He wanted to say, God, the things we want. He said: "How is the party."

"It's over at Raoul's," she said. Raoul, Slab, and Melvin being part of a crowd of disaffected which someone had labeled The Whole Sick Crew. They lived half their time in a bar on the lower West Side called the Rusty Spoon. He thought of the Sailor's Grave and could not see much difference.

"Benny." She had never cried, never that he could remember. It worried him. But she might be faking. "Ciao," she said. That phony, Greenwich Village way to avoid saying good-bye. He hung up.

"There's a nice fight on," Dewey Gland said, sullen and redeyed. "Old Ploy is so juiced he went and bit a Marine on the ass."

If you look from the side at a planet swinging around in its orbit, split the sun with a mirror and imagine a string, it all looks like a yo-yo. The point furthest from the sun is called aphelion. The point furthest from the yo-yo hand is called, by analogy, apocheir.

Profane and Paola left for New York that night. Dewey Gland went back to the ship and Profane never saw him again. Pig had taken off on the Harley, destination unknown. On the Greyhound were one young couple who would, come sleep for the other passengers, make it in a rear seat; one pencil-sharpener salesman who had seen every territory in the country and could give you interesting information on any city, no matter which one you happened to be heading for; and four infants, each with an incompetent mother, scattered at strategic locations throughout the bus, who babbled, cooed, vomited, practiced self-asphyxia, drooled. At least one managed to be screaming all through the twelve-hour trip.

About the time they hit Maryland, Profane decided to get it over with. "Not that I'm trying to get rid of you," handing her a ticket envelope with Rachel's address on it in pencil, "but I don't know how long I'll be in the city." He didn't.

She nodded. "Are you in love, then."

"She's a good woman. She'll put you on to a job, find you a place to stay. Don't ask me if we're in love. The word doesn't mean anything. Here's her address. You can take the West Side IRT right up there."

"What are you afraid of."

"Go to sleep." She did, on Profane's shoulder.

At the 34th Street station, in New York, he gave her a brief salute. "I may be around. But I hope not. It's complicated."

"Shall I tell her . . ."

"She'll know. That's the trouble. There's nothing you - I - can tell her she doesn't know."

"Call me, Ben. Please. Maybe."

"Right," he told her. "maybe."

V.

So in January 1956 Benny Profane showed up again in New York. He came into town at the tag-end of a spell of false spring, found a mattress at a downtown flophouse called Our Home, and a newspaper at an uptown kiosk; roar around the streets late that night studying the classified streetlight. As usual nobody wanted him in particular.

If anybody had been around to remember him they would have noticed right off that Profane hadn't changed. Still great amoebalike boy, soft and fat, hair cropped close and growing in patches, eyes small like a pig's and set too far apart. Road work had done nothing to improve the outward Profane, or the inward one either. Though the street by claimed a big fraction of Profane's age, it and he remained strangers in every way. Streets (roads, circles, square places, prospects) had taught him nothing: he couldn't work a transit, crane, payloader, couldn't lay bricks, stretch a tape right, hold an elevation rod still, hadn't even learned to drive a car. He walked; walked, he thought sometimes, the aisles of a bright, gigantic supermarket, his only function to want.

One morning Profane woke up early, couldn't get back sleep and decided on a whim to spend the day like a yo-yo, shuttling on the subway back and forth underneath 42nd Street, from Times Square to Grand Central and vice versa. He made his way to the washroom of Our Home, tripping over two empty mattresses on route. Cut himself shaving, had trouble extracting the blade and gashed a finger. He took a shower to get rid of the blood. The handles wouldn't turn. When he finally found a shower that worked, the water came out hot and cold in random patterns. He danced around, yowling and shivering, slipped on a bar of soap and nearly broke his neck. Drying off, he ripped a frayed towel in half, rendering it useless. He put on his skivvy shirt backwards, took ten minutes getting his fly zipped and other fifteen repairing a shoelace which had broken as was tying it. All the rests of his morning songs were silent cuss words. It wasn't that he was tired or even notably uncoordinated. Only something that, being a schiemihl he'd known for years: inanimate objects and he could not live in peace.

Profane took a Lexington Avenue local up to Grand Central. As it happened, the subway car he got into was filled with all manner of ravishingly gorgeous knockouts: secretaries on route to work and jailbait to school. It was too much, too much. Profane hung on the handgrip, weak. He was visited on a lunar basis by these great unspecific waves of horniness, whereby all women within a certain age group and figure envelope became immediately and impossibly desirable. He emerged from these spells with eyeballs still oscillating and a wish that his neck could rotate through the full 360 degrees.

The shuttle after morning rush hour is near empty, like a littered beach after tourists have all gone home. In the hours between nine and noon the permanent residents come creeping back up their strand, shy and tentative. Since sunup all manner of affluent have filled the limits of that world with a sense of summer and life; now sleeping bums and old ladies on relief, who have been there all along unnoticed, re-establish a kind of property right, and the coming on of a falling season.

On his eleventh or twelfth transit Profane fell asleep and dreamed. He was awakened close to noon by three Puerto Rican kids named Tolito, Jose and Kook, short for Cucarachito. They had this act, which was for money even though they knew that the subway on weekday mornings, no es bueno for dancing and bongos. Jose carried around a coffee can which upside down served to rattle off their raving merengues or baions on, and hollow side up to receive from an appreciative audience pennies, transit tokens, chewing gum, spit.

Profane blinked awake and watched them, jazzing around, doing handsprings, aping courtship. They swung from the handle-grips, shimmied up the poles; Tolito tossing Kook the seven-year-old about the car like a beanbag and behind it all, clobbering polyrhythmic to the racketing of the shuttle, Jose on his tin drum, forearms and hands vibrating out beyond the persistence of vision, and a tireless smile across his teeth wide as the West Side.

They passed the can as the train was pulling into Times Square. Profane closed his eyes before they got to him. They sat on the seat opposite, counting the take, feet dangling. Kook was in the middle, the other two were trying to push him on the floor. Two teen-age boys from their neighborhood entered the car: black chinos, black shirts, black gang jack with PLAYBOYS lettered in dripping red on the back. Abruptly all motion among the three on the seat stopped. They held each other, staring wide-eyed.

Kook, the baby, could hold nothing in. "Maricon!" he yelled gleefully. Profane's eyes came open. Heel-taps of older boys moved past, aloof and staccato to the next car. Tolito put his hand on Kook's head, trying to squash him down through the floor, out of sight. Kook slipped away. The doors closed, the shuttle started off again for Grand Central. The three turned their attention to Profane.

"Hey, man," Kook said. Profane watched him, half-cautious.

"How come," Jose said. He put the coffee can absently on his head, where it slipped down over his ears. "How come you didn't get off at Times Square."

"He was asleep," Tolito said.

"He's a yo-yo," Jose said. "Wait and see." They forgot Profane for the moment, moved forward a car and did their routine. They came back as the train was starting off again from Grand Central, "See," Jose said.

"Hey man," Kook said, "how come."

"You out of a job," Tolito said.

"Why don't you hunt alligators, like my brother," Kook said.

"Kook's brother shoots them with a shotgun," Tolito slid.

"If you need a job, you should hunt alligators," Jose said.

Profane scratched his stomach. He looked at the floor.

"Is it steady," he said.

The subway pulled in to Times Square, disgorged passengers, took more on, shut up its doors and shrieked away down the tunnel. Another shuttle came in, on a different track. Bodies milled in the brown light, a loudspeaker announced shuttles. It was lunch hour. The subway station began to buzz, fill with human noise and motion. Tourists were coming back in droves. Another train arrived, opened, closed, was gone. The press on the wooden platforms grew, along with an air of discomfort, hunger, uneasy bladders, suffocation. The first shuttle returned.

Among the crowd that squeezed inside this time was young girl wearing a black coat, her hair hanging long outside it. She searched four cars before she found Kook, sitting next to Profane, watching him.

"He wants to help Angel kill the alligators," Kook told her. Profane was asleep, lying diagonal on the seat.

An this dream, he was all alone, as usual. Walking on a street at night where there was nothing but his own field of vision alive. It had to be night on that street. The lights gleamed unflickering on hydrants; manhole covers which lay around in the street. There were neon signs scattered here and there, spelling out words he wouldn't remember when woke.

Somehow it was all tied up with a story he'd heard once, about a boy born with a golden screw where his navel should have been. For twenty years he consults doctors and specialists all over the world, trying to get rid of this screw, and having no success. Finally, in Haiti, he runs into a voodoo doctor who gives him a foul-smelling potion. He drinks it, goes to sleep and has a dream. In this dream he finds himself on a street, lit by green lamps. Following the witch-man's instructions, he takes two rights and a left from his point of origin, finds a tree growing by the seventh street light, hung all over with colored balloons. On the fourth limb from the top there is a red balloon; he breaks it and inside is a screwdriver with a yellow plastic handle. With the screwdriver he removes the screw from his stomach, and as soon as this happens he wakes from the dream. It is morning. He looks down toward his navel, the screw is gone. That twenty years' curse is lifted at last. Delirious with joy, he leaps up out of bed, and his ass falls off.

To Profane, alone in the street, it would always seem maybe he was looking for something too to make the fact of his own disassembly plausible as that of any machine. It was always at this point that the fear started: here that it would turn into a nightmare. Because now, if he kept going down that street, not only his ass but also his arms, legs, sponge brain and clock of a heart must be left behind to litter the pavement, be scattered among manhole covers.

Was it home, the mercury-lit street? Was he returning like the elephant to his graveyard, to lie down and soon become ivory in whose bulk slept, latent, exquisite shapes of chessmen, backscratchers, hollow open-work Chinese spheres nested one inside the other?

This was all there was to dream; all there ever was: the Street. Soon he woke, having found no screwdriver, no key. Woke to a girl's face, near his own. Kook stood in the background, feet braced apart, head hanging. From two cars away, riding above the racketing of the subway over points, came the metallic rattle of Tolito on the coffee can.

Her face was young, soft. She had a brown mole on one cheek. She'd been talking to him before his eyes were open. She wanted him to come home with her. Her name was Josefina Mendoza, she was Kook's sister, she lived uptown. She must help him. He had no idea what was happening.

"Wha, lady," he said, "wha."

"Do you like it here," she cried.

"I do not like it, lady, no," said Profane. The train was heading toward Times Square, crowded. Two old ladies who had been shopping at Bloomingdale's stood glaring hostile at them from up the car. Fina started to cry. The other kids came charging back in, singing. "Help," Profane said. He didn't know who he was asking. He'd awakened loving every woman in the city, wanting them all: here was one who wanted to take him home. The shuttle pulled into Times Square, the doors flew open. In a swoop, only half aware of what he was doing, he gathered Kook in one arm and ran out the door: Fina, with tropical birds peeking from her green dress whenever the black coat flew open, followed, hands joined with Tolito and Jose in a line. They ran through the station, beneath a chain of green lights, Profane loping unathletic into trash cans and Coke machines. Kook broke away and tore broken-field through the noon crowd. "Luis Aparicio," he screamed, sliding for some private home plate: "Luis Aparicio," wreaking havoc through a troop of Girl Scouts. Down the stairs, over to the uptown local, a train was waiting, Fina and the kids got in; as Profane started through the doors closed on him, squeezing him in the middle. Fina's eyes went wide like her brother's. With a frightened little cry she took Profane's hand and tugged, and a miracle happened. The doors opened again. She gathered him inside, into her quiet field of force. He knew all at once: here, for the time being, Profane the schlemihl can move nimble and sure. All the way home Kook sang Tienes Mi Corazon, a love song he had heard once in a movie.

They lived uptown in the 80's, between Amsterdam Avenue and Broadway. Fina, Kook, mother, father, and another brother named Angel. Sometimes Angel's friend Geronimo would come over and sleep on the kitchen floor. The old man was on relief. The mother fell in love with Profane immediately. They gave him the bathtub.

Next day Kook found him sleeping there and turned on the cold water. "Jesus God," Profane yelled, spluttering awake.

"Man, you go find a job," Kook said. "Fina says so." Profane jumped up and went chasing Kook through the little apartment, trailing water behind him. In the front room he tripped over Angel and Geronimo, who were lying there drinking wine and talking about the girls they would watch that day in Riverside Park. Kook escaped, laughing and screaming "Luis Aparicio." Profane lay there with his nose pressed against the floor. "Have some wine," Angel said.

A few hours later, they all came reeling down the steps of the old brownstone, horribly drunk. Angel and Geronimo were arguing about whether it was too cold for girls to be the park. They walked west in the middle of the street. The sky was overcast and dismal. Profane kept bumping into cars. At the corner they invaded a hot dog stand and drank a pina colada to sober up. It did no good. They made it to Riverside Drive, where Geronimo collapsed. Profane and Angel picked him up and ran across the street with him held like a battering ram, down a hill and into the park. Profane tripped over a rock and the three of them went flying. They lay on the frozen grass while a bunch of kids in fat wool coats ran back and forth over them, playing pitch and catch with a bright yellow beanbag. Geronimo started to sing.

"Man," Angel said, "there is one." She came walking a lean, nasty-face poodle. Young, with long hair that danced and shimmered against the collar of her coat. Geronimo broke off the song to say "Cono" and wobble his fingers. Then he continued, singing now to her. She didn't notice any of them, but headed uptown, serene and smiling at the naked trees. Their eyes followed her out of sight. They felt sad.

Angel sighed. "There are so many," he said. "So many millions and millions of girls. Here in New York, and in Boston, where I was once and in thousands more cities . . . It makes me lose heart."

"Out in Jersey too," said Profane. "I worked in Jersey."

"A lot of good stuff in Jersey," Angel said.

"Out on the road," said Profane. "They were all in cars."

"Geronimo and I work in the sewers," Angel said. "Under the street. You don't see anything down there."

"Under the street," Profane repeated after a minute: "under the Street."

Geronimo stopped singing and told Profane how it was. Did he remember the baby alligators? Last year, or maybe the year before, kids all over Nueva York bought these little alligators for pets. Macy's was selling them for fifty cents, every child, it seemed, had to have one. But soon the children grew bored with them. Some set them loose in the streets, but most flushed them down the toilets. And these had grown and reproduced, had fed off rats and sewage, so that now they moved big, blind, albino, all over the sewer system. Down there, God knew how many there were. Some had turned cannibal because in their neighborhood the rats had all been eaten, or had fled in terror.

Since the sewer scandal last year, the Department had got conscientious. They called for volunteers to go down with shotguns and get rid of the alligators. Not many had volunteered. Those who had quit soon. Angel and he, Geronimo said proudly, had been there three months longer than anybody.

Profane, all at once was sober. "Are they still looking for volunteers," he said slowly. Angel started to sing. Profane rolled over glaring at Geronimo. "Hey?"

"Sure," Geronimo said. "You ever use a shotgun before?"

Profane said yes. He never had, and never would, not at street level. But a shotgun under the street, under the Street, might be all right. He could kill himself but maybe it would be all right. He could try.

"I will talk to Mr. Zeitsuss, the boss," said Geronimo.

The beanbag hung for a second jolly and bright in the air. "Look, look," the kids cried: "look at it fall!"

chapter two.

The Whole Sick Crew I.

Profane, Angel and Geronimo gave up girl-watching about noon and left the park in search of wine. An hour or so later, Rachel Owlglass, Profane's Rachel, passed by the spot they'd abandoned, on her way home.

There is no way to describe the way she walked except as a kind of brave sensual trudging: as if she were nose-deep in snowdrifts, and yet on route to meet a lover. She came up the dead center of the mall, her gray coat fluttering a little in a breeze off the Jersey coast. Her high heels hit precise and neat each time on the X's of the grating in the middle of the mall. Half a year in this city and at least she learned to do that. Had lost heels, and once in a while composure in the process; but now could do it blindfolded. kept on the grating just to show off. To herself.

Rachel worked as an interviewer or personnel girl at a downtown employment agency; was at the moment returning from an appointment on the East Side with one Shale Schoenmaker, M.D., a plastic surgeon. Schoenmaker was a craftsman and came high; had two assistants, one a secretary/receptionist/nurse with an impossibly coy retrousse nose and thousands of freckles, all of which Schoenmaker had done himself. The freckles were tattooed, the girl his mistress; called, by virtue of some associative freak, Irving. The other assistant was a juvenile delinquent named Trench who amused himself between patients by throwing scalpels at a wooden plaque presented to his employer by the United Jewish Appeal. The business was carried on in a fashionable maze or warren of rooms in an apartment building between First and York Avenues, at the fringes of Germantown. In keeping with the location, Brauhaus music blared over a concealed loudspeaker system continuously.

She had arrived at ten in the morning. Irving told her to wait; she waited. The doctor was busy this morning. The office was crowded, Rachel figured, because it takes four months for a nose job to heal. Four months from now would be June; this meant many pretty Jewish girls who felt they would be perfectly marriageable were it not for an ugly nose could now go husband-hunting at the various resorts all with uniform septa.

It disgusted Rachel, her theory being that it was not for cosmetic reasons these girls got operated on so much as that the hook nose is traditionally the sign of the Jew and the retrousse nose the sign of the WASP or White Anglo-Saxon Protestant in the movies and advertisements.

She sat back, watching the patients come through the outer office, not particularly anxious to see Schoenmaker. One youth with a wispy beard which did nothing to hide a weak chin kept glancing at her embarrassed from moist eyes, across a wide stretch of neutral carpeting. A girl with a gauze beak, eyes closed, lay slumped on a sofa, flanked by her parents, who conferred in whispers about the price.

Directly across the room from Rachel was a mirror, hung high on the wall, and under the mirror a shelf which held a turn-of-the-century clock. The double face was suspended by four golden flying buttresses above a maze of works, enclosed in clear Swedish lead glass. The pendulum didn't swing back and forth but was in the form of a disc, parallel to the floor and driven by a shaft which paralleled the hands at six o'clock. The disc turned a quarter-revolution one way, then a quarter-revolution the other, each reversed torsion on the shaft advancing the escapement a notch. Mounted on the disc were two imps or demons, wrought in gold, posed in fantastic attitudes. Their movements were reflected in the mirror along with the window at Rachel's back, which extended from floor to ceiling and revealed the branches and green needles of a pine tree. The branches whipped back and forth in the February wind, ceaseless and shimmering, and in front of them the two demons performed their metronomic dance, beneath a vertical array of golden gears and ratchet wheels, levers and springs which gleamed warm and gay as any ballroom chandelier.

Rachel was looking into the mirror at an angle of 45 degrees, and so had a view of the face turned toward the room and the face on the other side, reflected in the mirror; here were time and reverse-time, co-existing, cancelling one another exactly out. Were there many such reference points, scattered through the world, perhaps only at nodes like this room which housed a transient population of the imperfect, the dissatisfied; did real time plus virtual or mirror-time equal zero and thus serve some half-understood moral purpose? Or was it only the mirror world that counted; only a promise of a kind that the inward bow of a nose-bridge or a promontory of extra cartilage at the chin meant a reversal of ill fortune such that the world of the altered would thenceforth run on mirror-time; work and love by mirror-light and be only, till death stopped the heart's ticking (metronome's music) quietly as light ceases to vibrate, an imp's dance under the century's own chandeliers ....

"Miss Owlglass." Irving, smiling from the entrance to Schoenmaker's sacristy. Rachel arose, taking her pocketbook, gassed the mirror and caught a sidelong glance at her own double in the mirror's district, passed through the door to confront the doctor, lazy and hostile behind his kidney-shaped desk. He had the bill, and a carbon, lying on the desk. "Miss Harvitz's account," Schoenmaker said. Rachel opened her pocketbook, took out a roll of twenties, dropped them on top of the papers.

"Count them," she said. "This is the balance."

"Later," the doctor said. "Sit down, Miss Owlglass."

"Esther is flat broke," Rachel said, "and she is going through hell. What you are running here -"

"- is a vicious racket," he said dryly. "Cigarette."

"I have my own." She sat on the edge of the chair, pushed away a strand or two of hair hanging over her forehead, searched for a cigarette.

"Trafficking in human vanity," Schoenmaker continued, "propagating the fallacy that beauty is not in the soul, that it can be bought. Yes -" his arm shot out with a heavy silver lighter, a thin flame, his voice barked - "it can be bought, Miss Owlglass, I am selling it. I don't even look on myself as a necessary evil."

"You are unnecessary," she said, through a halo of smoke. Her eyes glittered like the slopes of adjacent sawteeth.

"You encourage them to sell out," she said.

He watched the sensual arch of her own nose. "You're Orthodox? No. Conservative? Young people never are. My parents were Orthodox. They believe, I believe, that whatever your father is, as long as your mother is Jewish, you are Jewish too because we all come from our mother's womb. A long unbroken chain of Jewish mothers going all the way back to Eve."

She looked "hypocrite" at him.

"No," he said, "Eve was the first Jewish mother, the one who set the pattern. The words she said to Adam have been repeated ever since by her daughters: 'Adam,' she said, 'come inside, have a piece fruit.'"

"Ha, ha," said Rachel.

"What about this chain, what of inherited characteristics. We've come along, become with years more sophisticated, we no longer believe now the earth is flat. Though there's a man in England, president of a Flat Earth society, who says it is and is ringed by ice barriers, a frozen world which is where all missing persons go and never return from. So with Lamarck, who said that if you cut the tail off a mother mouse her children will be tailless also. But this is not true, the weight of scientific evidence is against him, just as every photograph from a rocket over White Sands or Cape Canaveral is against the Flat Earth Society. Nothing I do to a Jewish girl's nose is going to change the noses of her children when she becomes, as she must, a Jewish mother. So how am I being vicious. Am I altering that grand unbroken chain, no. I am not going against nature, I am not selling out any Jews. Individuals do what they want, but the chain goes on and small forces like me will never prevail against it. All that can is something which will change the germ plasm, nuclear radiation, maybe. They will sell out the Jews, maybe give future generations two noses or no nose, who knows, ha, ha. They will sell out the human race."

Behind the far door came the thud of Trench's knife practice. Rachel sat with her legs crossed tightly.

"Inside," she said, "what does it do to them there. You alter them there, too. What kind of Jewish mother do they make, they are the kind who make a girl get a nose job even she doesn't want one. How many generations have you worked on so far, how many have you played the dear old family doctor for."

"You are a nasty girl," said Schoenmaker, "and so pretty,too. Why yell at me, all I am is one plastic surgeon. Not a psychoanalyst. Maybe someday there will be special plastic surgeons who can do brain jobs too, make some young kid an Einstein, some girl an Eleanor Roosevelt. Or even make people act less nasty. Till then, how do I know what goes on inside. Inside has nothing to do with the chain."

"You set up another chain." She was trying not to yell. "Changing them inside sets up another chain which has nothing to do with germ plasm. You can transmit characteristics outside, too. You can pass along an attitude . . ."

"Inside, outside," he said, "you're being inconsistent, you lose me."

"I'd like to," she said, rising. "I have bad dreams about people like you."