"But I don't ... You mean somebody down at the station ...?"

"Not quite. The possibility was suggested by a member of his crew. The shaveling Evelyn."

Mrs. Kooshof's laughter was loud and prolonged, a sequence of outrageous squeals that totally eclipsed Captain Nineteen's brief interview with a member of his crew.

"I see no humor in this," I said acidly.

"You? Captain Nineteen?"

"Just an option," I told her, although in truth I had already cooled on the idea. (The one thing Thomas Chippering cannot abide is ridicule.) Wistfully, I sighed and switched off the television set.

Pity, I thought.

Thus I dismissed the whole notion.

Gave up, in other words.

Over the next day or two I brushed aside Evelyn's inquiries regarding my future as Captain Nineteen. Out of the question, I told her.

In my heart, however, I felt like a dupe to orthodoxy. I trudged through my day care duties, limped home in midafternoon, collapsed on the sofa, lay watching Captain Nineteen reruns with dull eyes and dull spirit. Today's man of the future, I would think, and then I would laugh aloud at my own cowardice.

In retrospect, I now realize, these were symptoms of a larger, more dangerous malaise. The events of recent months were clawing at me, compressing my heart with the relentless G-forces of sorrow. Late one night I found myself sitting in the garage, holding a lighted match, talking to my bombs as if they were living creatures. Lorna Sue's face seemed to bob before me. "I loved you!" I yelled.

Later I yelled, "Where are you?"

I smiled and swallowed the match.

In the end, it was one of those random, unexpected incidents of life that gusted up out of the blue to rescue me from the spiritual doldrums. One moment my ship was becalmed, the next I was unleashing the lifeboats.

And if not for the sly, persistent Evelyn, a whole fascinating chapter of my life would have surely been stillborn. (I have discovered through trial and error, primarily the latter, that none of us stands at the helm of life's great ocean liner; control is an illusion; destination itself is a pitiful chimera; we are at best mere passengers aboard a drifting vessel, some of us in steerage, some in first class, all at the whim of a ghostly crew and passing icebergs.) The initial circumstances were hardly extraordinary. As was her custom, the affectionate little Evelyn had crawled up on my lap at the beginning of rest period one Wednesday morning, squirming and tugging at my hair and otherwise misbehaving in the most outrageous ways. Eventually I was compelled to insist that she join her classmates on the floor. (Each student was required to have a bath towel on hand for just this daily ritual.) Young Evelyn, however, took poorly to discipline. Fists clenched, her tonsils suddenly in plain view, the little hellcat responded with what can only be called a classic temper tantrum. The decibels were astonishing.

Through all this commotion, and much more, I stood my ground. Even with Evelyn adhering to me like a vicious she-crab, I pushed to my feet and managed to unroll her lavender bath towel.

"I won't do it!" she cried, and took a firm new grip on my hair. "I don't like the floor!"

"You will do it!" I roared back.

And so on.

Oddly, if only for a passing moment, I found myself revisiting two or three identical struggles with Lorna Sue, in particular those occasions when I had attempted to affirm my connubial rights and privileges. Lorna Sue, for better or worse, was never one for spontaneity. "I don't like the floor!" et cetera.

Call it post-traumatic stress syndrome: Something snapped inside me.

I swatted young Evelyn.

On the backside. Hard.

Curiously, though, the girl neither yelped nor cried-nothing of the sort. She gazed at the center of my forehead as if shopping for a casket.

"You hit me," she finally said, her voice flat, betraying nothing.

" 'Hit' is incorrect," I told her. " 'Hit' is absolutely not the word."

"It was a hit."

"A tap," I insisted.

The girl looked at me steadily. "It felt like a real hit. And it hurt." There was a pause as she allowed this information to work its way through my circuitry. "You're not supposed to hit children."

"Well, true, but on the other hand-"

"My mom won't like it, I bet."

"No. Probably not."

There was little point, I realized, in debating the issue. After a moment Evelyn sighed and curled up on her bath towel.

"Okay, I'll lie down," she said, "except you have to lie here with me."

"With you?" I said.

"Beside me. On my towel."

I shook my head. "I doubt that's a good idea. If you wish, I could sit for a moment."

"No, I want you to lie down," Evelyn said. She appraised me with cunning blue eyes. "And you better do it. Or else I'll tell my mom how you hit me. Don't think I won't tell her."

"Of course you will."

"So come on. Right now."

Slowly, with all the obvious reservations, I removed my navy-blue sports coat, loosened my tie, kicked off my shoes, and rather awkwardly began to arrange my large, gangly frame on Evelyn's lavender towel. The word manipulator had come to mind, and as I lay back, I could not help but be reminded of Toni's honors thesis, those late nights at the typewriter, a memory that then blurred into a thousand other such incidents of feminine blackmail.

So, yes. Another jolt of deja vu. But at the same time, as punishments go, this seemed a fairly modest one. (Evelyn was correct. It had, in fact, been a full-fledged "hit.") I drew a few sleepy breaths and counted my blessings.

Not so bad, I decided.

Perhaps I dozed off. Perhaps I was merely lost in fluid reverie. Either way, when I surfaced a few minutes later, young Evelyn lay curled up on my chest, appraising me with solemn blue eyes.

"You know something else?" she said quietly.

"What's that?"

The girl wagged her head with genuine compassion. "I don't think my mom will like this either."

* I am forever astonished at the longevity of childhood. How it never ends. How we are what we were. How turtles and engines and stolen kisses leave their jet trail across our gaping lives.

* Spot. Words, I've noticed, have a way of following us around like a nagging old melody. We try to stop humming the damned tune, we bite our tongues, but ten minutes later we are at it again: "In short, there's simply not/a more congenial spot ..."

"... for happy-ever-aftering/than here in Camelot."

With women, I have learned, the fundamental function of language is rarely to impart intellectual content, or to share objective meaning; it is rather to give vent to some murky-headed sense of "emotion." The delicious young Toni, for instance, could not have composed a precise, readable, well-crafted sentence if her very life were at stake. Upon her deathbed-beside which I fervently hope to kneel one gorgeous day-Toni will no doubt request that I ghostwrite her own last words. (Which, even in the afterworld, she will righteously claim as her own.) There was no room for maneuver. Evelyn made her demands, I bit the bullet, and by this circuitous route, paved with treachery, I found myself auditioning two days later for the role of Captain Nineteen. In part, of course, I felt gulled and used-at the noose end of my emotional rope-yet there was no denying the electric sizzle along my spine as I entered the studios of Channel Nineteen on a cloudy Friday afternoon. I was accompanied by Mrs. Robert Kooshof, whose smirking skepticism bothered me not at all.

"He who hoots last," I declared, which sent my good-humored fiancee into a spasm of inexplicable giggles.

I ignored her.

The arc of my life had bent to its natural end. You, I thought, are Captain Nineteen.

After a short, nerve-racking wait, we were escorted onto the set by a pretty little stagehand named Jessie, short for Jessica, short for mouth-watering. (Strawberry hair. Eyes of cinnamon. Assorted fruits, vegetables, and Virginia baked hams.) Even with Mrs. Kooshof at my side, this daring scamp went out of her way to flash me the whole appetizing menu. (If life is a banquet, I thought ruefully, it seemed fiendish that I should now be limited to a single course of Dutch gruel.) Bedazzled, still flirting with her eyes, the outrageous Jessie introduced me to my two outclassed competitors for the job: the first, our local Buick-Oldsmobile dealer-an unctuous, beady-eyed sharpie; the other, a plodding and decidedly heavyset plumbing contractor. Neither struck me as officer material.

The three of us shook hands, wished one another well, then drew lots to establish the order in which we would perform our screen tests. (Plumber first, car dealer second, myself last.) The audition, Jessie explained, would be a straightforward affair. Twenty minutes each. No retakes. A "crew" of twelve children had been summoned to select the new Captain Nineteen.

Lastly, much to my surprise, we were informed that the whole business would be broadcast live over the channel's three-county cable network.

I cleared my throat.

"Live?" I said.

"Well, sure," said Jessie. "Ad lib and all that. With little kids you have to be on your toes."

I was taken aback. "In that case," I said, "what about costuming?"

"Sorry?"

"The space suit. I'll need a uniform."

Jessie shrugged. "Well, that's a problem. We've only got the one-it was Hans's." She gazed up at me with fawning admiration. "Hans, he was sort of slender-not as tall as you. I guess you could give it a try."

I winked at Mrs. Kooshof, excused myself, and followed my adoring Jessie into a cramped and categorically sub-par dressing chamber. The room, I noted immediately, was aswirl with ghosts of the slain Captain Nineteen. Memorabilia of all sorts cluttered the walls. Primarily photographs: Hans Hanson tattooing his name to a young woman's bared left scapula; Hans with an arm around the tiny, fluted waist of the 1991 Miss Minnesota; Hans sharing an ice cream cone with a youthful Eydie Gorme.

Here, I recognized, was a man after my own heart. And Jessie, too, seemed spellbound by the photographs. She stood perfectly still for a time, as if at a funeral, then sighed and hugged herself. "Hans, he was something else," she murmured. "Great with kids."

"Oh, I can see that," I said comfortingly. "I'm sure the man was wonderful to work with. I trust that you and I will soon establish the same close relationship."

The girl squinted at me. "And what is that supposed to mean?"

"Only that I care."

"Yeah, well," she said. "Far as I'm concerned, there's only one Captain Nineteen. The uniform's in the closet there. I'll wait outside."

"Righto," I said.

The next several minutes were a struggle. Hans's space trousers barely reached my ankles, the gold-braided jacket bunched up at the shoulders, and as Jessie and I marched back to the soundstage I felt rather like a can of moist and densely packed Spam.

"Gorgeous," said Mrs. Kooshof. "Those epaulets, I just love, love, love them."

I blushed.

"My fly boy," she cooed.

There was a short delay as Jessie moved to a waiting room and led in our youthful crew, all ages six and under. (The extortionist Evelyn, I noted, was among them, and I went out of my way to give the girl a stern, behave-yourself salute as she was strapped into the special "crew module" at stage left.) Things then rapidly accelerated. Waivers were signed, two cameramen strolled in, lights went up to illuminate the familiar Captain Nineteen spaceship set-a flimsy, stopgap, depressingly out-of-date affair constructed entirely of plywood and painted cardboard. All this, I promised myself, would soon change. Modern electronics. Refitted control panel. Air bags for the children.

"Thirty seconds!" cried one of the cameramen.

Stiffly, with considerable back strain, I lowered myself into a seat beside Mrs. Robert Kooshof. The obese plumber had already moved to his mark in front of the control panel. "This," I whispered to Mrs. Kooshof, "should prove fascinating. A sewage specialist, for God's sake."

"He's cute," she said. "A big panda bear."

I snorted. The reference brought back a number of unhappy memories, in particular a long, trussed-up night in Tampa.*

"Panda," I muttered. "Perhaps so, but he's hardly a corporal, much less a captain. I give him two minutes before he mangles the word hopefully."

The poor man's performance, as it turned out, was substantially worse than predicted. In the interest of brevity, I need only summarize his blunders. (1) An utter absence of soldierly bearing. Horrid posture. Slothful gaze. (2) No command authority whatsoever. On his ship, the crew was in charge. He toadied; he pampered; he flattered and swooned. At one disgraceful point, which shocked even Jessie, the man virtually resigned his commission-allowing a vote, of all things, on the crucial issue of whether to "scope in" a Roy Rogers episode. (I had learned years earlier, in the classroom, that democracy has its wartime limits.) (3) To my astonishment, the man forfeited all pedagogic pretense. He juggled a set of plumber's tools, bounced little Evelyn on his knee, guffawed like Santa Claus, and said-I quote verbatim-"Hopefully we're all having a great space ride." (4) Most alarmingly, by far, the egotistical bumbler was a thief. He exceeded his time limit by a full thirty-seven seconds.

It was this final aggravation that compelled me to rise from my seat and stalk across the studio toward the trim-figured Jessie. "You are the stagehand here," I hissed, "and I suggest you bring out the hook. Fair is fair. I will not be robbed."

"Stagehand?" said Jessie. "I'm the producer."

I shrugged and aimed a defiant finger at the loquacious, audition-hogging plumber. "Fine, then-producer-but this is no time for job descriptions. Right now, in case you haven't noticed, that self-centered bozo is stealing my allotted-"

"What a sexist," she snarled. "Just because I happen to be a woman."

"Yes, yes," I said. "Believe me, I've taught whole courses on the subject. I can spot misogyny in a flash-the man is a plumber, after all."

"Not him. You."

The clock was ticking; I paid no attention. "A pig, indeed," I said briskly, "but the issue now is thievery. I must insist that someone pull the plug."

"You!" she yelled.

"Me? I'm not the stagehand."

I blinked at her. Behind us, in a control booth, some sensitive engineer called for quiet.

"Just back off," Jessie snapped. "Put a gag on and wait your turn like everybody else."

Fuming, I returned to my seat.

A cartoon was played, the Buick dealer took over, and for twenty agonizing minutes I sat glaring at a monitor. I need not detail the car sharpie's errors. He stunk. He fouled his own nest. He maimed the word nuclear-"nu-cul-er," he pronounced it-and systematically tortured the innocent little adjective real. (As in: "We got ourselves a real swell crew today.") A travesty, in short. Unmitigated barbarism. Furthermore, I would not have purchased so much as a wheelbarrow from this transparent scam artist, much less the loaded Riviera he so brazenly pitched during his interview segment.

I had had enough.

During a commercial break, I hurried out to the car, opened the trunk, and carefully placed one of my bombs in a leather briefcase.

My own audition, if I dare say so, went beautifully.

Jessie beamed at me throughout. She blushed at points; she clawed at her skin.