I stood up and stepped over the edge into the water, which was cold. Looking down, I saw that the pool had its tiles arranged into the shape of a giant fish, much like the one I had found on the sh.o.r.e and eaten-a huge silver fish with fins and gills. The water came up to my knees, and the rest of me was drenched by the spray, and it was very cold. But I felt no discomfort.

I was staring down at the giant fish on which I stood when the two of them came up beside me. The man bent, cupping his hands together, held them under water for a moment and then raised them, dripping, to my head. I felt his hands, open now, on my head and then the water from them was streaming down my face.

"I baptize thee in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit," he said.

The woman reached out and placed her large soft hand on my head. "Amen and praise the Lord," she said softly.

We stepped out of the fountain and I waited, with the man, the dogs, and Biff, while the woman went to Sears and came back with towels for our feet. We dried our feet and legs, put on our shoes, and continued walking, in silence.

I felt even lighter than before, more remote and yet more truly present at the same time, extremely alive to what was outside me and inside me at the same time. I felt that I had crossed some invisible line, one that had been waiting for me ever since I had left Ohio, and had now entered some symbolic realm where my life was light, "like a feather on the back of my hand," and where only my own experience of that life, my own undrugged experience, was all that I was living for. And if that experience meant death in the Lake of Fire, it would have to be acceptable.

I wonder now, writing this down, if that is how those who immolate themselves feel when they decide to do it. But they are drugged, unaware. And they cannot read.

Could baptism really work? Could there be a Holy Spirit? I do not believe so.

We walked in silence down the wide hall and back up the broad staircase, and the lights behind us dimmed and darkened, and the music became silent and the fountains stopped as we left.

Near the top of the stairs I was able to turn for a moment to look down on the vast and empty Mall, with its chandeliers dimming and its fountains dying down, and its storefronts still bright as if waiting for customers who would never come. I could sense the sad dignity of that place, of its broad, clean emptiness.

They took me back outdoors into what had become evening, and led me, still silently, to one of the large buildings that flanked the obelisk-a big, official-looking building with a well-trimmed lawn and no weeds around it. We went to the back of the building and I saw a garden there and, added on to the building itself, an incongruous back porch made of wood, looking like one I had seen in Birth of a Nation.

We entered by a door on this porch and I found myself in a huge, high-ceilinged room with perhaps thirty people in it, all plainly dressed, all silent, sitting around an enormous wooden table as though they had been waiting for me. The people at the table had been silent when we came in; they remained silent as the old man and his wife led me through the room and around the table-as silent as the eating rooms of a dormitory or of a prison.

We went down a narrow hallway into another, equally large room, with rows of wooden chairs in it, facing a podium. Behind the podium was a wall-sized television screen, now off.

Baleen led me up to the podium. There was a large black book on it and, although whatever lettering might have once been on its cover was now completely worn off, I was certain the book was the Bible.

The lightness and strength I had felt in the Mall were leaving me. I stood there, slightly embarra.s.sed, looking at this quiet old room with its worn wooden chairs and its pictures of the face of Jesus on the walls and the big television screen, and before long the people from the kitchen started coming into the room and sitting down, men and women walking in quietly in twos and threes and sitting wordlessly and then looking at me with a kind of shy curiosity. They all wore jeans and simple shirts, and a few of the men were bearded like me but most were not. I watched them with a certain hope that I might see young people, but that hope was disappointed; no one was any younger than I. There was a couple holding hands and looking like lovers; but they were obviously in their forties.

And then when all of the chairs were full Edgar Baleen stood up and suddenly threw his arms out wide, palms upward, saying loudly, "My brethren."

Everyone watched him attentively; the lovers let go of one another's hands. Most of the people were in couples, but in the second row was a woman of about my age, sitting alone. She was tall and, like all of them, simply dressed, wearing a denim shirt with a blue ap.r.o.n over it, but she was striking to look at. Despite my nervousness I found myself watching her as much as I could without being obvious about it. She really was, I began to see, a beautiful woman; it was pleasant to look at her and to get my mind partly off what I had just been through at the Lake of Fire and of what might be in store for me. Whatever might happen, I felt that the crisis was past now; and I deliberately made myself think about the woman.

Her hair was blond, curling slightly around the sides of her face. Her complexion, despite the roughness of her clothes, was clear white and flawless. Her eyes were large and light-colored and her forehead was high, clear and intelligent-looking.

"Brethren," Baleen was saying. "It's been a good year for the family, as all know. We've been at peace with our neighbors, and the Lord's provisions at the Great Mall have continued in their bountiful abundance." Then he bowed his head, thrust his arms forward and upward, and said, "Let us pray."

The group bowed their heads, except for the woman I had been watching. She inclined her head only very slightly. I bowed mine, wanting to take no risks. I had seen meetings like this one in films and I knew that the idea was to bow and be silent.

Baleen began to recite what seemed to.be a memorized, ritual prayer: "G.o.d grant us safety from the fallout past and the fallout to come. Preserve us from all Detectors. Grant us thy love and keep us from the sin of Privacy. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen."

I could not help being startled by the words "the sin of Privacy." It was completely contrary to my teaching, and yet something in me responded favorably to the phrase.

There were a few coughs and squirmings from the group when Baleen finished, and everyone looked up again.

"The Lord has provided for the Baleens," he said, in a more ordinary tone of voice now, "and for all of the Seven Families in the Cities of the Plain." Then he leaned forward at his lectern, grasping its sides with what I suddenly noticed were small, white, womanish hands-hands with well-manicured nails-and spoke in a low voice, almost a whisper. "And it may be that now the Lord has sent us an interpreter of his word or a prophet. A stranger has come into our midst, has pa.s.sed an ordeal of fire before my own eyes, and has shown a knowledge of the Lord."

I saw that everyone was looking at me. Despite the new calmness I had seemed to find in myself, it was very disconcerting. I had never been an object of attention like that before. I felt myself blushing and had a sudden wish for the old rales of Privacy that forbade people to stare at one another. There must have been thirty of them-all of them looking at me with open curiosity or suspicion. I put my hands in my pockets to keep them from trembling. Biff was at my feet, rubbing herself between my ankles. For a moment I even wanted her to go away, to stop paying attention to me.

"The stranger has told me," Baleen was saying, "that he is a carrier of the old knowledge. He says he is a Reader."

Several of them looked surprised. Their stares at me became even more intense. The woman I had been watching leaned slightly forward, as if to get a closer look.

Then, with a dramatic wave of his arm in my direction, Baleen said, "Step forward to the Book of Life and read from it. If you can read."

I looked at him, trying to appear calm; but my heart was beating powerfully and my knees trembled. All those people a.s.sembled in that one place! I had expected something like this to happen, but now that it had come I seemed to have reverted to the person I once had been-before Roberto and Consuela, before Mary Lou, before prison and my escape and my new, rebellious self-sufficiency. Even as a shy professor, lecturing on mind control by repeating words I had memorized and said many times before, I would be nervous in the presence of my largest cla.s.ses-of ten or twelve students at one time. And students were all properly trained to avoid my eyes while listening to me.

Somehow I managed to walk the few feet to the lectern where the book sat. I almost tripped over Biff. Baleen stepped aside for me and said, "Read from the beginning."

I opened the cover of the book with a trembling hand and was grateful to be able to look down, avoiding the eyes of the congregation. I stared at the page for a long time, in silence. There was print on it; but somehow the letters did not make any sense. Some were very big and some were small. I knew that I was looking at a t.i.tle page, but I could not make my mind work. I kept staring at it. It was not a foreign language, I knew that somehow; but I could not make my brain a.s.semble the letters into coherence; they were just inked marks on a yellowed page. I had stopped shaking and was frozen. This lasted an intolerably long time. Into my mind had come a frightening image blanking out the page on the oak lectern in front of me: the yellow-orange fire at the bottom of the pit in the mall; the nuclear core that could vaporize my body. Read, I told myself. But nothing came.

I could feel Baleen moving closer to me. I felt that my heart would stop.

And then, suddenly, a clear, strong female voice from in front of me spoke out: "Read the book," it said. "Read for us, brother," and I looked up, startled, and saw that it was the beautiful tall woman who was sitting by herself and was now staring at me pleadingly. "You can do it!" she said. "Read to us."

I looked back to the book. And suddenly it was simple. The big, black letters that filled most of the page said, "Holy Bible," in capital letters.

I read it: HOLY BIBLE.

And then, under that, the letters were small: "Abridged and updated for modern readers"

And at the bottom of the page: "Reader's Digest Condensed Books. Omaha. 2123"

That was all that page said. I turned to the next, which was filled with print, and began, more calmly now, to read: "Genesis, by Moses. At first G.o.d made the world and the sky, but the world had no shape and there was n.o.body living on it. And it was dark, too, until G.o.d said, *Give us some light!' and the light came on. . ."

I went on, more and more easily, and calmly. It was not at all like the Bible I had read from back at the prison, but that one had been much older.

When I finished the page I looked up.

The beautiful woman was staring at me with her eyes wide and her mouth slightly open. On her face was a look of wonder or of adoration.

And I was peaceful again, inside. And suddenly so tired, so worn and used andovercome, that I dropped my head there at the podium and closed my eyes, letting my mind become blank, empty of everything except the words: My life is light, waiting for the death wind, Like a feather on the back of my hand.

I heard chairs sc.r.a.ping the floor as men and women stood, and I heard the footsteps of people leaving the big room, not speaking; but I did not look up.

Finally I felt a hand, strong but gentle, on my shoulder and I opened my eyes. It was the old man, Edgar Baleen.

"Reader," he said. "Come with me."

I stared at him.

"Reader. You pa.s.sed the ordeal. You're baptized. You're safe from the fire. You need some rest."

I sighed then and said, "Yes. Yes. I need some rest."

And so I had come from prison to this-to being "Reader" for a group of Christians, to being some kind of priest. From that time on for months I have read to them from the Bible in the mornings and the evenings while they listen in silence. I read and they listen and nothing is said.

Writing it now, here in my house at Maugre, alone and safe, and now well-fed, I can hardly remember that strangeness of living with the Baleens. In many ways my older memories of Mary Lou and of the silent films are more vivid and present to me, even though I will be expected to appear for an evening reading only a short time from now. I have spent this entire day writing, since my morning reading. I will stop now and feed Biff and have a gla.s.s of whiskey. Tomorrow I will try to finish this new account of my life. And to tell the sad story of Annabel.

That first night old Edgar put me in a room upstairs to sleep, and left me. There were two beds in the room, with headboards made of bra.s.s tubes that looked like the one the old man had died in in the film where the clock stopped and the dog cried. I took my shoes off and got into the bed with my clothes on and Biff got up on the quilt, curled up at my feet, and went immediately to sleep. I felt envious of her. Although I was exhausted, and although the bed was the most comfortable thing I had ever had to sleep on, with its hugely thick mattress and its big, flower-printed quilt that had a tag reading SEARS' BEST-GOOSE DOWN sewn to its pink binding, yet I could not sleep. My mind was becoming full. In the darkened room and with my senses sharpened by fatigue, I began to picture a mult.i.tude of things from my past with a preternatural clarity. It was something like the vivid mind control that I had studied and taught in Ohio, with clear, hallucinatory images; but it was not aided by the usual drugs, and I had no control over it.

I saw clear images of Mary Lou at her reading on the library office floor, of the blank faces of the aging students in my little seminar in Ohio, their eyes downward as they sat in their denim student robes with their minds blown and serene, and of Dean Spofforth, tall, intelligent, frightening, dark brown, and inscrutable. I saw myself as a child, standing in the middle of a square outside Sleeping Quarters for Pre-teens at the dormitory. I had been put in Coventry for a day as a punishment for Invasion of Privacy, when I had shared my food with another child. The Rules of Coventry required me to stand still and be touched-on the face, or the arms, or the chest-by every child who crossed the square; I would writhe inwardly at the touch of each and my face was hot with shame.

Then I saw the little Privacy cubicle that was the first place I can remember sleeping in, with its narrow, hard, monastic bed and the Soul Muzak that came from the walls of soundproof Permoplastic, and the little Privacy rug on the floor on which I would say my prayers: "May the Directors make me grow inwardly. May I move through Delight and Serenity to Nirvana. May I be untouched by all outside . . ." And the private wall-sized TV that I learned to give myself to wholly, leaving my child's body behind for hours at a time while images of pleasure and joy and peace flashed over its glittering, holographic surface, and my body served only to provide my brain with the chemicals needed for blank pa.s.sivity, from the pills that I would take on cue from the TV when the lavender sopor light would flash.

I would watch the TV from supper until bedtime and when I slept I would dream of TV: bright, hypnotic, a constant fulfillment in the disembodied mind.

And then, lying there in that strange old bedroom at the end of a day when I had been baptized in water and nearly immolated in nuclear fire and had read from the Book of Genesis to a family of strangers, I could not sleep because of an imagination I could no longer control. I became flooded with a wish for the simplicity of my past life as a true child of the modern world. I wanted, I craved my sopors and marijuana and my other mind-flowering dope, and my Chemical Serenity and televised experience and my prayers to whatever a "Director" might be, and the sweet, drugged, dream-ridden sleep in my tiny Permoplastic room-air-conditioned, silent, safe from the confusions, the yearnings, the restlessness, and the despair that my new life was made of. I did not want to live with thereal anymore; it was too much of a burden. A sorry, heavy burden.

I thought of the old horse in the film, with his ears stuck up through holes in his straw hat. And of the words "Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods." I thought of myself and of Mary Lou, possibly the last generation of man on the face of the earth, in a place with no children and no future. I saw faces burning in the Burger Chef, embracing in their own fiery conclusion the eventual death of the species.

I was overcome with sadness. And yet I did not cry.

I saw the faces of the robots that tended us as children, blank and stern. And the face of the judge at my hearing. And Belasco, with his wise, old, cynical eyes, grinning at me.

Finally, when I began to feel that the images would never stop crowding into my tired mind, I turned on a battery-powered lamp by my bedside, found my little Audel's Robot Maintenance and Repair Guide, and opened it to the blank pages at the back where I had copied down some poems before I left prison. I read "The Hollow Men," the poem Mary Lou and I had been reading when Spofforth had arrested me: This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.

It was no comfort, true as it sounded, but it helped make the pictures fade from my mind.

And then, just as I was becoming relaxed, while reading a poem by Robert Browning, something very unsettling happened.

The door to my room opened and old Baleen's son, Roderick, came in. He did not speak to me, but nodded in my direction. Then he proceeded to undress himself in the middle of the room, heedless of Privacy, Modesty, or my Individual Rights, stripping himself to his naked hairy skin, and humming softly. He knelt at the side of the other bed and prayed aloud, "O Lord, most powerful and most cruel, forgive my miserable afflictions and sins, and make me humble and worthy. In Jesus' name. Amen." Then he got into the bed, curled up, and began almost immediately to snore.

I had nodded earlier in almost involuntary a.s.sent to the Baleens' phrase "the sin of Privacy"; but this raw intrusion of another person in my bedroom was overwhelming. And I had been alone so long, on the empty beaches with only Biff.

I tried to continue reading, from "Caliban upon Setobos," but the words, always difficult, made no sense at all, and I could not relax.

And yet, surprisingly, I fell asleep after a while and woke up in midmorning refreshed. Roderick was gone, and Biff was over in the corner of the room poking at a little ball of lint with her paw. The sun was coming through lace curtains. I could smell food from downstairs.

There was a big communal bathroom down the long hallway outside my room; old Edgar Baleen had shown it to me before putting me in the bedroom. The bathroom had an ancient, greenish metal plate on the door that said, in raised letters, MEN. There were six clean white lavatory bowls and six toilet stalls. I washed myself as best I could and combed my hair and beard. I needed a bath but had no idea of how to take one, and my clothes were worn and dirty. The new ones I had picked out had been left behind at Sears. Then I went down the big front stairway and into the kitchen.

There had been letters engraved in the stone arch over the doorway of the building: HALL OF JUSTICE: MAUGRE. The sign had made little impression on me the day before, but standing in the kitchen now, I imagined that the room, like the one I had done my Bible reading in, had been a courtroom in the ancient world; it was very large and high-ceilinged, with tall, thin, arched windows on each of the longer walls. The huge, now empty table in the center of the room looked as though it had been roughly made a long time before with a Sears chain saw; rough benches were placed around it.

Along one wall under the windows was a wide black inst.i.tutional stove, with a pile of wood on each side of it, and wooden counters with tops that looked polished and scrubbed and worn. Over the stove were white enameled oven doors, and on each side of them hung a row of pots and pans, large ones, stretching half the length of the room. On the opposite wall were eight battery-powered white refrigerators; each said KENMORE on its front. Next to the refrigerators was a long and deep sink. At this were standing two women, in floor-length blue dresses, their backs toward me, washing dishes.

Everything seemed completely different from the way it had been the night before. There were gla.s.s bowls of freshly cut yellow tulips on the table, and the room was filled with daylight and smelled of bacon and coffee. The women did not look over at me, although I was sure they had heard my footsteps on the bare floor.

I walked over toward the sink and hesitated. Then I said, "Excuse me."

One of them, a short, dumpy woman with white hair, turned and looked at me, but said nothing.

"I wonder if I could have something to eat."

She looked at me a moment, then turned and reached up and got a yellow box from a shelf over the sink and handed it to me. There was writing on the box that said: SURVIVAL COFFEE, INSTANT TYPE. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE: MAUGRE. IRRADIATED TO PREVENT SPOILAGE.

While I was reading that she had gotten me a large rough ceramic mug and a spoon from the dish drainer beside the sink. "Use the samovar,", she said, and nodded toward the stove across the room.

I went over and made myself a mug of strong black coffee, seated myself at the table, and began to sip it.

The other woman opened a refrigerator and got something out and then turned and walked across the room to the stove. I saw that she was the woman whom I had stared at, and who had exhorted me to read, the night before. She did not look at me. She seemed shy.

She opened one of the ovens on the stove, took something from it, put it on a platter and brought it over to the table. Avoiding my eyes, she put it in front of me along with a dish of b.u.t.ter and a knife. The dishes were heavy and dark brown.

I looked up at her. "What is it?" I said.

She looked at me, surprised at my ignorance, I suppose. "It's a coffee cake," she said.

I had never seen such a thing and did not know how to deal with it. She took the knife and cut a piece from the cake. She spread b.u.t.ter on it and handed it to me.

I tasted it. It was sweet and hot and had nuts on it. It was completely delicious. When I finished it she handed me another piece, smiling shyly. She seemed fl.u.s.tered, and that was odd, since she had appeared quite bold the night before.

The cake and the coffee were so good, and her shyness was so much like what I had been trained to expect from people, that I felt emboldened and spoke to her in a friendly way. "Did you make this cake?" I said.

She nodded and said, "Would you like an omelette?"

"An omelette?" I said. I had heard the word, but had never seen one. It had something to do with eggs.

When I didn't reply she went over to the refrigerator and came back with three large, real eggs. I had eaten real eggs only on rare occasions, such as my graduation from the dormitory. She took them to the stove and cracked them into a brown ceramic bowl, and then placed a small and shallow black pan on the stove, put b.u.t.ter in it and let it heat. She stirred up the eggs vigorously, poured them into the pan, and with a great deal of agility slid the pan rapidly back and forth on the stove while looping the eggs around with a fork. She was very beautiful, doing this. Then she took the pan by its handle, brought it over to the table, upended the handle, and neatly slid a yellow crescent of eggs onto my plate. "Eat it with a fork," she said.

I took a bite. It was wonderful. I finished it silently. I believe, even now, that omelette and coffee cake were the best meal I had ever eaten in my life.

I felt even bolder after eating and I looked at her, still standing by me, and said, "Would you show me how to make an omelette?"

She looked shocked, and said nothing.

Then from the sink the other woman's voice said, "Men don't cook."

The woman beside me hesitated a moment, and then said softly, "This man is different, Mary. He's a Reader."

Mary did not turn around. "The men are in the fields," she said, "doing the Lord's work."

The woman by me was shy, but she knew her own mind. She ignored Mary and said to me, "Did you read the writing on the coffee box when she gave it to you?"

"Yes," I said.

She went to the stove and got it from where I had left it. "Read it to me," she said. And I did. She was very attentive to the words and when I was finished she said, "What's *Maugre'?"

"The name of this town," I said. "Or I think it is."

She looked open-mouthed. "The town has a name?" she said.

"I think so."

"The house has a name," she said. "Baleena." That is how I have chosen to spell it: It was not written anywhere until I wrote it, much later, for old Edgar.

"Well, Baleena is in the town of Maugre," I said.

She nodded thoughtfully, and then went to the refrigerator and got a bowl of eggs. Then she began to show me how to make an omelette.