"This is Orest Mercator. He's going to help me check for leftovers."

"You're the one who wants to sit in a cage full of deadly snakes. Can you tell me why?"

"Because I'm going for the record," Orest said.

"Why would you want to get killed going for a record?"

"What killed? Who said anything about killed?"

"You'll be surrounded by rare and deadly reptiles."

"They're the best at what they do. I want to be the best at what I do."

"What do you do?"

"I sit in a cage for sixty-seven days. That's what it takes to break the record."

"Do you understand that you are risking death for a couple of lines in a paperback book?"

He looked searchingly at Heinrich, obviously holding the boy responsible for this idiotic line of questioning.

"They will bite you," I went on.

"They won't bite me."

"How do you know?"

"Because I know."

"These are real snakes, Orest. One bite, that's it."

"One bite if they bite. But they won't bite."

"They are real. You are real. People get bitten all the time. The venom is deadly."

"People get bitten. But I won't."

I found myself saying, "You will, you will. These snakes don't know you find death inconceivable. They don't know you're young and strong and you think death applies to everyone but you. They will bite and you will die."

I paused, shamed by the pa.s.sion of my argument. I was surprised to see him look at me with a certain interest, a certain grudging respect. Perhaps the unbecoming force of my outburst brought home to him the gravity of his task, filled him with intimations of an unwieldy fate.

'They want to bite, they bite," he said. "At least I go right away. These snakes are the best, the quickest. A puff adder bites me, I die in seconds."

"What's your hurry? You're nineteen years old. You'll find hundreds of ways to die that are better than snakes."

What kind of name is Orest? I studied his features. He might have been Hispanic, Middle Eastern, Central Asian, a dark-skinned Eastern European, a light-skinned black. Did he have an accent? I wasn't sure. Was he a Samoan, a native North American, a Sephardic Jew? It was getting hard to know what you couldn't say to people.

He said to me, "How many pounds can you bench-press?"

"I don't know. Not very many."

"Did you ever punch somebody in the face?"

"Maybe a glancing blow, once, a long time ago."

"I'm looking to punch somebody in the face. Bare-fisted. Hard as I can. To find out what it feels like."

Heinrich grinned like a stool pigeon in the movies. The siren began to sound-two melancholy blasts. I went inside as the two boys checked the clipboard for house numbers. Babette was in the kitchen giving Wilder some lunch.

"He's wearing a reflector vest," I said.

"It's in case there's haze, he won't get hit by fleeing vehicles."

"I don't think anyone's bothered to flee. How do you feel?"

"Better," she said.

"So do I."

"I think it's being with Wilder that picks me up."

"I know what you mean. I always feel good when I'm with Wilder. Is it because pleasures don't cling to him? He is selfish without being grasping, selfish in a totally unbounded and natural way. There's something wonderful about the way he drops one thing, grabs for another. I get annoyed when the other kids don't fully appreciate special moments or occasions. They let things slide away that should be kept and savored. But when Wilder does it, I see the spirit of genius at work."

"That may be true but there's something else about him that gives me a lift. Something bigger, grander, that I can't quite put my finger on."

"Remind me to ask Murray," I said.

She spooned soup into the child's mouth, creating facial expressions for him to mimic and saying, "Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes."

"One thing I have to ask. Where is the Dylar?"

"Forget it, Jack. Fool's gold or whatever the appropriate term."

"A cruel illusion. I know. But I'd like to keep the tablets in a safe place, if only as physical evidence that Dylar exists. If your left brain should decide to die, I want to be able to sue someone. There are four tablets left. Where are they?"

"Are you telling me they're not behind the radiator cover?"

"That's right."

"I didn't move them, honest."

"Is it possible you threw them away in an angry or depressed moment? I only want them for the sake of historical accuracy. Like White House tapes. They go into the archives."

"You haven't been pretested," she said. "Even one pill can be dangerous to ingest."

"I don't want to ingest."

"Yes, you do."

"We are being coaxed out of the ingestion swath. Where is Mr. Gray? I may want to sue him as a matter of principle."

"We made a pact, he and I."

"Tuesdays and Fridays. The Grayview Motel."

"That's not what I mean. I promised not to reveal his true ident.i.ty to anyone. Considering what you're after, that promise goes double. It's more for your good than his. I'm not telling, Jack. Let's just resume our lives. Let's tell each other we'll do the best we can. Yes yes yes yes yes."

I drove to the grade school and parked across the street from the main entrance. Twenty minutes later they came surging out, about three hundred kids, babbling, gleeful, casually amuck. They called brilliant insults, informed and s.p.a.cious obscenities, hit each other with bookbags, knit caps. I sat in the driver's seat scanning the ma.s.s of faces, feeling like a dope dealer or pervert.

When I spotted Denise I blew the horn and she came over. This was the first time I'd ever picked her up at school and she gave me a wary and hard-eyed look as she pa.s.sed in front of the car- a look that indicated she was in no mood for news of a separation or divorce. I took the river road home. She scrutinized my profile.

"It's about Dylar," I said. "The medication has nothing to do with Baba's memory problems. In fact just the opposite. She takes Dylar to improve her memory."

"I don't believe you."

"Why not?"

"Because you wouldn't come and get me at school just to tell me that. Because we already found out you can't get it with a prescription. Because I talked to her doctor and he never heard of it."

"You called him at home?"

"At the office."

"Dylar is a little too special for a G.P."

"Is my mother a drug addict?"

"You're smarter than that," I said.

"No, I'm not."

"We'd like to know what you did with the bottle. There were some tablets left."

"How do you know I took them?"

1 know it, you know it.

"If somebody wants to tell me what Dylar really is, maybe we'll get somewhere."

"There's something you don't know," I said. "Your mother no longer takes the medication. Whatever your reason for holding the bottle, it's just not valid anymore."

We'd looped around to the west and were now driving through the college campus. Automatically I reached into my jacket for the dark gla.s.ses and put them on.

"Then I'll throw it away," she said.

Over the next few days I tried an a.s.sortment of arguments, some nearly breathtaking in their delicate webby texture. I even enlisted Babette, convincing her that the bottle belonged in adult hands. But the girl's will was supremely resistant. Her life as a legal ent.i.ty had been shaped by other people's bargaining and haggling and she was determined to follow a code too rigid to allow for the trade-off, the settlement. She would keep the object hidden until we told her its secret.

It was probably just as well. The drug could be dangerous, after all. And I was not a believer in easy solutions, something to swallow that would rid my soul of an ancient fear. But I could not help thinking about that saucer-shaped tablet. Would it ever work, could it work for some but not others? It was the benign counterpart of the Nyodene menace. Tumbling from the back of my tongue down into my stomach. The drug core dissolving, releasing benevolent chemicals into my bloodstream, flooding the fear-of-death part of my brain. The pill itself silently self-destructing in a tiny inward burst, a polymer implosion, discreet and precise and considerate.

Technology with a human face.

28.

Wilder sat on a tall stool in front of the stove, watching water boil in a small enamel pot. He seemed fascinated by the process. I wondered if he'd uncovered some splendid connection between things he'd always thought of as separate. The kitchen is routinely rich in such moments, perhaps for me as much as for him.

Steffie walked in saying, "I'm the only person I know who likes Wednesdays." Wilder's absorption seemed to interest her. She went and stood next to him, trying to figure out what attracted him to the agitated water. She leaned over the pot, looking for an egg.

A jingle for a product called Ray-Ban Wayfarer began running through my head.

"How did the evacuation go?"

"A lot of people never showed up. We waited around, moaning."

"They show up for the real ones," I said.

"Then it's too late."

The light was bright and cool, making objects glow. Steffie was dressed for the outdoors, a schoolday morning, but remained at the stove, looking from Wilder to the pot and back, trying to intersect the lines of his curiosity and wonder.

"Baba says you got a letter."

"My mother wants me to visit at Easter."

"Good. Do you want to go? Of course you do. You like your mother. She's in Mexico City now, isn't she?"

"Who'll take me?"

"I'll take you to the airport. Your mother will pick you up at the other end. It's easy. Bee does it all the time. You like Bee."

The enormity of the mission, of flying to a foreign country at nearly supersonic speed, at thirty thousand feet, alone, in a humped container of t.i.tanium and steel, caused her to grow momentarily silent. We watched the water boil.

"I signed up to be a victim again. It's just before Easter. So I think I have to stay here."

"Another evacuation? What's the occasion this time?"

"A funny smell."

"You mean some chemical from a plant across the river?"

"I guess so."

"What do you do as the victim of a smell?"