"Cotsakis, my rival, is no longer among the living."

"What does that mean?"

"It means he's dead."

"Dead?"

"Lost in the surf off Malibu. During the term break. I found out an hour ago. Came right here."

I was suddenly aware of the dense environmental texture. The automatic doors opened and closed, breathing abruptly. Colors and odors seemed sharper. The sound of gliding feet emerged from a dozen other noises, from the sublittoral drone of maintenance systems, from the rustle of newsprint as shoppers scanned their horoscopes in the tabloids up front, from the whispers of elderly women with talc.u.med faces, from the steady rattle of cars going over a loose manhole cover just outside the entrance. Gliding feet. I heard them clearly, a sad numb shuffle in every aisle.

"How are the girls?" Murray said.

"Fine."

"Back in school?"

"Yes."

"Now that the scare is over."

"Yes. Steffie no longer wears her protective mask."

"I want to buy some New York cuts," he said, gesturing toward the butcher.

The phrase seemed familiar, but what did it mean?

"Unpackaged meat, fresh bread," he went on. "Exotic fruits, rare cheeses. Products from twenty countries. It's like being at some crossroads of the ancient world, a Persian bazaar or boom town on the Tigris. How are you, Jack?"

What did he mean, how are you?

"Poor Cotsakis, lost in the surf," I said. "That enormous man."

"That's the one."

"I don't know what to say."

"He was big all right."

"Enormously so."

"I don't know what to say either. Except better him than me."

"He must have weighed three hundred pounds."

"Oh, easily."

"What do you think, two ninety, three hundred?"

"Three hundred easily."

"Dead. A big man like that.", "What can we say?"

"I thought I was big."

"He was on another level. You're big on your level."

"Not that I knew him. I didn't know him at all."

"It's better not knowing them when they die. It's better them than us."

"To be so enormous. Then to die."

"To be lost without a trace. To be swept away."

"I can picture him so clearly."

"It's strange in a way, isn't it," he said, "that we can picture the dead."

I took Wilder along the fruit bins. The fruit was gleaming and wet, hard-edged. There was a self-conscious quality about it. It looked carefully observed, like four-color fruit in a guide to photography. We veered right at the plastic jugs of spring water and headed for the checkout. I liked being with Wilder. The world was a series of fleeting gratifications. He took what he could, then immediately forgot it in the rush of a subsequent pleasure. It was this forgetfulness I envied and admired.

The woman at the terminal asked him a number of questions, providing her own replies in a babyish voice.

Some of the houses in town were showing signs of neglect. The park benches needed repair, the broken streets needed resurfacing. Signs of the times. But the supermarket did not change, except for the better. It was well-stocked, musical and bright. This was the key, it seemed to us. Everything was fine, would continue to be fine, would eventually get even better as long as the supermarket did not slip.

Early that evening I drove Babette to her cla.s.s in posture. We stopped on the parkway overpa.s.s and got out to look at the sunset. Ever since the airborne toxic event, the sunsets had become almost unbearably beautiful. Not that there was a measurable connection. If the special character of Nyodene Derivative (added to the everyday drift of effluents, pollutants, contaminants and deliriants) had caused this aesthetic leap from already brilliant sunsets to broad towering ruddled visionary skyscapes, tinged with dread, no one had been able to prove it.

"What else can we believe?" Babette said. "How else can we explain?"

"I don't know."

"We're not at the edge of the ocean or desert. We ought to have timid winter sunsets. But look at the blazing sky. It's so beautiful and dramatic. Sunsets used to last five minutes. Now they last an hour."

"Why is that?"

"Why is that?" she said.

This spot on the overpa.s.s offered a broad prospect west. People had been coming here ever since the first of the new sunsets, parking their own cars, standing around in the bitter wind to chat nervously and look. There were four cars here already, others certain to come. The overpa.s.s had become a scenic lookout. The police were reluctant to enforce the parking ban. It was one of those situations, like the Olympics for the handicapped, that make all the restrictions seem petty.

Later I drove back to the Congregational church to pick her up. Denise and Wilder came along for the ride. Babette in jeans and legwarmers was a fine and stirring sight. Legwarmers lend a note of paramilitary poise, a hint of archaic warriorhood. When she shoveled snow, she wore a furry headband as well. It made me think of the fifth century A.D. Men standing around campfires speaking in subdued tones in their Turkic and Mongol dialects. Clear skies. The fearless exemplary death of Attila the Hun.

"How was cla.s.s?" Denise said.

"It's going so well they want me to teach another course."

"In what?"

"Jack won't believe this."

"In what?" I said.

"Eating and drinking. It's called Eating and Drinking: Basic Parameters. Which, I admit, is a little more stupid than it absolutely has to be."

"What could you teach?" Denise said.

"That's just it. It's practically inexhaustible. Eat light foods in warm weather. Drink plenty of liquids."

"But everybody knows that."

"Knowledge changes every day. People like to have their beliefs reinforced. Don't lie down after eating a heavy meal. Don't drink liquor on an empty stomach. If you must swim, wait at least an hour after eating. The world is more complicated for adults than it is for children. We didn't grow up with all these shifting facts and att.i.tudes. One day they just started appearing. So people need to be rea.s.sured by someone in a position of authority that a certain way to do something is the right way or the wrong way, at least for the time being. I'm the closest they could find, that's all."

A staticky piece of lint clung to the TV screen.

In bed we lay quietly, my head between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, cushioned as if against some remorseless blow. I was determined not to tell her about the computer verdict. I knew she would be devastated to learn that my death would almost surely precede hers. Her body became the agency of my resolve, my silence. Nightly I moved toward her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, nuzzling into that designated s.p.a.ce like a wounded sub into its repair dock. I drew courage from her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, her warm mouth, her browsing hands, from the skimming tips of her fingers on my back. The lighter the touch, the more determined I was to keep her from knowing. Only her own desperation could break my will.

Once I almost asked her to put on legwarmers before we made love. But it seemed a request more deeply rooted in pathos than in aberrant s.e.xuality and I thought it might make her suspect that something was wrong.

23.

1 asked my German teacher to add half an hour to each lesson. It seemed more urgent than ever that I learn the language. His room was cold. He wore foul weather gear and seemed gradually to be piling furniture against the windows.

We sat facing each other in the gloom. I did wonderfully well with vocabulary and rules of grammar. I could have pa.s.sed a written test easily, made top grades. But I continued to have trouble p.r.o.nouncing the words. Dunlop did not seem to mind. He enunciated for me over and over, scintillas of dry spit flying toward my face.

We advanced to three lessons a week. He seemed to shed his distracted manner, to become slightly more engaged. Furniture, newspapers, cardboard boxes, sheets of polyethylene continued to acc.u.mulate against the walls and windows-items scavenged from ravines. He stared into my mouth as I did my exercises in p.r.o.nunciation. Once he reached in with his right hand to adjust my tongue. It was a strange and terrible moment, an act of haunting intimacy. No one had ever handled my tongue before.

German shepherds still patrolled the town, accompanied by men in Mylex suits. We welcomed the dogs, got used to them, fed and petted them, but did not adjust well to the sight of costumed men with padded boots, hoses attached to their masks. We a.s.sociated these outfits with the source of our trouble and fear.

At dinner Denise said, "Why can't they dress in normal clothes?"

"This is what they wear on duty," Babette said. "It doesn't mean we're in danger. The dogs have sniffed out only a few traces of toxic material on the edge of town."

"That's what we're supposed to believe," Heinrich said. "If they released the true findings, there'd be billions of dollars in law suits. Not to mention demonstrations, panic, violence and social disorder."

He seemed to take pleasure in the prospect. Babette said, "That's a little extreme, isn't it?"

"What's extreme, what I said or what would happen?"

"Both. There's no reason to think the results aren't true as published."

"Do you really believe that?" he said.

"Why shouldn't I believe it?"

"Industry would collapse if the true results of any of these investigations were released."

"What investigations?"

"The ones that are going on all over the country."

'That's the point," she said. "Every day on the news there's another toxic spill. Cancerous solvents from storage tanks, a.r.s.enic from smokestacks, radioactive water from power plants. How serious can it be if it happens all the time? Isn't the definition of a serious event based on the fact that it's not an everyday occurrence?"

The two girls looked at Heinrich, antic.i.p.ating a surgically deft rejoinder.

"Forget these spills," he said. "These spills are nothing."

This wasn't the direction any of us had expected him to take. Babette watched him carefully. He cut a lettuce leaf on his salad plate into two equal pieces.

"I wouldn't say they were nothing," she said cautiously. "They're small everyday seepages. They're controllable. But they're not nothing. We have to watch them."

"The sooner we forget these spills, the sooner we can come to grips with the real issue."

"What's the real issue?" I said.

He spoke with his mouth full of lettuce and cuc.u.mber.

"The real issue is the kind of radiation that surrounds us every day. Your radio, your TV, your microwave oven, your power lines just outside the door, your radar speed-trap on the highway. For years they told us these low doses weren't dangerous."

"And now?" Babette said.

We watched him use his spoon to mold the mashed potatoes on his plate into the shape of a volcanic mountain. He poured gravy ever so carefully into the opening at the top. Then he set to work ridding his steak of fat, veins and other imperfections. It occurred to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain.

"This is the big new worry," he said. "Forget spills, fallouts, leakages. It's the things right around you in your own house that'll get you sooner or later. It's the electrical and magnetic fields. Who in this room would believe me if I said that the suicide rate hits an all-time record among people who live near high-voltage power lines? What makes these people so sad and depressed? Just the sight sight of ugly wires and utility poles? Or does something happen to their brain cells from being exposed to constant rays?" of ugly wires and utility poles? Or does something happen to their brain cells from being exposed to constant rays?"

He immersed a piece of steak in the gravy that sat in the volcanic depression, then put it in his mouth. But he did not begin chewing until he'd scooped some potatoes from the lower slopes and added it to the meat. A tension seemed to be building around the question of whether he could finish the gravy before the potatoes collapsed.

"Forget headaches and fatigue," he said as he chewed. "What about nerve disorders, strange and violent behavior in the home? There are scientific findings. Where do you think all the deformed babies are coming from? Radio and TV, that's where."

The girls looked at him. admiringly. I wanted to argue with him. I wanted to ask him why I should believe these scientific findings but not the results that indicated we were safe from Nyodene contamination. But what could I say, considering my condition? I wanted to tell him that statistical evidence of the kind he was quoting from was by nature inconclusive and misleading. I wanted to say that he would learn to regard all such catastrophic findings with equanimity as he matured, grew out of his confining literalism, developed a spirit of informed and skeptical inquiry, advanced in wisdom and rounded judgment, got old, declined, died.

But I only said, "Terrifying data is now an industry in itself. Different firms compete to see how badly they can scare us."

"I've got news for you," he said. "The brain of a white rat releases calcium ions when it's exposed to radio-frequency waves. Does anyone at this table know what that means?"

Denise looked at her mother.

"Is this what they teach in school today?" Babette said. "What happened to civics, how a bill becomes a law? The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the two sides. I still remember my theorems. The battle of Bunker Hill was really fought on Breed's Hill. Here's one. Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania."

"Was it the Monitor Monitor or the or the Merrimac Merrimac that got sunk?" I said. that got sunk?" I said.

"I don't know but it was Tippecanoe and Tyler too."

"What was that?" Steffie said.