"Are you serious?"

"What we have here is a situation we ought to conduct in private. This house is full of women. Or am I wrong?"

"We're alone here. What is it you want to talk about?"

"They listen in their sleep," he said.

We went out the back door to keep from waking Heinrich. I followed him along the pathway at the side of the house and down the steps to the driveway. His little car sat in the dark. He got behind the wheel and I slid in next to him, gathering up my bathrobe and feeling trapped in the limited s.p.a.ce. The car held a smell like some dangerous vapor in the depths of a body-and-fender shop, a mixture of exhausted metal, flammable rags and scorched rubber. The upholstery was torn. In the glow of a street-lamp I saw wires dangling from the dash and the overhead fixture.

"I want you to have this, Jack."

"Have what?"

"I've had it for years. Now I want you to have it. Who knows if I'll ever see you folks again? What the h.e.l.l. Who cares. Big deal."

You're giving me the car? I don't want the car. It's a terrible car."

"In your whole life as a man in today's world, have you ever owned a firearm?"

"No," I said.

"I figured. I said to myself here's the last man in America who doesn't own the means to defend himself."

He reached into a hole in the rear seat, coming out with a small dark object. He held it in the palm of his right hand.

"Take it, Jack."

"What is it?"

"Heft it around. Get the feel. It's loaded."

He pa.s.sed it to me. Stupidly I said again, "What is it?" There was something unreal about the experience of holding a gun. I kept staring at it, wondering what Vernon 's motive might be. Was he Death's dark messenger after all? A loaded weapon. How quickly it worked a change in me, numbing my hand even as I sat staring at the thing, not wishing to give it a name. Did Vernon mean to provoke thought, provide my life with a fresh design, a scheme, a shapeliness? I wanted to give it back.

"It's a little bitty thing but it shoots real bullets, which is all a man in your position can rightly ask of a firearm. Don't worry, Jack. It can't be traced."

"Why would anyone want to trace it?"

"I feel like if you give someone a loaded gun, you ought to supply the particulars. This here is a 25-caliber Zumwalt automatic. German-made. It doesn't have the stopping power of a heavy-barreled weapon but you're not going out there to face down a rhino, are you?"

"That's the point. What am I going out there to face down? Why do I need this thing?"

"Don't call it a thing. Respect it, Jack. It's a well-designed weapon. Practical, lightweight, easy to conceal. Get to know your handgun. It's only a question of time as to when you'll want to use it."

"When will I want to use it?"

"Do we live on the same planet? What century is this? Look how easy I got into your backyard. I pry open a window and I'm in the house. I could have been a professional burglar, an escaped con, one of those drifters with a skimpy beard. A wandering killer type that follows the sun. A weekend ma.s.s murderer with an office job. Take your choice."

"Maybe you need a gun where you live. Take it back. We don't want it."

"I got myself a combat magnum parked near my bed. I hate to tell you what mischief it can cause with the placement of a man's features."

He gave me a canny look. I resumed staring at the gun. It occurred to me that this was the ultimate device for determining one's competence in the world. I bounced it in the palm of my hand, sniffed the steely muzzle. What does it mean to a person, beyond his sense of competence and well-being and personal worth, to carry a lethal weapon, to handle it well, be ready and willing to use it? A concealed lethal weapon. It was a secret, it was a second life, a second self, a dream, a spell, a plot, a delirium.

German-made.

"Don't tell Babette. She'd get real put out if she knew you were harboring a firearm."

"I don't want it, Vern. Take it back."

"Don't put it just anywhere neither. A kid gets ahold of it, you have an immediate situation. Be smart. Think about where to put it so it'll be right there at the time. Figure out your field of fire beforehand. If you have an intruder situation, where will he enter, how will he approach the valuables? If you have a mental, where is he going to come at you from? Mentals are unpredictable because they don't know themselves what they're doing. They approach from wherever, from a tree limb, a branch. Think about putting jagged gla.s.s on your window ledges. Learn dropping to the floor fast."

"We don't want guns in our little town."

"Be smart for once in your life," he told me in the dark car. "It's not what you want that matters."

Early the next day a crew came to fix the street. Vernon was out there at once, watching them jackhammer and haul the asphalt, staying close to them as they leveled the smoking pitch. When the workmen left, his visit seemed to end, collapsed into its own lading momentum. We began to see a blank s.p.a.ce where Vernon stood. He regarded us from a prudent distance, as if we were strangers with secret resentments. An indefinable fatigue collected around our efforts to converse.

Out on the sidewalk, Babette held him and wept. For his departure he'd shaved, washed the car, put a blue bandanna around his neck. She could not seem to get enough of crying. She looked into his face and cried. She cried embracing him. She gave him a Styrofoam hamper full of sandwiches, chicken and coffee, and she cried as he set it down amid the gouged-out seat stuffing and slashed upholstery.

''She's a good girl," he told me grimly.

In the driver's seat he ran his fingers through his ducktail, checking himself in the rearview mirror. Then he coughed a while, giving us one more episode of lashing phlegm. Babette wept anew. We leaned toward the window on the pa.s.senger's side, watching him hunch around into his driving posture, setting himself casually between the door and the seat, his left arm hanging out the window.

"Don't worry about me," he said. "The little limp means nothing. People my age limp. A limp is a natural thing at a certain age. Forget the cough. It's healthy to cough. You move the stuff around. The stuff can't harm you as long as it doesn't settle in one spot and stay there for years. So the cough's all right. So is the insomnia. The insomnia's all right. What do I gain by sleeping? You reach an age when every minute of sleep is one less minute to do useful things. To cough or limp. Never mind the women. The women are all right. We rent a ca.s.sette and have some s.e.x. It pumps blood to the heart. Forget the cigarettes. I like to tell myself I'm getting away with something. Let the Mormons quit smoking. They'll die of something just as bad. The money's no problem. I'm all set incomewise. Zero pensions, zero savings, zero stocks and bonds. So you don't have to worry about that. That's all taken care of. Never mind the teeth. The teeth are all right. The looser they are, the more you can wobble them with your tongue. It gives the tongue something to do. Don't worry about the shakes. Everybody gets the shakes now and then. It's only the left hand anyway. The way to enjoy the shakes is pretend it's somebody else's hand. Never mind the sudden and unexplained weight loss. There's no point eating what you can't see. Don't worry about the eyes. The eyes can't get any worse than they are now. Forget the mind completely. The mind goes before the body. That's the way it's supposed to be. So don't worry about the mind. The mind is all right. Worry about the car. The steering's all awry. The brakes were recalled three times. The hood shoots up on pothole terrain."

Deadpan. Babette thought this last part was funny. The part about the car. I stood there amazed, watching her walk in little circles of hilarity, weak-kneed, shambling, all her fears and defenses adrift in the sly history of his voice.

34.

The time of spiders arrived. Spiders in high corners of rooms. Coc.o.o.ns wrapped in spiderwork. Silvery dancing strands that seemed the pure play of light, light as evanescent news, ideas borne on light. The voice upstairs said: "Now watch this. Joanie is trying to snap Ralph's patella with a bushido bushido stun kick. She makes contact, he crumples, she runs." stun kick. She makes contact, he crumples, she runs."

Denise pa.s.sed word to Babette that Steffie was routinely examining her chest for lumps. Babette told me.

Murray and I extended the range of our contemplative walks. In town one day he went into small embarra.s.sed raptures over diagonal parking. There was a charm and a native sense to the rows of slanted vehicles. This form of parking was an indispensable part of the American townscape, even when the cars were foreign-made. The arrangement was not only practical but avoided confrontation, the s.e.xual a.s.sault motif of front-to-back parking in teeming city streets.

Murray says it is possible to be homesick for a place even when you are there.

The two-story world of an ordinary main street. Modest, sensible, commercial in an unhurried way, a prewar way, with prewar traces of architectural detail surviving in the upper stories, in copper cornices and leaded windows, in the amphora frieze above the dime-store entrance.

It made me think of the Law of Ruins.

I told Murray that Albert Speer wanted to build structures that would decay gloriously, impressively, like Roman ruins. No rusty hulks or gnarled steel slums. He knew that Hitler would be in favor of anything that might astonish posterity. He did a drawing of a Reich structure that was to be built of special materials, allowing it to crumble romantically-a drawing of fallen walls, half columns furled in wisteria. The ruin is built into the creation, I said, which shows a certain nostalgia behind the power principle, or a tendency to organize the longings of future generations.

Murray said, "I don't trust anybody's nostalgia but my own. Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It's a settling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come to violence. War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country."

A humid spell of weather. I opened the refrigerator, peered into the freezer compartment. A strange crackling sound came off the plastic food wrap, the snug covering for half eaten things, the Ziploc sacks of livers and ribs, all gleaming with sleety crystals. A cold dry sizzle. A sound like some element breaking down, resolving itself into Freon vapors. An eerie static, insistent but near subliminal, that made me think of wintering souls, some form of dormant life approaching the threshold of perception.

No one was around. I walked across the kitchen, opened the compactor drawer and looked inside the trash bag. An oozing cube of semi-mangled cans, clothes hangers, animal bones and other refuse. The bottles were broken, the cartons flat. Product colors were undiminished in brightness and intensity. Fats, juices and heavy sludges seeped through layers of pressed vegetable matter. I felt like an archaeologist about to sift through a finding of tool fragments and a.s.sorted cave trash. It was about ten days since Denise had compacted the Dylar. That particular round of garbage had almost certainly been taken outside and collected by now. Even if it hadn't, the tablets had surely been demolished by the compactor ram.

These facts were helpful in my efforts to believe that I was merely pa.s.sing time, casually thumbing through the garbage.

I unfolded the bag cuffs, released the latch and lifted out the bag. The full stench hit me with shocking force. Was this ours? Did it belong to us? Had we created it? I took the bag out to the garage and emptied it. The compressed bulk sat there like an ironic modern sculpture, ma.s.sive, squat, mocking. I jabbed at it with the b.u.t.t end of a rake and then spread the material over the concrete floor. I picked through it item by item, ma.s.s by shapeless ma.s.s, wondering why I felt guilty, a violator of privacy, uncovering intimate and perhaps shameful secrets. It was hard not to be distracted by some of the things they'd chosen to submit to the Juggernaut appliance. But why did I feel like a household spy? Is garbage so private? Does it glow at the core with personal heat, with signs of one's deepest nature, clues to secret yearnings, humiliating flaws? What habits, fetishes, addictions, inclinations? What solitary acts, behavioral ruts? I found crayon drawings of a figure with full b.r.e.a.s.t.s and male genitals. There was a long piece of twine that contained a series of knots and loops. It seemed at first a random construction. Looking more closely I thought I detected a complex relationship between the size of the loops, the degree of the knots (single or double) and the intervals between knots with loops and freestanding knots. Some kind of occult geometry or symbolic festoon of obsessions. I found a banana skin with a tampon inside. Was this the dark underside of consumer consciousness? I came across a horrible clotted ma.s.s of hair, soap, ear swabs, crushed roaches, flip-top rings, sterile pads smeared with pus and bacon fat, strands of frayed dental floss, fragments of ballpoint refills, toothpicks still displaying bits of impaled food. There was a pair of shredded undershorts with lipstick markings, perhaps a memento of the Grayview Motel.

But no sign anywhere of a shattered amber vial or the remains of those saucer-shaped tablets. It didn't matter. I would face whatever had to be faced without chemical a.s.sistance. Babette had said Dylar was fool's gold. She was right, Winnie Richards was right, Denise was right. They were my friends and they were right.

I decided to take another physical. When the results were in, I went to see Dr. Chakravarty in his little office in the medical building. He sat there reading the printout, a man with a puffy face and shadowy eyes, his long hands set flat on the desk, his head wagging slightly.

"Here you are again, Mr. Gladney. We see you so often these days. How nice it is to find a patient who regards his status seriously."

"What status?"

"His status as a patient. People tend to forget they are patients. Once they leave the doctor's office or the hospital, they simply put it out of their minds. But you are all permanent patients, like it or not. I am the doctor, you the patient. Doctor doesn't cease being doctor at close of day. Neither should patient. People expect doctor to go about things with the utmost seriousness, skill and experience. But what about patient? How professional is he?"

He did not look up from the printout as he said these things in his meticulous singsong.

"I don't think I like your pota.s.sium very much at all," he went on. "Look here. A bracketed number with computerized stars."

"What does that mean?"

"There's no point your knowing at this stage."

"How was my pota.s.sium last time?"

"Quite average in fact. But perhaps this is a false elevation. We are dealing with whole blood. There is the question of a gel barrier. Do you know what this means?" '"No."

"There isn't time to explain. We have true elevation and false elevations. This is all you have to know."

"Exactly how elevated is my pota.s.sium?"

"It has gone through the roof, evidently."

"What might this be a sign of?"

"It could mean nothing, it could mean a very great deal indeed."

"How great?"

"Now we are getting into semantics," he said.

"What I'm trying to get at is could this pota.s.sium be an indication of some condition just beginning to manifest itself, some condition caused perhaps by an ingestion, an exposure, an involuntary spillage-intake, some substance in the air or the rain?"

"Have you in fact come into contact with such a substance?"

"No," I said.

"Are you sure?"

Positive. Why, do the numbers show some sign of possible exposure?"

"If you haven't been exposed, then they couldn't very well show a sign, could they?"

'Then we agree," I said.

"Tell me this, Mr. Gladney, in all honesty. How do you feel?"

"To the best of my knowledge, I feel very well. First-rate. I feel better than I have in years, relatively speaking."

"What do you mean, relatively speaking?"

"Given the fact I'm older now."

He looked at me carefully. He seemed to be trying to stare me down. Then he made a note on my record. I might have been a child facing the school princ.i.p.al over a series of unexcused absences.

I said, "How can we tell whether the elevation is true or false?"

"I will send you to Gla.s.sboro for further tests. Would you like that? There is a brand-new facility called Autumn Harvest Farms. They have gleaming new equipment. You won't be disappointed, wait and see. It gleams, absolutely."

"All right. But is pota.s.sium the only thing we have to watch?"

"The less you know, the better. Go to Gla.s.sboro. Tell them to delve thoroughly. No stone unturned. Tell them to send you back to me with sealed results. I will a.n.a.lyze them down to the smallest detail. I will absolutely pick them apart. They have the know-how at Harvest Farms, the most delicate of instruments, I promise you. The best of third-world technicians, the latest procedures."

His bright smile hung there like a peach on a tree.

"Together, as doctor and patient, we can do things that neither of us could do separately. There is not enough emphasis on prevention. An ounce of prevention, goes the saying. Is this a proverb or a maxim? Surely professor can tell us."

"I'll need time to think about it."

"In any case, prevention is the thing, isn't it? I've just seen the latest issue of American Mortician. American Mortician. Quite a shocking picture. The industry is barely adequate to accommodating the vast numbers of dead." Quite a shocking picture. The industry is barely adequate to accommodating the vast numbers of dead."

Babette was right. He spoke English beautifully. I went home and started throwing things away. I threw away fishing lures, dead tennis b.a.l.l.s, torn luggage. I ransacked the attic for old furniture, discarded lampshades, warped screens, bent curtain rods. I threw away picture frames, shoe trees, umbrella stands, wall brackets, highchairs and cribs, collapsible TV trays, beanbag chairs, broken turntables. I threw away shelf paper, faded stationery, ma.n.u.scripts of articles I'd written, galley proofs of the same articles, the journals in which the articles were printed. The more things I threw away, the more I found. The house was a sepia maze of old and tired things. There was an immensity of things, an overburdening weight, a connection, a mortality. I stalked the rooms, flinging things into cardboard boxes. Plastic electric fans, burnt-out toasters, Star Trek Star Trek needlepoints. It took well over an hour to get everything down to the sidewalk. No one helped me. I didn't want help or company or human understanding. I just wanted to get the stuff out of the house. I sat on the front steps alone, waiting for a sense of ease and peace to settle in the air around me. needlepoints. It took well over an hour to get everything down to the sidewalk. No one helped me. I didn't want help or company or human understanding. I just wanted to get the stuff out of the house. I sat on the front steps alone, waiting for a sense of ease and peace to settle in the air around me.

A woman pa.s.sing on the street said, "A decongestant, an antihistamine, a cough suppressant, a pain reliever."

35.

Babette could not get enough of talk radio. "I hate my face," a woman said. 'This is an ongoing problem with me for years. Of all the faces you could have given me, lookswise, this one has got to be the worst. But how can I not look? Even if you took all my mirrors away, I would still find a way to look. How can I not look on the one hand? But I hate it on the other. In other words I still look. Because whose face is it, obviously? What do I do, forget it's there, pretend it's someone else's? What I'm trying to do with this call, Mel, is find other people who have a problem accepting their face. Here are some questions to get us started. What did you look like before you were born? What will you look like in the afterlife, regardless of race or color?"