue.'

'From somewhere blue?'

The B.S.S. operative had perspired also through his rouge, and his mascara had melted to become whorish. 'A person with no political value to anybody except that the Saudi Ministry of Entertainment made one the h.e.l.l of a shrill stink.'

'The medical attache, the specialist of digesting, you refer to.' Marathe shrugged again in that maddening Francophone way that can mean several things. 'Your offices wish to ask was the Entertainment's cartridge disseminated through our mechanisms?'

'Don't let's waste your finite time, ami old friend,' Steeply said. 'The mischief happens to occur in metropolitan Boston. Postal codes route the package through the desert Southwest, and we know your dissemination-scheme's routing mechanism is proposed for somewhere between Phoenix and the border down here.' Steeply had worked hard at feminizing his expressions and gesturing. 'It would be a bit starry-eyed of O.U.S. not to think of your distinguished cell, no?'

Beneath Marathe's windbreaker was a sportshirt whose breast pocket was filled with many pens. He said: 'Us, we don't have the information on even casualties. From this blue dazzle you speak of.'

Steeply was trying to extract something stubborn from inside his other shoe. 'Upwards of twenty, Remy. Out of commission altogether. The attache and his wife, the wife a Saudi citizen. Four more raggers, all with emba.s.sy cards. Couple neighbors or something. The rest mostly police before word got to a level they could stop police from going in before they killed the power.'

'Local police forces. Gendarmes.'

'The local constabulary.'

'The minions of the law of the land.'

'The local constabulary were shall we say unprepared unprepared for an Entertainment like this.' Steeply even removed and replaced his pumps in the upright-on-one-leg-bringing-other-foot-up-behind-his-bottom way of a feminine U.S.A. woman. But he appeared huge and bloated as a woman, not merely unattractive but inducing something like s.e.xual despair. He said, 'The attache had diplomatic status, Remy. Mideast. Saudi. Said to be close to minor members of the royal family.' for an Entertainment like this.' Steeply even removed and replaced his pumps in the upright-on-one-leg-bringing-other-foot-up-behind-his-bottom way of a feminine U.S.A. woman. But he appeared huge and bloated as a woman, not merely unattractive but inducing something like s.e.xual despair. He said, 'The attache had diplomatic status, Remy. Mideast. Saudi. Said to be close to minor members of the royal family.'

Marathe sniffed hard, as if congested of the nose. 'A puzzling,' he said.

'But also a compatriot of yours. Canadian citizenship. Born in Ottawa, to Arab emigres. Visa lists a residence in Montreal.'

'And Services Without Specificity wishes maybe to ask were there below-the-surface connections that make the individual not such a civilian, unconnected. To ask of us would the A.F.R. wish to make of him the example.'

Steeply was removing dirt from his bottom, swatting himself on the bottom. He stood more or less directly over Marathe. Marathe sniffed. 'We have neither digestive medicals nor diplomatic entourages on any lists for action. You have personally seen A.F.R.'s initial lists. Nor in particular Montreal civilians. We have, as one will say, larger seafood to cook.'

Steeply was looking out over the desert and city, also, as he swatted at himself. He seemed to have noticed the gespenst gespenst-phenomenon of his own shadow. Marathe for some reason pretended again to sniff the nose. The wind was moderate and constant and of about the temperature of a U.S.A. clothes-dryer set on Low. It made the shrill whistling sounds. Also sounds of the blowing grit. Weeds-of-tumbling like enormous hairb.a.l.l.s rolled often across the Interstate Highway of I-10 far below. Their specular perspective, the reddening light on vast tan stone and the oncoming curtain of dusk, the further elongation of their monstrous agnate shadows: all was almost mesmerizing. Neither man seemed able to look at anything but the vista below. Marathe could simultaneously speak in English and think in French. The desert was the tawny color of the hide of the lion. Their speaking without looking at one another, facing both the same direction - this gave their conversing an air of careless intimacy, as of old friends at the cartridge-viewer together, or a long-married couple. Marathe thought this as he opened and closed his upheld hand, making over the city Tucson a huge and black blossom open itself and close itself.

And Steeply raised his bare arms and held them out and crossed them, maybe as if signalling for distant aid; this made X's and pedentive V's over much in the city Tucson. 'Still, Remy, but born in the hated-by-you Ottawa, this civilian attache, and connected to a major buyer of trans-grid entertainment. And follow-up out of the Boston offices reports possible indications of the victim's prior possible involvement with the widow of the auteur auteur we both know was responsible for the Entertainment in the first place. The we both know was responsible for the Entertainment in the first place. The samizdat. samizdat.'

'Prior?'

Steeply produced from his handbag Belgian cigarettes of a many-mm. and habitually female type. 'Film director's wife'd taught out at Brandeis where the victim'd done his residency. The husband was on board over at A.E.C., and different agencies' background checks indicated the wife was f.u.c.king just about everything with a pulse.' With the slight pause of which Steeply could excel: 'Particularly a Canadian pulse.'

'Involvement of s.e.xuality is what you are meaning, then, not politics.'

Steeply said, 'This wife herself a Quebecer, Remy, from L'Islet county - Chief Tine says three years spent on Ottawa's "Personnes Qui On Doit" list. There's such a thing as political s.e.x.'

'I have said to you all we know. Civilians as individual warnings to O.N.A.N. are not our desire. This is known by you.' Marathe's eyes looked nearly closed. 'And your t.i.ts, they have become c.o.c.k-eyed, I will tell you. Services Without Specificity, they have given you ridiculous t.i.ts, and now they point differently.'

Steeply looked down at himself. One of the false b.r.e.a.s.t.s (surely false: surely they would not go as far as the hormonal, Marathe thought) nearly touched the chins of Steeply when his looking down produced his double chins. 'I was asked to secure personal verification, is all,' he said. 'My general sense at the Office is the bra.s.s consider the whole incident a stumper. There're theories and countertheories. There are even ant.i.theories positing error, mistaken ident.i.ty, sick hoax.' His shrugging, with his hands on the prosthesis, appeared not at all Gallic. 'Still: twenty-three human beings lost for all time: that'd be some hoax, no?'

Marathe sniffed. 'Asked to verify by our mutual M. Tine? How you call him: "Rod, a G.o.d"?'

(Rodney Tine, Sr., Chief of Unspecified Services, acknowledged architect of O.N.A.N. and continental Reconfiguration, who held the ear of the White House of U.S.A., and whose stenographer had long doubled as the stenographer-c.u.m-jeune-fille-de-Vendredi of M. DuPlessis, former a.s.st. coordinator of the pan-Canadian Resistance, and whose pa.s.sionate, ill-disguised attachment (Tine's) to this double-amaneunsis - one Mlle. Luria Perec, of Lamartine, county L'Islet, Quebec - gave rise to these questions of the high-level loyalties of Tine, whether he 'doubled' of M. DuPlessis, former a.s.st. coordinator of the pan-Canadian Resistance, and whose pa.s.sionate, ill-disguised attachment (Tine's) to this double-amaneunsis - one Mlle. Luria Perec, of Lamartine, county L'Islet, Quebec - gave rise to these questions of the high-level loyalties of Tine, whether he 'doubled' 41 41 for Quebec out of the love for Luria or 'tripled' the loyalties, pretending only to divulge secrets while secretly maintaining his U.S.A. fealty against the pull of an irresistible love, it was said.) for Quebec out of the love for Luria or 'tripled' the loyalties, pretending only to divulge secrets while secretly maintaining his U.S.A. fealty against the pull of an irresistible love, it was said.) 'The, Remy.' It was clear that Steeply could not fix his b.r.e.a.s.t.s' directions without pulling down severely his decolletage, which he was shy to do. He produced from his handbag sungla.s.ses and put on the sungla.s.ses. They were embellished with rhinestones and looked absurd. 'Rod Remy.' It was clear that Steeply could not fix his b.r.e.a.s.t.s' directions without pulling down severely his decolletage, which he was shy to do. He produced from his handbag sungla.s.ses and put on the sungla.s.ses. They were embellished with rhinestones and looked absurd. 'Rod the the G.o.d.' G.o.d.'

Marathe forced himself to say nothing of their appearance. Steeply tried with several matches to light a cigarette in the wind. The encroachment of true dusk began to erase his wig's chaotic shadow. Electric lights began to twinkle in the Rincon foothills east of the city. Steeply tried somewhat to cup his body around the match, for shelter for the flame.

It's a herd of feral hamsters, a major herd, thundering across the yellow plains of the southern reaches of the Great Concavity in what used to be Vermont, raising dust that forms a uremic-hued cloud with somatic shapes interpretable from as far away as Boston and Montreal. The herd is descended from two domestic hamsters set free by a Watertown NY boy at the beginning of the Experialist migration in the subsidized Year of the Whopper. The boy now attends college in Champaign IL and has forgotten that his hamsters were named Ward and June.

The noise of the herd is tornadic, locomotival. The expression on the hamsters' whiskered faces is businesslike and implacable - it's that implacable-herd expression. They thunder eastward across pedalferrous terrain that today is fallow, denuded. To the east, dimmed by the fulvous cloud the hamsters send up, is the vivid verdant ragged outline of the annularly overfertilized forests of what used to be central Maine.

All these territories are now property of Canada.

With respect to a herd of this size, please exercise the sort of common sense that come to think of it would keep your thinking man out of the southwest Concavity anyway. Feral hamsters are not pets. They mean business. Wide berth advised. Carry nothing even remotely vegetablish if in the path of a feral herd. If in the path of such a herd, move quickly and calmly in a direction perpendicular to their own. If American, north not advisable. Move south, calmly and in all haste, toward some border metropolis - Rome NNY or Glens Falls NNY or Beverly MA, say, or those bordered points between them at which the giant protective ATHSCME fans atop the hugely convex protective walls of anodized Lucite hold off the drooling and p.i.s.s-colored bank of teratogenic Concavity clouds and move the bank well back, north, away, jaggedly, over your protected head.

The heavy-tongued English of Steeply was even more difficult to understand with a cigarette in the mouth. He said, 'And you'll of course report this little interface of you and me right back to Fortier.'

Marathe shrugged. ' 'n sur.'

Steeply got it lit. He was a large and soft man, some type of brutal-U.S.-contact-sport athlete now become fat. He appeared to Marathe to look less like a woman than a twisted parody of womanhood. Electrolysis had caused patches of tiny red pimples along his jowls and upper lip. He also held his elbow out, the arm holding the match for lighting, which is how no woman lights a cigarette, who is used to b.r.e.a.s.t.s and keeps the lighting elbow in. Also Steeply teetered ungracefully on his pumps' heels on the stone's uneven surface. He never for a moment turned his back completely at Marathe as he stood on the lip of the outcropping. And Marathe had his chair's wheels' clamps now locked down tight and a firm grip on the machine pistol's pebbled grip. Steeply's purse was small and glossy black, and the sungla.s.ses he wore had womanly frames with small false jewels at the temples. Marathe believed that something in Steeply enjoyed his grotesque appearance and craved the humiliation of the field-disguises his B.S.S. superiors requested of him.

Steeply now looked at him, in probability, behind the dark gla.s.ses. 'And also that I just right now asked you if you'd report it, and that you said bien sur? bien sur?'

Marathe's laugh had this misfortune to sound false and overhearty, whether or not sincere. He made a mustache of his finger, pretending for some reason to stifle a need to sneeze. 'You verify this because of why?'

Steeply scratched under the hem of his blonde wig with (stupidly, dangerously) the thumb of his hand that held the cigarette. 'Well you are already tripling, Remy, aren't you? Or would it be quadrupling. We know Fortier and the A.F.R. know you're here with me now.'

'But do my brothers on wheels know that you are knowing this, that they have sent me to pretend I double?'

Marathe's sidearm, a Sterling UL35 9 mm machine pistol with a Mag Na Port silencer, did not have a safety. Its fat and texture-of-pebbles grip was hot from Marathe's palm, and in turn caused Marathe's palm to perspire beneath the blanket. From Steeply there merely was silence.

Marathe said: '... have I merely pretended pretended to pretend to pretend to betray.' to pretend to pretend to betray.' 42 42 And the desert U.S.A.'s light had become now sad, more than half the round sun gone behind the Tortolitas. Only now the chair's wheels and Steeply's thick legs cast shadows below the dusk-line, and these shadows were becoming squat and retreating back up toward the two men.

Steeply did a brief pretend-Charleston, playing with his legs' shadows. 'Nothing personal. You know that. It's the obsessive caution. Who was it - who once said we get paid to drive ourselves crazy, the caution thing? You guys and Tine - your DuPlessis always suspected he tried to hold back on the information he pa.s.sed s.e.xually to Luria.'

Marathe shrugged hard. 'And abruptly M. DuPlessis has now pa.s.sed away from life. Under circ.u.mstances of almost ridiculous suspicion.' Again with the false-sounding laugh. 'An inept burglary and grippe indeed.'

Both men were silent. Steeply's left arm had on it a nasty mesquite scratch, Marathe could observe.

Marathe finally glanced at his watch, its dial illuminated in his body's shadow. Both men's shadows were now climbing the steep incline, returning up to them. 'Me, I think that we go about our affairs in a more simple manner than your B.S.S. office. If M. Tine's betrayal were incomplete, we of Quebec would be aware.'

'Because of Luria.'

Marathe pretended to fuss with his blanket, rearranging it. 'But yes. The caution. Luria would be aware.'

Steeply stepped gingerly up to the edge and tossed out his cigarette's stub. The wind caught the stub and it soared slightly upward from his hand, moving east. Both men were silent until the b.u.t.t fell and hit the dark mountainside off below them, a tiny bloom of orange. Their silence then became contemplative. Something tight in the air between them loosened. Marathe no longer felt the sun on his skull. Dusk settled about them. Steeply had found his triceps' scratch and twisted the flesh of his arm to examine it, his rouged lips rounded with concern.

YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.

Tuesday, 3 November, Enfield Tennis Academy: A.M A.M. drills, shower, eat, cla.s.s, lab, cla.s.s, cla.s.s, eat, prescriptive-grammar exam, lab/cla.s.s, conditioning run, P.M P.M. drills, play challenge match, play challenge match, upper-body circuits in weight room, sauna, shower, slump to locker-room floor w/ other players.

'... to even realize what they're sitting there feeling is unhappiness? Or to even feel it in the first place?'

1640h.: the Comm.-Ad. Bldg.'s males' locker room is full of clean upper-cla.s.smen in towels after P.M P.M. matches, the players' hair wet-combed and shining with Barbicide. Pemulis uses the comb's big-toothed end to get that wide-furrowed look that kids from Allston favor. Hal's own hair tends to look wet-combed even when it's dry.

'So,' Jim Troeltsch says, looking around. 'So what do you think?'

Pemulis lowers himself to the floor by the sinks, leaning up against the cabinet where they keep all the disinfectants. He has this way of looking warily to either side of him before he says anything. 'Was there like a central point to all that, Troeltsch?'

'The exam was talking about the syntax of Tolstoy's sentence, not about real unhappy families,' Hal says quietly.

John Wayne, as do most Canadians, lifts one leg slightly to fart, like the fart was some kind of task, standing at his locker, waiting for his feet to get dry enough to put on socks.

There is a silence. Showerheads dribble on tile. Steam hangs. Distant ghastly sounds from T. Schacht over in one of the stalls off the showers. Everyone stares into the middle distance, stunned with fatigue. Michael Pemulis, who can stand about ten seconds of communal silence tops, clear his throat deeply and sends a loogie up and back into the sink behind him. The plate mirrors caught part of its quivering flight, Hal sees. Hal closes his eyes.

'Tired,' someone exhales.

Ortho Stice and John ('N.R.') Wayne seem less fatigued than detached; they have the really top player's way of shutting the whole neural net down for brief periods, staring at the s.p.a.ce they took up, hooded in silence, removed, for a moment, from the connectedness of all events.

'Right then,' Troeltsch says. 'Pop quiz. Pop test-question. Most crucial difference, for Leith tomorrow, between your historical broadcast TV set and a cartridge-capable TP.'

Disney R. Leith teaches E.T.A.'s History of Entertainment I and II as well as certain high-level esoteric Optics things you needed Permission of Inst. to get into.

'The Cathodeluminescent Panel. No cathode gun. No phosphenic screen. Two to the screen's diagonal width in cm. lines of resolution, total.'

'You mean a high-def. viewer in general, or a specifically TP-component viewer?'

'No a.n.a.logs,' Struck says.

'No snow, no faint weird like ghostly double next to UHF images, no vertical roll when planes fly over.'

'a.n.a.logs v. digitals.'

'You referring to broadcast as in network versus a TP, or network-plus-cable versus a TP?'

'Did cable TV use a.n.a.logs? What, like pre-fiber phones?'

'It's the digitals. Leith has that word he uses for the shift from a.n.a.logs to digitals. That word he uses about eleven times an hour.'

'What did pre-fiber phones use, exactly?'

'The old tin-can-and-string principle.'

' "Seminal." He keeps saying it. "Seminal, seminal." '

'The biggest advance in home communications since the phone he says.'

'In home entertainment since the TV itself.'