"Yup."

"Christ, they're idiots!"

"I know, I know."

"Talbot's going to murder murder them." them."

"Maybe not, if you can get me out of here. Just slip me back through to the lot. I'll never involve any of your names, I promise you that."

"Jeez Louise!"

"Check my hand."

Shaking his head, Gofer unclipped his scanner and shone it on my knuckles. The purple emblem seemed to hover, a tiny hologram.

I tried to hustle him past deliberation, by acting as if he'd already agreed. "Let's make a move now, they're not looking."

"Jeez-"

"Only I really need to stop in the bathroom, I was stuck there all night."

"Oh, brother."

When I emerged from the men's toilet Gofer regarded me pityingly, my threat all dissipated now. "Guess it was unlucky for you this whole thing went down today," he said.

"Crazy unlucky," I agreed. unlucky," I agreed.

"Teach you to try that again."

"Indeed. Never."

"It's not funny."

"I'm not laughing."

At the A/B doors I whispered, "Probably you should just say I left something in my car." Gofer made a face, then leaned through a sliding window.

"This guy's got to go back to the lot," he said, his tone morose, like a bullied boy. "I'm taking him out."

"Okay," came the bleary reply. The cage's bolts slammed open and shut, each in turn, and we moved through.

"Hey, so what exactly did did go down in there?" I asked Gofer at the entrance to the lot. The dawn's early light, still combing through the treeline, shocked my crummy orbs. I caught a whiff of myself, an ordinary all-night stink. Three disgruntled crows jogged across the gravel as we approached, then flapped aloft to barely clear the razor curls atop the Cyclone fence, and winged for the highway and the strip mall beyond it. The birds made shabby harbingers of my freedom: the prospect of my rental car's AC, some McDonald's coffee. go down in there?" I asked Gofer at the entrance to the lot. The dawn's early light, still combing through the treeline, shocked my crummy orbs. I caught a whiff of myself, an ordinary all-night stink. Three disgruntled crows jogged across the gravel as we approached, then flapped aloft to barely clear the razor curls atop the Cyclone fence, and winged for the highway and the strip mall beyond it. The birds made shabby harbingers of my freedom: the prospect of my rental car's AC, some McDonald's coffee.

"Holy Moses," said Gofer, incredulous I'd been so near yet missed the breaking story. "Nothing apart from a fellow up in the SHU fooled an officer into opening his door, made a run for it. I guess he had some stolen keys, so we've got a whole headache about it now. Talbot's having a cow."

"Guy escaped?" I was blessed, I understood now, in being one headache too many this morning. Hence my easy ticket out. No one, least of all Gofer, wished to see Talbot further inflamed. I couldn't have scripted Robert Woolfolk's role better if I'd tried.

"Killed himself."

"What?" I blurted.

Gofer shut his eyes and stuck out his tongue.

"They killed him him, you mean."

"Nope." He staged-whispered for effect. "Suicide. Got loose, then did away with himself, poor crazy son of a gun."

"Why would he kill himself if he got free?"

Gofer shrugged. "This fellow leaped off a gun tower, highest point on the yard. Gunnery officer said he was hooting like an eagle. He hit a sloped concrete embankment, landed sideways, I guess. It was pretty sickening. They were taking pictures out there but nobody's going to use them. Craziest thing I've ever seen-his arms got tangled under his body, so he sort of crumpled up and broke in half as he slid down that bank. Didn't even look human by the time he came to a stop."

chapter16.

The Hoagy Carmichael Room, a mock Midwestern parlor with carpet and furniture and vitrines full of Carmichael's own scrapbook memorabilia, was open only by appointment, but I was able to make one on the spot. I didn't sense the room's keepers had too much demand. The formalities were only to be certain no intruder seated themselves at Hoagy's upright piano and started playing, or swiped hand-scrawled notes from Bix Beiderbecke or Governor Ronald Reagan. The key-bearer was a middle-aged secretary down the corridor, in the Archives of Traditional Music, there in Morrison Hall. She hovered nervously beside me in the room, until I persuaded her I was a good bet. Then I was left alone, to balm my soul in contemplation of the original sheet music for "Ole Buttermilk Sky" and "My Resistance Is Low" and a ribbon-bound screenplay of To Have and Have Not To Have and Have Not autographed by Bogart, Faulkner, and Hawks. Afterward I went to the listening room and spent some time on headphones, exploring lost acetates, rare masters of Carmichael's music. The Collegians, Carmichael's Indiana University fraternity band, had recorded a stomp called "March of the Hooligans"-careening hot jazz with a fiddle solo to peg it as Hoosier. I played that tinny, miraculous bit of schoolboy art five or six times, then returned to dwell some more in the Zen garden of the room. autographed by Bogart, Faulkner, and Hawks. Afterward I went to the listening room and spent some time on headphones, exploring lost acetates, rare masters of Carmichael's music. The Collegians, Carmichael's Indiana University fraternity band, had recorded a stomp called "March of the Hooligans"-careening hot jazz with a fiddle solo to peg it as Hoosier. I played that tinny, miraculous bit of schoolboy art five or six times, then returned to dwell some more in the Zen garden of the room.

I'd driven all day and far into Sunday night from the mall lot in Watertown, committing topological penance across western New York and into Pennsylvania, on a flat, three-lane interstate which judged or forgave nothing, only left me wholly to my own judgment. Now I understood: I'd wakened Aeroman to kill Robert Woolfolk. It was a collaboration that had taken Mingus and the ring and my half-conscious hatred years to devise, though the seed of inspiration had been unmistakable, in Aaron X. Doily's plunge into the Pacific Street vest-pocket park, twenty-three years ago-what goes up comes down. Aeroman was nothing if not a black body on the ground. I hadn't even played fair and told Robert of the ring's switch to invisibility. I wondered if he'd discovered it. I wondered if the guards on the tower had only told themselves they'd seen the man who screamed like a raptor on his way down, if there'd been anything to see until he'd smashed to pieces on the embankment.

For so long I'd thought Abraham's legacy was mine: to retreat upstairs, unable or unwilling to sing or fly, only to compile and collect, to sculpt statues of my lost friends, life's real actors, in my Fortress of Solitude. To see the world in a liner note: I am the DJ, I am what I play. But here I'd catapulted across the country in an airplane seat, a deranged arrow-man of pure intention, to uncover Mingus and Robert at Watertown-they hadn't asked me to come. Maybe I'd underrated the Rachel in me, the Running Crab ready to destroy and bolt, to overturn lives and go on the lam.

So now I had to move on the ground, touch the earth. I needed to follow her crab footprints exactly, make no mistake in whom I was tracking this time. I drove just over the limit, anonymous in the flow, but inside the space of the car I was a vigilante, a low rider. I drove without music, my CD wallet on the backseat, untouched-no soundtrack to prettify the ugly scene of me. I stopped only to stretch my legs, gas up, and piss, and to make a handful of calls, letting Abraham and Francesca know I wouldn't be returning to Brooklyn, contacting the airline to cancel a ticket and the rental office to say I'd be returning the car to Berkeley in a few days, not La Guardia tomorrow. No one was pleased, but I didn't give anyone a choice in the matter. I didn't call Abby, because I didn't have anything to tell her, not yet.

I lost my wits on the road at around three. The sporadic lights coming the other way seemed always about to veer into mine, despite the wide grassy divider between us. I found a Howard Johnson's then, at the entrance to Ohio, and slept for a few queasy hours, showered, hit the road again. I made Indiana by midmorning-a left turn at Indianapolis, past Larry Bird's auto dealership, south to Bloomington. Campus parking was a bitch, so I settled for a faculty spot. I'd killed a man last night-I could stand a campus parking ticket.

At a terminal in the library I made my discovery: my quarry not only still lived in Bloomington, he worked on campus. I wouldn't even have to repark my car. The researcher at Zelmo Swift's law firm had traced Running Crab's last known address to Bloomington, 1975, before she'd dropped off the map after bail flight in Lexington, Kentucky. But Abraham had refused even to look inside Zelmo's manila folder of "This Is Your Life!" data, and neither Zelmo Swift nor Francesca Cassini could have known, as I did, another name to use to pick up the Bloomington trail.

The Archives of Traditional Music and the Carmichael Collection shared Morrison Hall with a portion of IU's English and psych departments, and with the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, which occupied two of the hall's upper floors. It was at the Kinsey Institute that I'd located Croft Vendle. He worked in their Office of Public Affairs. I called him from a phone in the library, and he told me to come by.

When I arrived, the Kinsey secretary explained that Croft was on a call. So I sat in a waiting room and read brochures. From the evidence, the institute was still struggling to defend its first, half-refused gift of knowledge to the American mind, and teetering always on the brink of exile from the campus by Indiana's priggish legislature. The walls around me held the single biggest repository of "erotic materials" in the world, Alfred Kinsey having forged deals with police departments all over the country to quietly cart away seized materials, sparing the expense of their storage or destruction. For all this, the offices were homey, walls lined with neat-framed fifties-vintage smut, black-and-white photos as sunny as Topps baseball-card photography. Beside the receptionist's desk hung an honorific row of studio portraits of past directors, beginning with bow-tied Alfred himself, and continuing through a charming sequence, leading to the present day, of thoughtful eyeglass-frame-gnawing psychologists, gentle stewards of freaky reality.

Croft was a man I barely recognized, in a rust corduroy two-piece, maroon tie, and milk-chocolate Earth shoes. His ruddy features swarmed with wiry silver beard, all trimmed to an exact length, even where it sprouted from his ears. He resembled a diet or exercise guru, someone usually seen only in running shorts but temporarily got up in a suit for a book-plugging appearance on Today Today. It was a shock. In my mind's eye only Abraham aged; Rachel and her lover were still verdant, in 1974 bodies forever.

"I've got this call on hold," Croft said apologetically, gesturing back toward his office. His voice was helium-high, another thing I didn't remember. He seemed to take my appearance more in stride, despite my hints of road-weary desperado: three-day beard and sunburned forearm, Vietnam-vet walleye. Perhaps he'd been expecting me for years. "It's this wealthy gay collector in Los Angeles, he's been dangling this donation for months, a stash of Japanese erotica, thousands of pieces. I've got him on the brink, but it's taking some real hand-holding."

"No problem," I said. "I can wait." I wondered if Erlan Hagopian's Rachel-paintings would find their way here someday. Maybe they already had.

"I was thinking if you're free you'd come out to the farm for dinner," he said. "So we can talk."

"Number 1, Rural Route 8?" I asked.

Croft's eyes widened. "We call it Watermelon Sugar Farm, but yeah. Bring your car out front at five and I'll lead you. Place can be difficult to find-kind of a backroads, no-map-to-the-territory deal."

"Okay."

"Cool," he said. "I'd better get back to this call. If you're just killing the afternoon I could get Susie, she's our intern, to give you the full Kinsey tour."

"That's okay."

I'd noted the Hoagy option on the way through Morrison's lobby, and suspected that better fit my mood. So Croft went to his phone call, I to "March of the Hooligans."

"Just one thing I want to show you," said Croft. "Then we ought to go for a walk around the property, before the light's gone. It's a rare night."

Croft, piloting a decrepit Peugot, had led me along a serpentine country road, through hamlets and farmland and well into the woods, before we'd turned onto a well-maintained dirt road with W W. SUGAR SUGAR marked on the mailbox. There we'd rumbled past a few rotting Volkswagen Beetle exoskeletons, field grass swum up through their engines, to stop in front of a hand-hewn cabin, with an ancient paint job mostly blistered off its plank exterior. I thought it leaned dangerously, but we headed for the half-open door. Beside it, an upright manual lawnmower was rusted to sculpture beside a primitive stone well, each having surrendered, like the Beetles, to the field grass. marked on the mailbox. There we'd rumbled past a few rotting Volkswagen Beetle exoskeletons, field grass swum up through their engines, to stop in front of a hand-hewn cabin, with an ancient paint job mostly blistered off its plank exterior. I thought it leaned dangerously, but we headed for the half-open door. Beside it, an upright manual lawnmower was rusted to sculpture beside a primitive stone well, each having surrendered, like the Beetles, to the field grass.

"You live here?" I asked. I withheld the question that went with it: Was Croft the only one left on the property? The scene was Walden-pretty, but a little desolate, regarded on civilization's terms.

"God, no, the homes are down the hill, in the woods. We've got a hundred and sixty acres. This place was the old communal cookhouse, back when we all ate together. Plus a winter sleeping bunk for the folks in tepees. This was some time ago, though. Nobody uses this for anything anymore, except the bees."

I suppose there was never a reason for tearing down a cabin or scrapping a stopped automobile, if you had all those acres. Particularly if your models of exterior decoration were author photos of Richard Brautigan, at the door of a Kaczynksian Montana shack.

Inside was an abandoned kitchen: an old range, its enamel webbed like the glaze of a Renaissance painting, a long, stained butcher-block which could have been salvaged for installation in a loft in Emeryville or Gowanus, and a double-basined sink with an old plastic bucket below, in place of plumbing. What Croft had called a sleeping bunk sagged so low over the stove it threatened to kiss it. I picked out wood rot and insect eggs, a hollow-log scent. Croft clambered over some barrel staves and steel drums, into the corner beneath the loft, and from a shelf full of water-swollen hardcover books plucked up a mechanical something and curled it under his arm. When he crawled back through the wreckage, he presented it to me: a manual typewriter. The double ribbon, black-over-red, which had produced the reverb of crimson in Running Crab's postcard font, was still strung between the spools, though the spools themselves were thick with corrosion, going nowhere in a hurry.

Any stray tendril of fantasy that Croft was about to produce Rachel in the flesh, that she dwelled incognito like a Weatherman or Symbionese soccer mom in one of those homes in the woods, evaporated now, even before he spoke.

"We kept it in the Bug, when we drove out to the coast. We'd write you a postcard each time we stopped for gas, or to get stoned."

"You wrote them, or she did?"

"I had to kind of push her, but she helped. I think she was ashamed, you know? Later it was just me. After she was gone." I held the melted typewriter in my two hands, like a beggar with his hat. Croft brushed at the sodden chunks of rust it had deposited on the sleeve of his corduroy jacket.

"You want it?" he asked.

"No." I wanted my cleaning deposit back when I returned the rental, that's what I wanted.

"Let's go for a walk."

The dirt road curved out of the open field at the property's entrance, down the hill and to the woods. We left the cars, strolled into the glade, the cool forest, too steep and irregular to ever have been farmed. The sun gone from sight below the hill's line, the birch trunks and pale ferns seemed bioluminescent, charged with the day's light. Our footfalls whispered unreplied on the private road's fresh layer of sharp, gray gravel. The woods were an engine of silence, pumping it to the sky.

Around each turn lay a house. Wooden two-story buildings, seven or eight total, each with their thoughtful trace of Buckminster Fuller or Christopher Alexander-circular rooms with skylight domes, greenhouse windows, breezeways attaching a low annex or small studio. Each house with a car or two in the drive, a few with smoke unfolding from a chimney. Here and there bicycles, chain saws, snowshoes, mulching piles, splintery blast marks of log splitting, ax wedged in a stump. The Watermelon Sugars were home, their kitchens lit. From the distance of the road, though, we granted their privacy as we passed. I was humbled, as I ought to have been, to see what varieties of life could hide between the arrogant, oblivious coasts.

"Rachel and Jeremy were probably the biggest challenge this community ever faced," said Croft in his squeaky alto. "Confronting them helped us grow up, so I guess we owe them a lot. I'll never forget that night, we held hands in a circle around them and told them they had to go. I just about shit my pants. Jeremy had already punched me a couple of times, but I was too embarrassed to admit it to anyone. Turned out he'd punched a lot of people."

"I don't know who Jeremy is," I said.

"Somebody told me he died a couple of years ago. He was basically just this really charismatic, really violent guy from Kentucky who used us as his playground for a few months. His favorite game was to scare guys by getting them really high, then talk about how he'd once killed a man outside a bar with a single blow to the throat. He had a lot of those biker horror stories. Right after the throat story he'd move in on the guy's girlfriend. Everyone was sort of passive, you know, like 'If she wants to be with Jeremy, that's cool, maybe she'll bring him some peace.' Rach was actually the only person who really stood up to him."

"He took her away from you?" I asked. It was growing darker, and I'd been momentarily transfixed by the scene in a bright-lit kitchen window-a middle-aged woman, her hair as gray as Croft's, sliced tomatoes at a counter, while behind her, two blond daughters, bright and shiny as Solver girls, played a dual-remote video game, some dungeon or deep-seascape glowing unearthly blue on a screen. But they couldn't see me, and I felt like Frankenstein's monster, peeping at the humans. So I turned away.

"Oh, we weren't spending much time together at that point. Rachel was her own problem, a lot of people weren't completely thrilled about my bringing her out here. She had that New York sarcastic thing that burst a lot of people's balloons." He laughed. "I mean, she sort of ran rings around people, truth be told. She ran rings around me me. Plus she wasn't happy here. She's wasn't all that happy, period, or she would never have gone with Jeremy. I think she regretted leaving New York."

"Did she talk about-Abraham?"

"Well, she was pretty ashamed," Croft said. It was the same word he'd used to explain why he'd had to force her to write the postcards. I supposed it was true, the right word. I decided to quit fishing for more.

Croft went on. "Mostly I just remember this one day, I tried to get her to come looking for mushrooms with me. She hated that kind of thing, she thought it was stupid. This was after Jeremy showed up too. I was just trying to reach out, you know, make some connection, because she seemed so balled up. So she had this routine, every time I tried to get her to do anything outdoors she'd say, 'I wonder what's playing at the Thalia.' Like I should know what she was missing, from her life before. She'd say, 'Maybe it's The Thirty-nine Steps The Thirty-nine Steps, or A Thousand Clowns A Thousand Clowns,' or whatever. So this particular day she said yes, I don't know why. It had just rained for three days, and we went hunting for fresh morels." Croft gestured at the forest floor, and I understood he meant here here. More or less right around here. "Not that she picked mushrooms. She was chain-smoking-she couldn't drive, either, she constantly forced me to run her into town for cigarettes. Anyway, she walked with me, smoking like a fiend, and when she started in about the Thalia she said, 'Maybe they're showing Beat the Devil Beat the Devil,' and I said, 'What's so great about Beat the Devil Beat the Devil ?' and she told me the plot of that fucking movie for an hour. I mean, doing Peter Lorre's voice and everything, all the lines-she had the whole thing memorized." ?' and she told me the plot of that fucking movie for an hour. I mean, doing Peter Lorre's voice and everything, all the lines-she had the whole thing memorized."

I didn't reach for music until I was out of Indiana. First Croft and I reclaimed our cars, and he showed me his house, another beauty nestled at the end of the drive, where the Watermelon Sugar property nearly ran out. A fire lane cut across another twelve acres, then opened onto the interstate, up from Louisville, Kentucky. If the wind blew right you could hear the trucks. It was then that Croft mentioned, just an afterthought, that the farm was in the fight of its life, against a creature less chimerical than Rachel and Jeremy. The legislature meant to extend the highway across the property, a four-billion-dollar contract for local construction-one which, Croft said, would cut only ten minutes off the trip to Chicago. We considered this together, tipping our ears to catch the distant whine of tractor trailers. Then he showed me inside, and we lit his kitchen, and he made me a plate of spaghetti. He offered a guest-room bed, but I wanted to drive. He told me I could use his phone and I nearly did, then decided I'd call Abby from somewhere west of here, somewhere nearer to home, when I'd sorted out more of all I'd have to explain.

At the door Croft hugged me, awkwardly, and I hugged him back, awkwardly. There was nothing to accept or refuse in the embrace. Isabel Vendle's nephew wasn't the mother I never had, any more than a rotting typewriter was. He wasn't the father I never had, either. Abraham was the father I never had, and Rachel was the mother I never had, and Gowanus or Boerum Hill was the home I never had, everything was only itself however many names it carried, and so I hugged Croft and I went out to pilot my car through the woods, back to the serpentine road. I was lost a few times on the way to Bloomington, but I never stopped and asked for directions. There was no one to ask. And I wasn't in a hurry.

It was after midnight when I skirted Gary, Indiana, birthplace of the Jackson Five. In Illinois I stopped for gas and noticed the wallet of discs on the backseat. Once on the road I groped one into the mouth of the car's player, the first to fall into my hand-Brian Eno's Another Green World Another Green World. Prog rock-troll music, Euclid Barnes would have called it. I'd listened to this record my whole life since discovering it in the cut-out bin on the eighth floor of Abraham and Straus, at the dying record store there, behind the stamp and coin collecting department. Using Brooklyn skills, I'd boosted another copy, a commercial cassette, from the Main Street record shop of Camden Town, then played it endlessly one night as I made love to Moira Hogarth. I adored the record's harmless spookiness: Eno's keyboard washes, John Cale's sawing cello, Robert Fripp's teardrop fretwork. And I always associated it with driving, with miles rushing beneath headlights and my eyes. I associated it with one drive in particular.

This was the winter of my expulsion from Camden College. After Richard Brodeur's letter, I'd been forced to return to the campus once more, to collect my belongings-books, bedclothes, stereo-all crated in the attic of Oswald House. So Abraham had, in his typical, infuriating, silent way, driven me north, in a borrowed car. The school was closed then, for the long, fuel-conserving winter break. Still, at my insistence, Abraham had waited in the car, while I found a security guard who could unlock the dorm's attic. I didn't want my father to set foot on the grounds.

Returning, we'd driven through a Massachusetts blizzard, wind swirling flakes in a tunnel of white around the mole-eye of our windshield. Our silence was total. My shame at Abraham's presumed disappointment could only be stemmed by stony, preemptive fury of my own. When the storm was at its height, our car inching through the polar cyclone, navigating by the taillights of a wavering truck whose treads ground a path through the slurry, I'd reached into the backseat, into a carton of books and cassettes and, as tonight, pulled out the Eno, and put it into the car's player. The music made an ideal soundtrack to the blizzard's unreality. I suppose Abraham was actually struggling with a vivid amount of danger, but Another Green World Another Green World 's supernatural placidity seemed to acknowledge his effort and to calm us at the same time. Eno sang 's supernatural placidity seemed to acknowledge his effort and to calm us at the same time. Eno sang I can't see the lines I used to think I could read between I can't see the lines I used to think I could read between - - Earlier, the first years of high school, when the Clash and Ramones were first thrilling me and Gabriel Stern and Timothy Vandertooth, I'd bring a record home and play it for Abraham and ask him, "Do you hear it? How great it is? There's never been music like this!"

"Sure," he'd say. "It's wonderful."

"But do you really really hear what I'm hearing? Can you hear the same song I do?" hear what I'm hearing? Can you hear the same song I do?"

"Of course," he'd say, leaving me perfectly unsatisfied, leaving the mystery unplumbed: Could my father hear my music? Could my father hear my music? By my college years, though, I'd never have asked, even if we weren't on that dour voyage home. Those lines of inquiry were shut down, so I barely troubled to speculate what By my college years, though, I'd never have asked, even if we weren't on that dour voyage home. Those lines of inquiry were shut down, so I barely troubled to speculate what Another Green World Another Green World might mean to Abraham, whether he felt it shaping our pummel through the snow. Eno sang, might mean to Abraham, whether he felt it shaping our pummel through the snow. Eno sang, You'd be surprised at my degree of uncertainty You'd be surprised at my degree of uncertainty - - I considered now that what I once loved in this record, and certain others- Remain in Light Remain in Light, "O Superman," Horses Horses -was the middle space they conjured and dwelled in, a bohemian demimonde, a hippie dream. And that same space, that unlikely proposition, was what I'd eventually come to hate and be embarrassed by, what I'd had to refuse in favor of soul, in favor of Barrett Rude Junior and his defiant, unsubtle pain. I'd needed music that would tell it like it is, like I'd learned it to be, in the inner city. -was the middle space they conjured and dwelled in, a bohemian demimonde, a hippie dream. And that same space, that unlikely proposition, was what I'd eventually come to hate and be embarrassed by, what I'd had to refuse in favor of soul, in favor of Barrett Rude Junior and his defiant, unsubtle pain. I'd needed music that would tell it like it is, like I'd learned it to be, in the inner city. Another Green World Another Green World was like Abraham's film: too fragile, too yokeable-I wanted a tougher song than that. I knew stuff B. Eno and A. Ebdus didn't, and I couldn't afford to carry them or their naivete, any more than Mingus could afford to carry me or mine. was like Abraham's film: too fragile, too yokeable-I wanted a tougher song than that. I knew stuff B. Eno and A. Ebdus didn't, and I couldn't afford to carry them or their naivete, any more than Mingus could afford to carry me or mine.

The collapsing middle was what Running Crab had fled out of. It was the same space the communists and gays and painters of celluloid imagined they'd found in Gowanus, only to be unwitting wedges for realtors, a racial wrecking ball. A gentrification was the scar left by a dream, Utopia the show which always closed on opening night. And it wasn't so different from the space Abraham raged not to find opening to welcome his film, a space the width of a dwindled summer, a place where Mingus Rude always grooved fat spaldeen pitches, born home runs.

We all pined for those middle spaces, those summer hours when Josephine Baker lay waste to Paris, when "Bothered Blue" peaked on the charts, when a teenaged Elvis, still dreaming of his own first session, sat in the Sun Studios watching the Prisonaires, when a top-to-bottom burner blazed through a subway station, renovating the world for an instant, when schoolyard turntables were powered by a cord run from a streetlamp, when juice just flowed flowed. I'd come to Indiana not to see a typewriter, or meet Croft, but to walk that back road in dusk and see the middle space the Watermelon Sugars had wrested from the world, before the makers of highways wrested it back, just as I'd gone to Katha's house to see the pallet she kept for her sister, to hear M-Dog's rhymes. A middle space opened and closed like a glance, you'd miss it if you blinked. Maybe Camden had been one once too, before it was poisoned with cash. It bore the traces. In the same spirit, on Rachel's principles, I'd been pushed out like a blind finger, to probe a nonexistent space, a whiteboy integrating public schools which were just then being abandoned, which were becoming only rehearsals for prison. Her mistake was so beautiful, so stupid, so American. It terrified my small mind, it always had. Abraham had the better idea, to try to carve the middle space on a daily basis, alone in his room. If the green triangle never fell to earth before he died and left the film unfinished, it would never have fallen-wasn't that so? Wasn't it?

Brian Eno sang How can moments go so slowly? How can moments go so slowly? as we drove through the storm. Abraham and I let ourselves be swept through the blurred tunnel, beyond rescue but calm for an instant, settled in our task, a father driving a son home to Dean Street. There was no Mingus Rude or Barrett Rude Junior with us there, no Running Crab postcard or letter from Camden College pushed through the slot. We were in a middle space then, in a cone of white, father and son moving forward at a certain speed. Side by side, not truly quiet but quiescent, two gnarls of human scribble, human cipher, human dream. as we drove through the storm. Abraham and I let ourselves be swept through the blurred tunnel, beyond rescue but calm for an instant, settled in our task, a father driving a son home to Dean Street. There was no Mingus Rude or Barrett Rude Junior with us there, no Running Crab postcard or letter from Camden College pushed through the slot. We were in a middle space then, in a cone of white, father and son moving forward at a certain speed. Side by side, not truly quiet but quiescent, two gnarls of human scribble, human cipher, human dream.

Just Walking in the Rain by Jay Warner, unread by D. Ebdus, is a responsible account of the Prisonaires. by Jay Warner, unread by D. Ebdus, is a responsible account of the Prisonaires.

"It Was the Drugs," lyrics by Chrissie McClean.

Among too many to thank, I must at least mention Elizabeth Gaffney, Lynn Nottage, Sarah Crichton, David Gates (the man in the abandoned house), Christopher Sorrentino, Lorin Stein, Julia Rosenberg, Walter Donohue, Zoe Rosenfeld, Bill Thomas, Richard Parks, and Yaddo.

Above all, Christina Palacio, Karl Rusnak, Dione Ruffin, and my brother, Blake.

Also by Jonathan Lethem Fiction Gun, with Occasional Music Gun, with Occasional Music Amnesia Moon Amnesia Moon The Wall of the Sky, the Wall The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye (stories) As She Climbed Across the Table As She Climbed Across the Table Girl in Landscape Girl in Landscape Motherless Brooklyn Motherless Brooklyn This Shape We're In (novella) This Shape We're In (novella) With Carter Scholz Kafka Americana Kafka Americana As Editor The Vintage Book of Amnesia The Vintage Book of Amnesia The Year's Best Music The Year's Best Music Writing 2002 PUBLISHED BY DOUBLEDAY.

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