John Domini

Talking Heads: 77

Papa fix, Mama make.

What a job you’ve got…, nothing to do but run from one dizzy amusement to another and then write a piece about it.

— Katherine Anne Porter, Pale Horse, Pale Rider

Chapter 1

By Monday morning, Kit found it hard to believe the issue was nothing but paper. It was nothing but newsprint, finger-smudging and itch-inducing. The color of dead flesh. If he hadn’t scrolled it up into a stick, Kit wouldn’t even have known he had anything in his hand. Yet this weightless stuff, this imitation stick in his fist — this was his issue. This was Sea Level, Volume One, Number One. “A biweekly journal of politics & opinion.” Twenty pages staple-bound. Pub date January 6, 1978. Kit’s idea had become an office, and his talking to himself talking on the phone. Charter subscriptions were $15, and over the counter it cost 75 cents. It carried a trademarked title logo and his own name at the top of the masthead. Kit Viddich, Editor. Kit, not Christopher, another idea that had gone public. Another notion that seemed to need solidifying oomph.

For Sea Level was also a troublemaker. Volume One, Number One had hit the Boston streets at the beginning of the weekend, and by Monday morning it had stirred up some ruckus. It had whipped powerful people into rush meetings at the Massachusetts State House; it had carved out a clear agenda for Number Two. Hard to believe the issue was only paper.

Kit sat in his office, Sea Level scrolled in his hand, wondering. He was the only one there so far. The only one who’d heard the latest on the ruckus. And the first person he called was his wife.

“I heard from the State House again,” he said.

“Oh, not really. Already, Kit?”

“First thing when I came in.”

“And you mean to say it was the same sort of call? A call confirming what you heard Saturday?”

Hearing the good news repeated back to him made Kit wonder again about this paper in his fist.

“Bette,” he said, “it’s for real. There’s going to be an inspection.”

“Well, my. Are we proud?”

Kit touched his neck. He managed a laugh, a kind of laugh, a noise that went flat against the glass surrounding him. As Editor-in-Chief, Kit had wooden walls to hip level and glass the rest of the way.

“Are we, Kit?” his wife repeated. “Proud of our muckraking?”

He had a private booth, a saint’s reliquary. The others who worked for Sea Level—when they were in the office — had only the half-walls, in the old brownstone style. The ceilings were very high, American Empire, and Kit himself was built tall and elbowy, a ranch-bred Minnesotan. His laugh echoed a long way up. His wife went on waiting.

“Bet-te.” He drew out both syllables. “Actually, I believe that’s hard-nosed muckraking. Hard-nosed, darling. That’s the word.”

Winter static butterflied along the line.

“A man gets down in that muck with a soft nose,” Kit said, “he’s going nowhere.”

“Oh. Kit the wit.”

Kit the hurt, more like. The static didn’t improve, but he heard her sigh. “Betts, don’t tell me. The Apple’s giving you trouble again.”

“The Apple. Well, that plus a few of what I suppose you’d describe as crank calls.”

“Crank calls? What, heavy breathers?”

“Worse, I’m afraid. The sort who launch right into their erotic dreams.”

“You’ve had a few of these?” Kit frowned over the phone. “More than a couple?”

This time her sigh was exasperated. “Kit, didn’t you ask me about the Apple?”

Patience, husband. She doesn’t need you to tell her what to do about crank calls.

“Didn’t you ask me about that infernal contraption?”

Once Kit’s first issue had gone to the printers and he and Bette knew they’d have no unforeseen expenses, she’d bought a computer. She’d gotten one of the new in-the-home models. Kit’s wife worked in writing herself, editing papers for a couple of professors at Harvard Medical.

“Half the time,” she said, “well, you’ve heard of the worm in the Apple?”

Ah, Bette — like the actress. Like Bette Davis, another Concord Academy girl. By now Kit had some sense of how much star poses and stage business meant to them — how central it was to why they’d fallen for each other. Stage business had become, by now, their natural give and take. An arch intimacy. Freely they risked one-liners that would’ve had the other person groaning if they’d been spoken a second slower. It was a strange way to succeed as a couple, Kit understood, and it had more than a little to do with how his wife and he came to the marriage from such different directions. He was the hard-driving Minnesota investigator, and she the weary Brahman know-it-all. Kit understood; he could get his mind around all of this, more or less, even here in his office on a Monday morning. And even here, it had his heart growing baggy. In the center of his chest hung a big, gray beehive soaked with rain, sagging and heavy.

He could see her, too. Among the wisps of reflection in the glass wall before him, he could actually see his wife. At her new plastic keyboard, at the Cambridge end of the conversation, Bette had left her hair undone. Haystack hair. There were half-lit moments when she looked like another late-’70s California girl, another clone of Farrah Fawcett-Majors. To see her that way however was to overlook her mouth, her smile. Bette’s mouth contained more working parts than most. Sometimes when she smiled Kit thought of an antique wicker picnic hamper, all shelves and handles and drawers and flaps. That was her face, over her keyboard: a hamper in a haystack.

“Frankly,” she was saying, “I can see why you newsies stick to typewriters.”

Kit knew when to play the straight man. He pointed out that she’d taken a leap, getting the Apple. He couldn’t think of anyone else who had their own personal computer.

“Oh, come on. I’m not so much the brave pioneer as all that.” Bette mentioned a cousin who’d purchased one of the new machines, a man who did tax work and accounting. “At this rate,” she said, “the entire extended Steyes family should be online — isn’t that the word? The whole sick crew should be online by 1980.”

With that, at last, his wife congratulated him on today’s call. “You say this morning confirms it? A full-bore inspection? Well, my. Hard-nosed muckraking, indeed.”

“The Boston Building Commission.” With his free hand Kit stood his scrolled copy of Sea Level on his desktop, an exclamation point. “They had some kind of conference call Friday night, some kind of executive session. Quick and dirty, you know. And it’s on. They’re going to the penitentiary.”

Once more he jabbed the paper into the desktop. The lead article in Number One had been an examination of building decay in a state penitentiary, a prison named Monsod. The report had taken up more than half the book, its final columns unwinding on page 17. Kit had written the story himself. While Sea Level was getting underway he’d have to do a lot of that, writing the stories himself (ten o’clock on a Monday morning, and he still had the office to himself). On the penitentiary piece, Kit had done good work. He’d turned up more first-hand material than he’d have thought possible. He’d sent advance copies to State House committee people, and Saturday afternoon the first call had come. A contact at the Building Commission.

“My, yes,” Bette said. “The first story in the first issue of a shoestring venture, and the entire Massachusetts government springs into action.”

“Aw, Betts. A shoestring venture? Is that what I’ve got?”

But Kit’s laughter, once again, didn’t go far. He let his scrolled first issue flop across the desk. “Bette,” he said, “I’ve got to get in on that visit.”

“The visit?” She needed a moment. “You mean to Monsod?”

“Monsod State Penitentiary. The inspection’s set for Thursday.”

“Oh, Kit. Oh, honestly.” It never took her more than a minute. “Must the media be everywhere?”

“The first issue’s just a building block, Bette. Deadline for the next’s only ten days away.”

“But Kit. Surely you don’t need to go inside? You don’t need to go and, I don’t know, take samples? That despicable closet, for instance—”

“The closet especially, Betts. The closet’s the most incredible thing in the story. I’ve got to see it.”

“Oh, hell. Honestly.”

In the glass before him, Kit rediscovered her face. And if he turned away, there was more glass. His office fit in bowed streetfront of a waterfront brownstone. A second-story space, American Empire, it had windows facing in three directions. Even in January the sun made the place hot.

“Well, what am I to say?” Bette went on. “Be careful, lover. If you’re allowed to go, be careful.”

“I was wondering,” Kit said, “about Cousin Cal.”

“Cousin Cal.”

No, it never took her long. Cal was Harding Calvin Steyes, of Halterstock & Steyes. A Boston holding company, in trusts and real estate mostly, Halterstock & Steyes had ties to the State House that went back more than a century.

“You want to go to my cousin once removed,” Bette said. Elizabeth Steyes Viddich. “You believe he could help you get into Monsod.”

“Aw, Betts. It’s possible. Maybe one of the guys on the Building Commission likes to hunt duck.”

“Kit, don’t joke. Please, don’t. Cal and his shotgun, that’s the stuff of nightmares to me.”

Aw, Betts. It wasn’t as if Kit himself didn’t suffer the awkwardness of this, calling his wife for a favor. Especially when, not more than an hour earlier, the two of them had been snuggled together crotch to crotch. They’d been fucking hard, hump against ripple. An odd first-of-the-week greediness. Odder still, Bette had told him to do without the Trojan. She’d told him she was past the “worrisome” part of her cycle.

Oddest of all, suddenly Kit’s thinking was full of their morning ferocity. After his wife’s first peak, he recalled, they’d separated so she could take him another way. She’d rolled over deliciously, all haunchful in anticipation. The image flared before his mind’s eye; it may even have appeared among the reflections before him. This as, over the phone, Bette grew chillier by the word.

“You know Kit, Cousin Cal may well be the last person on earth I’d want to feel indebted to.”

“Darling, I’m calling to ask. I’m calling you first.”

He called her darling and his heart remained baggy. In the phone’s earpiece his tone sounded sensitive. Yet Kit sat there flashing on his wife’s last climax, when she’d thrown her head back to let him watch.

“And Kit,” Bette was saying, “you must realize that my Cousin Cal, well. He’s what’s delicately known as ‘a family hire,’ Cousin Cal. I suspect the only phone number he could give you would be L.L. Bean’s.”

Kit didn’t laugh. In the phone’s electronic pathways every sound he made seemed like a lie. The black instrument in his hand was itself a lie, not a phone at all but rather his wife’s elongated cowgirl hips, thrusting up between his spread hands. Well Betts, Cousin Cal see State House call Monsod—

“Bette,” Kit said, “this is wrong. I have to say, I did wrong. Asking you like this. You remember this morning, the way we made love? That’s all I’m thinking about right now. I’m asking you about Cousin Cal and I’m thinking about us this morning. Fucking our brains out.”

Bette made a noise, a release in the throat. Kit remembered a similar sound, part groan part exhale, while her neck and chin had arched up and up across a ruined pillow.

“It’s my unconscious taking revenge,” he went on. “That’s what it’s got to be. My unconscious punishing me for calling you. Aw, Betts, forget I ever asked about Cousin Cal.”

“Kitty Chris. Honestly.”

“I’m sorry. Darling, forget it, forgive me.”

“Goodness. It’s just one crank call after another today.”

“This morning was so incredible, Betts. You were like something out of Joan Baez.”

She made the noise again, but this time he could see her in the present. On rare occasions — undone occasions like this — Bette took on a look to match that haystack head of hers. A tatterdemalion look: a broken blue openness. A weakness.

“You were so deep,” he went on. “You were like, ‘Arise, Arise, Mary Hamilton.’”

“I thought you’d given up on folk music,” she said. “I thought you couldn’t believe in the voices any more.”

Ah Bette, making distinctions. Putting that distance between herself and how she’d been touched. It didn’t fool Kit. Didn’t fool the man who could see her over the phone.

“Actually,” she said, “this morning ran a bit deep for me as well, don’t you know. Yes. Possibly too much so.”

Bette’s rare tatterdemalion. It was another bit of herself she and Kit kept between the two of them. The rest of the world, so far as he could tell, knew only Bette with her hair done. Bette in strict equestrienne posture.

“Kitty Chris, I didn’t know what I was doing.”

“Betts, tell me.” The stupidity of his original reason for calling rocked him, an undertow. “What’s the matter?”

“I’m not so sure about my cycle, Kit. My time of the month, as they used to say.”

God, the stupidity. Lunging after career help in all the wrong places. Kit bent over the phone, his head dipping below his desktop shelving, below his “Ve-Ri-Tas” mug and attaboy memorabilia. “Bette,” he said. “The Trojan, not using the Trojan — that was as much my call as yours.”

“Oh, now.”

“Betts, the responsibility’s as much mine as yours.”

“Kit, oh. You told me the truth just now, the whole truth, as the bailiffs say. And, well. I should tell you the same. Kit, this morning I didn’t have a clue.”

“Darling.” He recalled her testiness when she’d picked up the phone. “Have you been worrying about this?”

“Well, yes. It’s frightening, Kit. I’m nearly thirty, don’t you know. I’m an adult. Yet when I told you to skip the precautions like that I must’ve been talking to myself, don’t you know. I must’ve been telling myself something. And I’ve no idea what it is.”

“You’re frightened.”

“I’m frightened, Kit. Honestly.”

Then there were women at Kit’s door. Two women, peering through the glass. For a moment, blinking, startled upright, Kit thought they’d heard everything. He couldn’t recall if one of them had knocked.

“My family must have some part in it,” Bette was saying. “Some part in this, this test of who I’m to be or whatever. I mean becoming a family, joining my own family. Well.”

“Ah.” Kit said. The two women were no surprise, really. They were the only other people who approached full-time for Sea Level. One, shorter, darker, was his Administrative Assistant Corinna Nummold. The other, prettier, more strange, was his sole staff writer, Zia Mirini.

“With my family,” his wife went on, “well. One wouldn’t say I’m filled with joy at the prospect of joining the grand pageant down the generations.”

Aw, Kit. Bad first move, bad last move. He hated to cut his wife off when she got like this, exploring, examining. He knew how much she loved to think.

*

He was familiar with the doubt, a worm on his back. A natural corollary to the itching in his hands every time he paged through the first issue. But, what was to doubt? Sillier rags than Sea Level hit the streets all the time. Since the computer money had started to arrive in the mid-’70s, it’d seemed like Boston had a new journal on the stands every other week. The first to prove it could be done were the Cambridge Phoenix and Boston After Dark, now the Boston Phoenix and the Cambridge Real Paper. “Underground” papers in ‘67 and ‘68, they’d become the establishment. There was even a movie about it. A movie about some radical Boston rag making the mid-’70s crossover to mainstream money. Loss of innocence, testing of values — not a bad movie.

Under the Line? Was that the name?

Kit paused in the corridor outside the Sea Level offices, trying to recall. He only had to go up one flight. Leo was right upstairs.

Washington D.C., after all, had the Washington Monthly. Their first issue, who knows, it could have been smaller than Kit’s. Austin, Texas, for God’s sake, served as a base for the Texas Observer. Why shouldn’t Boston have room for a paper like that? A writer’s paper, non-slick. “Think” stuff, “issues” stuff. Kit saw his journal as a kind of biweekly Op Ed publication — biweekly rather than monthly, to set it apart from the Observer and the others. Each piece would begin with the news. There’d be room for the occasional semi-scoop, like the Monsod story. That was the news, the outbreak above the horizon. But then a non-slick paper would tow the reader back to more elemental questions. Closer to Sea Level.

Plus Kit hadn’t come to it naked. Hadn’t spent his whole life behind those glass walls, a saint in his own reliquary. At the Harvard Crimson he’d made editor. After that, he’d put in five years at the Globe. The last three years, he’d been the paper’s man in agriculture.

He’d lobbied for the job, arguing that he was from farm country himself. A calculated risk. Agriculture hardly got the glamour assignments, and on top of that, the work kept him out of the city as much as three weeks a month. But the job had paid off. For starters, he’d loved it. Every assignment cast Kit as the lone gunslinger, fighting for justice. He’d blasted away at the bad guys who owned timberland in Oregon, tobacco in the Carolinas. And this isolation on the job meant, not glamor, but sole byline credit. His best piece, a series on migrant workers in the Carolinas, had put his name on the front page all week. It had won him a Nieman Fellowship. Kit found himself “going back to Harvard in glory,” as Bette put it. Not yet thirty, he found himself a speaker at the Nieman symposia, the same gatherings he’d sat in as an awestruck undergraduate.

A speaker, hoo boy. So what do you have to say for yourself now, Viddich? What, going to Leo with hat in hand?

To Leo Mirini, Zia Mirini’s father. President and CEO of Mirinex, Incorporated. Just one flight up.

Lately Kit had come to know the drawbacks of playing the gunslinger. In the year after his Nieman, as he’d tried to drum up the financing for Sea Level, Kit had been put through a kind of boot camp in interpersonal relations. Ten months of meeting after meeting, white lie after white lie. This when so much of his previous work had been strictly solo, all a-lone by the telephone. It was like learning all over again how to knot a tie. In Kit’s case, the lack of social skills was compounded by all the time he’d spent away from Boston. He’d spent three years studying Mexican emigration routes or Nebraska corn-storage law, instead of his own home city. He was still suffering the consequences, Harvard and the Nieman notwithstanding. Even this morning, he’d thought of Cousin Cal before he’d thought of Leo. He’d needed to see Zia, in her punk lipstick and mascara, before he thought of going to Leo.

The stairwell had a nasty echo. Cold, too. Kit might as well have been in an MTA station, waiting for a trolley.

If he’d been better at meetings, better at Boston, he’d have found a backer he was more comfortable with. God knows Leo was rich. Mirinex, Inc. owned not only mid-level properties like this one—Sea Level’s offices had been a sweetener on the deal — but also a number of high-yield condominium conversions in the Back Bay. And the old man had begun by working for the state, a crew chief on Massachusetts’s roads and buildings. He had the contacts Kit needed this morning, but not much else in common with a Minnesota Ivy Leaguer.

At least, the old man wasn’t Sea Level’s only backer. Kit had cashed in fifteen hundred dollars of his father’s G.I. life insurance. The bonds had proved pretty low-yield, considering how long it had been, but there’d been something left after college expenses at least. He’d also gotten help from Bette.

When Leo had made his offer, Bette’s family lawyer had looked over the contract. He’d said the question was: Did Kit want to sign?

Third floor. Outside Leo’s office, Kit went back to an older recollection. A deeper warming. He went back to the Globe series on migrant workers. It remained his best work, his best job making sense of an outbreak above the horizon. Better still, his Lone Ranger act had done some good. After his story had finished its run, the North Carolina legislature had changed the regulations. The gunslinger and the saint, for once, had gone hand in hand. At the recollection, Kit’s joints seemed to loosen.

Kit remained a believer. His ambition, as big and well-architected as it was, could never stand erect without the more durable struts of conscience. He could imagine no better life’s work than to go on wringing out — Bette shaded this phrase with such irony — the whole truth.

*

Mirinex offered something very different from downstairs.

Kit’s office looked its age. When he wanted to open a window he had to wrestle against the chipping overlay of a hundred earlier paint jobs. When he’d hung a calendar, the nail had punched through the spackle plastered over an earlier hole. He’d wound up jumping around with his hand in his mouth, tasting blood. Not that Kit was complaining. No. What better home for a paper run on shaky money and true grit than an office that went back to the days of yellow journalism? When the place’s rough edges left him bleeding, it was an object lesson from history itself.

Up at Leo’s, however, they’d left history behind. They’d redone the place in a bewildering ‘70s mix, hard techie gray and dull earthy brown. The receptionist sat at a blinking command console like something out of Star Wars. The walls were decorated with Mirinex product samples, an array of aluminum pipe fittings. Aluminum on suede. You thought of washer-dryers, garden hoses, the ganglia under kitchen sinks.

On the table in the reception area, a copy of Sea Level looked flimsier than ever, in newsprint format among industry slicks. Also out of place was the top-page sketch, a tottering jailhouse. The subhead, In Monsod, Every Cell May Be Death Row.

“Kit, kid.”

Leo Mirini, all satchelmouth and ham. Kit once again rolled his first issue into a stick.

When Zia Mirini was working on a cigarette, downstairs, her face would sometimes reveal its Italian side. Her lips around the Marlboro would look as ripe as the young Brando’s. Leo was the older version, the Godfather. He knew it, too. This morning Leo actually cupped a calloused hand around Kit’s neck. For that matter, what was this big-deal welcome, coming out of his office? Why didn’t he just have Kit sent in? And no way somebody who’d made such a success in this country could still have such a thick accent.

But, though Kit didn’t buy the act, Leo always made him feel like the tallest, whitest gooney bird on earth. Leo stood a foot shorter and a good eighty pounds baggier. Out here among his product samples, he kept his chest thrust up.

“Kit, kid,” he repeated.

Was the nickname part of the charade? “Leo,” Kit said, “I need to ask a favor.”

“Really, hey. He-ey, no kidding. I was just thinking I had to ask you a favor.”

“Me? You need something from me?”

“Yeah. He-ey. Maybe you and me, we can help each other.”

Didn’t waste any time, did he? Wondering, Kit followed Leo down a buckskin-colored corridor.

A more formal space, the CEO’s office was decorated by reproductions of murals from Pompeii, scenes of gladiators and heroes. Their reds and flesh-tones had darkened under centuries of ash. On a corner of Leo’s desk sat a white block of stone. A piece of Roman marble, the man had told Kit proudly. Coliseum marble, Leo had said, momentarily revealing a cool appraiser’s eye.

This morning, Kit found himself stalling and unable to sit. He talked about Zia’s piece in the first issue. Saturday night, at the paper’s publication party, Leo’s daughter had gotten a lot of compliments. “Everybody I talked to was impressed. These are professionals, Leo.”

The old man had made hiring his daughter the single non-negotiable stipulation of financing. He’d let Kit look over a couple of Zia’s papers from UMass Boston, plus a club review she’d placed in the Real Paper. These might have held a glimmer of something, a few bubbles of possibility. But nothing had prepared Kit for the intelligence and style of her first full-length piece.

“There was an editor from the Globe,” Kit went on, “who said she’d like to have Zia do some work for her.” Rachel Veutri, an old friend who now worked for the Sunday magazine. “And I’ll tell you, this is a woman who doesn’t know anything about punk rock. She’d never even heard of the band.”

“Human Sexual Response,” the father said.

“Human Sexual Response.”

“Wise guys.” The father blinked impassively. “A buncha faggots.”

It didn’t take Leo long to put Kit uptight. Human Sexual Response was a gay group, mostly anyway. Their songlist included a ditty named “Buttfuck,” and in interview their leader liked to talk about San Francisco’s new homosexual councilman Harvey Milk. Zia had proven admirably balanced on the subject, neither backing away nor making a fuss.

“Faggots,” Leo repeated. “I mean, these are the kind of people? The people my daughter runs with?”

“Leo, frankly, I thought it would never work either. You remember I had doubts about that kind of thing for Sea Level. That kind of … entertainment coverage.”

Oh Kit, stalling and feinting. When he and Leo had discussed their contract, this had been Kit’s lame attempt at an argument against hiring the man’s daughter. She didn’t fit the editorial stance, he’d said, or tried to say. Sea Level was supposed to cover hard news.

“I remember,” Leo said.

Kit twisted the paper stick in his hands. The way Leo sounded, just now, you’d think he wanted nothing to do with Sea Level. This had always been the bedrock quandary of working with him — once Leo had made sure his daughter went on the payroll, he’d acted as if the paper itself were incidental. Stranger still, so far as Kit could see, Zia hadn’t needed Pop to buy her a paper. She’d been making headway, breaking into print. Why hadn’t the old man just set her up with a computer?

Kit had fallen a long way from this morning’s good news. Abruptly, half angrily, he told Leo: “So, listen, there’s something you should know.”

Kit told him and went on to point out how neatly the BBC’s timing — going into the prison Thursday morning — fit Sea Level’s deadlines. And he brought up the danger of doing nothing. “I mean, Leo, you can bet the Globe’s going after this hammer and tong.” The confirmation call this morning, in fact, had come from a Globe stringer. “You can bet that, right this minute, there’s someone at the Globe who’s on the line to the State House.”

Folding back into place beside the desk, he gave the old man a long moment to reply.

“But see,” Kit continued finally, “so far I have an advantage on the Globe. I know more than they do.”

The stringer had been in touch with the BBC about an entirely different matter. He’d been part of a Globe Spotlight investigation into the city’s current arson wave. Small world, that investigation had helped Kit think of Cousin Cal. The stringer had mentioned that in two recent arson cases, two apartment buildings that had burned down over Christmas, title was held by Halterstock & Steyes.

“Right now,” Kit said after another long moment, “I know more about Monsod Penitentiary than just about anyone in the city. All I need is some help from the Building Commission.”

The stringer had been so talkative, of course, because he was fishing for an assignment. Since Kit had reached the editor’s side of the desk, freelancers had gotten a lot more generous with tips, ideas, whatever they had. Today’s was typical, a Monday-morning eager beaver. So why was this old man before him just sitting there, a Brando-on-a-log?

“The BBC takes a reporter along every now and then,” Kit said. “A reporter or a politician or somebody.”

The old man’s hands lay still. His vest, bunched up around his slouch, revealed a shadow-silver lining.

“They’ll take someone along now and then,” Kit repeated. “Even if it’s dangerous.”

“Dangerous,” Leo said. His voice came rheumy, showing his age. “Hey Kit, yeah. A place like that could be dangerous.”

“Ahh …”

“They got murderers in there, Kit,” the old man said. “Murderers, rapists, real slime. They had a riot a coupla months ago, right?”

“There’ve been disturbances, yeah. They’ve had trouble on and off for a year now.” Trouble enough to prick up Kit’s muckraker antennae. Once he had the paper up and running, Monsod was the first place he looked for a story.

“Disturbances, bullshit. They put a guard in the hospital. Kit, there’s no telling what those animals might do.”

Kit refolded his arms.

“They’re gorillas in there, Kit. Dangerous guys.”

But surely Leo realized the BBC people would have a security escort. A proper inspection wouldn’t allow for contact with the prisoners. “I mean,” Kit said, “they’ve got a job to do, these inspectors. Just to check out that closet …”

“Oh yeah, the closet,” Leo cut in. “That’s an incredible story, Kit. Where’d you get something like that?”

Where’d he get it?

“See Kit, that closet, I mean, that’s just what I’m talking about. That’s really dangerous, Kit. Where’d you ever hear about that?”

“Leo, come on now.” Kit was careful to smile. “I don’t remember anything in the contract about giving you my sources.”

The publisher had worked himself forward in his chair, gesturing. At this he dropped his hands.

“Kit, I’m not kidding around here. Monsod, a place like that, they’ll rip you open and pull you inside-out.”

“Leo,”

“Place like that, no way you want to go in there.”

“Leo, I have to.”

Back to the silent treatment. His heavy face hidden, Leo fingered the white hunk of stone between them, the two-thousand-year-old marble. Kit knew enough to leave him alone. Leo must have long since figured out what he was here to ask. In fact in the next half-minute, Kit realized he knew this old worker with the horny palms better than he’d thought.

After Kit’s father had been killed, Kit had been raised by ranchers. By his uncles, his mother’s two brothers, men without children of their own. One preferred life as a cowboy bachelor and the other — this was supposed to be a secret — preferred men. The brothers raised beef cattle on a spread of nearly three hundred acres in central Minnesota. And while Kit was growing up, again and again they’d taken him through the same style of talk as Leo liked to use. A style with a built-in contradiction. The body language came across crystal-clear, impossible to misunderstand, while the words spoken remained fuzzy and elliptical. Kit’s uncles had always kept him guessing. They’d mention something Kit had never seen, some place he’d never been to, and expect him to understand a whole range of implied meaning. “Hibbing,” an uncle would say, or “Mesabi red.” From that alone Kit was supposed to deduce an entire way of life. Plus out of nowhere these ranchers could come up with intensely personal questions he shouldn’t have had to answer in the first place.

“What about your wife?” Leo Mirini asked, still fingering the stone on his desktop. “Can’t she help you?”

Kit touched his neck.

“Your wife,” Leo said, “she’s old Boston, right? Old Boston, an old family. They gotta have somebody over at the State House.”

“I can’t do that,” Kit said.

“You can’t? A reporter can’t ask his wife?”

Kit took a crack at silence himself. Trying to relax, he stared from under his eyebrows. Leo changed the angle of his chin.

“You’re sure they’re going in there?”

Kit waited out the black thought that neither the Saturday call nor this morning’s confirmation had got it right.

“Of course I’m sure,” he said.

The old man left off stroking the desktop rock. He refolded his hands under his belly. Kit remembered his misguided attempt with Bette and wondered if, in coming to Leo, he was again out of line. What was the protocol here? He tried to reckon meaning from the bulge of Leo’s paunch, the shrunkenness of the neck. He’d never seen the father so still, so thoughtful.

“Well, Kit, hey,” Leo said finally. “It’s good news, yeah. Very good news. Hey!”

Surprised him. Something like ten minutes late, the old man at last got around to congratulations. His hands came back up and his satchelmouth showed teeth. Kit worried for a moment that there might be another round of neck massage. The CEO’s office was small enough that with his “hey” and “how ‘bout that,” the man may have made the pictures on the walls shiver. Kit may have seen it happen. He tried to keep up, grinning.

“Thanks,” Kit said, “thanks.”

“And I think I got an idea here, Kit. I think I can help.”

“You can?”

Surprised him, surprised him. One of Leo’s brown hands remained in mid-air between them, but its message had changed. A moment ago that hand had been a celebration, gimme five, but now it was a warning: Hush. With that one statement the old man’s voice had dropped. Kit latched up the jack-in-the-box in his chest—he can help! — and checked the window, the doorway. The view was of blind waterfront warehouses, and the office remained closed.

“You remember my business down in Surinam?” Leo asked.

Surinam?

“Sure Leo,” Kit said, “I remember. Your bauxite.” Raw material for the Mirinex product line. Leo had set up one of his sons down there, along with a Caribbean bank account.

“Right,” Leo said. “Cheap labor, cheap product.”

Kit nodded. The Texas Observer, he figured, probably had a little dirty money behind it too. Baptist sleazeball oil money or something.

“Right. I mean, I been thinking about Surinam, Kit. You help me out down there, I’ll help you out up here. I been trying to figure a way I could get some more cash to my boy.”

“Cash?”

“Kit, kid. Cash, I mean, that’s how you do business down there. You don’t pay much like I told you, you don’t hardly pay anything, not real money. But you have to be down there with like three thousand, maybe five thousand dollars. Cash. You have to be ready, see what I mean?”

Kit fitted his paper stick upright beneath his chin.

“Lately, whenever my boy tries to do business,” Leo went on, “it seems like somebody else’s got the cash. Somebody else’s trying to cut in.”

Kit’s stick was straight up, his spine likewise. Not only did Leo’s problem seem a long way from the Building Commission, but also the whole subject left Kit feeling unready. In the newspaper network people rarely talked about cash. Whether a writer was at the East End News, the Phoenix, or even the lower rungs of the Globe, everyone understood that there simply wasn’t much money involved. Kit’s friends tended to mention specific figures only when they’d worked up a good head of contempt — contempt being, of course, the best camouflage for envy. Can you believe, someone might say, they paid twelve hundred dollars for that piece of shit? The sort of steeply pitched attitude that made Zia Mirini a natural for the job.

Zia’s father explained that, at the Surinam plant, the labor varied from job to job. “Sometimes it takes a hundred women, punching them out round the clock, and then sometimes the place is practically empty.”

“I hear you, Leo.” Texas Monthly probably had cocaine money behind it. Maybe Mexican babies-for-sale money.

“So whenever I go down there, Kit, I got to have cash. Cash in hand, for the boy. That’s where you come in.

“Kit, kid,” Leo went on. “I wonder if you know how bad it looks, a businessman writing out all these checks to cash.”

“Cash,” Kit said.

“Kit, lemme tell you. Writing checks to cash, a businessman might as well just drop trou and bend over.” Leo had swung closer, his bulk on his forearms. He complained a while about audits, the IRS. “Someone like you, Kit, I mean. You probably never had to go through an audit.”

Aw, why hadn’t Kit spent more time in Boston? Why didn’t he know better the scams a guy in Leo’s line of work might pull? “Well Leo,” he tried, “I would think that’s what you’ve got accountants for.”

“Kit, madonn’. I’ve got accountants. Fucking con artists, the things they try to talk you into.” The old man went into another brief round of complaints. Another set of terms Kit had never heard of: general ledger, discounted cash flow.

“So Kit,” Leo said. “So what I’m thinking is, I’ll give you some more money.”

“What?”

“Oh, now he lightens up. Oh-ho, hey-yey. I’m offering you extra cash, Kit. That’s what we’re talking about here. Could you use an extra grand for January?”

“A, a grand? A thousand dollars?”

The old man’s smile showed some tongue.

Latch it up, Viddich. “Leo,” Kit said, “you know what my budget is.”

“I know it’s only two weeks till the next issue. And I know your budget, yeah.”

“Leo, what’s the deal? What do you want?”

“It might sound a little rough.”

Kit had come up here, after all. He’d come and he’d asked.

“Here’s how it works. Kit, say I give you a check for twenty-five hundred. I mean, your first one, I can give you that next week. You could be taking twenty-five hundred dollars to the bank Monday morning.” Leo had brought his smile so close that Kit could smell his coffee. “But then, Kit, every time I do this for you, you do something for me. You get me back fifteen hundred. Cash.”

It was like the weight of Kit’s eyes had increased. “What? I give you something back?”

“Only fifteen hundred, Kit. Fifteen hundred to me in cash. You do what you want with the other grand.”

Kit couldn’t trust any response more complicated than a stare. He dropped his hands but kept them fisted around his paper. Leo took advantage of the silence, shoveling on the rationale. ‘S just business. Your friends at the Globe, hey, they do this kind of business all the time. Your friends at fucking Harvard … Kit got up from the desk. He put a long stride between him and Leo’s espresso-breath, between him and that smutty gesture every time the man said “cash.” He noticed that the idea of laundering money didn’t impress the figures from Pompeii. In one fresco, a wrestling scene, two grapplers had robes over their shoulders but their genitals swung naked.

Leo swiveled left-right, following Kit. “Listen,” he said, “you told me yourself the Globe wanted to get into Monsod. You think they’re not looking for some shit to trade?”

Casting around for help, Kit recalled other times he’d been faced with shady deals. In the Midwest once, a hops vendor had dropped six hundred dollars on his desk. Just spread the bills on his desk and walked out of the office. In North Carolina there’d been talk of a lot more.

But none of those people had been paying Kit’s salary.

“Leo,” he tried, “let’s set aside the money a minute. This cash deal, let’s leave it alone for a minute.” He faced the desk. “Didn’t you say you could help me with the BBC?”

It took more than that to break the old man’s momentum. Even changing the subject, Leo kept his chest up. “Yeah, well the Building Commission, I mean. Yeah. I know some guys. Tomorrow, see, there’s this thing at Parker House. Tomorrow lunch. They want Mirinex at Parker House.”

Parker House was possibly the most prestigious hotel in the city, just across the street from the State House.

“There’s going to be the governor,” Leo said. “Ed King.”

“The governor.” Kit, laying mortar over his vocal cords, managed to match Leo’s tone. Ho hum, just another lunch with the governor.

“Him and some guys in the trades, you know. Contractors, commissioners, the usual guys.”

This was the kick Leo got out of his charade, of course. One-upping the Harvard boy made his day.

“Myself,” Leo went on, “I can’t go, really. Just can’t, you know.”

Kit sighed. You could see how the man’s daughter was still struggling with this kind of thing, struggling to find a space that didn’t have her father’s fingerprints all over it. This morning, when Kit had told Corinna and Zia he was going upstairs, the writer had turned away with an angry flinch.

“Anyway,” Leo said, “over the years, you see what I’m saying. I know some guys.”

With that Kit’s publisher fell silent again, sitting management-style for once, his hands on his desk.

“Parker House,” Kit said. “That’s at noon?”

Leo snorted. “You got balls, Kit kid.” He shook his big head. “I’ll say that, you got some fucking balls.”

Aw, balls were beside the point. Kit had nothing to lose. Regardless of what Leo might do, Sea Level had a dozen likely ways of dying.

“Didn’t I tell you,” the old man said, “this could rip you open and pull you out from the inside?”

Kit had lowered his arms. The rolled newspaper, clutched in both hands, made a bar across his crotch. He couldn’t take the money, no. He hadn’t done what small good he had, for North Carolina or the Building Commission, just to end up laundering checks. He hadn’t come this far only to discover that the first issue was nothing more than a sack of cash. He didn’t want a paper if he couldn’t also have a conscience. “Leo,” he asked, “why’d you give Sea Level your money?”

No answer; Kit tried another tack. “Leo, think about it. If something went wrong, we’d end up in front of a Grand Jury.”

“He-ey.” Leo waved a limp hand. “This isn’t the movies, Kit. Isn’t the movies, and I’m not the Mafia.”

Not the Mafia, check. “Leo, I can’t do it.”

“Bullshit.”

“Leo.”

“Bullshit, I can’t I can’t I can’t. What’s that, the fucking Harvard fight song? Kit, don’t you want to go to Parker House?”

“Aw, come on. Parker House isn’t the issue here.”

“You mean you really think”—Leo’s rage, more than a little bogus to begin with, gave way to bewilderment—“I’d still get you in there when you won’t do nothing for me?”

“Leo. I can’t. And as for getting into Parker House, that’s the least of my worries.”

The old man went buttonmouthed again. He went thoughtful, eerily thoughtful, his shape slack. It occurred to Kit that the wrestlers in the fresco hadn’t laid a hand on each other yet. They were still maneuvering for position.

Chapter 2

And after Kit had gotten his lunch with the governor, the next day, it didn’t seem as if the wrestlers’ maneuvering had stopped. He didn’t have any more answers than before. Tuesday afternoon the same as Monday afternoon, Kit sat in his office, holding off on final decisions about his next issue.

On his desk lay two mockups. Two versions of Number Two. One was devoted exclusively to the penitentiary, with a banner block of 14- or 18-point type across the top half of the cover. The other offered the sort of front page editors pull off the Sale rack, three columns of news and follow-up. Clipped to the “Monsod Exclusive” mockup was a business card from the noontime meeting at Parker House, from one of the suits who’d glided around that top-floor suite. The card looked impressive, Massachusetts State Senate and all that. But Kit doubted it brought him any closer to Monsod. To him, the Parker House gathering felt like a reenactment of the inconclusive little comedy he’d played out with Leo, the action a hair overripe.

Of course Kit’s visitors, Tuesday after lunch, wanted to hear about where he’d been and who he’d been with. His Circulation Manager stopped by with the first weekend’s sales figures, then stayed to examine the card.

“Forbes Croftall, State Senator,” he read. “M’tellin’ya. A major mover there, Kit.”

“His aide, Tad,” Kit said. He pointed to the card’s upper right corner. “I only met his aide.”

“So, still. Croftall runs a couple committees, right?”

“He’s majority whip.”

“So. What are you looking so down about?”

Kit cast his eyes up the whorled glass of his office walls. “Circulation Manager,” it occurred to him, was an awfully highfalutin title. But then, what else could you put on the masthead? “He Goes to the Newsstands and Grovels?” The man had an accent that, around Boston, left him at a handicap. Every time he opened his mouth, the city’s Anglo-Protestant nomenklatura heard white trash. M’tehhllinn’yaghh. And he had a disconcerting pun of a name, Tad Close.

“M’tellin’ya, Kit. This is promising.”

“Tad. I only met his aide.”

A hickish type, the aide. A country preacher in wire-rims and a black suit. But Croftall’s man had read Kit’s piece on Monsod — the one surprise of the entire runaround lunchtime, and the single ray of hope. Kit and the aide had talked about the latest prison disturbance. Their discussion had become, in the end, just tangibly heated. While the aide’s looks had soured, their preacherly lines deepening, Kit had reminded him that a former Monsod guard was still in recovery over at Massachusetts General. Fractured skull, spinal damage. State revenues covered the costs of surgery, therapy, counseling, and job retraining. Easily more than a hundred thousand total. At last Croftall’s aide, just tangibly heated, had promised to put the story on the Senator’s desk.

A ray of hope. Tad might be right, glowing over the man’s card. But outside of this one case the Parker House event had proven utterly mundane. Croftall’s aide, in fact, had been one of few men on the scene with actual clout. Nearly everyone else worked, as Leo Mirini would say, in the trades. Some made a living contracting for construction, some sub-contracted for the roofing or the windows or the ganglia under kitchen sinks. They’d come to Parker House to ingratiate themselves with the Governor.

Not that the Governor was easy to find. Not that he was out glad-handing, goodtiming, talking the Bruins or the Celts. The Governor waited behind the closed door of the suite’s bedroom. He was in there over a room-service lunch. And simply being on the guest list, like Kit, didn’t get you a meeting. No. In order to get private time with Ed King a man needed to, as Croftall’s aide put it, “make a commitment.” A man needed to make a donation, that is; he needed to lay down some cash for King’s next campaign. The event was a fundraiser. The contractors came with checks, and in return the Governor gave them a lunch-greased handshake. Grease for grease.

“I didn’t meet King,” Kit told Corinna Nummold, his Administrative Assistant.

“Takes money to meet the head guy,” Corinna said. “Kit, I bet you don’t get any building contracts either.”

This was still later on Tuesday. Corinna had poked her head into Kit’s reliquary to remind him she had to pick up her son. Her much-photographed Arturito. Kit blinked up at the woman, then at his glass walls. Finally, out across the office halfwalls, he once more spotted the framed portrait of Arturo on the paper’s reception desk. And Kit thought he had problems. Here was a woman three years his junior with a boy in third grade and no idea where the father might be.

“Nope,” Corinna was saying. “I guess Kit Viddich won’t be getting any contracts from the governor this year.”

Her attempt at gringo conversational biplay. To Corinna, that’s what her position with Sea Level was about, learning the ways of the Norteamericano. Not for her the smoke-ringed ennui of a hipster like Zia Mirini.

“Maybe I shouldn’t make jokes,” she said more gently. “I just mean to tell you, I heard about stuff like this.”

Not for her was Zia’s gaunt punk anti-style, either. Corinna had a meaty Dominican face and frame, and she didn’t try to hide it. She wore big career-girl hair, thick career-girl shoulder pads. Kit hoped his smile looked encouraging.

“If it was me,” she said, “seeing that stuff right in front of my face — Kit, I would’ve lost it. That corruption, I mean. I would’ve started screaming at people.”

“Aw, Corinna. It wasn’t the place. Screaming would’ve done more harm than good.”

She nodded: The way of the Norteamericano.

“Well, it’s not like it was easy for me either, Corinna. I walked out.”

“I can see it wasn’t easy for you.”

The woman touched a pinkie to the corner of one eye, showing a trace of anger. God knows, she must be sick and tired of the skinny Anglo girls getting all the attention.

“Kit, I mean. It’s like you’re hardly here.”

“Corinna. It was just some men in a room.”

Kit had seen the whole show at Leo’s office, yeah. At the Parker House, the only way he’d been able to talk with anyone had been by mentioning Leo. Also the lunch came in one flavor only, Tangy Testosterone. Old-boy testosterone. The event had Leo’s crassness about cash, too. Since this was January, the squeakiest month in the fiscal year, the Governor’s people had brought along loan forms. They’d brought both 60-day and 90-day forms. They’d set the papers in two stacks on a table outside the Governor’s bedroom. Grease.

Kit had found himself getting nowhere, and more than a little disgusted. He’d taken Croftall’s card and walked out. He knew enough about Boston to understand that this sort of thing went on all the time. Patronage, sure. He even knew how someone like Forbes Croftall would defend the system, using words like “commitment,” expressions like “tell the men from the boys.” Kit wasn’t such a saint that he didn’t know. Nonetheless, the experience left him unable to touch his lunch. The arson wave across the city, the rot in Monsod — these must have begun with the sort of deals men were making today up in Parker House. Kit took the aide’s card and walked.

Aw, Leo. What had the old man been up to, arranging Kit’s entré?

Tuesday afternoon, it had reached the point where Kit didn’t know what to tell freelancers. The paper’s assignments had to remain open-ended. And with the Art Director, things got still more complicated. The Director was a friend of Zia’s, another clubgoer, an almost weightless woman named Topsy Otaka. She and Kit huddled over the drafting table in Sea Level’s back room. When he asked for two different front-page mockups, Kit felt sheepish and without a clue. This, in turn, led him into a thoughtless gaffe. He described his source on Monsod — mentioning no names, at least — as a “junkie murderer.” A bad gaffe, since Zia’s friend was herself in a methadone program.

Apologizing, a white knight with egg on his face, Kit made an effort to clear his head. He asked:

“Why would Zia’s father put his money into my paper?”

Topsy, already uncomfortable, started to look even worse. She massaged the inside of one elbow.

“He knows the kind of story I go for,” Kit said. “He knows what his own business is, let’s face it. Mirinex does deals that are borderline, sometimes.”

“Well,” Topsy said, “he wants to help Zia.”

Getting nowhere. What Kit went through Tuesday afternoon had always been the hardest part of his chosen work. Loose ends taking so long to come together — it always put him into a distracted funk. He whispered prayer after prayer for a phone call. He wasted minute after minute with his head back and his boots up, lost in the reflections along his high office glass.

*

SEE SEA LEVEL RUN

Dick and Jane need not apply

As I’m sure everyone on the Pulitzer committee knows by now, Boston has a new newspaper. Or a sort of newspaper, anyway, rather a mongrel, part Rolling Stone, part I.F. Stone. At all events, its name is Sea Level and it does look … interesting.

The editor is Christopher “Kit” Viddich, the husband of the former Elizabeth Steyes (yes, that’s Stye, of the the Brattle Street Sties). Your peripatetic Society gal was lucky enough to attend the party for the first issue, held last Saturday evening at a private address in the Back Bay.

The occasion proved … interesting.

Consider the Belle of the Ball, at Mr. Vidditch’s affair. Belle of the Ball, sans doute, was Zia Mirini, a comely young sylph despite her best efforts to appear otherwise. Her shirt — do my eyes deceive me? — was the upper half from a set of long johns. No ordinary white long johns either; but, well, what would you call that color? Pompeiian red? And then there was the “news” she was “investigating.”

The woman’s writing a piece on a disc jockey. A “radio personality,” as they say. Someone named Oedipus.

Kit got a kick out of Zia’s desktop decorations. Leo’s daughter liked tacky Italian postcards, retouched within an inch of their lives. She had a good half-dozen of these, their pop pastels a shock under the dim plastic desk cover. She had — let’s see. A shot of Naples and the Bay, Vesuvius trailing smoke in the distance. The blue was like heaven, the gray like sin. And she had the Bread and Wine, flesh and blood.

“Kit? Are you there?”

He looked up from Zia’s desktop, blinking, abashed, then lapsed back into silence.

The man across the desk laughed, not unkindly. “I know, I know,” he said. “One of those Parker House wingdings’ll make you feel like starting a commune in Canada.”

This was Rick DeMirris, Kit’s favorite freelancer. A thinker, an agitator, Rick had stopped by as Tuesday wound down. He’d perched on one the halfwalls surrounding Zia’s workspace, talking shop while Zia pretzel’d this way and that behind her desk and Kit leaned against the facing partition. No top-of-the-masthead pretensions in this office.

“You’ll survive,” Rick said. “Hey, you’re back with the good guys now.”

Kit tried to think of a way to change the subject. Rick hadn’t said much yet about his own story, a Mass Transit piece. The MTA had made an unexpected find during excavations for a waterfront station, turning up a Colonial shipworks down at what used to be the harbor. They’d even found native Shawmut stuff. A local archaeologist had declared the site “invaluable.”

But the freelancer preferred to talk about Zia’s piece. “Oedipus?” he asked. “No shit? Is this a nom de knob?”

“The name of his show is even better.” Half a smile peeked from one side of Zia’s cigarette. “Nocturnal Emissions.”

They made a strange pair, Rick and Zia. Worlds in collision. The freelancer let his hair billow well below the shoulder, whereas Zia cropped hers close, allowing no more than a trace of its natural curl. And Rick wore a sweater of deep hides-the-dirt brown, a fatigue jacket that hung on him like spaghetti gone cold. Mr. Natural and the punkette.

Miss Marina was altogether quite smitten by this … disc jockey. She waxed positively girlish, insofar as one can in red thermal underwear and a black leather jacket. She kept fingering her rosary beads (at least, I think they were rosary beads). The question raised by her hero’s career, Miss Moroni kept saying, was this: How can a punk be a success?

“How can a punk be a success,” Rick said. “Sexy.”

To Kit, Zia’s Oedipus profile sounded like what he wanted in Sea Level. No puff, no fluff. Zia wasn’t interested in anything so superficial as finding out the disc jockey’s real name. She wanted to explore the meanings of his career.

“See, Oeddie began in the basement,” Zia explained. “Cellars by starlight. Like, the mattress is on the floor, and you have to share it with someone in a methadone program.”

Grinning, Rick hooked one arm under his sweater, scratching his narrow chest.

“That was Oeddie,” Zia said, “totally in the basement.”

You should understand, earnest reader, that Miss Mirrorme’s outfit was entirely appropriate to her calling. The red and the leather, the ex-communicant’s rosary, all perfectly appropriate. The woman writes about the new “punk rock,” you see. Yes, “poke rock,” the latest ‘70s scourge.

The crowd included a number of Miss Marinara’s, ahem, musician friends. Indeed, her champion deejay was on the scene, great Odious himself. Quite flush with success, oh yes — a puke, but flush. Over New Year’s, it seems, the man was hired by the biggest rock station in town.

“Suddenly he’s made it,” Zia was saying. “An office, a telephone. He’s really made it.” And this was in Boston, she repeated. “I mean, with the demographic this city has, the number of, like, young people …”

Rick was nodding.

“Boston radio, I mean, it’s the cutting edge.”

“No shit,” Rick said. “Radio, electronics, that’s where the action is these days. Us print types, we’re way behind.”

Zia snorted. “So Oeddie now, he doesn’t just get, like, a salary and benefits. He gets clout in the industry.”

“And how can a punk be a success?”

Pensive, she tugged at her top, a red thermal undershirt. Tough girl: when she tugged, you noticed her breasts.

“Sexy,” Rick said. “A real hook, there. It’s loss of innocence, it’s testing of values.”

Meanwhile, among Miss Merengue’s, ahem, friends, there emerged a curious consensus. All the spank-rockers seemed to regard Sea Level as though Mr. Viddich were one of their own. They saw him as a comrade-in-underwear.

I spotted for instance four or five members of, ahem, the Human Sexual Response, a “gay” outfit. Yes, “gay,” meaning “real slime.” The Humans make no attempt to hide their perversion — part of the Castro District/Harvey Milk/Village People consensus, I suppose, out of the closet and all that. The leader, I daresay, found the new editor in town quite delicious: a tall tumbler of Minnesota lake water.

“I love him,” the leader of the Hummins was heard to declare. “That Bitch character — I mean, you think I’m a punk? I mean, that man’s a punk.”

“Well yeah, see it’s important,” Zia said, suddenly loud. “It matters, what happens down in those basements.”

Rick’s eyes flicked wide. Where was the woman’s button, when had he pushed it? But Kit understood — Zia’s heat was directed at him. At him, sure. Kit had never hidden his misgivings about Zia’s subject matter, this cellars-by-starlight stuff. The first time he’d sat down with her he’d let her know that, originally, he’d never anticipated doing much “entertainment reporting” in Sea Level. Better she heard it from Kit himself, he’d figured, than from her father.

Hoo boy, had that been a dumb move. A glaring example of his defective social skills. No wonder he felt like he was walking on eggshells around here.

Rick knew an exposed nerve when he heard it crackle.

“Zia, tell me,” he said, “how’d you like working with old Kit here?” Rockin’ Rick. “He’s a wild man, you know.”

Then Kit, on eggshells, saw something new. He saw Zia’s arm, the way she massaged her arm. If he hadn’t been at such a bleary internal distance he’d never have noticed. Zia was a lefty, wouldn’t you know it, and here on her workspace halfwall Kit observed that when she got worked up, she massaged her right forearm. She massaged the right only — unlike her friend Topsy, for instance, who massaged the left only.

“I mean, I love him,” someone was saying. “I mean, you think you’re a punk? This man’s a punk.”

Kit didn’t think he’d ever seen Zia in short sleeves.

Oddyes said much the same: Mr. Benttip was a pogue after his own heart. I caught up with the young deejay — or did he catch up with me? — over by the heroin. Caterers had set out Sterno cans, syringes, and strips of tubing for tying off. Oddipuss, heating his spoon, couldn’t have sounded more enthusiastic.

“I’m wicked psyched to see the next issue,” he said.

Kit didn’t follow up on his suspicions. His lack of socializing was bearing down on him with brutal clarity — he’d only just now realized that Rick was flirting. The freelancer wasn’t here to talk about a new T station, no. He was here to say “sexy” every chance he got. Rick had even come to the office with a newly pierced ear, a touch Zia might go for. Among guys, only the hard-core hip would risk an earring; the accessory was still mostly taken as a sign a man was gay.

So Kit let his suspicions lie, putting out of mind the low thought that he might stay and rifle Zia’s desk. What was he supposed to find? Works? Anyway he already knew old Leo had a private agenda for Sea Level. Three or four private agenda, more than likely. And he’d spent too much time alone with his low thoughts, his strange thoughts. Kit quit the office when the other two did but then, back home in Cambridge, he found himself alone once more. Bette had left a letter on the kitchen table.

Kit could see it from the apartment doorway, a full sheet of print squared against the edge of the table. From the doorway, he knew she was leaving him. His wife was leaving. The believer had lost what he believed in most. Silly fumblethumbs believer. All that remained to him was nothing but one echoey room after another, worm-eaten rooms with walls of peeling dreams like the decaying fiber of his moan as he crossed the kitchen on long rancher’s legs.

No. No, this was another sort of letter. An ordinary see-you-soon letter, ticking off the evening schedule.

Bette wouldn’t even have written the thing, or she wouldn’t have written so much, except that she’d wanted to see what a computer printout looked like. “I tell you frankly,” Kit’s wife had written, “there are moments when I believe that I’ll never pull anything from this Apple except worms.” Aw, Betts. Kit recalled her smile, its intricate works, and then, lifting the fanfold sheet from the table, he discovered she’d clipped a second message to the back. A message that required no reading — a wrinkly blue Trojan. She’d been careful about the paper clip, making sure it wouldn’t poke through the packaging.

He hadn’t yet come entirely out of his wooze. As he unclipped the condom, Kit lost his bearings again, tumbling back to yesterday’s before-breakfast uproar. To exhale meeting exhale in the half-light while he and Bette snuggled and he lingered inside her. The wrinkles succulent, UnTrojan’d.

“That next issue,” said Attaputz, shooting up, “that’s got to be a motherfucker.”

Really, one wonders what Miss Marryme sees in this person. Why, he’s hardly a person at all — just a voice on the air.

“It’s got to come from the basement,” the “deejay” was saying. “A lot of pressure on that next issue.”

Even after Kit cleared his head — a couple fingers of Johnny Walker helped — Bette’s printout still read to him like something in another language. The dot matrix suggested Braille.

His wife explained that she’d taken her latest editing over to Professor Glenza at the Medical School. She had no appointment, no deadline, but she wanted to know what he thought of what she’d done so far. “I suspect that Glenza is to me rather what you are to your Ms. Mirini,” she’d written. “(Yes Mzzzzzzz: she’s a bee in my bonnet).” Aw, Betts. “I suspect, you’ve now got two women who need mentors, saviors, knights on white chargers.”

What language was this? Kit knew most of his wife’s stage business, but tonight’s printout careened from pose to pose in free-fall. Bette hadn’t entered another word about Zia. Instead, she’d started a fresh paragraph, saying that after the Med School she was “heading to Rowley to give Hepburn a good lunging.” Hepburn was Bette’s Morgan, a stallion, three years old. One of those odd accoutrements of family wealth that exist outside the month-by-month cash flow. Kit’s wife kept her mount stabled at a farm belonging to one of her aunts. “Tuesday’s a good day for it,” Kit read. “Aunt Georgie goes into Haymarket Tuesdays.” And after that, Bette planned to visit a psychic.

A psychic. “She speaks with ghosts, this woman.”

Just a voice on the air, that’s your precious hero of prank-rake radio. The way he comes in one ear and goes out the other. Why, a person can’t tell if he’s ahead of the times or behind. And so far as your humble Society reporter could see, Mr. Bitterid was no better. Saturday night I journeyed out of my body briefly, in order to get a fuller view of the proceedings. I floated up by the rafters, in the dimension of the spirit. And Boston’s newest newspaper editor why, I’ve never seen an aura so dangerously in flux.

“Well yeah see it’s important,” declared tatty young Miss Mindyourmind — or rather her tatty young essence, afloat beside me.

“It’s like I said,” her shade went on. “How can punk be a success?”

Bette had gotten the psychic’s name from a man she’d known years ago. A man Kit wouldn’t have met, a holdover from a time in her life she called “The Rampage.” “Ivan,” Kit read. “One of a very few I’ve kept in touch with from out of that, well. Out of that era.” And if she was reaching back to The Rampage, Bette concluded, well. Then she must need whatever she was reaching for. She must need it badly, this seance. “Of course I’ve already told you so in words,” Bette had written. “Words, words, words. But I believe I also let you know by means of, what shall we call it, symbolic language. See attached.”

Bette had used underlining too: “God knows I hope to avoid living Aunt Georgie, but I’d love to hear from dead Aunt Winnie.”

Kit finished his reading, his rereading, in their bedroom. He sat on the crumpled covers, his heart once more a soaked beehive. He had a notion of finding the psychic’s address and running over there. Darling, he’d begin, I’ve been chasing some ghosts myself. He’d ask if there’d been more crank calls. And he’d say something about Zia, something to put both his and Bette’s minds to rest.

Eventually his eyes shifted to the photo of his father.

The photo stood on Kit’s bureau in a formal wooden frame, a Midwestern, mid-century frame. It had come with one of the last letters from Korea. Chris Viddich Senior, Nordic and full of bones, stood on the wing of his Marine Corps Sabre jet. The baggy flight suit couldn’t conceal his fitness, his muscularity. The helmet was off. His grin seemed like the fleshy outermost spill of an eruption (was this just because the photo’s black and white recalled ‘40s war flicks?), like some all-natural prehistoric sureness had proved too powerful for the suit and helmet.

“It’s the question of the ‘70s,” Miss Marines went on — still asking her question. “This is all about the ‘70s.”

Her own aura had an astonishing sureness, I must say, some all-natural prehistoric sureness too powerful for her longjohns and leather. And though she claimed to be of the moment, riding the ether of this decade only, she spoke in terms that were timeless.

“It’s culture vs. counterculture,” she said. “It’s that basic. As basic as keeping up a good front when, behind the front, you’re riddled with doubt.”

*

Did he sleep? Did he wake and touch his wife, take coffee and the MTA? Midnight and morning seemed to carry Kit down the same shadowy tubes. By ten-thirty Wednesday, Corinna was getting exasperated. She began waving at him with each new call, showing off her nails, trying to light a fire under the boss.

For one call, her high-gloss lips got into the act as well. Eagerly they shaped a word Kit couldn’t read. A, B, A, B?

Then he recognized the connection, the static. He thought again of Bette’s psychic, talking to the dead.

“Mrs. Rebes?” Kit bent close to the machine.

Getting the Monsod story had required no pull, no Parker House. The first of the Five W’s was Who, sure, and so Kit had chased down the names of the men serving sentences longer than three years. Then he chased down their families. Finally Kit found a convict in the right place — down in solitary — with a contact on the outside he could trust. The prisoner was Junior Rebes, doing thirty-five years to life. Rape, murder, narcotics. Junior seemed to spend a lot of time in solitary, in the penitentiary basement. Down there, according to what Kit could put together, the rot was worst.

The contact on the outside was Junior’s mother. “You got a minute for me, Missah Viddich?”

“All the time you want.”

It still jarred him, a woman ten or twelve years his senior calling him “Mister.” But she didn’t like using first names. She never let him visit her apartment either. She claimed she had to keep Kit away from her other son. According to her this second son, Louie-Louie, was a better boy than Junior. But Louie-Louie would expect too much from Kit. The younger boy would expect Kit to turn the whole system around for them, get them on the TV or something.

Mrs. Rebes herself seemed to expect nothing. Today she told Kit she’d read the piece, she’d shown it around the coffee shop, and to hear her you’d think that Sea Level’s few smudgy columns were the best her boy could have hoped for.

Kit had seen her shop. On the Goodwill Industries side of the South End, its floor tiles had long since run to yellow. There he’d made himself sleepless with caffeine, listening. Mrs. Rebes had revealed at last that she could show him something “a lot better than plain old letters.” She’d told him she had “the actual, real cassettes.” The tapes Junior had sent from prison. After that Kit had done most of the talking. The hopped-up flow of his words however had felt unreal, intrusive, hypocritical, and it’d come to Kit that he needed to work the same transformations on himself as on this string-fingered, unhappy woman. He needed to trust his own asking. He had to know that he was beyond sheer nickel-plated ambition.

Mrs. Rebes could stare for minutes on end between question and answer. Just sit there staring in cap and apron, a still-young woman worn to shreds.

Today Kit remained close to the phone. “There’s a certain kinda way,” the mother was saying, “it’s even better you didn’t use our real name. It’s better in the paper I mean, for someone else readin’ it.”

“I’m glad you think so, Mrs. Rebes.”

“It opens their eyes, in a certain kinda way. When you say the name isn’t real, they see it could be anybody.”

“Well … that’s the idea.”

Fine talk. To hear him you’d think a man put together a story out of nothing but angelhair and the Ten Commandments. Kit’s using an alias for Junior, however, had been as much a matter of protecting his back as anything more noble. Globe editors lurked in the bushes. And Sea Level might have suffered worse, with a single-source story. Public Relations at Monsod had stonewalled him when Kit called for confirmation. Refused to confirm or deny. A couple of the other convicts’ families had provided corroboration here and there, but for more than one crucial passage Kit was going entirely on Junior’s cassettes. Junior was the only one who could describe the closet. So Kit had created a straw man, “Manny.” He’d declared up front that the name was an amalgam, a fiction.

You had to do something. There were stories like that, top-page possibilities soft in a couple of spots. Kit however had never done it before, cooked up an amalgam.

“Yeah,” the mother told him now. “But it’s not just any reporter woulda done what you done.”

“Well … thank you.”

“Not just any reporter look out for my boy.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Rebes.”

Kit began to think he knew why the mother had called. She needed bucking up; she’d developed a dependence. How’s that feel on the conscience, Viddich?

“I’m working on a follow-up, Mrs. Rebes.” The constructive tone didn’t ring unredeemably false, at least. “Maybe next time we can meet at your place.”

“Uh-huh well now you mention it Missah Viddich, you know that’s kind of why I called. About the, the follow-up.”

“Don’t worry. Please. Nothing’s going to happen until you and I get a chance to talk.”

“I hear that. But see and cause like, see, now there’s another newspaper call me.”

The phone-static rose and fell, surf and undertow.

“Was the Globe. Somebody from the Globe call me.”

Kit checked the outer office. The workspaces remained quiet, the women head-down at their desks. Junior’s mother assured him she hadn’t told the other reporter anything. Missah Viddich be the only one look out for her boy till now, she not about to start trustin somebody else.

He couldn’t just go on saying thank you. But what Kit came up with—“You have to do what you think is best for you.”—tasted even flatter.

“Uh-huh well see, I ain’t talkin’ to somebody else, don’t fret. Oh see. Somebody else just lookin’ out for themself.”

Kit continued to labor toward clear thinking, ripping through the papier-mâché of the last couple of days. He asked the mother if she’d gotten the Globe reporter’s name. Mrs. Rebes recalled a syllable or two, maybe the first initial, but she hadn’t thought to make a note. Kit cut her off when she started to apologize: “Don’t, don’t …”

Too loud. The glass walls echoed.

Lowering his voice, loosening his grip on the receiver, he told her there was no harm done. “If you told them you won’t talk,” he assured her, “they shouldn’t pester you.” Meantime he faced up to the news — bad news but hardly unexpected. Sea Level had never been more than a couple of phone calls ahead of the pack. Sooner or later somebody else had been bound to find Junior’s mother. All things considered, it was better to hear it from her, the source, with her smoker’s squeak and nervous honesty. Better Mrs. Rebes than reading it in tomorrow’s paper.

“I told em,” she was saying. “Told em. Oh see, I was thinkin the whole time, ain nobody been good to me like Missah Kit Viddich.”

“That’s … thank you.”

“You done some good for me, good like in the Gospel. My boy was dead and you made him live.”

“Thank you.”

Afterwards Kit sat back from the silent phone. For the first time in a while he noticed the things he’d taped to the glass rather than the glass itself.

He’d put up a couple of table-teepees, goofy stuff he’d found in restaurants out West. One came from Wyoming, some hole in the wall where every booth had a photo of “The World-Famous Jackalope.” The shot was almost as overdone as Zia’s postcards. A cowboy in two-hundred-dollar chaps lifted a saddle onto a huge horned rabbit. They’re tough to handle, the logo read, but you won’t find any animal faster.

A gunslinger saint, riding on a fantasy. Yet now Kit sat there with a hard-to-figure new energy. He was suddenly hands-on around the workspace. He touched the table-teepee before him — and, astonishing himself, chuckled at the joke. He touched the card from Senator Croftall’s aide.

He was on his feet, his back to the workspace, looking out over Sea Level’s home block. Across the way, the turn-of-the-century brownstones had bowed window-settings that bulged on either side of their central doors. Like dark children with mumps. Like brown forearms stitched down the middle with a needle’s track. The city had its diseases, certainly. But who said Sea Level couldn’t cure one or two of those diseases? Kit felt the constriction of the Boston winter, the weight of church bells a hundred years old tolling eleven. But who said he had to keep his head down under the gray, the clockworks? With or without the Building Commission, he still had a story. With or without Leo Mirini’s ambiguous support, he still had a paper.

It did cross his mind, by the time he headed out to Corinna’s desk, that this morning’s energy might look just as foolish as Monday’s.

“Who haven’t we tried yet?” he asked her.

She blinked. Gently, editor.

“That freelancer who called me Monday,” Kit said. “That stringer with the Spotlight Team. Let’s find out who he knows.”

“You got a number for him?”

“Sure. And come to think of it there’s another Globe number I want you to try. Somebody from over there just called my source on Monsod.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Don’t worry.” Kit assured her that Mrs. Rebes wouldn’t talk. “But think about it, Corinna. It’s time I talked to that editor that came to the party. Rachel, remember?”

“You’re going to ask someone at the Globe for help?”

Over in Zia’s space, the writer had been huddling with Topsy Otaka. Kit had okayed a design inset for the disc-jockey piece. But the mention of Rachel Veutri brought Zia’s head up; Kit hadn’t been blowing smoke when he’d told Leo how the Globe woman had liked the Humans piece.

“Zia, you remember Rachel,” he said.

“I remember.”

“I think it’s time we talked to her. It’s time we got a move on.”

Zia’s eyeliner was like two equals signs. “Dylan comes back,” she said.

Kit laughed. “Aw, Z.” To think he’d once wanted to do without this live wire. To think he’d let a hambone like Leo disconnect his own wires. The next several hours seemed to Kit to be defined by Zia’s black-bordered gaze, a strict outline of what mattered. For starters, there was no reason he couldn’t make plans for two Number Twos. No reason he couldn’t line up assignments and deadlines for each of the mockups on his desk. When he’d been covering Agriculture for the Globe, he’d always had three or four pieces brewing at once. Kit had even hired researchers, and one of those researchers had been Bette. Worked that time.

Today he took pains to clarify the alternatives, figuring the difference between the two issues in column-inches, in word-counts. He did this out where everyone could see him. He set both of Topsy’s designs on one of the extra desks between his space and Corinna’s.

Not that his sense of purpose didn’t suffer the occasional blow. Things got sticky when he took Zia into his office and made it clear that the Oedipus profile might be bumped back an issue. She understood, sure. If Kit got into Monsod, sure. But the black borders of Zia’s gaze trembled, the gaze itself shifted to Kit’s jackalope, and for the next minute or so he was wondering again if he was up to this. He had Zia wait, there within his glass walls, while Corinna tried Rachel Veutri’s number again. And reaching Rachel, Kit took pains to keep his purpose in focus.

“Whatever happens,” he told the Globe editor, “we still have to lead with Monsod. We can’t go changing what we’re about after a single issue.”

Rachel — he made sure Zia knew — agreed.

“The penitentiary has still got to be one of our top-page pieces,” he said into the phone, “whether I get inside or not.”

His friend couldn’t help him, it turned out. Rachel worked more in Zia’s territory; Kit, when he’d finished his questions, passed the phone to his writer. Nonetheless both the call and the work came as a relief. A recharge. With increasing zip, Kit made assignments for himself, Kit the employee. He scheduled a couple of hours in the Harvard Law Library, he noted down follow-up questions for Mrs. Rebes. He needed to talk to her again, whatever happened.

Kit even found confirmation of Zia’s heroin habit, out of the blue at the end of the afternoon.

This happened in the office across the hall. The outfit over there, like Sea Level, was something Zia had helped bring into the building. It was a women’s counseling setup, non-profit. Another ‘60s angel struggling with plucked wings. Till now, Kit’d had no idea where Zia had heard of the organization, but according to Leo, it’d been Zia who’d found the outfit. The old man had been happy to take on a tenant whose service status helped him get a break on property taxes.

Today, Kit was called across the hall late, after four. He was the only one left at Sea Level, and across the hall, the mirror over their bathroom medicine cabinet had fallen off its hinges. A woman came asking for help, making jokes about a “man’s job.” Over there, they were down to a single staff person as well. And by that hour, Kit had more or less accepted defeat. He’d seen how it was — no Monsod inspection for Sea Level’s Editor-in-Chief. He’d seen and he hadn’t gotten all webbed up in imaginary layout and pasteup. Then among the call-memos on the counseling group’s bulletin board he spotted one for “Alice Mirini.”

The call was from a doctor with a Hindu name, the address a health center over in the Fenway. And here came Kit’s muckraker antennae.

“Has the methadone clinic been trying to reach Zia lately?” he asked, turning the detached cabinet mirror between his hands. “I’m afraid I’ve kept her pretty busy.”

“Oh yes,” the woman answered brightly. “Topsy and her both got all their calls before they left.”

Yet it was as if the news never laid a glove on him. As if Leo had never laid a glove on him. Of course now and again, during his remaining half-hour or so in the office, Kit found himself rocked with a spasm of anger. He’d sit there clenching his notepad, his eyes pinched shut. And he’d think of the thousand-year-old rock on Leo’s desk. The man wanted to keep Sea Level under that rock, Sea Level and his daughter both. He wanted to have his own in-house rehab. Nonetheless, by the time Kit’s grip on his spiral-top notepad began to hurt, the anger would already have passed. He’d study the fading red marks in his palm and tell himself: Come on. This latest piece of dirty business only confirmed what he’d been feeling since he’d gotten off the phone with Mrs. Rebes. Regardless of Leo’s Godfather games, regardless of Kit’s rookie groaning, there remained something in Sea Level’s staple-bound paper that wouldn’t smudge off.

Tomorrow he was going to the Law Library. He was working up an attack on the state system for awarding construction contracts. Would two hours be enough?

He was still at his notes when the phone rang again. The Senate majority leader, Forbes Croftall.

“I’m glad I found you, Mr. Viddich. I’m glad you were still on the job.”

The Senator had read Kit’s piece. His aide had passed it along. “We were both impressed, Mr. Viddich, indeed impressed.” The hum in Kit’s ears made him recheck the empty workspace: Corinna’s open desk calendar, Zia’s bright neglected postcards. “At any rate, Mr. Viddich, after reading the excerpts my aide selected for me, I thought a call to the Building Commission was in order.” Kit ran a touch-test along his desktop: pens and stapler and here was a photo of Bette on horseback. The Senator’s conversational style recalled her family’s, Brahman Brisk. “And Mr. Viddich, did you know that your piece had made the rounds at the Commission as well?” Comp copies, check. Kit hadn’t even gotten the go-ahead yet, the word he was waiting for, and already his knees were pumping, he had to force himself to listen through the sproing and wobble of the jack-in-the-box in his chest.

Just five minutes ago, the Senator said, he’d gotten a call back from the commissioners. “I’ve been empowered to extend you an invitation, Mr. Viddich. You can ride with the inspection team.”

Kit kept it under the desk, flutter — kicking like he was swimming sprints.

“Though you will have to be there before seven-thirty, Mr. Viddich. Bright and early tomorrow morning.”

The Senator went on talking, names and addresses. With that of course it was anticlimax, dishwater. Kit said thanks, formally. His legs settled. The Senator spieled on and Kit fitted the phone under his jaw, he took down the details on his appointment calendar. The thrill was durable: a tasseled puppet’s cap tickled the inside of his ribs. But he checked his wall calendar, he made sure to thank the man again.

“You know, it was your piece that did it, Mr. Viddich. We were all very impressed.”

He’d have to leave a note for Corrina, she’d have to make some calls. And the word “we” settled Kit still more. He took up his notepad again and leaned into the phone. His electricity faded into questions, possible connections, quick scribbles across yellow paper. The aide, after all, was no friend of his, a crooked preacher. Croftall was no angel either.

“I put a lot of work into that piece, Senator,” Kit tried.

“You called our attention to some very disturbing material, Mr. Viddich. Very disturbing material. Really, we can’t get on with our business until we have a look at this.”

Croftall must have his reasons. “And that’s why you’re doing this, Senator? My case deserves special treatment?”

“Well, as I’m sure you’re aware, so much of what we read in the news these days is nothing but fluff. The words fade right into the paper. But your piece, well. Indeed.”

He tried to picture the senator, but he couldn’t recall anything recent on TV. “Still I do have to wonder, Senator. Such a last-minute change of policy, ah …”

“Oh now. You’ve heard of this sort of thing happening before, surely. Every once in a while, someone from the media goes along on an inspection.”

Dishwater. Names and details, but no explanations. And the Senator would like to see whatever story came out of the visit. “You could make an appointment if you’d like, Mr. Viddich. My aide has the book.” But this wasn’t the place for Kit to go after the answers he wanted. Asking would do more harm than good. He told Croftall only that he’d “like to talk, some time.” Like to scratch a few blackboards and see if the man squirmed.

Kit hung up knowing the larger motive. No mystery there. A few of the people who made policy had gotten scared. They’d decided that on this one, they better look clean. No mystery at all. Kit’s zizz returned, flutter-kick, flutter-kick. He came up with noises that made his chest-muscles ache. Between Monday and Wednesday he’d gotten into Monsod and found out Leo’s dirty little secret — pretty good. Pretty good for the first three days of the rest of his life.

He stood pumping his arms, his fists. Made it!

Unexpectedly he caught his reflection in the dark streetside windows. Batman afloat in the Gotham skies. He sat again, his breathing settling until it no longer echoed, and stared at the photo of his wife.

Chapter 3

He hadn’t expected a frisk. The Monsod security officer was young, Kit’s age. He had an athlete’s upthrust butt, an Irish delinquent’s pout. He smelled of starch. Kit missed nothing, because as soon as he and the inspectors were through the prison sally port, the guard was on him. Kit was spun against the nearest wall, his hands and feet propped apart. He lost his height advantage. The first touch forced his eyes shut. The bars of the sally port buoyed up again in the darkness, lines and bars that were also somehow layout and pasteup. His ears began singing. The guard worked with stubborn fingers, a boxy palm — always first the fingers, then the palm — probing armpits and nipples and crotch.

The officer said nothing to indicate it was over. He called in at a nearby lock-box while Kit was still grimacing against the wall.

What about the Building Commission inspectors? Why didn’t they join in the fun?

There were two inspectors, older men. Their shoulders had dropped and they appeared shrunken in down vests, rubber boots, tool belts. Kit never got to ask why they weren’t searched. The security led them into the upper courtyard of cells, and there Kit was rocked by the scent of newly-washed floors. An ammonia frisk. Also the guard warned them that he didn’t have much time. The staff was shorthanded again, he said. By then, the inmates had started up.

“Y’all gonna get naked in here, mothafucks. Nobody gets outta here.”

“End of the line, sweet butts. Might as well get down and get naked right now.”

“Oooo, check out the pretty one, check him out. The tall one.”

“The blonde? Nazi movie faggot?”

“Oooo, mothafuck heard you!”

“Nazi boy! Nazi movie!”

Kit couldn’t believe he’d let his look slip. He’d heard the horror stories, he hadn’t worn blue.

He fished out his notepad. During the ride from downtown, Kit had sketched the floor plan at basement level. He’d already looked over the blueprints on file at the Building Commission, checking the details Junior Rebes had given him. In the city van this morning, thinking ahead, making his sketch, he’d placed question marks here and there. But the page he opened to now was all about Bette.

Before they’d made it out past the 128 beltway this morning, Kit had begun jotting notes about his wife. The inspectors wouldn’t talk, the floor plan took five minutes at most, and next thing he knew he was noting down what Bette had told him about the psychic. Apparently Kit himself had turned up at the seance. “B: ‘Not only saw u, saw yr father’.” In the van, the letters came out spiky. “B: ‘Well Some souls are inextricly linked, I spose.’” The notes had felt wildly irrelevant, of course. He’d struggled for some insight to justify them: “Bs: Frightened? Family? Too close?”

“Sweet Nazi butt, get naked. No secrets in here.”

“Mothafuck, what you lookin’ for under your coat? Lookin’ for your Daddy under there?”

Kit couldn’t get hold of his pen.

“Lighten up,” the Monsod guard told him. “Looking pissed just makes it worse.”

It was bedlam as they reached the end of the courtyard. Prisoners thrust arms through the bars, brushing thumbs with fingertips. I’ll pay, I’ll pay. Kit hadn’t expected such a game. The cons themselves were the butt of the joke here. Their grins and hipshot poses were copped from Flip Wilson’s Geraldine, from God-knows-what other drag queens — all more than halfway to self-hatred. A man on an upper bunk extended a tongue as long and yellow as Kit had ever seen, but when he wagged this tongue it signaled disgust as much as tasty licks. Bedlam.

“Whoo, sweet butt!”

“You got to understand,” the guard shouted, as he punched the lockbox to the next door, “you’re the whole party for these guys. You’re the star. They love it when the virgins freak.”

The buzz from the box cut through the uproar. The door clanked and shrieked as the guard pulled it open.

“A virgin on the premises, whoa. That’s party time.”

On the other side, the man bent to the call box and barked his code. Kit recalled the probing at his crotch.

“Plus,” the officer went on as the door groaned shut, “you should know, these last three-four weeks, these guys’ve been ready. Every day they’ve been jacked up and ready to rock.”

Kit still had his pad. “Is that since the disturbance?”

The guard nodded, tugging at the gate to check the lock.

“So how come you’re understaffed?”

The man gave him a look. “Whoa. You’re a reporter and you’ve got to ask that?”

“The cutbacks are that bad?”

“Far as I’m concerned,” the guard said, “the cutbacks are what did it. If they’d give us the men we asked for, there wouldn’t have been no disturbance in the first place. This stuff you’re gonna see, this shit downcellar, that was just the excuse.”

They were in a narrower place now, a corridor of cells. The noise had subsided. Kit got out his pen.

“You put that in your paper, okay? My name’s Garrison, Charley Garrison, and I don’t care who knows it. You tell them that the way things are this morning, I got less than three years in here and I’m the senior man on duty.”

“And we gon’ put it in yo ass, Garrison!” a prisoner cried.

Screeches, catcalls, obscenities. In this space the noise was total, the silence of a moment before inverted. The hallway was worse than the courtyard, more compressed, more metal. A lab rat would have known enough to turn and run. Kit didn’t realize the guard had something more to say till he touched a finger to Kit’s pad.

“Just tell them,” Garrison repeated.

He turned his back again, before Kit could respond. Hunched over his notes, his gorge bubbled with coffee. He’d needed a third cup.

“Better catch up, sweet butt.” A single voice, quiet. When had the ruckus died down?

“Don’t want to be left all a-lone, sweet sweet.”

The penitentiary had five levels, “E” at the bottom and “A” at the top. The entry from outside was at the central level. The heat increased as they descended, until Kit felt his ribcage running sweat. He’d wondered about wearing his trenchcoat. Most of the way there were only a couple oversized bulbs for each corridor, the light made hotter by its steel reflecting cone. The cellblocks here were empty except for the occasional white stare. Even in the pen it was a weekday morning. There was the workshop, the law library, classes. No doubt some aired their resentments in the cold yard.

Kit had seen the blueprints. He’d visited county jails, and by now he must have interviewed a couple dozen cons. He could even recall Monsod’s optimum population, 1,118. He decided to figure out what proportion of the prisoners were where. Start with those in these corridors, a ballpark figure anyway. How many had he seen so far? Okay, now subtract that from — well, there were the cutbacks, the overcrowding. Make the total population more like 1500, a nice round figure. No need to make himself crazy. So, the workshop, the yard, the library … classes and group therapy … altogether make it eight possible locations for any prisoner, with the largest percentage per capita on a Thursday morning either in the shop or in the yard: say 300 “working,” 300 “playing.” No doubt a time-&-motion expert could break it down further.

In the center of “D” level, an otherwise blank corridor, stood the doors to the workshop. Here the heat was worst. The inmates worked stamping license plates, and the fumes of paint and molten metal made Kit’s eyes water. But the windows showed him nothing. Scarred and dented plexiglass, portholes on fog.

Okay, my basement boys and girls — how can you tell a tourist? C’mon, punks — how do you know a poser when you see one? I mean, you and me, we belong down in those dungeons. When we feel those club walls tremble with the bass guitar, we know what they’re saying, we read it easy as a blind man reads Braille. Right! We wouldn’t even be reading this kind of newspaper, this proud alternative press, if we didn’t belong down there.

But a tourist, a fly-by, a fake — how can you tell one when you see one?

*

Aw, Viddich. Stay with it. Below “D” level, Kit and the others entered an enclosed spiral stairwell. For the first time he got between the two inspectors. There, almost between one ringing step and the next, it was January again. January and nighttime: down here they left the lights out. Kit’s eyes were still adjusting when the four of them stopped.

“Wow.” The inspector who spoke was so close that Kit could feel the man shiver. “You can’t even use forced air?”

“Somebody had the bright idea of using the workshop ovens as the furnace.” The guard tapped his baton across the downstairs door to find the lockbox. “Right now the overhead pipes are so bad we can’t get any circulation.”

“Ah, Charley …” The inspector’s voice had changed. “Overhead pipes?”

“Charley,” the other inspector said, “we never heard about no overhead pipes.”

This guy too sounded off-key, forced. Kit wondered about the stairwell’s echo, and when the door opened, the group hustled through faster than necessary. Was there something worth knowing about overhead pipes? Kit tried to make a note in the dark, but a new dampness made his lungs catch. The smell was a thousand miles out of place, the skunk-cabbage chill of his uncles’ creekbed. When the fluorescents came on overhead, coffee pulsed under his scalp.

“What is this?” he said. “What are you so scared of?”

The inspectors had slipped past him. As he blinked and focussed, Kit could see they had no time for him anyway. The room looked wrecked, uninhabitable. Down here the cells weren’t lined up in rows like on the upper levels, and the doors didn’t have openings. Instead the place was arranged like a suite of offices around a vacant, phlegmy lounge. The offices were bolted top and bottom, and the floor had no rug. Standing water stretched across the room, maybe a yard shy of wall to wall. It was green with institutional paint.

On the unrippled surface of the pool, the lights’ reflection — the fluorescent strip, the tin crosshatching — suggested the ribbed back of a crocodile. One of the inspectors knelt beside the pool and, another surprise, he could dip his finger only to the second knuckle. But then, Kit reminded himself, Junior Rebes couldn’t have tested the depth. Chances were that Junior hadn’t even seen how far the green scuzz rose up the walls. Over the frame round the exit, flakes of paint lifted off the steel like lichen. The smell was fungous and rust trailed in stripes down from the bolts.

The only sounds were the movements of the inspectors and a rhythmic babble from inside one of the cells. A chant, punctuated by handclaps.

Kit went back to his pad: “?overhead pipes?” Then, okay, six cell doors on the floor plan. One, two, three, four, five and six. Doors not quite tall enough for him to enter without bending, with sliding panels at nipple height. Plus a seventh: shorter still and without a food slot, placed so its ceiling must be sawed off by the spiral stairs. God, was that the closet? The so-called utility closet? Angled against the door stood an ordinary police lock, the bar and hook cleaner, newer metal than the door itself.

Garrison spoke up: “We’re not scared of anything.”

Kit touched his neck. It took a moment to recall his question.

“I mean,” Garrison said, “there are lights in each of the cells. Lights and a space heater. The animals we got down here don’t need no more than that.”

“What about the stairwell, then?” Kit asked.

“The seepage musta got to the wiring already.” This was the inspector testing the water. “Wouldn’t you say so, Ad?”

“Looks that way,” Ad said. Neither of them glanced at Kit.

“Seepage in the wiring,” Garrison said, “whoa. The electric chair, you know, that’s been outlawed in this state.”

The three men laughed. They were nowhere near each other, the inspectors on opposite sides of the puddle, the guard across the room. But their echoes linked up over the water and, laughing, they became a single unit. A bloc. Kit kept frowning, thinking about the state payroll. These inspectors must have been just as scared and he was, but for them, the guard’s one-liner was a reassurance, a union card. A reminder that even in Monsod, you didn’t make waves. You didn’t ruffle the surface of pay grade and job title. A “corrections officer” like Garrison, if he started young enough and stayed with it, could retire at forty-five. A “maintenance engineer” like Ad — now nervously fingering hair over his bald spot — was a construction man who’d lucked onto a desk job.

The men grew quiet. Their look settled on him. The chanting continued, the spacey clap, clap.

Kit bent to write, tucking his elbows.

*

He’d half-expected briefcases filled with instruments. Syringes, weights and measures, test tubes. But aside from the tool belt, all these men had with them were a box of zip-lock Baggies. The belt held only one tool of any size, a foot-long wrench with a head big enough to open pipe fittings. In the other large holster, the inspector kept a couple of half-pint bottles. Baby bottles, Kit guessed. One still bore the white fuzz of an old label. When the man scooped the puddle Kit imagined him drinking the scum. Meantime the other inspector used a jackknife to take scrapings from the walls.

The guard was the big surprise. Garrison took time to check the cells and the rig on the door to the utility closet. But then the man left. There was more code at the call box, and then he was up the stairs. Before going he actually wagged his finger at Kit: “Stay put, kid.” Kid? The man was gone a while before Kit thought to check his watch. After that it was twenty-one minutes that they were alone.

Ad and the other inspector went on as if nothing had changed, taking measurements mostly. More ordinary tools, levels and tape measures, T-squares and a plumb bob. More of that wordless tune from one of the cells. A couple of the feeding slots opened for a peek, but nobody called, though maybe Kit heard a mutter, a cough. He felt as if he and the inspectors were ghosts. Once, Ad tugged up his workbooks and splashed out to the center of the seepage, walking on water.

Kit struggled for a story lead, a fix on Monsod that could jump-start his work here. The obvious analogy of course was to hell, the Inferno, but Kit thought he could do better. He started with the contrast between the outside appearance and this stinking core. As you approached Monsod it looked stupendous, a command center in black concrete and steel. But the life of the place was down here.

“1st glance:,” he wrote, “high tech in icy waste. Nuke site Antarctica. Last glance: swamp graveyard erupt’n. Bones & bodies exposed in muck.”

Everything he’d seen was part of the same, too. “Diff betw towers & E Level — mislead. Fact: tech dominance & swamp nakedness stages of SAME.”

Better, editor. Kit found his voice, enough at least to go after the inspectors. The two men first ignored him, then insulted him. “You’re so worried about the overhead pipes, kid, the door’s right there. Go check ‘em yourself.” Kit kept at it, but by and large their answers proved as simple as their tools. Metal strain, loose bolts, damage to the foundation. Kit would get a copy of the report as part of the deal. When Garrison returned, the inspectors were squatting in a huddle, in the opposite corner of the cellar. Whispering.

Garrison headed straight for the inspectors and stopped over them arms akimbo, so Kit had to circle the pool to get a decent view. Ad stroked his bald spot, his look unhappy. It was the other inspector who spoke. He said it was time to get into the crawlspace.

“Fucking A, Amby.” When had the guard had gotten this other one’s name? “You got to go down there?”

“Come on,” Ad said. “The word we got was, we can’t mess around.”

“Fucking A.”

With that, Kit was once more the center of attention. Ad kept on with his hair, Amby squinted, and Garrison crossed his big arms high on his chest. State employees. Of course the three men were concerned about the utility closet. The hatchway to the crawlspace was in the closet. You saw the blueprint, Viddich, you shouldn’t mind the stares now.

“Hey, smart boy,” the guard asked. “What’s the name of that paper you work for?”

Mildly Kit met his glare.

“What’s the name, smart boy?”

“The only name you need to worry about,” Kit said, “is Forbes Croftall.”

The guard flexed his crossed arms. The move made his holster squeak. Kit recalled Leo, his chesty macho, and then one of the lines The Godfather had made famous.

“Charley,” he said, “this is business.”

Unhappy, Ad got slowly to his feet.

“Charley,” Amby said.

“I don’t like it,” the guard said. “The whole setup’s fucked.”

“Charley, the word we got was, he’s seen the blueprints already. He knows where that hatch is.”

He knew more than that. He knew they’d rigged the closet as a cell for Junior Rebes.

“He’s seen the blueprints already,” Amby said.

Garrison flexed again. This time there was squeaking all along his belt. The man had plenty there, God knows. A clutch of keys the size of an axe head, a stick and a gun and a can of Mace, a radiophone as black and weighty-looking as a dumbbell. The four of them waited through a few beats more of the voodoo song from the cells. When Garrison broke away, whispering a blue streak, Kit managed to stifle the urge to flinch.

But the guard went out the door. Out the door, for the second time in five minutes. Kit again suffered the place’s stench, a cavelike mung that went to the roof of the mouth. But the big guard returned quickly, toting an iron rod over one shoulder. A rod more than half his height, heavy enough to make his upper body bulge as he shrugged the thing down. The end rang against the floor.

“He-ey!” The voice was from one of the cells. “What’s that shit?”

“Hey, I’m tryin’ to jerk off in here. Trying to concentrate.”

“You whuppin’ on somebody else, Garrison?”

“Aw. Mothafuck bad enough down here without—”

“Shut up!” Garrison screamed.

The cons shut up. Kit had his writing things pressed to his chest, his coat buttons digging into his bare wrists. A silly, overcomplicated trenchcoat. Ankle-length and double-breasted, all buckles and buttons and epaulets. Gear worthy of Byline: Ernest Hemingway.

Byline: Fuck you. Kit pricked up his ears, confirming that the chanting and handclaps had gotten louder. And could hearing the other voices help him pick out which cell?

“Junior?” He wheeled round, facing the closet. “Hey, Junior Rebes? Is that—”

“You shut up too,” Garrison said.

The closet door could only open halfway. Before going in, the inspectors shrugged and cricked their necks. Kit was last, holding his pad to his heart as he peered under the sill.

First, there were the walls. Kit’s man might have been off in the corner, his mother’s son, his “amalgam”—that might have been him, Junior, that gum-colored limpness in the corner. But first Kit needed a minute elsewhere. First, these walls. The steel in here had been coated with a layer of plaster. “?Plaster?” he noted. “?Other cells too?” Plaster, or some kind of mudding anyway, a good half-inch deep. “Contrctrs crazy? Crl & unusl pun.” Cruel and unusual punishment, because a man in solitary would start clawing the stuff from the walls even before the seepage softened it. He’d enjoy a moment’s hope that he could tear his cell apart. Junior Rebes especially must have held out that hope, since it wasn’t till recently that the overcrowding had forced the prison commissioners into using this space. Junior was the first con in here. He must have seen the virgin whitewash on the walls and dreamed of clambering out, an inky-dinky spider climbing the Man’s own waterspout. But here too he’d hit steel plate, half an inch in. The Man never stopped messing with your head.

So the prisoner had started to decorate. In Junior’s misshapen cell, women lounged and spread their legs across two walls, while elsewhere stretched erect cocks, one with most of a muscled stud’s torso attached. Rebes showed talent: the lips of one cunt fit the corner of the wall between two properly proportioned legs, and the bulb of a cock was sculpted in low relief. Also he’d put in a calendar. Boxes marked off Sunday to Saturday, boxes like cells. X’s within like stick prisoners. Some of the X’s had dangling cocks, a few others, the paired U’s of naked breasts.

The work took up most of the room’s sloped ceiling, from the underside of the stairway out. The space was narrow and low but surprisingly deep. The visitors had room enough, so long as Garrison squatted over his long iron as he moved in, and Kit never went farther than the door. There was a hanging iron cot, chains sweating in the cold. The space heater remained off. The portapotty was red with obscenities, words that appeared to have been scrawled in shit and blood.

Off in the corner leaned the man himself, still trying to chant away his time.

The overhead bulb played tricks on his skin. His bare feet were the pink and brown of funeral makeup, and the scabs on his fingertips glistened. If Junior hadn’t been proven correct so often, Kit would have doubted anything he had to say. Wiry and long-stemmed, the man sagged over gum-soft extended legs, singing to himself. His handclaps were so limp the palms popped, and his broad eyelids never opened. Whatever syllables he was speaking went on unbroken.

Kit noted: “?Drugs? Downs?”

The words were helpless. The ink skipped on the greasy paper. Kit sagged against the low doorjamb, rocked by the utter silliness of the hard-nosed muckraker. What was he doing? What, dragging another two-bit legal hassle into this naked indifference, this listless offering up of every filthy little secret the con had? Here every passing day was another stick nude exposed in a cage, and every wall showed him another unembarrassed tidbit straight from the yearning crotch. AC, DC, lazy greedy lying whatever. Here a former live wire lay preferring the back of the brain, caving happily inward. Should Kit burst in shouting Drugs!, shouting Corruption!, Junior would roll his languid eyes and say: No shit, college boy. He’d say: “Hey, I’m trying to jerk off in here.” And Kit’s white lie about the man — his sin of ambition — hadn’t even begun to approach the fuck-happy venality in the bodies and faces and boxes that swarmed over Junior’s cell. Compared to this, what were all Kit’s words, words, words? What exactly were they supposed to haul back to sea level?

*

The hatch for the crawlspace was a circular plate in the floor. The crawlspace, the reason they’d come in. Garrison had already undone the locks on the restraining bar. The big rod the guard had brought in was a lever for the hatch, an oversized tire iron. Now Ad worked the lever while Garrison folded the cot against the wall, out of the way. The bed chain’s bolts trembled as the cot slammed to.

“Jesus,” Kit said.

He’d retreated under the stairs. The hatch lay open and the inspectors stood again, unbuckling their belts.

“You knew the layout when you came here.” Garrison was glaring. “We’re not showing you anything you didn’t already put in the papers.”

Kit shook his head, bumping it lightly on the low ceiling.

“Isn’t anyone on the outside who doesn’t already—”

The guard’s phone cut on, a repeating alarm whoop.

The walls went on ringing after Garrison hit the switch. He whispered code numbers at the speaker, and the stink of the crawlspace began to cling.

I mean, our scene’s attracting tourists, these days. They love it, the lames. They love the whole dank show, AC, DC, lazy greedy lying whatever. They want to get their dirty little thrills seeing it out there on the dance floor — but no way they’re going to dance themselves. No way. Fuckin’ tourists.

Kit was pulling his face back together, under the low ceiling. Garrison’s whisper wasn’t so loud, he realized. It was just that Junior had stopped his babble. And everybody was suffering nerves by now. Amby, for instance, was holding the tool belt wrong. A pair of pliers was about to slip out of its holster.

“I am the ranking officer!” the guard said.

The pliers dropped. A kid’s clatter.

Garrison signed out and turned to Junior. The officer’s upper body bulged again as he squatted over the young stick. Now Kit couldn’t catch the whisper, and Garrison’s sweat-blotched back prevented anyone from seeing what he was doing with his hands — what he was doing to make Junior’s bare feet jerk round that way. But Kit understood, there was trouble somewhere. Trouble, violence, somewhere on another level. Somewhere else. He knew the word for it, “Disturbance.” Write it with a double underline, keep it at a distance.

The guard lifted his prisoner. He had Junior’s arms behind him, the wrists high up his back, and swiftly he cuffed the young con to one of the bed chains.

“Hey.” But whatever Kit had to say wasn’t there, a husk of a thought. The handcuffs clicked and someone grunted.

“Don’t you give me any grief about brutality, either.”

Kit brought his head up too fast, whacking it harder than before. Garrison’s head was huge, looming.

“If I left you down here and this dicksuck had his hands free,” the guard said, “then you’d see some brutality.”

Left him down here? “Charley …” Kit gripped his notepad in both hands. “Look, I know what’s going on.”

“We know what’s going on, Charley,” Amby said.

“Get us out of here,” Ad said. “Get us out of here now.”

“Let me, let me just say a couple things.” This end of the closet was too tightly packed. When Garrison turned to the inspectors, he touched an elbow to Kit’s gut. “Up there it might not be too bad — I mean, it might not. But the safest place for you guys is down here. I’m telling you. I’ve left people from the outside down on E before.”

The guard wouldn’t look at Kit, and Kit wouldn’t look at anyone else.

“Get us out of here,” Ad said.

“Oh Christ. Guys, this’s nothing. Just stick with the program here, that’s all I’m saying. You got a job to do.” He had Leo’s macho, yes. He repeated that down here was the safest place in Monsod. “The animals are all locked in their cages, down here.”

The inspectors peered back out the closet door, slackfaced.

“This’s nothing. Guys, nothing. Christ, we had one of them punk-rock bands in for a concert, you shoulda seen it then. Musicians wanted to meet the cons, whoa. Shoulda seen it. Only way you could tell ‘em apart was, musicians wore the makeup.”

Kit couldn’t believe it: the inspectors grinned.

“Let a buncha faggots like that in here, I mean. Then you’d see some trouble.”

Amby actually laughed. Ad wasn’t quite up to that yet, but his stance relaxed and his smile grew.

“So I know how to handle this,” the guard said. “Believe me. Let me go handle this, and you stay down here where it’s safe. And you, smart boy—” his face was back in Kit’s—“you’re going to stay away from Junior, there.”

Kit grunted, boxed in, sweating. The noise was too close to the last sound out of Junior.

“Hey,” Ad was asking, “who is this Junior anyway?”

“Yeah Charley. Who’s this Junior?”

“You guys,” Garrison said.

Kit was made to put on the tool belt. Both inspectors would have to go down in the crawlspace, and Garrison didn’t want any blunt objects lying around. “I don’t want ‘em anywhere near this animal.”

Kit raised his arms when he was told to. Garrison, having trouble with Kit’s coat, at first couldn’t cinch the belt. While the guard worked at his waist, Kit could at last look at Junior. The con was able to sit against his bedchains. But his upper body nodded from his irons and he didn’t move below the neck. Unresisting, spread-eagled, he might have been part of the smut sketched above his head. And Junior had started to babble again. Kit tried mouthing those noises, beginning to make sense of the words. “Save my strength,” went the chant, “I got to save my strength.”

When the guard backed off, Kit couldn’t look any longer.

The tapes Kit had heard weren’t the work of someone so impaired, so out of touch. Junior’s information had been the McCoy. After an hour transcribing the cassettes, Kit had begun to see slime on his own floor. But then it was hard to believe, as well, that this poor soggy stick had done what he was in here for to begin with.

“Just stay away from that animal,” Garrison was saying. “He can’t tell you anything anyway.”

During a break-in, Junior had been discovered by a young couple. This happened in one of new condominiums that dotted the South End, an area starting to gentrify. The couple who’d stumbled in on the burglary was part of the story, or they were a story in themselves. The man was married to another woman, not the one he was with. He had an arrangement that allowed him to use the condo. So he and this latest woman had arrived at an odd hour, a good time for a break-in. And the man hadn’t wanted anyone to know where he’d been; he’d tried to buy Junior off. It made the young crook snap. Junior raped them both, using his razor when the man’s sphincter muscles wouldn’t give. He’d ended up killing the girl.

When the case came to trial, Ed King had just made Governor. His campaign had promised a hard line against crime, and Rebes got consecutive 35-year terms. It didn’t help that, before the sentencing, his other victim killed himself. The adulterer was found in a hot tub, once again in the South End. He’d opened both wrists with an old Marine K-bar knife, Vietnam-issue, a weapon the man who owned it kept mostly for show. That man had been the adulterer’s pickup — his lover — the night before.

*

Garrison took the hatchway lever when he left. He called a last warning before hauling the door shut. “Watch him,” something. Kit couldn’t be sure how long it was before the other cons started up.

“Garrison!” The voice echoed round the far cell, then flattened over the puddle. “Garrison, you there?”

“I got your momma in here, Garrison.” A second voice.

“Garrison! Garrison, hey. The Irish suck the niggers!”

“Mothafuck’s gone,” a third voice said.

Silence again. Kit stooped at the closet doorway, looking out over the cells, the wrench hanging heavy. The pain in his head went into his neck. He had nothing to compare this to; he’d never expected fear to be such a drain. The seepage puddle looked deep enough to drown in.

Fuckin’ tourists. Party punks, y’know. They want to hear someone say they’re a punk, at a party. They want to know the names of the drugs, but no way they’re ever going to risk a glimpse at what the drugs might make them see.

Aw, Viddich. Rally. Deliberately, Kit recalled Garrison’s insults, and the way the guard had muscled him around. He needed some rage to get the blood flowing. Some movement. He ducked out into the central room. The closet cell was too much for him just now, a sadomasochist fantasy, a dream he was ashamed he’d had. The inspectors ignored him anyway, Ad out of sight in the crawlspace and Amby in the hatchway with a flashlight. Junior was shame itself. “Save my strength, save my strength,” S&M, S&M.

“So who else that out there?”

The voice could have come from any door.

“Yeah, mothafuck, who are you?”

The tool belt rattled and creaked, he felt it in the neck. Working on a chain gang.

“It’s just us now, handsome.” The nearest door. “That ruckus upstairs gon’ take ol Garrison a while.”

This voice was Hispanic, Cuban maybe, and the eyes at the slot were black. Kit recalled the migrant workers. He’d done some good for those people.

“You can’t hide from us, my man. We know what’s happenin’. About fuckin’ time we got a inspection in here.”

“And we know about them pipes upstairs, sweet butt.” A farther voice. “This time that ol’ Irish dicksuck gon’ be gone for a while.”

Kit strode round the seepage, come on. Come back, Shane. He got out the notepad again. He was here now, his story right here and nowhere else, the overhead pipes too. Flipping pages, he figured he’d start with the guys on the far side of the puddle. From there he could work round to the closet again. Start with just the voices, then come back to look Junior in the face.

“That’s right, get the paper out. Get ready.”

“Talk to us, man. Who are you?”

“… press,” Kit said.

“What’s that? What?”

“He didn’t say nothin. Yo, out there. You with us?”

The silence renewed briefly, a quiver in the fluorescent light. Kit touched his neck.

“I’m with the press,” Kit said.

He sounded remarkably clear that time, even levelheaded. And the response felt better yet, an echoey rumble of almost childish excitement. “The press?” came from behind one door. “The media?”

“The media, no shit?”

“Well well well well well.”

“What newspaper? Hey? Is it the Globe, is that your paper?”

Kit forced up a laugh. Getting stroked for his work gave him a low pleasure at best — nine times out of ten it only made him aware of some new pretension — but down here he’d take any pick-me-up he could get. By now Kit stood at the head of the puddle, his back to Junior’s cell. The walls were close. As he explained who he was and what he was doing, the words had a tin reverberation.

“What’s the name?” one of the doors asked. “Sealover?”

Kit looked left-right among the doors, answering their questions. He regretted the thousand rehearsals he’d had, talking about Sea Level till the spiel sounded stale, far removed from these eyes at their slots. When he glanced at his pad, it was open to the notes on his marriage.

“Huh.” This came from the door at the head of the room. “You ain’t so special.”

Kit shrugged, flipping the page.

“Little dick like you, huh. Why’d they let you in here?”

“Nigger, what’s your problem?” The Hispanic Kit had heard from first. “Don’t you ever think about nothing but the size of a man’s dick? Media is media, man.”

“Zoos is right. Right on.”

“Yo, sealover. Talk to me.”

“Listen.” Kit tried for the feel of a locker-room bull session. “Any of you guys ever talk to Junior there?”

“Junior? Junior Rebes? Yo, only people that nigger talk to’s in his head.”

“Naw,” another door said. “He ain’t so crazy as that. He’s seen some things. It’s just the drugs they givin’ him now.”

“Drugs?” Kit asked.

No answer. Was there a banging upstairs, something more than workshop noise?

“They’re giving him drugs?” he asked.

Or was it that Junior, off in his tattooed world, had started chanting more loudly? This time his babble was punctuated with grunts. Also the con’s beat drifted, irregular, sleepy. It made Kit think of the time, getting away from him. It reminded him he was still a coward, out here at these farther cells.

“Look,” he said, “I started with Junior, with his story. I worked with Junior’s mother.”

“Huh. What kinda story he got? That nigger’s guilty.”

“Yo, you want a story man? Talk to me.”

“Yeah, but first,” Kit said, “Junior—”

“Yo, never mind Junior. Biggest story down here is me.”

“Hey, sealover. You want personal exclusive, I’ll give you personal exclusive. We’ll get real close.”

Once more, the talk behind the doors mounted to a rumble. Kit, his pad and pen dropping, tried to think of specific questions. Drugs decay plaster concrete contracts. But then he should’ve expected this. He should’ve realized that every one of them had a wall full of fantasies. God, Junior’s closet had shaken him. Kit recalled the trouble he’d had with Junior’s mother, the struggle to believe in his asking, and he worked now to make the same kind of connection. He noticed again how Boston blacks generally didn’t talk that Superfly stuff, the Southern drawl of blaxploitation. Boston blacks instead had a sound that was almost Italian, high and sharp. You could hear it in Marvin Hagler, the middleweight out of Brockton. A strange, squeaky voice to come from such a scary-looking man.

Behind Kit’s back there was a new clatter. Horsetack falling into a truck bed.

“Life, life,” one door was saying. “One mess after another.”

Kit kept his back to Junior’s cell till he heard the inspectors shouting for help.

A muffled shouting, another voice from behind a door. But Kit caught the difference. He came round so fast the wrench handle swung out from his leg. And the long tool hurt him, flopping back against his thigh. It made him flinch. Or was it fright, was it what he saw? Framed by the shut door of the utility closet, his meager shadow lanced by the police lock’s bar — the bar now back in place — Junior Rebes stood easy. Free of the bedchain and out with the door shut behind him. At first it even looked like he was no longer handcuffed. Then Kit realized that the yellow gleam at Junior’s crotch was the reflection off the irons still holding his wrists. The skinny con had slipped his arms under him, the old skin-the-cat.

He seemed so utterly relaxed. Streetcorner. Not till a particularly desperate howl from the inspectors did Kit notice the murderer’s feet. Both were bleeding from the instep, from the heel. The escape had left tarry prints on the floor. Junior rested one foot on top of the other, and Kit could see a strip of ruined seeping skin against the pink underside. Cradling his wounds.

“Din hurt so bad,” the con said.

Kit realized he’d been staring at Junior’s feet with his pad in front of his face. Dumbshow fright. The other doors had picked up something and fallen silent.

“They try to scare you,” Junior said. “They try to make it sound like you be pushin over a mothafuckin old statue or somethin. Shoo.”

“What—” Kit exhaled hard—“what have you done?”

The younger man shifted his stance, setting both torn feet on the floor. The pain changed his face. His looks turned triangular. Kit noticed the Indian cheekbones, some red in their color. And beyond Junior, beyond that face, the news was all bad. The police bar sat snug in its housing.

“Just had to hit on that sucker till the chain broke,” the murderer said. “Just had to hump up and jump on that bed some. Din hurt so bad at all.”

“Jesus,” Kit said. “How did you, how’d you ever …”

Never mind. There were the drugs, there was Junior’s blood-frenzy. Enough. Already Kit was sizing the man up. He figured he had the edge: three-four inches in height, two free hands unslowed by downers, a cattleman’s upper body as opposed to the balsa-wood lankness of a street thief. And yet Junior’s looks — Kit, trembling, had to blink and make sure — were much like his own. Those prominent cheekbones, baby lips, hollow cheeks. The Nazi movie in sepia.

Talk to him, Viddich.

“Junior.” His throat was sandpaper. “I know you.”

“Yeah.” The con shuffled forward, winced again. “I heard what you told the guys. You the one been talkin’ to my Mama.”

“You heard?” Kit wrung his notepad like a rag. “Junior, listen to me. I know this—”

“You don’t know shit!”

Kit’s hands worked on their own, stashing the pad. Junior’s wail had brought the other cells to life. Worse noise than before, worse even than upstairs. Everybody started screaming bloody murder. Grease the motherfucker, grease him Junior, rip out his faggot balls.

Junior waved his cuffed fists, swamp conductor.

“You just want the story,” he shouted. “You want to take your fuckin’ story and get outta here!”

Kit had no answer. Down in Monsod, the meanest things ever said about the news business had come true. He was the parasite, the fake. Every gesture came off empty and two-dimensional.

Junior kept up the insults, half audible in this noise. He swayed but remained where he was.

Was it the stink that made Kit’s eyes water? He took stock of the foyer, the cells. The locks on the bolts across the doors were the size of a fist, too much even for Junior’s supernatural strength. But the foundation had shifted, a couple of doors rattled. He saw a nut wobble on the nearest frame.

“Sweet butt,” Junior said more quietly. “Pretty boy. Now whyn’t you give me the belt?”

Kit stepped away from the doors, from the one wobbling door. He splashed into the room’s center.

“Aw now where you gon’ run to, sweet boy? Huh. I’m the worst thing you ever seen in your life, you know?”

“Can’t get away from the worst thing,” one of the doors called. “Sooner or later, you bound to run smack face to face.”

He was aware of his boots, L.L. Beans. Bette was a master at catalogue shopping.

“I’m murderer and a rapist and a junkie superfreak,” Junior crooned. “Worst nightmare you ever had in your life, and ain’t no help comin.”

He remained out of reach, at puddle’s edge. “Ain’t nothin comin, believe me. I can see what’s goin down upstairs.”

All Kit could think of was the conventional wisdom about rape. Keep talking. Don’t let fantasy take over.

“Junior, I know you, I’m with you. Think about it. Junior, the drugs, talk to me about the drugs. Tell—”

Junior whipped his cuffed hands to his crotch. “Here’s the drug.” He squeezed till the basket bulged. “Right here.”

“Yah, whup that faggot asshole, Junior.”

“Grease the fuck and let us out!”

Junior grinned. He raised his hands as if taking a bead with a samurai sword. But still he hung back. Blood ran between his untrimmed toes into the water’s edge.

“Snuff him,” another door said. “Then we gon turn this stinkin rathole inside out.”

“Aw, please.” Kit looked left, right, behind him, trying to catch someone’s eyes at a slot. “Think about it.”

The blow caught him in the neck. It got him where he ached, dead on, and the near doorways bulged with fisheye pain. Kit moved without thinking, splashing and scrabbling as he dragged himself away from Junior’s follow-up. A wild follow-up — his attacker couldn’t stand straight and his swings were off-angle, whereas Kit had fallen in cold water and the shock had woken him. It had soaked him to armpit and crotch. It allowed him to spot the half-protected corner behind the bar of the police lock. Plowing the water’s scum with his freezing spread hands, Kit made towards the corner before the staggering con could get a decent hold on the tool belt. Before the screams from the other cells made it impossible to think. Screams, cattlecalls, the howls of a funky singer prompting the beat. Showtime, Junior, someone bellowed. Showtime! Another minute and they’d screech themselves right through their doors. Kit lurched to his feet.

Find a corner. Back to the wall. Get a weapon.

Kit fumbled at his belt, undoing the snap on the wrench’s holster. He put his back against the utility closet, inside the police lock’s extended bar. Behind him the inspectors were audible again, banging more than shouting. They had the better weapons, hammer and pliers and flashlight.

Junior lagged behind, his feet leaking red ribbons across the seepage. He winced with every step, but kept his cuffed fists extended. His knuckles were tight, pink.

Kit pulled out the wrench.

Junior stopped at the base of the lock bar, out of reach again. The con tottered, his chin kept dropping, and though Kit had the wrench in both hands now, he let it relax against his unsteady ribs. “Let’s talk,” he said. Junior leapt and belted Kit his worst yet. A clout across the temple with the sound of a belly flop and a red whip to it, slapping Kit sideways into the closet door. The lock’s fitting reeled like a stone in a toilet. Kit came back with the wrench on instinct, shortarm. He fought for something soft. The pain went into his breathing, he grunted for air, and when he faced round again, faced his attacker, it was a movement inside a sandbag. But Junior’s hands were bleeding worse than his feet. He was going for the wrench-head, spidering after it with pink fingers, and Kit could at last see the damage the cuffs had done, a dripping saw-toothed bracelet round each knobby wrist. The con couldn’t get a decent grip. Kit found himself in a crouch and jabbed more efficiently, aiming for the face, the whites. At last he got his arms up for a clear shot.

Junior cuffed the wrench-head aside and backed off. He and Kit were left facing weapon to weapon.

“Heyyy,” Junior said.

“Keep away, Rebes.”

The inspectors went on hammering behind the locked closet door. The clamor went up his spine and threw red halos wherever he looked. Or was that it the cons who did that, their screaming? There were dizzy effects, outcries from people that weren’t even in the building. Kit heard the voice of a ghost at Bette’s seance, the rough talk of Leo Mirini on the phone. He and Junior seemed the center, the hinge.

“This is crazy,” Kit said. “Talk to me.”

“Can’t talk if you be gettin so excited, sweet butt. Gettin excited, they always tellin me, that’s symptoms paranoia. You know? They tellin me I got a history. But if you just give me that iron, man, we won’t have no history.”

“Junior, Junior listen.” He was freezing, soaked. “I can still help you. We can put this behind us.”

The con limped a step nearer, fists bobbing.

“Back off!”

“How you gonna help me?” Junior’s eyes were lemon wedges. “You don’t know. I been through all my symptoms paranoia, been down to the end of every line. You know what a man can go through, when he’s alone in his own place? I been scratchin them walls, writin. Takes me right to the end of every line there is.”

“And where’s that?”

“Don’t try no sweet talk, pretty boy. I’m here to tell you, ain’t nobody out on the street knows what’s the shit like the man at the end of the line.”

“I want to hear it, Junior. Everything you know.”

“Oh yeah?” Junior’s mouth flattened. “That why you din say nothin when Garrison was crackin me upside the head?”

Nowhere else for Kit to look.

“I know what’s the shit,” Junior said.

“I came down here, Junior. I tried.”

“You tried. That’s the shit, the oldest most stinkin ofay tourist dogshit ever. Man, your story bout me din even use my real name.”

He might still have been inching closer, his chin over his claws, a yellow mantis. Or was it only the effort of listening? Kit bent more defensively, his butt against the door. “I guess you did a lot of thinking.”

“I did me so much thinkin I learned I didn have to think. Thinkin’s like Tinkertoys, nowadays you get a computer. I’m way past thinkin, man. The world’s worst nightmare.”

“But you want people to know, don’t you? You want them to know the truth.”

“Aw, man. Still just thinkin. Oh this poor victim of society, thinkin Tinkertoys, clickety-click. Oh this poor child, picked himself the wrong way to get a pretty piece of butt. I’m way out free from all that, my man. I’m everywhere.”

Junior smiled, and his battered complexion gave him a natural eye shadow. “I’m way out there scattered all over naked and free. A rapist and murderin superfreak, floatin free at the end of every line.”

Kit kept the iron bar angled up.

“Like see, you ask me, where’s the drug? Use to think it was the drugs they givin me too, you know, use to think the drugs takin me away. But the drugs, they make you weak. You gotta be strong to make it out where I am, gotta be strong and do like I did with that chain. Whomp on it, whomp on it some!” For a moment, arms pumping, it looked as if Junior had Houdini handcuffs. Punch a button somewhere and they’d come apart. “You want to be everyone’s nightmare, man, you got to do somethin unreal. You got to whomp, you know what I sayin? Then you Superfly. Whomp, whomp. Everybody can see you ain’t no faggot victim of society.

“But the drugs, man, those drugs.” His eyes shrinking once more, Junior shook his head. “They make you weak. Garrison and the guy on Monday-Wednesday, tryin to make me weak.”

“That’s something people need to hear,” Kit said. “The truth about the drugs, Junior, that’s—”

“Aww, honky dogshit. Drugs ain’t nothin to tell. My Mama’s had the drugs all her life, you know. It ain’t a Saturday night for her less she’s got her wine.”

The word Mama sounded wildly out of place.

“Useto watch my mama down at that church,” Junior said. “That wine all in her eyes. Wine stay in her eyes for days, after some Saturday nights. She screamin about Jesus. I see my Jesus up there, see the face of my Lord Jesus lookin down! Man, Jesus is the drug. Some big old Jesus face lookin down makin things right—that’s the drug. That church my mama got, only way to get the dogshit out of that place be to burn it down and piss all over the ashes.”

Junior spoke as if they were alone, almost a gossip’s side-of-the-mouth. Yet by now, the inspectors weren’t the only ones banging. The other cons were at it, using God knows what. Food trays, knuckles, the rubber bottoms of their institutional shoes. Kit’s wooze grew worse, stickum between his ears. It was all he could do just to keep a good grip on the wrench.

“I know you,” he tried again.

“Big ol Jesus face lookin down.” Junior showed his teeth, he spat. “Jesus nothin against your worst nightmare.”

“Nothing compared to what’s at the end of the line.”

The boy met his eyes. “My mama’s reverend you know, he say, ‘Keep movin on up. Brother, keep movin on up.’ On up to what, man? We nothin and we always be nothin.”

“Junior, Junior. Let me help.”

“We nothin, ofay. Nothin unless we floatin free and fuckin naked everywhere, pissin all over the ashes.”

“Yah, Junior!” one of the other cons screamed. “Showtime!”

“I’m trying,” Kit said. “I think I can do some good.”

“Aw you messed-up lyin tourist asshole. You don even like havin me this close.”

The cuffed fists nearly touched the wrench head. Yet Kit had leaned forward, his face exposed. Junior was right — he’d been a coward and a liar, and now it was time to do better. Time to act.

A slam from the stairwell, a shock in spite of everything.

A blood-colored can sailed into the center of the room. Had one of the others gotten loose? But what would they be doing with a tear-gas canister? The cylinder splashed down and boiled across the puddle, coils of greasy air hissing from each end. Finally, the security officer:

“Ad? Amby? What the fuck?”

The canister worked fast, a bad ‘60s memory on top of everything else. It stung Kit’s eyes, it turned the room to smoke, and he couldn’t answer. The inspectors hammered, it got to his knees, he couldn’t answer. Now came the first hot shock in his lungs as the canister squirmed and boiled.

“Smart boy?”

A shadow loomed in the rusty air. Kit glanced up, startled, and Junior caught him hard across the face.

“Mothafuck,” he said.

“Hey, is that you?” Garrison called.

Junior whacked him again, backhand and off-balance but a dead hit on the original sore spot. “Nothin but talk.”

“Is that you?”

“I got him!” Kit screamed.

The last slap had left him stooped. With one red glare he fixed Junior’s position — those lemon-wedge eyes sunk in shadow, those prideful cheekbones — and whipped the wrench up into his face. Kit swung from the gut. Something gave at the end of the clout, a breakage that sent a tremor up the iron. A shiver up the elongated tool and right to the ends of Kit’s nerves, so that while Junior’s head was still lifted by the first blow, Kit jerked his weapon back down. From the gut, putting his back into it, Kit yanked the handle like a pulley-rope so the head’s fat metal Gshape caught Junior a second time between the eyes. A second hit. The follow-through carried Kit’s shoulder forward into the kid’s chest. Junior’s cuffed hands dropped into the center of Kit’s back.

His touch was something else in the middle of this. Light fingers, gently spread — an embrace, in the middle of this. Together they fell into the nearest wall, rolled up so tight that Kit might have caught a vague heartbeat. But when he and Junior hit the wall the wind went out of them both.

When Kit got a breath, he tasted no gas, only Junior’s stink. Also there was some sort of warm drool down the back of his neck. Kit wrung himself over, facing up from within Junior’s limp hold. At his first glimpse of the kid’s face and he was bucked free and got to his feet.

He discovered the wrench in his hand and dropped it.

Come on, look. Even a tourist can look. From this angle, Junior appeared merely sleepy and out of it again. Saving his strength, clap clap. But the gas had gotten to the other cells, the bitter industrial air. Even the guard and the inspectors couldn’t get away from it, choking and spitting as they struggled with the jammed closet door. Even a tourist couldn’t pretend it had never happened. Junior might have been bleeding from the eyes, from the inner corners of the eyes. His face was enlarged but hard to read, a carnival balloon that had started to deflate, a pocked and smudged documentary face whorly and gray with bad reception. Then a shudder passed under the undone prison uniform, a chest-lifting flinch, and for a moment there Kit was watching a different kind of documentary, Junior Rebes in the hundred-yard dash, the kid in slo-mo trying to steal an extra fraction of a second at the wire. He would have made a good man in the dash.

Then Junior’s chest heaved, and some mess swilled up between his parted front teeth, a winy pulp. It swilled up and Kit went down — down again while his legs still ached from getting up, his white-boy desk-job legs. Junior’s last spasm had left his neck arched, his chin in the air. Most of what came out of his mouth ran towards his hairline. Under the seepage his looks disappeared.

How could he breathe? Kit pawed through the sticky shirt, squeezing up a double-handful of hairless unmoving chest. How could Junior breathe?

The guard had hold of his tool belt.

Chapter 4

WHITE NOISE ZIA SEE

Boston Media Cleans Up Monsod

Dilettantes in the Demi-Monde: Mr. Right’s Got It Wrong. The Monsod on TV isn’t there. It’s a fairy tale. Thursday’s violence at the state’s largest prison facility was the worst yet, resulting in at least one death. Coverage by the Boston mainstream media has proven woefully off the mark — even deliberately misleading. Television, radio, and the Globe have avoided the real story.

How can you tell a tourist?

I mean, no question, already our scene has tourists. Our leathery late-’70s punk scene, our search for something or other across cellars by starlight — already it’s attracting fly-bys and poseurs. No question. It’s attracting the folks who have some notion of being hip, right?

The MBTA ran nearly empty at this hour. Past drivetime, well into dinnertime, Kit rode a car that held at most a half-dozen others. Students, swing-shifters. And these people kept their distance. Kit clung to one of the seats for the handicapped, his elbow hooked round the vertical pole. A bandage sawed off one corner of his forehead. Under that his ear and temple bulged, purple, and across his long jacket exploded uncertain new colors: graveyard-red, trowel-black. When Kit blinked his whole upper body shivered.

The emptier the car, the worse the sway and rattle. People kept their distance.

The trolley’s racket got through Kit’s painkillers. Back at Massachusetts General, over an untouched cafeteria lunch, he’d taken only half the prescribed dose. In the Law Library he’d gone pretty much cold turkey. Cold turkey, he’d kept the hours he’d assigned himself.

He’d done his research cross-legged on the floor, on the neoprened concrete between the stacks. Down there, he could tell when someone was coming. Even when his eyesight turned murky and his ears filled with moans, so long as he stayed on the floor he could feel the approaching footsteps.

After finishing at the Law Library, Kit had hobbled back to the “T” station in Harvard Square. He’d ignored the turnoff towards his own apartment. He’d headed downtown.

Yet he hadn’t been able to get to the office either. He’d come near, the end of the block. Then for an hour or so Kit had struggled through the wind tunnels of the financial district, the high sheer urban development. What few storefronts he came across staggered him. He got lost in the glare of a record store, the checkerboard of new LPs.

In time, he’d allowed himself alcohol. The bar was as murky as the Law Library, with Happy Hour chili. He’d gulped another half a painkiller. He’d decided to climb back into the “T”. But Kit still wasn’t heading home, to Cambridge, to Bette. He was riding the other way, out of town, towards the ethnic-pride suburbs beyond Dorchester. Zia should be there, at the Sons of Columbus.

Big media has been actively avoiding telling the truth. When it comes to Monsod, they can’t face the truth. Instead, Boston’s primary news outlets have fallen back on quick and easy notions of crime and punishment. On Hollywood. They won’t run any story too complicated for a thirty-second plug.

Once again, it’s up to the alternative press to set the record straight.

This reporter caught Thursday’s early-evening news on a TV at a downtown tavern. Even in these first reports, the major media distorted the facts. Editors had no idea what they were up against.

You know the kind of lames our scene’s starting to attract. The ones who dream all week about slumming on Saturday night. Dream about waking up hip.

My basement boys and girls, to these lames our scene amounts to nothing more than a fairy tale. It’s Sleeping fucking Beauty — one kiss and she’s hip. I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by a fairy tale. But when you encounter a tourist, down in our dank — how can you tell? Clothes, hair? An uninformed line of talk?

Ah, it goes deeper. Zia see, boys and girls. Zia see.

At the Sons of Columbus, he’d find Zia and he’d break the news about the next issue. A special issue, a double issue, devoted exclusively to the scandal of Massachusetts building contracts. Kit would include the Monsod story, of course. Sea Level would tell the real story, not the kind of pap they ran on TV. Kit would tell the whole truth. He’d figure out whatever was going on with those overhead pipes, that uncertain buzz. Seepage, drugs, violent death — the whole truth. Of course.

But this issue had more to it than that. More than today’s trouble. It goes deeper, Kit thought.

Or possibly he said it aloud: “It goes deeper.” With the rocking and screeching of the trolley car, it was hard to tell when he was talking to himself. Also, the line hooked south through Roxbury, the ghetto. For a few stops Kit’s was the only white face in the car, so he couldn’t be sure what the other riders were staring at.

Editors have no idea. One station actually ran the Monsod story second. Apparently some deep thinker at Channel 3 believes that a prison riot matters less than a visit from Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan, that doddering perennial also-ran! And not one of the local stations could spare more than five minutes for Monsod coverage.

Then there were the errors of fact. On Channel 7, a prolonged exterior shot showed smoke erupting from a smashed top-story window. According to the voiceover, this fire was in the prison workshop.

No way. Hollywood. The workshop is three stories below the window in the shot, on “D” Level. This reporter himself passed the workshop, Thursday morning. This reporter was there, the alternative. A spokesman for conscience.

Zia see. What makes a tourist a tourist, Zia see. Thursday.

I’m talking two white males, aged 25–30, cruising the downtown. Cruising that dubious urban corner — part financial district, part Boston Garden hardhat spillover — and part ours, right? Part the cruise lands of our kind. The basements where we’re trying to brew a new beginning.

Dilettantes in the demimonde. Visitors at the zoo. Thursday night, these two were trying to pass as blue boys. You know, blue boys. S&M, swat & moan. One fellow wore some sort of uniform — could that have been a prison guard’s uniform, Teresa? Santa Teresa, a security uni from a Massachusetts state pokey? — while the other guy was covered with bruises.

And I mean, bruises was just the beginning. I hadn’t seen anything like this guy since my last fight with my boyfriend. Hadn’t seen anything like those stitches in his scalp since the last time I checked out the tracks in my forearm.

The worst distortions appeared on… this reporter didn’t get the channel… it was on one of the networks, anyway. One of the networks had an interview with one of the extra security, called in for the emergency. And they wrapped this interview up neat as the last fade on The Waltons:

Q: You say that one of the prisoners was killed?

A: His door got open somehow, some kinda weakness in the materials looks like. We just had an inspection here this morning.

But enough about me. The question is, how’d I know that these two were tourists?

Hmm. There were their outfits, for starters. That guard’s uniform had potential, granted, and the name patch was a nice touch (C. Garrison, it read). But the guy carried entirely the wrong kind of accessories on his belt (a walkie-talkie? a bunch of keys?)

Kit’s head rested against the trolley window. For some moments now he’d been sitting this way, with his back to the car’s center aisle, watching the reflection of his own eyes floating over the concrete and cable of the T’s underground walls. Now suddenly that reflection began gliding over exteriors. Landscapes. Through his own dim-mirrored eyes, Kit saw duplexes and three-stories in scrappy garden blocks. He saw aluminum siding, sheeny as polyester.

The ethnic-pride suburbs. The Sons of Columbus.

The Sons, Leo called it. The club was just the place for Sea Level to begin dragging demons out into the light. Just the perfect irony. Six months ago, Kit had arranged the details of the contract at the Sons. His first visit, he’d met Zia. Later he’d returned for the final signatures, under a studio portrait of Leo and his two boys. And now here Kit was, once more meeting Zia at the Sons — in this business, you knew where your writers were. But this time he was coming to tell her she was off the paper.

She was off Volume One, Numbers Two & Three. No room for entertainment reporting in the kind of issue Kit had in mind. No room for fluff when you’re telling the whole truth.

Zia needed to hear it right away, face to face. She needed to understand, also, that she had a conflict of interest. Her father’s products had turned up in the crawlspace under E Level. Mirinex products. Pipe fittings.

Kit had spotted the stuff as soon as the Building Commission inspectors came out of the utility closet. He couldn’t miss it, really—Mirinex, Inc., embossed on the familiar U-joints and right angles. The inspectors carried them in their fists, in their Baggies. The two state employees had forgotten all about not making waves. They’d come out screaming, kicking, hacking up tear gas. And what else was Kit going to look at, if not the evidence in the inspectors’ hands? What, when under his own hands Junior’s face was disappearing?

Q: You say that one of the prisoners was killed?

A: His door got open somehow, this one con. Some kinda weakness in the materials looks like. We just had an inspection here this morning, y’know.

Q: His name was Rebes? Carlos Rebes?

A: Junior, they called him. That was his street name.

Q. And you think Junior started the trouble?

A: That’s what it looks like.

Q. He got out first?

A: When Rebes gets out, see, that’s when you have your disturbance. He starts acting up, see, that’s when it gets out of hand. I mean Junior — he had a hostage situation down there, y’know. He had the inspection team tied up. Then like, he’s the one started it, so he’s the one who goes down. That’s what it looks like.

Their outfits were part of the giveaway, no question. Part of how you could tell these were tourists. I mean, the name patch on the “prison guard” was a nice touch. C. Garrison, in clean, state-employee stitching. Nice. But the guy carried entirely the wrong kind of accessories (a walkie-talkie? a bunch of keys?) and his pants were way too loose in the crotch. Way too loose in the crotch for a self-respecting blue boy. Especially one all Irish-pouty and pumped up, like this jocko. As for the other guy, well, again, one did see potential. The bruises, for instance. And did I mention that he was lean and Scandie, rather David-Bowie-looking with his twingabled hairline, his vulpine jaw? Po-ten-tial. I loved the stains on the jacket too.

But I mean, stains don’t fool me. I mean, I saw his pants. I mean — permanent press! Office wear! Plus when it came to footgear, the guy didn’t even know about red sneakers. I heard the unmistakable squeak of L.L. Bean.

Channel Whatever’s interview continued for perhaps another half-minute. This reporter couldn’t stand to watch. This reporter knows why Junior Rebes died. It wasn’t because he “started it.” It wasn’t a matter of “sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.” No way. Hollywood. Junior Rebes died as a result of poor choices, poor building materials, the wrong people in the wrong places…

Junior Rebes died, in short, for reasons that go way beyond the grasp of a rent-a-cop and a talking head. His killing won’t fit into what the TV-news folks like to call “information units.” It can’t come down from the satellite feed in a single simple bite. When Channel Whatever finished its interview, who should come on the screen but Farrah Fawcett-Majors, the Girl of the Moment, utter hollow hype — and yet her face alone seemed more honest than the so-called “news.”

Their outfits were part of the giveaway, sure.

And uhh…the “Garrison” fellow? The beef in the uni? He uhh, he uhh… he came and went. Rather a ghostly Garrison. One moment the guard and the gangly Scandie would be deep in conversation, gesturing over fistfuls of red scotch — and the next, Mr. Uni would disappear. Blink and he’d be gone. Quick as a Ramones song. Scandie would be left like his homeboy forefather Hamlet: with th’incorporal air holding discourse.

Strange stuff, yeah.

Garrison’s hard. He’s the part I never quite put in place.

But our beaten-up Scandie, he went on proving himself out of touch. He never felt my eyes on him. And whenever Garrison’s signal faded (don’t ask me), the blonde poser watched the TV news. I mean, he watched the network news — he believed in that tripe.

Those painkillers he was taking didn’t fool me either.

Her face. Infinitely honest. The hair out of whack, the mouth intricate. A face like a hamper in a haystack.

This reporter.

Why did Junior Rebes die? Well, why do you need an alternative press? Spokesman for conscience, for complexity, for the scum of the earth…

This reporter was doing important work, sitting in a bar watching TV. Every sip of Johnny Walker was a blow for social responsibility. After all, the security guard in the network interview wasn’t even on the scene when Rebes died. He wasn’t even there. Junior had stopped breathing — his chest had gone still, under this reporter’s hand — long before any backup security arrived.

So he looked like a tourist, yeah. He acted like a tourist. But for the real proof — deep, dream-deep — we need the angels on my shoulders. The angels Cue and Ayy.

Cue: (striving for journalistic objectivity) Who the fuck are you?

Ayy: A wounded warrior in the battle for truth.

Cue: (holds up a thought balloon: WHAT KIND OF PAINKILLERS IS THIS GUY TAKING?)

Ayy: A wounded warrior, (indicates stains) Bloody but unbowed. You oughta see the other guy.

Cue: The other guy? What, your friend in the uni?

Ayy: For starters. The guard is only the visible symptom of the infection. The lesion, the buboe. The outbreak above the horizon.

Cue: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Big media. It could turn Christ himself into an idol, a graven image. You know the network showed a photo of Junior Rebes, too? And you know the murdered convict actually looked a little like Farrah Fawcett-Majors? The womanly lips, the wedge-like eyes… after a moment, this reporter couldn’t stand to look.

This reporter had believed in that face. Believed. Behind Junior’s face lay a mess, sure, but this mess nonetheless constituted a soul. In there, dream-deep, waited a secret worth knowing. A secret so powerful it would single-handedly replace all the world’s lies…

Or so this reporter had thought, till he saw even the face of his Monsod source turning to sheer screen, sheer blonde hype, blonde on bone … and then Farrah herself came on, and she’d been astonishing, the most honest thing up there …

Whatever she was about, this Girl of the Moment, this hamper in a haystack, she was true to it, haunting and true.

and this reporter.

and this reporter.

Ayy: The guard is only a pawn in their game. He is an appendage of the machine, a puppet of the bourgeois.

Cue: Hoo boy.

Ayy: I saw the pipe fittings.

Cue: (again, the thought balloon)

Ayy: I saw the pipe fittings. The BBC inspectors came out of the closet, and I saw.

Cue: Well, of course you saw. Isn’t that the point, when someone comes out of the closet?

Ayy: I saw their Baggies. I saw the infection itself.

Cue: You know, I’m starting to think you’re not such a tourist after all.

Ayy: I saw the bourgeois sickness, in all its grease. And I know who controls the means of production. I know and I’m going to bring him down. No matter what Garrison says.

(the guard reappears with a big, red, Irish grin)

*

The Sons of Columbus on a weeknight. The foyer was unlit, the reception rooms sober, the furniture folded against the walls. More than anything, the place said: cost-efficient. For a banquet at the Sons, they brought out the long tables. For Vegas Night, the round tables. The kitchen doors groaned when they swung, heavy chipboard, dark enough to hide the dirt from a Boy Scout’s hands and strong enough to take a crack from a caterer. The club was a working three-dimensional design for the immigrant work ethic. Seven days a week, any job, any hours.

Kit was still thinking of Garrison. Charley Garrison — talk about an immigrant work ethic. Even the chill of the walk from the T recalled the way his feet had held the cold from Monsod’s basement. That morning Garrison had said nothing till the inspection team was safe. Wordlessly the guard had herded everyone upstairs and out through the cellblocks a different way, to a different sally port. Only then did he pull Kit aside. He spoke in a cracked whisper, a tone that prodded Kit like a second frisk. He told Kit not to write about the fight with Junior.

You know the kind of trouble you’re in for, Garrison had whispered, you write about that fight? Whoa. The guard had told him to say only that Junior had died in the disturbance. That’s all that pervert scum is worth.

And then, downtown, Kit had seen just that story on TV.

(the guard reappears with a big red Irish grin. Ayy swivels to face him) Ayy: This man says, what’s the big deal about the truth? He says, “Whoa” (he does a pretty good South Boston accent, actually), “the truth, that always comes down to the same sorry shit anyway.” Always comes down to fear or greed or some other sorry shit. That’s all you’ll get, Garrison says, once you’ve gone through all the excuses. Cue: Uhh, you’re some kind of reporter? Ayy: (proudly) With an alternative newsweekly. A journal of politics and opinion.

(Garrison disappears) Cue: Uhh, you know something? I myself— Ayy: An alternative newsweekly. Where every day there’s a war on. The Bastille must be taken every day. Cue: What paper is this? Ayy: And this next issue, this is going to be big. We’re not just going to do the prison, Rebes, that story. We’re going to do the whole building-contracts scandal. In Massachusetts. Cue: Building contracts in Massachusetts. Well. That is fascinating. Ayy: (oblivious) This next issue, it’s going to be huge. A double issue. Maybe even forty pages. Cue: (massages inside of elbow) Ayy: This issue, it’ll be single-subject only. The scandal only, a single simple dirty picture. Hit ‘em between the eyes. Cue: (goes on massaging)

*

“Hey, what happened to you?”

Kit had propped himself in an open kitchen door. Here a radio droned, setting loose 101 Strings on stainless steel. And there didn’t appear to be any Sons tonight in the Sons of Columbus. Kit saw only women. Even the ones with no fat to speak of had that flesh to them, Italian flesh. Kit couldn’t tell at first where the knots of dough left off and the kneading hands began. They wore loose workaday dresses that bagged over apron strings. Scarves held their hair.

“Hey? You with us?”

Kit touched his neck. One of the women came away from the counter and, just like that, put her own hand over his. Lightly she fingered the bruises beside his ear.

“You really got a bump there,” the woman said. A smoker, she studied him with one eye closed. “What was it, some kinda accident on the Expressway?”

“Yeah, looks bad,” another woman said. “Sure you don’t wanna lie down?”

Nobody asked what Kit was doing here. Not even a can-I-help-you? The smoker raked the hair back from his temple.

“Stitches too,” she said. “Y’know this kind of thing can throw off your sense of balance.”

Kit had heard the same at Massachusetts General. But these women were nothing like the nurse there, none of that professional distance. Kit’s neck gave at the smoker’s touch. Oh, a touch. The moan in his ears returned, the noise that had deafened him in the Law Library. He wanted to speak.

And then, perfect timing, Zia.

She said something about a message at the office, something about never expecting him here. The words reached him spottily, through a buzz of surprises. Kit faced a Zia Mirini he’d never seen. The moan that’d been building up in him broke, hushed, and he couldn’t stop staring. Even with the apron on, it was obvious Zia’s dress had been designed for better than kitchen work. Loud pink trim laced the spattered flour. After a moment Kit placed the dress, he’d seen it at the office. But he’d seen it with yellow cowboy boots and the usual hair. Tonight Zia wore a scarf, like the others. No makeup.

Kit found his voice. “Zia,” he said, “you look like the poster girl for a convent.”

More new sides to the woman: “God, how’d you know? I’ve been shooting for Joan of Arc since I was twelve.”

He grinned up the better side of his face.

“So what are you a poster for, Kit? What happened?”

A reasonable question. Kit’s voice failed him again; he got no further than telling her he’d gotten into Monsod.

“Oh you did? You did?” Zia actually clapped her hands. “Oh I’m glad, Kit. That’s fantastic for you. And it’s great for the paper, I mean — really great. Congratulations.”

His grin was getting to his bruises.

“Honestly, Kit. You’ve done something incredible.”

The smell of bread was torture, a vapor his stomach couldn’t hold. Or was it the news he’d planned to give her that made him so queasy? What he’d had in mind as he’d headed out of the city had seemed so sturdy, so clear. Self-evident. Yet here in this touchy-feely kitchen, before this happy young stranger, Sea Level’s next issue already seemed like a bogus reason for doing anything. Had he come all this way just to hurt Zia? To show her his bashed-in face and then tell her she was laid off?

“Zia, can we talk?”

She shared a look with the smoking woman, a glance he couldn’t read. For the first time since Monsod, Kit wanted a good look at himself. The best he could find was the kitchen’s security mirror, the bulbous circle of glass up in one corner of the room. The reflection turned him upside down. Or the proportions were all wrong, the head too heavy, patched and barely holding together.

To: K

From: Corinna Nummold,

Administrative Assistant

RE: Projected budget, SL #2 & 3.

Kit, I’m sorry, but I don’t belong here. I don’t want any part of this.

I mean, I realize you’re planning a double issue, next issue. I realize you need figures for that. A projected budget.

But Kit — it’s you who don’t realize. You can’t even begin to try to realize. Double issue’s going to cost you, Kit. Cost you a lot more than a man can pay.

See, to get the rates for the issue, I went to the libraries. I mean, you got to go where the facts are, right? And Kit, I’m telling you. I heard something.

There’s a crying in the libraries, Kit. That’s what I heard. A crying and a sobbing, a noise nobody can make sense of. Right there in the libraries.

I never did lay eyes on what was doing the crying, understand. The thing was in those stacks somewhere, oh yeah. Some kind of secret weeper, some broken heart. But it could tell when I was coming.

Because all it wanted, see, was to get across the message. The moan, only. That’s all it wanted. A moan inside the stacks, the stats, the facts.

A moan. Like to start me crying myself.

You know back home, Kit, back in the Dom Rep? We got the voodoo people back there. Voodoo witches and such in the woods, they come over from Haiti. Talk in tongues, you know. Voices from your worst nightmare, voices of the dead. Change your own voice to hear de voices of de dead. Bad news.

Don wan no part of it, Kit. Cain give no figures. I knows when we don belong in de facts n de stacks.

*

“First time my father said he brought you to the club,” Zia told Kit, “I could have killed him. My city friends aren’t supposed to know about this place.”

Kit kept his hands in his pockets, a fist round his pills. City friends? They were on the second floor, in a room that smelled of vacuuming. The space had a bar, a Sears setup with two stools. Kit had a seat at the long committee table. His back straight, his posture careful. No telling what the swivel might do to him.

“Whenever I have to battle the traffic coming down,” Zia went on, “I need a drink. And that’s without any bruises to show for the trip.”

Kit tried to think of pick-me-ups. Rum and Coke had sugar and caffeine, beer starch and calories.

“Scotch, right?” She held up the familiar bottle, the little man in a hurry. “Walker Red?”

The first taste went straight to his wounds. Straight into cavities all over his head. Zia took the chair beside him, waiting. Even her hands were a surprise tonight, the knuckles raw and overworked. Kit found himself starting with compliments, repeating everyone’s praise for her piece.

“With you,” he said, “it’s not just the hip versus the unhip. With you it’s a whole culture.”

“Well.” Zia fingered up a Marlboro. “It’s one girl’s little secret sliver of the culture.”

“But that’s just it, Z. You know the secrets. You know what’s going on inside.”

She let her first drag of smoke seep up over her face.

“Someone like myself,” Kit went on, “I’m a dinosaur. I can’t even get past the names. I see a name like Talking Heads and I just go — huh?”

“Well, words aren’t really the point, Kit. What matters is like, performance. Manipulating media.”

Kit touched his neck. His stalling had taken him back where he’d left off, mentally, back into the big ideas he’d been toying with — his invisible layout & pasteup. The last place he needed to go.

“So, Kit,” Zia said, through seeping smoke. “You have something to tell me?”

He tried to think of her as a stand-in for the people who’d be reading his next issue. A warm-up audience. “Zia, do you realize what’s been going on in Monsod?”

“I heard some things this afternoon.” One of the women down in the kitchen, it turned out, had a man inside. Another was the wife of a guard. “Between the two of them,” Zia said, “they had the phone tied up for hours.”

She’d heard how the disturbance had started, too, down in solitary. “A guy down there got killed, right?”

Kit propped an ice cube against his tongue. The light here was rotten, the wall fixtures imitation gas lamps.

“The one who started it, right Kit? He’s the one who got killed?”

“I know all about it, Z. I was down there with him.”

“What? You were with him?”

It was a light that made faces glow, and her eyes were so large. “The guard left us, Zia. He cuffed the guy and left.”

“Jesus. Is that like, when this happened?” She gestured at his face, his jacket. “Was that the guy who hit you?”

He drank again, around the propped ice. His hand in his pocket, he strangled his pills.

“Aw, Z. There’s so much corruption.” If he did this right, said it right, she’d understand. She’d see she had to stay out of the next issue. “So much corruption …

“Think about it, Z. Down in Monsod it’s life and death. Life and death — now that should be simple enough. Right? That should be simple, getting that across. Life and death. But everybody wants to set up a different story. Everybody wants whatever makes them look best. It should be plain and simple, life and death and the whole truth, but everybody’s stalling and cowardly. They’re cowardly, Zia. They’re trying to cover their asses.

“Even Junior,” Kit went on. “Junior down in a closet in E Level. Down deep inside his own head day after day. He had a whole story worked out.”

Zia touched his arm, something else to adjust for. “In a closet, Kit? Like, from the first issue?”

“Junior was the man, Zia. Junior Rebes, Carlos Junior Rebes. That name in the piece was a fake, didn’t you know?”

“Well I remember you saying something…”

“Come on, Z. That Manny business was a fiction. A a necessary evil, that’s what that was. But today I met the man himself. I saw the totally fucking unnecessary hellhole of a closet. The graffiti alone, in there, the graffiti alone is more honest than nine-tenths of the other crap people want to put across. Aw, you want to hear about corruption, Zia? Let me tell you something. They had him on drugs down there.”

“Kit, like, slow it down. Okay? I can’t—”

“My guess is Seconal, reds. I mean, they wanted him half-asleep down there.”

“Who, Kit? Who’d they want asleep?”

“Rebes, Z, Carlos, Junior, Rebes. Do you remember the first issue or not?”

No answer. His shout was so loud amid the mail-order furnishings, for a moment Kit believed he’d regained his normal voice. He’d talked his way back to strength. But then Zia echoed his echo: she repeated the name.

“Junior Rebes.” She touched her head rag.

That was all it took. Two words, and Kit’s throat clogged again. He felt as if he’d become the upside-down figure in the kitchen’s security mirror. Distorted, bloated, leaking, sick.

“Kit,” Zia went on finally, “wasn’t Rebes the one who was killed?”

Kit touched his neck.

“And he was the same guy as in the first issue, too? The one in the closet?”

“We talked, Z, Junior and me, we talked. I saw his cell. His graffiti.”

“Whew. They locked him in a closet and fed him drugs.”

Zia went for her drink, clumsy with a flour-speckled hand. Kit followed suit. His plan was looking worse by the minute — he’d struck a nerve he’d never intended to.

“Jesus,” she was saying. “Kit, this is some story. This is major.”

Once more Kit strangled the container in his pocket. “The drugs, ah. That’s not the story, Z. The drugs are just, ah, incidental.”

“Oh come on.”

“I mean it, Zia. This story, this is only going to start with Junior. After that, we’re going to bring it all back to sea level.”

She started looking more like the woman he knew. Smirky, with hidden blades. “Back to sea level.”

“Zia, this story, we’re going to bring it right back to wherever people make up their minds. Wherever they make up their whole lives. In the bedroom, on the telephone, wherever. This story goes right there.”

“Kit, you don’t have to sell me. You’re the editor.”

“Aw, Z.” Though he still couldn’t let go of his pills, this kind of talk did feel better. “Look, just think about my getting into Monsod to begin with. Think about why they even let me in there.”

She exhaled dramatically. “I was wondering. Was it, was it maybe that aide you met? The Croftall guy?”

“Croftall, exactly. It was Croftall who told the BBC to take me along. And I’ll tell you, Z, I believe I know why. Look at this hard, there’s no question why. Croftall thought that with me in there he could put on some kind of a show.”

“Well, that’s a classic, isn’t it? CYA.”

“CYA, exactly. Everybody wants to cover their ass.”

Zia too, Kit figured, was feeling better. She liked this kind of bashing away as much as he did. Nonetheless the thought of how far the Monsod story might reach silenced him all of a sudden. It called Bette to mind. Bette — she loved to think. She’d have no trouble figuring out that this story might even reach her family. Cousin Cal wasn’t the only Steyes with connections to the State House.

Zia went on. “Dirty stuff like this, I mean, isn’t it always something like CYA?”

The bad guys might well include some of Bette’s people.

“The motive’s always like, the same old grubby little handful. It’s greed, maybe. Or it’s fear.”

And there was Bette’s broken look. Tatterdemalion.

“Or it’s hubris,” Zia said, “that’s a classic.”

Kit was blinking, one hand around his pills and the other clinging to his scotch. What was he doing here, free associating? What was this, flashing on himself in a funhouse mirror, himself and his wife? He could trust something about how he felt here, talking shop. But there remained, also, something utterly wrong, a wrong built into the whole idea of coming out to the Sons of Columbus. That touch downstairs in the kitchen, that woman’s touch — it had disrupted his entire long day, it had toppled the supports that held him upright. What was he doing here?

“Listen Zia,” he began. “Listen, let me tell you what I found out in the Law Library.”

But he couldn’t stop blinking. His ears filled with the moan again, and he couldn’t catch Zia’s response (she was surprised, he heard that much: Kit, you went to the library?). He was crying again. He was crying full-throated, sobbing, keening, right there in front of the woman. At first he couldn’t even cover his face. It was hard to let go of his pills and his liquor.

Ayy: This next issue, it’s going to be a monster. It’s going to be Godzilla. Cue: (massages inside of elbow) Ayy: This next one, you’ll see what the Man’s made of. Cue: (goes on massaging)

*

Kit toured his emotions like a man walking a polluted beach. Odd bits crackled and stuck underfoot. Here he stumbled onto a black remorse over his insanity at coming out to see Zia at all; there he found a gooey relief over sharing some part of his grief at least. Here was the doubt, the worm. One moment the thing wriggled on the sand, the next it shivered on his back. There lay a pipe-fitting from Mirinex, bleached by saltwater, with a trapped dead fish inside.

Plus the grimy internal shoreline (something like along the boardwalk in Revere) turned up flotsam and jetsam Kit couldn’t recognize. He knew his imaginary double-issue when he saw it, Sea Level #2 & 3. He knew those grimy folds of protecting himself — of avoiding Bette and anyone else who truly mattered. But by now he glimpsed other garbage stuck to the pages, clots and strands he couldn’t identify. Mystery sickness.

At least he knew better than to try and talk about it, this illegible scrawl at water’s edge. When Kit spoke up now, he stuck to the basics. He apologized. He said, I’m in bad shape, Z., bad shape, and enjoyed another wash of relief at getting it off his chest. But mostly he opened his mouth only to get another chew of the dinner she’d brought for him, the bread and tomato sauce. The stuff clung to his gums and had him groaning in thanks. You’re too good, Zia.

“I am being a nice girl,” she said, “aren’t I?”

Head bent, she fished out another Marlboro. When her face came up again, there she was, first time tonight — the punk Z. The wicked daughter.

“But well,” she went on, “I guess I should fess up. Under the circumstances, I mean. I should tell you.”

Kit, waiting, sampled the coffee. Neapolitan, Zia had called it. Packed a jolt, especially with what tasted like a soupspoon of sugar.

“Kit, I’ve been a nice girl for a reason. I’ve had like, an ulterior motive. I’ve been softening you up.”

So there was more junk dumped on Kit’s beach. Ugly stuff, brackish. Jealousy. This afternoon, thanks to Kit’s friend Rachel, Zia had gotten a call from Esquire.

“They want to reprint the Humans piece. Esquire, Kit!”

Zia’s grin had softened again.

“I mean, Kit, I have to say … I realize this isn’t fair of me laying this on you now. After what you’ve been through.”

“It’s okay. I’m a big boy. Congratulations, Z.”

“Yeah well like, that’s just it. My news, it’s just career news.”

“So? More power to you, Zia. I mean it. Congratulations.”

The words came more easily than he’d have expected. His talk tasted, in fact, of honest gladness. What Kit said didn’t sweep away the jealousy, no—This is the drug, Junior had reminded him, grabbing his own jealous crotch — but it showed Kit that even tonight, he turned naturally to better responses. Even now he remained a believer. “Zia, I came out here, didn’t I? I came here under my own steam. So what else are you going to tell me?”

She eyed him, over a wide and skeptical wedge of lip. In bits and pieces, sounding as if she were trying it out, she told him about the phone call. “Like suddenly it’s this instrument of destiny, right there in your hands. Like suddenly my whole life has changed.” Zia had spent the next hour—“at least”—with the thing disconnected.

“I mean, I was glad I was coming out here, Kit. Out here to the Sons.” She’d signed up for the kitchen duty long ago; this weekend was the Sunday following Epiphany. “Feast of the Baptism. Jesus, I can’t believe how this stuff stays with you.” But now she’d come here needing the dough-flecked women, the radio droning off the stainless steel. “Like I told you before, I don’t want my city friends to know. They have their own things — there’s even one guy I know who likes to cool out by riding around on the T. Just riding the Red Line. Me, I have the Sons of Columbus.”

“Whew.” Zia fished for yet another Marlboro. “Today, I even wanted to hear the family gossip. These guys here, they catch me up on my brothers. And I mean, you can imagine how I feel about my brothers. Castration’s too good for them, right? Then there’s my cousins, my thirteen hated cousins. Or I hate like, eleven of them.”

“I know what you mean,” Kit tried. “Did I tell you, I was raised by my uncles?”

She exhaled slowly, loud.

“I’m just saying,” he went on, “I know how it can be with family. One of my uncles was gay, you know.”

“Kit…”

“Or he is gay. He’s never told us, he’s old-fashioned. But we all—”

“Kit. What I’m saying is, I’m not ready for this.”

How many times did he have to get lost on this polluted beach? Kit folded his hands around his coffee cup.

“Kit, I mean, you’re an old hand at success.” Zia dipped the Marlboro towards him, a tip of the hat. “You’ve been climbing that ladder since you learned how to walk. Like, since you were back on the ranch, right? But me, I’ve always been a sickie. I mean, you must have some idea. My friend Topsy, the trouble she was into, that must give you some idea.”

Her eyes remained large, a stare to contend with. “Cellars by starlight, Kit. And like, I’m not just talking about dancing.”

“Zia.” The coffee cup was warm in Kit’s grip. “Your past doesn’t matter now.”

“Oh yeah, Kit? It doesn’t matter even if it’s something my father can hold over me? You know my father’s a schemer, Kit. He’s always got a scheme going, and he’s always got a rock in his hand in case the scheme goes wrong. You know like, that rock on his desk?”

“Zia.” Kit felt his frowning in his temples. “That rock on his desk, it’s two thousand years old.”

She snorted, still staring.

“It’s old, Z. It’s history. Right now, today, Sea Level’s legitimate. It’s not your father’s, it’s ours, and if we’re square and legitimate then so is the paper.”

Another bladed smirk.

“You know what I mean, Z. I’m talking about your talent, what you can do. Your father, whatever he’s got on you, it doesn’t matter.”

Her look relaxed. Zia picked at her scarf, fumbling for thanks, for apologies. “I don’t get a lot of, a lot of this kind of thing, Kit. I don’t have much practice.” Kit smiled and repeated his congratulations — though in fact the reminder of Leo’s schemes left him newly uneasy.

In Kit’s invisible layout & pasteup, this afternoon, he’d found a place for Leo’s schemes. He’d figured that the quickest way to finance a double issue would be to do what the old man wanted. If Kit laundered the cash for Surinam, if he took the five thousand and gave back three and a half, he’d have more than enough for Sea Level.

Zia, beside him, tore off a hunk of bread for herself. “Whew,” she said, around her first bite. “Whew.”

Kit leaned back from his plate, his half-finished coffee, hiding behind an exhausted smile. Wondering how he’d ever gotten so polluted. This afternoon he’d figured out a way to take advantage of Leo’s schemes without so much as a prickle of conscience. In the Law Library he’d discovered worse, the most crooked system for awarding state contracts in the country, a trail of grease that went back more than a century. But even that hadn’t put Kit off. The end justifies the means, he’d figured. Take the money.

“All of a sudden,” Zia was saying, “I’m this like, rising young hotshot. You know Kit? All of a sudden I’m not one of the fungus any more. Just the opposite, in fact. The Esquire editor, he even said he wanted a picture.”

“How can a punk be a success?” Kit asked.

“Exactly, exactly.” She didn’t pick up on Kit’s darkening tone. “I’m living my own story. A fucking dream come true!” Her stare grew even larger. “And it’s like, complicated. It’s complicated, what’s happening to me. Kit, I feel like I could talk to you all night about what’s happening. This afternoon after the phone call, you know, I tried to cool out by asking myself like, what clothes should I wear? In the photograph, I mean. What clothes? And I stood by the closet and tried to pick out the wildest stuff. You know what kind of stuff; I’ve seen you notice what I wear.

“But then I realized like,” Zia said, “it doesn’t matter what I wear in the photograph. I could come in without any clothes at all; I could come in stark, fucking naked. And I’d still be the reporter, Kit. The Humans, they’ll be the sickos. This afternoon like, for the first time in my life I had work. I wasn’t one of the Humans; I wasn’t just another cellar-dweller. I had, my own chosen work. I stood in front of my clothes closet and I knew it.”

Zia’s pale headscarf made it appear that she’d gotten a G.I. haircut, a buzz cut. Under these imitation gas lamps she called to mind that last photo of Kit’s father. She had that sureness, natural, powerful.

“Kit, it’s incredible what’s been happening, since you took me on. It’s like—you’re incredible. Kit, totally. You don’t even hold my father against me.”

Her father, his father. Kit was stumbling over every kind of junk there was.

“And today you did this like, heroic thing, this incredibly brave and noble deed. And still you’re on the job. You’re on the job, you’re letting me know. Even if it means coming all the way out here. You’re thinking about me, you’re making sure I’m part of it. The next issue.”

That roused him. “Aw, Zia.” Kit reached for his coffee. “I don’t know about the next issue.”

“Oh, it’s going to be a killer. A motherfucker.”

“I don’t know, Z.” The drink was an unlikely mix by now, bitter but sugary. “I’m not sure what to do, about the next issue.”

“Oh, hey Kit. He-ey.” Zia laid a hand inside his elbow, her fingers light. “You must be tired.”

“Zia, I’m not sure. I’m in bad shape.”

So I left our blue boy, our pseudo S&Mie. With an itch in my arm, I went looking for a darker dive. And the Cue & Ayy I laid out above, my day with the dilettante — well as you’ve probably guessed, that isn’t exactly what took place. Not exactly, no. It’s what those of us in the news business call a “made-up quote,” or a “total fabrication.” Every now and then we have to do that sort of thing in order to get our point across. But my point, remember, is that this guy had missed the point.

This guy was lost. Way out of his depth. His friend Garrison might’ve had some ghostly substance, yeah, okay. Garrison kept fooling me, yeah, a stubborn bit of bad news, buoying up into view no matter how jaundiced an eye I cast over the scene.

But Our Subject, Our Scandie Ayy — he was lost. He didn’t get it.

And I’ll have more to say about that, me basement boys and girls. Lots more on how we tell the true hearts from the clueless, in this day and age. Watch this space.

Meanwhile — Z my name is Zia, I’m going to live in Zanzibar.

Chapter 5

He liked the wind off the channel, the way it reshaped his bruises. The wind itself came in battered shapes in the Woods Hole crossing. Here in the Hole, along the ferry lanes between Cape Cod and the islands, two ocean currents collided — the Gulf Stream and the Buzzards Bay. The thick sea broke apart into whirlpools, into patches of white-flecked chop, and above the water the airflow wrestled through rough-edged directional shifts. North, east, west, south — in January the wrestling was worst. Yet Kit took the brunt of it. He stood at the forward rail of the Nantucket ferry, a lone outdoor voyager on a boat three-quarters empty to begin with. He liked the wet scrub in each new blast of air.

The wind even whistled through his stitches, faint, faint. Kit started tipping his head, trying to create the whistle. He savored the tickle at his sutures.

Not that this wasn’t a strange place to find himself, Friday afternoon. Hardly a day had passed since he’d gotten these sutures. Hardly a day and a night since the phone call that had set up his bruising. And here Kit stood, playing sickbed games with the Atlantic Ocean. Strange, no question. His farthest yet from the things that needed doing.

North, east, west, south, Kit saw nothing but storm and twilight. The mainland had disappeared as soon as he and Bette were out of the dock. Martha’s Vineyard didn’t show till the ferry was in the harbor. Now between the Vineyard and Nantucket they moved without landmark, without bearing. A ghost adrift. When Kit first stepped out of the ferry cabin, the churning, misted vertigo forced up a shout — wordless, raw-throated.

Yet Kit liked the taste of the air, too, rich and natural as a rained-on heap of leaves. It freed him from the odors of his coat. Bette had sponged off the fabric before he’d woken, but the stink of Monsod had lingered. During the ride down from Boston Kit had dozed off again, and the smell had triggered headachy stabs of nightmare. Eventually he’d needed his Percodan. Now, however, even Kit’s painkillers couldn’t dull the kick of this whipsaw gray, this chaos of touch and whistle right in his face.

It allowed no mind games either. No layout & pasteup.

*

Bette joined him at the rail without a word. She wore a long coat without a waist, an undertaker’s coat. Her hat was fur, with earflaps.

“The air,” Kit said. “It’s good for me.”

Still watching the sea, she adjusted her hat. Kit thought of Zia last night, tugging at her headscarf.

“The air’s good for my head. Bette, I’ll tell you one thing, I’ll tell you this for starters.” He’d told Zia nothing, finally. “Lately Betts, I’ve been — overfantasizing.”

That brought her around. Frowning, lips moving, Bette seemed to be trying out his last word.

“Bette, I’ve got to tell you. If I’m going to tell anyone I’m going to tell you. For starters, anyway.” Here they came, yes, the things that needed doing. Unhinged as the windcurrents over the Hole. “I’m overfantasizing. If that’s the, if that’s… Betts, listen. I’m inventing newspapers in my mind.”

“Oh, come.” She had a way of straightening her head, making a T-square with neck and shoulders.

“In my mind, Betts. It’s got me worried.”

“You’re not inventing papers in your mind, Kit. You’re actually bringing them into print and making them available to the public.”

“No, no. Also in my mind, Bette. I’m running double-columns up there. I’m composing whole, weird….” And though sometimes he had to stop and massage his neck, sometimes he couldn’t believe the words he came up with — nonetheless just letting Bette in on this much of his trouble left Kit feeling relieved. This much was the easy part, sure. It was the least of his reasons for calling Corinna, over at the office, and telling her she’d have to go on taking messages till Monday. Yet as Kit talked with his bundled-up wife he enjoyed a renewed sense that their getaway might work after all. He and Bette were taking the weekend at “the Cottage,” her family place on Nantucket.

“It’s strange, Betts,” he was saying. “The columns might start with something in my life, they might comment on something there. But next thing you know, they begin to comment on each other.”

Her eyes, enlarged, held an obvious question.

“I’m not crazy, Bette. I’m — I think this might be a way of not being crazy. My invisible layout and pasteup. It might be what I have instead of crazy. But, hoo boy. The flashes I get up in there.” He jerked a gloved finger at his head. “Sometimes they’re not even newspapers, exactly.”

“Bette,” he asked, “you remember when I called you about Cousin Cal? I called about Cousin Cal, and all I could think about was making love with you. You remember that conversation?”

“I do.” She seemed to be fighting a smile. “It was Monday. Monday, yes.”

“Monday. Back when this whole mess was just starting.”

To Kit, his runaway imaginings during that phone call looked to be part and parcel of the head games that had since come on worse. “I told you, then. About what was going on with me. And even then, I knew it wasn’t right.” But that same morning he’d also felt this sopping beehive in his chest, this heart not yet dried out and eggless. The humming bulk remained, stirring in the channel winds.

“Kitty Chris.” Her look showed some of its old open-endedness. “And to think I’ve always wanted to drive men wild.”

“Aw, Betts.”

“Well. Invisible layout and pasteup, what am I to say?”

Good question. Kit couldn’t be sure of his smile.

“Perhaps it’s a symptom of stress. Over the Med School don’t you know, they talk a lot about stress.” She’d spoken to the Med School before they left, needing a deadline extended.

“Though, Kit, it hardly seems as if the stress is going to get any better. You saw our kitchen table.”

Kit couldn’t be sure of his whole face, over the yawning gap of everything that remained to be said. When at last he’d gotten out of the bedroom, this morning, he’d found his kitchen table littered with phone-memos. He’d squinted through a lateriser’s thickness. Thurs 2PM: Rachel Veutri, talk Globe/Monsod? Thurs 2:20PM: Carl Niedermeyer, talk Herald/Monsod? Thurs 3:25: Sylvia Briskin, GBH, Monsod. Th 4:10: Rachel again. Corrina had checked in too, naturally: Lot of calls/office. The memos ran on into a long second row, and included a query from the Associated Press.

The call that must have gotten Bette up had come from the State House, at half-past seven. Kit didn’t recognize the name, but it had to be one of Croftall’s people. Making sure the old man’s ass was still protected.

“I kept wondering,” Bette said now, “why the phone didn’t wake you.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Betts.”

She moved her mouth, its intricate working parts, and framed a word or two. But once more, white shreds of condensed air gathered between them. An argument made visible: miniature cumulonimbus, gathering. And this would be a bad one. If Kit couldn’t keep the better talk flowing, this weekend would be the first real knockdown drag-out of the marriage. He hadn’t heard the phone this morning because last night he’d come home in Zia’s arms. In her arms, in a classic drunk’s carry, she’d hauled him up the stairs. He’d never noticed the memos.

“I’m sorry,” he repeated. “Betts, out at the Cottage we’ll get this all—”

“Oh, the Cottage. Kit, you know Cousin Cal is there.”

It was duck season on Nantucket. Harding Calvin always spent the week at the estate, with three or four cronies. “Darling,” Kit said, “I told you. These guys are hunters. They’re not going to hang around the house.”

She frowned, behind more cumulonimbus.

“Betts, back in Minnesota we broke camp before dawn and we didn’t get back till supper.”

“Well, and then there’s you. You, Kit. The entire drive down to the Hole you hardly uttered two words. You slept.”

He wrapped his hands around the railing, blinking, teary. The channel was chaos, dirty whitecaps in one patch and a green hole in another.

“Tell me about Cousin Cal,” Kit said. “Tell me about that time in Milton with him and the gardener.”

“What? The gardener?”

“In Milton, when you were a kid. How did that go?”

“Kit, really. What’s that got to do with—”

“Tell me, Betts. You were, what? Nine, ten? And Cousin Cal, he really hurt you. You and that gardener.”

The wind had pulled blonde strands from under her hat. These played back and forth across her furred earflaps, a brighter element between them.

“The man you’re thinking of,” Bette said slowly, “was more than a gardener.”

“Oh sure,” Kit said. “This was a caretaker. He did the whole Milton place.”

“Jean-Paul Rebec.”

“Jappy, right? You called him Jappy.”

“Oh Kit, you remember perfectly well.”

“Tell me. Please. Didn’t he make toys?”

“Yes. Yes.” Bette lifted her chin, indicating some far-off attic toy box. “Jappy could whittle a toy and tell me a story all at the same time. For the scary stories he’d whistle sound effects. The stories about the loup-garou don’t you know, those came complete with sound effects.”

“He made you a loup-garou, didn’t he?”

“Yes. Yes. A wolfman with fangs and a corduroy tongue, quite a piece of work really. Though I think that may have been a, what shall I say — an act of rebellion? It may have been the raised fist of rebellion, Kit, in the form of folk art. That Jappy should give me a monster like that. After all, I was the boss’s daughter.”

Kit laughed, surprising himself. He would’ve thought he was much too cold for that.

“Taking me back to Jappy, oh Kit.” Bette pulled the hair from her eyes. “Honestly.”

“Betts, I love it. You love it, you love to think.”

“Well. I don’t know whether this is a dirty trick or the nicest thing you’ve ever done.”

“But then the blacks started moving down from Roxbury, right? Your family began to worry about property values?”

Her smile shrank.

“It must have been hard, Betts. Saying goodbye—”

“It was a lot harder for Jappy. I was a girl when we sold, Kit. I was a girl and I lost a playmate. But Jappy, that man lost everything. He didn’t have children. He didn’t have a career, God knows. He had Milton.”

“And Cousin Cal,” Kit said, “he made a scene, right? He ordered the man off the place.”

“He came right into the stables and ordered Jappy out. The poor man kept stopping by for weeks after he’d been let go.”

“Couldn’t stay away.”

“He kept telling me goodbye. He’d drop in at the stables, stooped and murmuring, don’t you know.” She shook her head. “And then one time — there’s Cousin Cal. Loud with booze, naturellement. To hear him talk, Jappy was a trespasser. A criminal. A criminal.”

“But you got your revenge. You tore up the stone walls.”

Bette’s hair twisted around her lowered face.

“Betts? You wrecked the gardens?”

“You’re the only one who knows that, Kit. To this day, my family thinks it was the blacks.”

“You snuck out the bedroom window.”

“I snuck out the window. Jappy never worked on the gardens, you see. The flowers were my mother’s job, my aunt’s job. Women’s work. And on the other side of the gardens, the side along the road, there were the stone walls. Well. Wild horses couldn’t have stopped me.”

But when she lifted her head Kit found her look less proud than he’d expected.

“Once a snake was under a stone, Kit. A snake, honestly. Glittering in the moonlight. It didn’t stop me. No. No. When the thorns on the rosebushes cut me, I pulled off my nightgown and bundled it round my hands.”

“And that’s when you decided to call yourself Bette.”

“Bette like Bette Davis.” With a boot heel, she scuffed the deck’s all-weather roughage. “Oh, I became an actress that night. The next morning I wore dark tights and long sleeves. I concocted some shaggy-dog story about the cuts on my hands.”

She kept kicking at the deck. Chop, chuff, scuff. Kit thought of his phlegm-full conversation with Corinna, that morning. That’s it? the woman had asked. That’s all I can tell these people — you’ve left the city?

“I, I wanted to hear it again,” he told his wife. “Before the Cottage.”

And here it was, the look Kit had fallen for. The hamper in the haystack, the unabashed tatterdemalion. Blue, blonde, white. Whenever Bette showed him this face Kit could once more sense their first hot point of contact — she the know-it-all and him mad to find out — while at the same time he spotted glimmers of a more durable connection. Glimmers of equivalent core elements. Kit couldn’t name these elements. Most words felt too broad (“curiosity”), and whenever he came across something more precise it turned out to be an impossible antique (“pluck”). Kit knew only that words were part of it, part of their shared, staged business: an instinct for words, a fussing over words. He could even see the pleasure they took in the fussing, another glimmer. Enough for a believer to go on.

*

Then after half a day steeling themselves for a depressed and cold Cottage — another Monsod, to hear Bette describe it — Kit and his wife pulled up at a very different place.

Every light was blazing. Kit recalled the downtown record stores, their radium-bright checkerboard. Now what kind of winters had these New England Brahmins expected, building their seaside houses with so many windows? Kit circled round the Duster to the trunk, ticking off windows as he went. Front parlor, back parlor. Dining room, sitting room. The library and Uncle Walt’s study, the large and small guestrooms.

Even up in the widow’s walk, an uncovered bulb was burning. A dab of yellow against the evening glower. Monsod, no way. From where Kit stood, the Cottage looked like a funhouse. Twists, turrets, crazy lighting. And now, naturally, two little heads popped up at the nearest downstairs window. Two little ticket holders.

Did Bette have the wrong weekend? Should they have tried calling a second time?

Two children banged through the Cottage’s front door. Two boys, calling “Unca Kit!” Calling “Aunt Beddy!”

Hans and Rutger, sure. Bette’s sister’s boys.

“My guys! My tough guys!” Kit shouted.

Their huffing and puffing was flavored with hot chocolate. Within their hoods their faces nestled like eggs. And the boys had to show Kit how’d they’d learned to slap five: “Gimme some skin, Unca Kit. Gimme some skin!”

Kit took a couple of hits, murder on his cold hands. “My two ratso fave terrorist tough guys!”

Bette’s sister was eighteen months younger, but she’d had her first child more than five years ago. She met the group at the Cottage doorway, surprised, in slippers. Cecelia, Ceci. Her bones had Bette’s length and strictness, but tomatoes had grown through the fences. Lots of cheek, lots of top and thigh. Ceci framed her features with boxy suburban-Mom glasses. In tee shirt and work shirt, she might still have been breastfeeding.

“Well,” Ceci said. “We’re going to have a full house.”

“Hey, Bette — can’t you at least say hello?” In the front hall, in the speckled shadow of the unwashed chandelier, Cecelia filled the silence with quick bedroom arrangements. Cousin Cal and the duck hunters, she began, had longstanding reservations on the first-floor rooms. “You know,” Cecelia said, “cooks’ quarters.” But Bette didn’t appear to be following. Pulling off her furred hat, she blinked at the crackles of static electricity. She backed away onto the front stairway’s elongated bottom step, steadying herself with a hand on the banister’s final curve. Bette might have been a mannequin in a museum tableau. Days of the Empire.

“Well,” Ceci went on. “Let me move into a single room. You guys deserve a double.”

Let me move? Let me? Surely Cecelia couldn’t have fallen for Bette’s pose. Surely she didn’t believe in the mannequin. But the mother was actually making apologies. Fingering the hems of her work shirt, she was saying, “I guess you guys won’t get quite the quiet getaway you were expecting.”

Sisters, boy. “So, Ceci,” Kit asked. “What brings you down here?”

The woman touched her glasses. At Kit’s waist the two boys were tugging, pleading: “Play the monster.”

“Same as you I guess,” Ceci said. “A getaway.”

The louder of the two boys was the younger. The blond foursquare Rucky-rat. “Play the monster!” he squealed. “Please!”

“Guys,” Kit said, “give your Mom a chance.” Anyway he didn’t think he was up to the game, your basic Search-&-Destroy. Kit would go after the boys with his head tucked inside his sweater collar, a hunchback effect.

Ceci said, “I just woke up this morning feeling, well. Like I had to flee.”

“I hear you.”

Kit glanced at Bette. He for one felt himself coming into a fresh energy that had its roots in the talk on the ferry. A weekend in a funhouse sounded a lot better than what he’d been expecting. But Bette was looking elsewhere, across the hall. Uh-oh. Framed in the double-wide opening to the dining room, Cousin Cal stood cradling an open shotgun. The brass butts of two fresh shells glittered in the chamber.

“The monster!” Rutger shouted.

A mean piece of machinery, a.10-gauge, Cal’s gun was really too powerful for duck. The uncle toted it up high, two-handed, an unnatural position which kept his shoulders back and chest out. Ten-hut, soldier.

Cecelia addressed him mildly. “More guests for the weekend, Cousin Cal.”

Cal kept glaring. The shell butts gleamed between his chapped hunter’s hands.

“And I told you before,” Ceci went on, “I don’t want the guns around the boys.”

Cal’s face had Marlboro-Man dimples, and his eyes the mercury glint of hard liquor.

“I told you, Cal,” the sister said. “You keep all that stuff in the kitchen. I don’t want to see it.”

The.10-gauge dropped to waist level, and for a moment Kit couldn’t see the shell butts. But then the brass casings gleamed again, harmless in the open housing. Cousin Cal exhaled loudly — you might’ve heard him up on the widow’s walk — but he turned away, gun down, head down. Overgrown Cousin Cal, shrinking fast.

Kit looked at Ceci, eyebrows raised.

“Oh, that old fruitcake,” the sister said. She laughed, touching her glasses. “Cousin Cal, I swear. You can almost hear the fantasies he’s got going.”

Bette, at bottom of the stairs, appeared more regal than ever. As if she’d been positive that the old man would start blasting away, and she’d wanted to look her bravest.

“You can almost hear him,” Ceci said, shaking her head. “Here I am, the world’s toughest cowboy. I mean, fantasies.”

“The monn-sster,” one of the boys whined.

“But you, Kit,” Cecelia went on. “Looks like you ran into real trouble.”

Kit was getting tugged at again. He discovered he’d herded Hans and Rutger behind him, he’d kept them out of harm’s way. He’d been expecting bloody murder every bit as much as Bette.

*

Their room seemed to do their talking for them. The radiator whispered, the bed frame cackled. And Bette too might be coming into a new energy, she just might. At the windows overlooking the shoreline, she went up on tiptoe in a full-body stretch and then with a sudden burst of humming shook her hips. His seaside Sheba. His island witch: She cast a spell with her kiss, leaving him powerless and tongue-tied against the cold wall after Cecelia called upstairs. “Drinks!” the sister called. “Hot drinks!” Down in the parlor he refortified, taking mint wafers and brandied tea, while Ceci complained genially about her life on Beacon Hill. The neighbors were all gay these days. They were very nice guys, granted, community-minded guys. But still, the sister said, they weren’t people she could look at for hints about herself. Hints about what she was going through. She needed at least a few people around like that, Ceci explained, people she could use to suss out something about herself. Bette surprised Kit by mentioning his uncle, the rancher who liked men. She said Kit had found the uncle a decent enough role model, even though he was gay and still in the closet to boot. Bette didn’t sound malicious, and the subject was by no means off bounds, but with that Kit gave in to the boys’ pleading, he played the Monster. An old cracked mackinaw off the coatrack served as his Monster-Net. He tore around the downstairs, roaring till his bruises throbbed. By the time Cecelia called a halt — the boys got revved up fast, their faces red as Christmas — Bette was standing at another seaside window. She was saying it might be nice to take a walk while there was still light. Together, Kit and his wife went out. Below the sea wall they took each other’s hands. Without a word they crunched over winter sand till Kit found himself once more up against it: the channel’s bracing chaos, the mulchy seething whatever. The foam at his feet looked like more of the same, bubbles and scribbles shifting and multiplying. Brainless, directionless. He was once more up against it, the last winy pulp that had swilled out of Junior’s mouth, the seepage under which the man’s face had disappeared. Okay, editor: What’s the issue now? You’ve shaken off your temporary insanity about Sea Level, Nos. 2 & 3. You’ve escaped the phone memos and you’ve gotten past a scary little loup-garou made of rags. You’ve put all that paper behind you. What now? Kit thought of the courtroom phrase, “the whole truth,” and wondered if he’d ever get anywhere near a truth like that again.

He tugged his wife’s hand. His eyes began to water, and at first he thought it was the wind, but then he realized it was the words. He told her everything.

*

Make love to me. Of all the unlikely responses… and with all the sisterly obligations due up in the next hour or so, with dinner and the boys’ bedtime due up…. Yet as soon as she and Kit got back in the house, her face pinched tight and his spongy as a baby’s, Bette lead the way to their room. Once they were up by the salted windows again she hooked him into a hug, close enough to have him retasting the low tide in the smell of their woolens. Then: Make love to me. Please Kit, now. The asking alone sounded a bit off — she almost never asked, in so many words. Kit glanced around the room, at once noting three or four good reasons why they shouldn’t, the unlocked door and the men grumbling downstairs and the still-unmade bed. The mattress was horsehair, at least half a century old.

She had her coat off, her jeans open, one hand at his belt while the other drew his fingers up under her sweater. Her nipple was warm but stiff, and hands and flesh and eyes she had him. The Monster-Net.

The room’s key had been lost long ago, but with a quick jostle Kit heaved the bureau against the door. The mahogany piece thumped into place, elephantine, gashing the doorjamb’s multiple paint jobs. Christ, were they going to knock the place apart? Still Bette had him netted. She had him hooked by a belt loop, a zipper pull, the mushrooming head of his cock. It was a game and not a game at all, a mess of psychology you got free of by diving in still deeper. Bette folded up, making herself an easier reach in undone clothes. Kneeling on the edge of the bed, she started to suck on Kit while his feet were still on the floor. The springs and bed frame screeched and jangled while she hunkered down into a mouth-first bundle. Knock the place apart.

“I don’t have Trojans,” he gasped. “I didn’t think—”

“I don’t care,” she said. “I don’t care.”

Her sucking, his diving was all they needed of foreplay. His unrubbered cock was too serious for that, his confession too recent.

They couldn’t lose their awareness of the Cottage, the mattress, the cackling wood, and in Kit this triggered images from the ranch where he’d been raised. He flashed on freshly dug potatoes in burlap sacks, on the Jello-and-hay odor of a foaling. Bette moaned, he whispered—darling, the best—yet these guttural breathings seemed to belong with Kit’s memories, as if she’d been back in Minnesota with him. The notion played just perceptibly through his windings against her cunt, through the throb in his injured temple. Because why couldn’t she have been there, at his uncles’ ranch? The time a husband and wife spent at sex stretched way past the norms, didn’t it? Packed with a thousand adjustments, replayed both out loud and in dreams, the time a husband and wife spent at sex expanded out and away according to rules all its own. And he and Bette had put in a lot of time, by now. A whole childhood and adolescence of foreplay and afterwards. Marriage, as Kit knew it, could include the cackling of this seaside manse, the old money showing off, while at the same time it shared his memory of feeling his way up into a mare’s birth canal in order to yank out a stuck foal. Why not? He and Bette were doing it even now, cackling and reaching. Upright on their knees, they clung hip to hip.

Kit rocked with long tremors, kiss to cock. Bette’s look was all tatterdemalion. Here were handfuls of buttock, there a dissolving down-the-throat moan.

They went through spasms for a while, jamming after the best angle. Such a shape they made, upright, the lovers’ capital Y. Y for Yes, Yeah, You. She’d been right to insist.

Afterwards Kit lay fingering his stitches with one hand, the other on the thigh she’d thrown across him. The stretch-fabric of their life as a couple felt as if it were drifting down over them, a vast parachute material, tangible in a thousand gentle rumples. He began making sentences, fumbling, not quite thinking. The talk came out as the marriage-feeling was reeled back in, a compensatory mechanism. Occasionally his sweeter nothings made Bette fish tenderly along his hip, her crotch nudging his bone line.

“Second time,” he found himself saying. “No Trojan, no precautions. The second time.”

She raised her eyes, but it was dark by now.

“Think about it.”

The only noise was a squeak against his breastbone: her wet face, moving. Wet, yes, and he should have known what was happening the moment it started. His wife was crying, he should have known. Her shoulders quivered and she buried her face in his chest.

“Aw Betts.” He locked his arms around her. “Darling.”

Was this his deficient social skills again? Another dumb farm boy move?

“I love you. I love you.”

No answer except the squeaks between them, skin on skin.

*

1/14, 50 minutes:

Subject anxious. Reports dream activity. Rises from couch once twice 4 times.

At street window—“Life, life, one mess after another.”

Dream of paper sack. Bus station, everybody reading paper, he has sack on lap. Can’t let go of sack. Sack seams coming apart, leaking blood.

Visibly anxious. Neck massage.

MEMO: KV Story, 2nd rewrite

I see a property, guys. I see a majordocudrama. I see Emmy.

Guys, you got me wicked psyched. Wicked psyched. The trailers for KV Story, they’ll be like sixty seconds on the hot button. And the beauty is, we can play the integrity number. Hard-hitting real-life drama fresh off the streets.

Kit had thought he’d spend Saturday in the library. In winter, the room was the most livable in the house. Walls of packed shelves provided a leathery coziness, and the fireplace still worked. Ceci had even vacuumed the carpet. The boys needed a clean palace to play, the sister explained. You didn’t want anybody coming home sick.

But before lunch, Saturday, she’d left the boys with Kit. She and Bette had gone into town to talk. Bette’s idea.

“I think I’d like, oh, a glass of wine with my sister,” his wife had said. “Overlooking the sea, you know.”

“A glass of wine?” Ceci said. “An actual adult setting?”

Bette didn’t laugh. She avoided Kit’s look. Instead it was the sister who caught his eye, taking his measure.

And once Cecilia’s wagon pulled out of the drive, the library no longer worked for him. Not with the boys there, playing Star Wars before the fire. They had figurines, Luke, the Princess and the Wookie, and they kept pestering him to join. Aw, wasn’t he going to get a break? A moment to think? What was Bette doing, abandoning him? Kit found a few fingers of gin in dusty half-gallons left over from summer. He withdrew into the now-familiar wooze of alcohol and Percodan, browsing the spines along the farther bookshelves. He pretended an interest in the family Bible. Inked onto the opening pages was a century and a half of marriage, birth, death. The entries ended with the previous generation, a death in ‘51. His wedding — Bette’s, rather — wasn’t there.

Dream of werewolf. Werewolf in room, subject trapped behind desk “antique bureau.” Subject climbs free, hard labor, hand over hand. Other side, free, discovers he was a werewolf & now cured. Discovers wife still back in room. Goes get her & both start climb old bureau, trying avoid rays of full moon. Labor, panic.

Discussion of wife. Intimacy gratifying but threatening. Some fear of wife’s intellect—“Sex is life & death, not theory.” Some recognition of that fear, of its thrill etc.

Adequate understanding re different backgrounds. Avoidance behavior re different values — re wife’s emotional needs.

Avoidance: question about wkend w/wife prompts subject memories of own childhood. Subject again mentions Minnesota Public Radio. Believes MPR root of career, listening w/family, discussing at dinner. Cites state’s progressive politics, Humphrey.

Repeat Q about wkend w/wife.

Integrity, guys — that’s marketing. Integrity, keepin’ it real—you can’t find better marketing. I mean, do I see a blonde Alan Alda for KV?

What was key was, you worked in the double murder. You worked in the guy, the creep KV killed — jeez, what was his name? And you worked in what the creep did. You got the people dying on the screen. That was what was key. I mean, rape & murder, gay rape & murder, it’s right on the hot button. And it’s totally real! Real written all over it. Major marketing.

So, quickly. One problem.

We need kids, guys. We need Viddich and some kids. We’ve got a good guy here, right? And good guys, they’re good with kids.

It’s a formula, you know. Good with kids equals good guy. Nothing your Nielsen idiot understands quicker.

The project need kids.

Maybe the library would never have worked for him anyway. Kit didn’t read casually. Rather he had six or eight books he’d committed to the way other men gave themselves to a ball club or a fishing hole. He had companion books, reread so often that he could recite whole passages, savoring knockout verbs or other surprises. His choices tended to be more recent, however: Saul Bellow’s Herzog, Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid. The Cottage had nothing like that. As for Kit’s older favorites, the Hamlet was missing pages and the collection of Greek tragedies printed in double columns. Unreadable in the antique light.

Maybe it wouldn’t have worked, the library. When Kit left, it had nothing to do with Ceci’s boys. They’d given up asking him to play. Nonetheless, Kit drifted out of the room, out of the warmth and chatter. He began to climb the stairs.

The echo of his gin-slowed footsteps somehow seemed more in the spirit of the reading he’d longed for. He recalled a line from Herzog, for instance: I am willing without further exercise in pain to open my heart. He’d love to go back to that one now. Love to revisit a few of Herzog’s “mental letters.” Great stuff — imaginary letters to impossible readers. Letters to Nietzsche and Maimonides and Herzog’s own dead grandfather, invisible to everyone except a well-meaning but half-cracked professor of history.

Repeat Q about wknd w/wife.

Subject visibly anxious. Wknd at v old house, he says. “I mean, w/a widow’s walk.” Prompts more memories: Mother. M has “fine qualities.” Leftist, religious (Presby), open-minded.

Q: Open-minded? Example homosex uncle?

Ans: “Not talking about that.”

Q: How’s M feel about marriage? Example gr-children.

Neck massage. Pacing. Window.

TV, guys, has to get right where people live. Right into the kitchen. We want ‘em so they can’t even see the kitchen, because they’d rather look at our people.

So think about the wife, here. I mean, I like what you did with the wife. Farrah gets serious, that’s killer. She gets serious, and we still have plenty of sex for the trailer. Major marketing.

The library would’ve suited Bette better. When it came to reading, she was an omnivore. If she suffered insomnia or a not too nasty flu, she could go through hundreds of pages at a clip. The one author Kit had known Bette to reread was Tolstoy, and she preferred War and Peace.

Bette. Kit might pretend he was looking for books, at first, but by the time he got above the second floor he knew better.

Up here, the Cottage passageways were darker. Shades had been drawn at the end of summer. And when Bette had finished making love to him, she’d shut down as well. Later, when Kit’s nightmares woke him, she’d refused to be roused. Now when Kit came out on the widow’s walk, he heard the hunters in their blinds. Distant guns. Bette too was off in that distance, firing away.

The weather made the Cottage grounds invisible, and Kit flashed on his father in his Sabre jet, high over foggy Yalu river land. But his father never felt like this, the worm on his back, the world a wet bedlam in his face. His father never felt so wrecked. The thought of suicide, Nietzsche said, is a great consolation (another line Kit had first come across in Herzog). Yet now, the thought struck him just that way: stale and secondhand. Suicide felt like the most cornball idea he’d ever had. Like imitation honor, imitation pain. And in stark contrast, beyond imitation, there emerged the wife he loved, the work he believed in. So they felt at least out in this hard, cleansing winter, as Kit tossed the last of his gin over the railing.

Husband and editor — he was nothing if not both.

Subject again talks Mother. Loves—“I mean, of course.” But never understood M, never gave M credit.

Since prep sch (S left home at 14) he’s surrounded self w/ diff kind of woman—“All these bony ticking types.”

Never saw M’s “integrity.”

But think about the wife. Wife, sex, kids. Nothing the Nielsen idiot understands quicker.

Kids, guys. When the folks in the kitchen see Alan and Farrah on the box, they have to think — that’s real.

Real life. Killer marketing.

*

Someone must have been reading to Hans about the heroes of ancient Rome. The boy insisted that everyone call his character Darth Caesar. Kit was wondering about it when the women returned.

When he’d come back downstairs, back to the library hearth, at first Hans and the Rucky-Rat had wanted him to play the Monster. They played Star Wars all the time, they said. Kit’s stitches, they said, made him a cooler Monster than ever. No, my tough guys, no. Uncle Kit has had enough of the Monster for one weekend. Instead he took up the Wookie and jumped between the bad guy and the princess. He bellowed and made phaser noises: phew, phew.

He’d just noticed the Caesar thing when there came the groan of Ceci’s wagon, the tick-tock of Bette’s Fryes.

Hans was still into James Earl Jones: “Nohh one eh-scaapes Dahhrth Caeess-ar!”

“Darth Caesar?” Bette asked, already overhead. “As in, the divine Julius?”

“You should have heard them this morning,” Ceci said, squatting. “Princess Leia was a Vestal Virgin.”

This morning—Kit might have heard something in the sister’s tone. He and Bette hadn’t come out till nearly eleven, after which Bette had wasted no time asking about lunch. Now the mother hooked both boys into a prolonged hug. She kissed their hair and murmured how she’d missed them. Seemed like an unnecessary fuss, and she hadn’t yet met Kit’s eye.

“God,” Bette went on, “Darth Caesar. It’s an image for the American ‘70s. The dying Empire tries to preserve itself as a high-tech fairy tale.”

Her nerves were pretty obvious too.

“The new Caesar wants to make himself immortal,” she went on, “and so he turns to Industrial Light and Magic.”

On your feet, Viddich. If the weekend’s going to amount to anything, on your feet. Five minutes later he and Bette were back in the cold. Their unmatched strides crunched first over the walkway’s oyster shell, then over the frozen beach. There was sun by then, a break in the weather, but the wind seemed to flatten it, dirty it. Kit and Bette left no shadow.

“So you told her, right?”

“I’m afraid I did, Kit.”

He squatted and took up a stone. He chucked it into the surf and reached for another.

“You must have expected it,” she went on.

He nodded but didn’t stop, chucking sidearm.

“And surely you realize, Kit — Ceci’s discreet. You’ve seen how strong she can be. I believe it’s surprised us both, this weekend, seeing how strong she can be.”

Over the fogged crossing, the Woods Hole channel, gulls hovered unmoving. Kit let his throwing arm drop.

“Oh, honestly.” Bette paced behind him. “Kit, I had to talk about it. I had to talk about that and, well. I had to talk about everything. There’s this business of having babies, for instance. This very strange business of, well, maybe you and I are trying to have a baby and maybe we’re not. On that little matter we’re coming across rather impressionistic, I’d say.”

“I’m closing the paper,” Kit said.

Her pacing stopped. Still in his squat, he twisted, finding her face.

“I’m closing Sea Level,” he said. “Temporarily for starters, but maybe permanently. Maybe for good, Betts.”

Bette had a lot of color. Out here her hair — she’d forgotten her hat — was less hay, more frizz.

“I’ve gotten too close,” Kit said. “It’s what this time away was about. It’s integrity, it’s real life.”

“Kit,” Bette said, “won’t you let me have this?”

“Integrity and real life.” Kit shook his head. “Hoo boy. Believe me, Betts, I know what those words sound like.”

“This moment Kit, just this one moment. Please. Won’t you let me have it?”

“I’m not a bad guy, Betts. I’m a good guy.”

“My moment, Kit. Mine. Let me have it.”

Aw, Viddich. As Kit got to his feet he resisted the impulse to put his arms around her. He resisted the impulse to apologize, to tell her he loved her, to blurt out more examples of what a hero he was.

“Let me, Kit,” she said. “Me. I mean, I haven’t even had a decent opportunity to scream about Thursday night yet.”

She was his type, the bony ticking type, the kind of woman that had always put him in big hurry to prove himself. Upright, he kept his posture slope-shouldered and acquiescent. But for a long moment there was only the ragged surf, the tangled winds. Bette’s look softened just perceptibly.

“Are you actually closing the paper?” she asked.

Kit didn’t know what to do with his hands. He wished he still had his stones. Stones, a scrolled newspaper, something.

“You’re actually going to go in Monday morning,” she asked, “and tell people they’re out of a job?”

Patience, husband. “I haven’t thought about what I’m going to tell people, Betts.” He repeated that the shutdown might be only temporary. He’d see what things looked like in a month or so, after he’d worked through the ramifications of what had happened in Monsod. “I might need new money, too. There’s a conflict of interest with Mirinex.”

Bette said she wasn’t surprised — and none too hopeful about the money, either.

“I guess,” Kit went on, “there’s one woman I’d like to keep on salary if I can.”

“Oh? A woman? Would that be Zia?”

That was more like it, the kind of slam Kit had been expecting. And his usual response was to start sounding all lofty and professional, Mr. Top-of-the-Masthead. Not this time. Plain and simple, Kit explained that he’d meant his Administrative Assistant. Corinna Nummold, Betts. “She’s got a kid.”

Bette shook her head. “Kit, I must say. I still find it hard to believe.”

“If I don’t close,” he said, “I’ll never figure out why this happened.”

Her hair was frizz, a ratted frizz, a punk-rock cut. “Why what happened? Monsod, you mean?”

“I don’t know why it happened, Bette. Something went wrong, I mean I did something wrong. Me, I did it. And I don’t know why.”

Her eyes glittered. “You don’t know why you had to hit him a second time.”

Ow, there’s a slam. And that was Bette’s way, sure, getting in a shot when you least expected it. Kit resisted various new impulses. He folded his arms and nodded.

“Well, Kit, I would have thought that was what you were trying to find out Thursday night. That’s what you were looking for when you didn’t come home.”

Plain and simple, he apologized. “Like I say,” he went on, “I have to figure this out.”

“Oh. You do realize, Kit, this isn’t necessarily all about you. This ugly business.”

“Bette. I realize there’s other guys involved. Bad guys, good guys, and they’ve all got their story. Sure. But besides them, there’s me. I’m sorry, like I say. I’m half-crazed and I’m having nightmares and I’m very sorry about what I did. But just coming out to the beach and saying that — it’s not enough. Not nearly. Also I need to know why.”

“Well, why. The way you described the incident yesterday, it sounded like self-defense.”

Kind words, but Bette didn’t look any less like a punk. “Yeah, I could call it self-defense.” He made a face. “Aw Betts, those are just words. Words, words, words. I’d like to think I can do better than that.”

“Well, Kit. All things considered, I’d say you can see why I need some time alone.”

Her hair exploding in the wind, her face battered by crying — who was this person?

“I need some time alone, Kit. I need to be alone, and I need, oh. To be free to move. I need the car, Kit.”

“Betts, please. You need—”

“Kit, let me have this. Let me say this. I need to be alone and I need the car. I might do some traveling.”

Kit cast around for help. Up behind Bette the lights in the Cottage had gone on, a buttery blur in this cold.

“There’s public transportation from Woods Hole, Kit.”

Also Bette’s hair and face was in stark contrast to the rest of her, the undertaker’s coat and the square-toed boots. The first time he’d seen her, in the lobby of the Globe building, he’d gone under before this kind of impact. There too she’d overwhelmed the landscape. She’d made the turnstiles and switchboard disappear simply by flashing her ID.

“I need you now,” he said. “I’m scared.”

Did her look soften? Did her shoulders relax?

“Please, Betts.”

“Kit,” she asked more quietly, “do you believe in history?”

What? Kit touched his neck.

“Do you, Kit? Do you believe in history?”

“Bette, come on. I want you with me, back in the city. I want you up in the bed beside me—”

“Kit. Kit. I believe in history. I’m one of those for whom it’s real. History, the weight of history, do you understand? For those like myself, well. History’s nothing less than the person in the mirror. It’s our families and ourselves and it’s whatever we make of ourselves.”

He reached for her but she checked him. Her sharper angles re-emerged.

“We live in history, those like myself. When we move we’re moving through history, we can feel it.”

In her look, her miserable smile, Kit thought he detected a glass of wine too many. Could that be all there was to this? Wine and a bad night?

“Oh Kit,” she said.

Could he still win her back? “Darling, tell me.”

“You’re not the only one who’s seen something this weekend, Kit. You’re not the only one, and as for me, well.

“I’ve been forced to see the two of us as moving through history,” Bette said. “Both of us, Kit, moving through it.” Her looks came together now, the exploding yellow top and the black wrap beneath it. She became something far older and more powerful: a witch, a seeress. A siren on the rocks.

“History appears to me now as this awesome light getting brighter and brighter behind our backs. It keeps getting brighter, and it keeps making our shadows stiffer and stranger. Oh, it is certainly getting brighter, Kit. I hope you can understand. Because that light behind us, you see, it’s particularly bright for women. Just now it’s particularly hot and bright on your back if you happen to be a woman. You must’ve noticed, Kit. It’s really quite something for women, this our own 1970’s. Most of it’s sheer silliness, to be sure, utter silliness. Still there they are, the lights of history. Hot and bright if you happen to be a woman. Kit, you must’ve seen all the new women’s papers, at least. There’s Ms., there’s Sojourner. There’s Seven Days—that one even looks like Sea Level. You must’ve noticed.”

She was incredible, a new newspaper all by herself. Kit had the thought that he might be watching some kind of nervous breakdown. But he recalled as well the magical displacement he felt sometimes when they were in bed together, the way he could tumble upwards into the balloon fabric of their marriage. Tumble out beyond apartment walls, city limits, the date on the calendar.

“So many new papers,” Bette said.

She’d been staring out over the crossing. She might’ve been explicating the murk, describing shapes no one else could see. Now, however, she firmed her mouth, that delicate hamper, and her eyes returned to Kit. One look and he knew. One unforgiving scowl, with her mouth shrunk and her hair ratted, and he could tell that this had nothing to do with wine.

“Please,” he said. “Don’t make me go.”

This wasn’t about wine, nor nerves either.

“So tell me, Kit,” she asked, “what have you been doing lately, before the bright lights of history?”

“Please. You know there was nothing between me and Zia.”

“What sort of shadow have you been casting? What kind of a man am I married to?”

Chapter 6

Boston was no longer a city. Its signature brick and stone, all the more durable-looking during a leaden Sunday in January, in fact only fronted for crackling runaway outbreaks of fire. Fire was chewing up the neighborhoods from within, behind walls, under floorboards. Overhead pipes were feeding the fire too, hiding the fire and also feeding the fire, overhead pipes as bad as anything out in Monsod. Kit saw the trouble happening all over town. He didn’t see the fire, but he saw the smoke. The elevated stretches on the MBTA showed him a winter-drab cityscape dotted everywhere with smoke. Around the misshapen blocks of Cambridgeport, the smoke flexed darkly out of chimneys; in the brown and beaten South End it leaked away disguised as condensation, blurring unfastenable windows. The arson wave had turned supernatural. It had turned into a citywide haunting, with some ghosts the color of flame and some the color of smoke. Yet it was always the same ghost. The same dead young man, a napalm flash behind stately New England fronts. The same dead young man, a gray shred in heavy sea air.

Likewise, the Globe wasn’t a newspaper. And this name “Viddich” in the weekend stories about Monsod, that too was only a convenience, a pass-through. Another spirit had gone to work in the name — the same spirit as hid crackling behind the walls, eviscerating Boston even as it scattered in gray from windows and chimney tops. The same dead young man reborn. Junior Rebes was in the smoke, and he was in the paper. He’d taken over every medium.

Including Kit himself. Saturday evening Kit had struggled through hours and hours of making connections, slogging from boat to bus to trolley on his way up from the island — yet by Sunday afternoon here he was, back on the public transportation. He was heading to Junior’s. In Kit’s kitchen, the mother had sounded as static-swamped and faraway as she had in the office. But she was out of church, alone, free to talk. Junior’s brother wasn’t home.

Her building opened at Kit’s touch. Within the street door’s lock housing something clicked haplessly, and then, with a squeal of half-frozen wood, the lobby stood open. That was a violation right there. Also the dinners starting off the hallways reeked of grime and carbon buildup, fire hazards even when the burners were off. Kit touched his neck. He needed to be taking notes, gathering better “deep background.” He needed to be working out what he was going to say to the mother — what he was doing here at all. But even in this way-under-code stairwell, Kit’s thinking remained mostly full of flashes from his own kitchen.

He’d been unable to finish even a single Globe story about Monsod. He couldn’t stomach more than three bites of an English muffin. He’d kept unplugging and replugging the phone, shaken first by the message-slips that still covered his kitchen table, then shaken all over again by the hope that Bette might have a change of heart. But first he’d gotten a crank call, a pervert so needy that he’d stayed on the line, breathing heavy, a second or two after Kit said hello. After that, a Globe freelancer. It was the same eager beaver, in fact, who’d gotten to Kit with the news from the Building Commission on Monday morning. The last man Kit wanted to hear from.

Kit had clung to the frayed and dangling ends of his Editor-in-Chief rigging. No comment. Legal considerations. No comment. The next time he’d replugged the phone he’d called Junior’s mother.

Now Kit went up her stairway with one arm extended, glove-tips brushing the wall. Exposed wiring, check. Weak rails and loose floorboards, check. Walkups like this, he forced himself to recall, were in most cases a legacy of the Curley years. That was James Michael Curley, four times the mayor, a grandmaster of grease. You could still find traces of Curley in the Kennedys and Tip O’Neill, in their winking and liquorish grandstanding. Curley had inspired … now what was that book? The Last Hurrah. The Last Hurrah, first a bestseller and then a movie starring Spencer Tracy. Well, why didn’t they try showing the flick in Mrs. Rebes’s hallway? The projector might provide some decent heat in here. And the place was dark enough.

Cue: Hoo, boy. Are we proud? Ayy: Curley signed off on the whole sick scheme. He was a homegrown Hitler. Torchlight rallies, election fraud, even his own Gestapo. Louisiana had Huey Long and Boston had Curley. Cue: And Hollywood had them both. Don’t tell me you never saw All the King’s Men. Ayy: This isn’t just about images. There are lives at stake. Cue: Oh there are? Lives at stake, right now, upstairs? Is that why you’re here? Ayy: (eyeing me, thin-lipped, black-gloved: his own Gestapo) Cue: Is that why you’re here? Ayy: Look, I’ll tell you a movie l never saw. l never saw that movie about a Boston alternative newspaper. Cue: Don’t be so sure, man.

*

The mother was some time answering his knock. She wore a house robe and sweater, no church getup, and he couldn’t get a decent grip on her viny hand.

“Why you frownin so, Missah Viddich? Ain’t you happy, be seein my home?”

Her sweater was a cardigan, roped at the neck with plastic beads. She had the same Native American touches as her son, the model’s cheekbones and lemon-wedge eyes.

“Missah Viddich, oh see. I’m glad I got all that frownin on my side.”

She noticed the frowning but not the bruises.

“I’m happy to be here,” Kit told her. “I am, really.”

“It’s a house of the Spirit, Missah Viddich. I got me the Spirit, in this house.”

“Please, Mrs. Rebes — I’m not a mister, okay? I’m just Kit.”

“Kit, oh course now, sure. Course.”

She took another long moment with his face, his bruises.

“Huh. See now girl, this here’s Kit. Kit. Well listen, Kit, why don’t we have ourselves a drop?”

“A drop? A drink?” He got his hands back in his pockets. “Mrs. Rebes, what I’ve got to tell you …” Aw, what had he been doing, back there on the stairway, on the MTA? Why didn’t he have more than the faintest notion of what to say?

“This isn’t going to be easy,” he finished lamely.

Her smile: a fish-like embittered swallowing that stretched her pouchy lower face into something squarish.

“A little drop’s just the thing, then,” she said. “Little drop, sure. Be good for those bruises too.”

She moved away, motioning him in.

A flimsy person, perhaps forty-five, drifting off in slippers. Kit suffered a chilly recollection of the smoke-ghosts he’d seen from the T. The front room here looked too busy for this tired counterwoman. Busy as a heap of dry kindling. The heart of the space was a drinker’s setup: soundless TV, padded rocker, dusty blanket, dusty lamp, and a half-empty bottle of Catawba Pink. Beyond that, a hip-high radiator hissed and ticked. Its valve was bent, spraying steam. The glow of the standing lamp actually diffracted into an indoor rainbow. A half-crescent of faint yellows and reds shimmered there, above the radiator’s shoulder. Also the curtain in that corner couldn’t keep still. The material was threaded with glitter, like a Hare Krishna wrap, so as the curtain rose and fell it sent sparks through the steam rainbow. Ghosts in every medium.

Kit, struggling to firm up his thinking, made a silent survey of the stereo equipment. Components from different systems, the stuff was top of the line. The tuner had a good dozen controls. The eight-track player had a toggle for boosting the bass. Now what sort of a violation was that? If a boy goes breaking and entering and the mother lets him keep his swag at home?

Plus: a fraying plaid sofa and a vinyl beanbag sitter patched with duct tape. A ‘50s-style clock set in a helmsman’s wheel, way too large for the place (looked like it belonged on the Wood’s Hole Ferry). Though meant for the wall, it sat propped in one corner. Not that the mother had neglected the walls. Everywhere hung posters and cards and calendar cut-offs. Like mother, like son: the subjects couldn’t have been more different — Mrs. Rebes went in for religious stuff — but the decoration was every bit as compulsive and garish as in Junior’s closet. Zia Mirini might have wanted a couple of these pieces, like the portrait of Martin Luther King. He had a halo of Memphis motel neon. Kit also found a call for making King’s birthday a holiday.

Every scrap and stick was dusty, brittle, dry. The whole place could burst into flames at the first wrong-way spark. And extension cords littered the floor. Stringy brown cords from Woolworth’s made clumsy double x’s with whiplike orange models from Roto Rooter. A cord even ran out the room’s farther archway, into the cheese-colored kitchen. Kit couldn’t find the outlet.

“Thass right, take a good look.”

Mrs. Rebes waited before him, holding out a drink.

“Sorry,” he said. “Sorry.”

“Nothin to apologize for, Missah Viddich. Kit. Ain’t no one else ever cared to take a look.”

He accepted the glass, a formal stemmed piece.

“I try to keep it pretty in here, see. All the colors, oh see.” She’d resumed her square smile. “Can’t blame a mama with two boys to raise if she tryin to keep some colors, the place they call home.”

Two boys. “How’s, ah, how’s the brother taking it, Mrs. Rebes? Does he come by, ever? Does he help out?”

“Oh.” She drifted back to the Catawba Pink. “Louie-Louie, you know. He still a baby.”

They drank. Sitting, the mother rocked with head back, murmuring a hymn-like melody that Kit might have recognized.

“My Junior,” she said, or sang. “Finally found me a man who cares about my Junior.”

Her eyes were shut but the skin of the lids rippled. Her eyes moved, seeing nonetheless. Kit thought of the psychic in Brookline, the woman Bette had visited.

“Preacher told me I’d find someone,” she sang. “Preacher told me, there’d come someone see my boy for a hero.”

“Have you been talking with your preacher?” Kit asked.

“Oh now. Ain’t today Sunday?”

“But you’re seeing him, ah, on a regular basis? You’ve got some support?”

“Got me the best support of all, Kit. Got me the Spirit.”

“Yes. That’s, that’s good.” He tried to find a comfortable place on the sofa. “But you do have, ah, people to talk to? You do have friends or people at the shop?”

“At the shop? Hoo, now. Half the time ain’t nobody even over there but those itty-bitty college girls come in all dressed in black.”

He got a deeper swallow of the sweet liquor. The reminder of his wife, her and her psychic, had only thrown him off that much more. His thinking had half-fallen into the worn grooves of speeches he’d prepared — not for this mother — but for Bette.

“Missah Viddich, Kit. You know I already got this talkin-to from the preacher. You didn’ come here, now, just to give me this talkin-to?”

Bette there’s nothing I can do with the paper … nothing with the paper or on TV or in front of some kind of Grand Jury investigation … that’s not going to prove anything Bette … that’s not me.

*

He wound up hearing about Junior’s funeral. About the plans, rather. The mother’s church was hard-line, a House of Zion, but the preacher was a true Christian. He’d accept the prodigal into his house. “We got some folks kinda high-tone in the congregation, you know,” the mother said. “Some folks think they superstars. Got Afros on they heads but don’t know they black in their heads.”

Still, the funeral would have to wait. For now the state couldn’t release Junior’s body.

“Police.” Sour-faced, she drained her glass. “Police come and told me.”

“They need his body?”

“My boy dead, and even that ain’t enough for ‘em. They want his bones too.”

Kit touched his neck.

“Oh see, they want an autopsy. They got some kinda investigation goin.”

“I realize that,” Kit said. “They’ll probably have, ah, I realize there’s going to be …”

“Investigation, hoo sure. Investigation, my skinny high-yellow butt.” She dolloped herself a fresh glass. “They gonna take my Junior’s bones and they gonna trick ‘em up to look like whatever they want. They gonna make my Junior do they own slick-ass song and dance.”

“Mrs. Rebes, I’ll be there too. I mean at the investigation, the Grand Jury, whatever. I’ll be part of it.” The wine was so sugary, the sofa so full of dust.

“Damn right you will. Kit, I thank Jesus you’re here. Thank Jesus I found somebody see my Junior for a hero.”

“Ah, I don’t know about heroes, Mrs. Rebes.”

“Oh see. You a hero all by your own self.”

“No, Mrs. Rebes. No, please. We have to talk.”

“Well we talkin, ain’t we?” Her eyes were open again. “I’m talkin to you, Kit, I’m not talkin to nobody from the Globe. None of those others.”

“Yes, thanks, but—”

“Those others, they keep callin you know, they keep tryin. I won’t talk to a one of em.”

“That doesn’t matter any more, Mrs. Rebes.” Kit couldn’t seem to sit up straight, in this sofa. “It’s not about my paper getting a scoop on the other papers. Not any more.”

“Course it ain’t about gettin no silly scoop. It’s about my boy.”

The mother, Kit noticed then, had a halo. He’d sunk so deep into the sofa that her head appeared framed by the rainbow in the radiator spray behind her. A halo, like Martin on her wall, enhanced by the trembling Hare Krishna curtain.

“My boy,” she said, “wasn’t no goddamn homo.”

Kit couldn’t sit up. The sofa lamed him and the mother left him even weaker; he hadn’t scratched the surface of understanding her. Mrs. Rebes explained that rumors of Junior’s homosexuality were what really had put off the congregation at the House of Zion. “You remember what he did to that man, I mean what they say he did. To that white man at the robbery, you know what I’m sayin?”

For some time before the robbery, Mrs. Rebes explained, there’d been talk like that going around. Talk about Junior and other men. “White men specially, oh see.” Kit finished his wine, trying to think, but at once the mother was at his side again, pouring him another. She seemed to be saying — the sickly odor of the Catawba Pink distracted him — that people at the House of Zion could forgive dealing drugs and murder, but never turning tricks with white men.

“There’s other good boys wound up sellin’ soda,” she said, drifting back to her own drink. “Other children in that congregation, they wound up holding a murder weapon.”

“I don’t remember any of this in the tapes,” Kit said. “The tapes you gave me, they were about Monsod.”

“Well I din give you all the tapes.”

Settling once more under her halo, with her cardigan off her shoulders, the woman seemed suddenly twenty years younger. She must have been exotic once, Vogue-ish.

“I couldn give you em all.” She must have been a long cool drink of coffee and cream, once, with a loose walk and her son’s triangular face. “Oh no, Kit. I had to stick with my story.”

“Your story,” Kit said.

“My boy’s story. He was a hero.”

Kit choked down more of the wine, working to swallow. Just the fact that the mother had been careful about what she’d shown him, that alone was hard to handle. Kit had to remind himself, as the Catawba Pink scorched his gullet, that everybody with any part in this business had been careful. Himself included. He’d cooked up his amalgam, his “Manny.” But Kit knew who he’d done it for, the readers he’d been trying to impress. He had some idea, too, who Mirini and Croftall had been trying to protect. But who was Mrs. Rebes worried about? Who, with this haloed fussiness about her son’s choice of sex partners?

He knew one thing anyway — the woman was a believer. She imagined crowds surrounding her, a whole generation in the trenches alongside her. A woman like Mrs. Rebes had been the backbone of every rally for voting rights, every long march against segregation. In the trenches with the SCLC. She kept Martin on the wall, Martin and a hand-lettered poster calling for a day to honor him. The woman had committed herself to something holy, a Movement.

“I raised my Junior,” she was saying, “in a house that had the Spirit.”

Was she a dying breed? It was ten years since Martin had gone down, and her Junior seemed like vivid proof of the difference those years had made. Junior might not have read Jean Genet or Eldridge Cleaver, but he knew their scam, the imprisoned genius. His cassettes, the few his mother had let Kit listen to, would never have been so grotesque and thorough if the young con hadn’t carried around some media-enlarged sense of himself. Been to the end of every line there is. If Junior were in his mother’s position, today, he’d have had 60 Minutes there. And the difference had nothing to do with intelligence, or with growing up more in the street. Nothing so simple. Mrs. Rebes knew what kind of a dump she lived in — when she was sober, at least. She probably even knew the words that professors and social workers used to describe her choices, clay-heavy words like urban migration and church constituency. Yet for a woman like her, unlike for her son, all of that was unreal appearance. What mattered most wasn’t whether Junior’s cell was up to code, but whether his heart was pure. What mattered was his place among the saints.

The rest was nothing but words, words, words, for a woman like Mrs. Rebes. It was the white man’s way of taking far too seriously run-of-the-mill problems like loneliness, improper wiring, or trouble with the law.

“Plenty of good children,” she repeated, “wind up holding a murder weapon.”

Kit nodded slowly.

“The Lord sees the heart,” Mrs. Rebes said.

“I want to know,” Kit said, “why this happened.”

“Well, you want to understand about the child, you got to start with the father. Oh, see. You want to find out about Junior’s father, you got to go down to the Triple-X movies.”

“Mrs. Rebes, please.” Once more Kit struggled to straighten his spine. “I came here because, because …”

“You goin to tell me about my boy, ain’t you?”

They blinked at each other, upright in sagging chairs.

“You got somethin to say about seein my boy, down in Monsod the other day. Ain’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Well like I say, Kit. You do like I say before you try to tell me about my own flesh and blood. You take yourself down to those movie houses, you go down the Combat Zone and you watch one of them Triple-X movies. And you find them kinky white bitches hang out round there. Forgive me Jesus for callin them by their name. You go find them bitches my husband liked.”

He understood her better and better, but it made his heart baggier and baggier. Already Kit could see the miserable intimacy that had claimed her. A Movement woman with fine looks, a covenant woman with an easy walk, of course she’d fallen prey to a man utterly wrong for her. “He was from Cuba, you know, big man from Cuba and he said he couldn never go back. Lord, the evil that comes when a person loses touch with their home.” By the time Junior was learning the alphabet, his father was bringing home whores. Kit saw the bad news coming, saw it clearly way up the track, but it hurt when it hit just the same.

“The man had them kinky white bitches,” the mother said, “right in my own bed.”

“Mrs. Rebes—”

“And he used to make them bitches tell Junior about it, oh see. He needed that, see. You understand what I’m sayin?”

Kit understood, he got the whole sorry picture — the boy made to sit and listen to whores who told him his old man was a stud, and the out-of-whack father who needed to hear it. “The man paid them to tell my Junior, you understand, Kit. That was how he got himself, you know.”

Kit had to stand. Underfoot the extension cords scrunched, calling to mind the winter sand on the Cottage beach, more bad news. By then Mrs. Rebes had begun speaking in falsetto. She was mimicking what the hookers used to tell Junior. “Little boy, you know your Daddy’s a superstar? Little boy, your Daddy puts me into outer space.” Kit turned towards the cold windows and found himself surprised by the light behind the glass, the sounds of daytime from the street. The Krishna curtain glowed, and outside children called between the stoops: Yo, Tay-shah. It had felt like way past dark.

“Louie-Louie just a baby then,” the mother was saying, back in her normal voice. “Jesus, I thank you every day. That devil husband of mine left for Hollywood before he could get his claws into Louie-Louie.”

“Hollywood?” Kit asked.

“Where he goin to get himself more kinky white bitches than out there? That devil made for Hollywood.”

She went for the wine again. Kit, looking down on her now, saw the mechanicality of it. Screw-cap off, bottle up, bottle down, screw-cap on.

“Mrs. Rebes, please. Take it easy.”

“Take it easy?” The screw-cap must’ve made each drink seem like the last. “Kit, that man was the one behind everythin evil. What he did was the first beginnin of all the bad news.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No way to tell about him without gettin sick.”

“Sorry.”

Kit, shifting his wineglass, put a hand on her shoulder. She jumped as if he’d stabbed her. She came out of the chair, catapulted out, moving with more straightlimbed control than he’d have thought possible. She whipped around to face him, the cardigan flying off her shoulders. Her eyes flared.

“Don’t you give me no pat on the back,” she said. “Missah. Missah Viddich. You better not be comin here just to give me some little ol pat on the back.”

Kit drew in his hands, closing them around his glass. A moment’s silence was all it took to remember gripping the wrench, facing Junior.

“There been evil in my life, oh see. Evil in my boy’s life, both my boys’ life. Ain’t about no pat on the back.”

He couldn’t loosen his grip, couldn’t lower his arms.

“Whatever story you think you gon get from me, it ain’t shit if it ain’t got the evil.”

*

Zia see, my basement boys and girls. Zia see what makes the guy a tourist. Our Scandie pseudo. What he was, was back in the ’60s. A believer.

Makes him a tourist, yeah. Makes him like something out of a wax museum. Because it’s about the ’70s, these days. We prefer a different brand of trouble, in the ’70s. We don’t buy that Movement guff, times they are a-changin’. We don’t believe the believer. When it comes to counterculture, we’ve got a better idea.

None of that, Viddich. None of that now, and no crying either. Ain’t about no crying. Yesterday on the bus from Woods Hole, he’d still been crying, hiding in the Trailways lavatory, whimpering first Junior’s name and then his wife’s. But today in the mother’s easy-to-burn living room, it was out of the question. The woman was three-quarters drunk, yes, but the rest of her had loaded up on even stronger stuff — on lofty dreams and bloody murder. Back at the coffee shop where she worked, back when Kit had been trying to pump her for information, she’d looked so helpless, string-fingered. Now he was the helpless. Fingers knotted and all eyes.

Kit went backwards along the stereo units, eyeing the eight-tracks. Commodores, Tavares, Parliaments/Funkadelics. He kept going, slow-footed, around the sofa and back to his seat. The mother circled where she stood, watching. She was still spitting bile. “Whatever story you think you get from me, you better have the father my boy got. Father who got off on havin his own child watch.”

Those Movement bozos, I mean, talk about living in the demimonde. Did you ever catch their “sins of flesh” act? Did you ever hear them talk about sex? Or try to talk about it, anyway. Whenever they tried to talk S-E-X (couldn’t say the word by its name, oh see), in fact they talked L–I-E-S. L–I-E-S, my boys and girls. They were about as trustworthy as the Father in the confession booth — the one with his hand inside his robe. Old Martin Luther King himself, oh see, he tomcatted around. Preached the brotherhood and chased the sisterhood. Like the Father in the confession booth, breathing heavy and asking about your nastiest secrets.

Stop it, Viddich. Kit, resettling into the sofa, caught a glimpse of the kitchen. The faded enamel was flagged with more cards and posters.

“My Junior couldn help himself,” the mother was saying. “Doin the white boys, he couldn help himself. Not with a father like he got.”

“Aw, Mrs. Rebes,” Kit said, “you shouldn’t trust me with your story.”

She broke off, her square mouth ajar.

“You shouldn’t,” Kit said. “I’m not the right one to hear it and I’m not the right one to tell everyone else.”

She made some response, soft-spoken. Kit wasn’t looking. His eyes on the kitchen, he wondered how long it had been since either of them had eaten.

“I’m not like you,” he said, “and I’m not honest enough. Mrs. Rebes, I’m one of the landlords.”

Again he couldn’t be sure what she said. Some kind of question, maybe you a landlord? Mostly he heard the radiator, tocking and hissing as it cranked up more heat under ill-fitting windows. And he still hadn’t taken off his coat.

“My people are landlords,” he told her. “They own a lot of property, back in Minnesota.”

“Minne-sota?” He heard that. “Shoo. They even got trouble out there?”

Kit knew what she was doing: Mama fix, Mama comfort.

“They even got black people, out there?”

“Oh God. You’re making me go through high school again.” He never could say “prep school,” silly reverse snobbery.

“How’s that, Kit?”

“Hoo, boy.” He knew what she was doing, but he couldn’t begin to say what he was doing. “In high school I did all this reading about, you know. About the black experience. I figured I had to catch up. Like Nobody Knows My Name, for instance, I think I read that six times.” The time has come, God knows, for us to examine ourselves, but we can only do that if we can free ourselves from the myth of America.

The mother made some new reassuring noise.

“Listen, Mrs. Rebes, that’s not the half of it. In those days I wrote poetry. I wrote protest poetry.”

She poured another slow and echoing dollop of wine. Kit’s heart grew baggier.

“Poetry,” he said. “It was lies, Mrs. Rebes. L–I-E-S.

“I grew up with my uncles,” he said. “My father died in Korea, his plane blew up. And Mrs. Rebes, you should see the ranch, my uncles’ ranch. My mother and I lived in the Big House for twelve years and we hardly made a dent in the place. I’ll tell you. If somebody was coming to the ranch for the first time, for instance we got a lot of sales reps from John Deere or International Harvester, and if they were stopping by for the first time — when my mother or I showed up, they’d look at us like, ‘Where’d you come from?’ Think about it. Such a big well-oiled machine, Mom and I were practically invisible.”

“Your Daddy’s plane just blew up?”

Her voice was a whisper, but the words were clear. She stood close, all of a sudden; her house robe almost brushed his tucked-together knees. When had that happened? Kit watched her refill his glass.

“I grew up with my uncles,” he said. “Not that they weren’t good to me, my uncles.”

His gullet was tightening. Ordinarily, tears would be coming. “They were good guys, sure. My uncles taught me everything, anything I asked, and God knows I was always asking. I was always after someone about giving me a lesson, Mrs. Rebes.” He eased his throat open with a long drink.

“But I remember him bringing my mom flowers,” he said. “My father I mean. My mom says there’s no way I could, but I do. I do. I remember a kind of beach-blue orchid, I mean a blue like you find sometimes in the stones on a beach. Aw, I know what that sounds like, I know blue is blue — but you never forget your first honest-to-God orchids, Mrs. Rebes. Your first orchids, the smell, the color, you never forget. It’s like when you learned to read. It’s like the first time you read something and you know you got what was in there, and you know nobody helped you and it was the truth.”

He drank. There was a feathery touch at his hairline, the mother fingering his stitches.

“See, that was my father, bringing flowers,” Kit went on. “My uncles would never bring flowers. They were good, oh sure, they were both good guys and one of them always had women around. But this kind of thing we’re talking about now, this kind of sweetness bringing flowers, that wasn’t them.”

The woman murmured something, over his head. About time she noticed he was hurt.

“You know there’s a picture in one of the albums,” he said, “a shot of my mother and father holding a bunch of orchids. Arm in arm, over these bright fresh black-and-white orchids. It’s ah, it’s a very professional shot.

“And I realize the mind can play tricks on you, Mrs. Rebes. I know what a photo can do. I realize it might be the reason I remember the orchids, even the color, the blue. It could all be because of the photo. Hoo, boy. But I’ll tell you, Mrs. Rebes, those two loved each other. My mother, my father. They loved each other, that’s the whole truth, and it doesn’t matter if there’s a photo. It doesn’t matter how the mind can play tricks on you. I mean, my father was an ace.”

Kit, the glass at his lips, found himself sucking air. The thing was empty and the mother was poised to pour again.

“Seven confirmed kills between September and January, listen, the man was an ace.” He used the glass to put an exclamation point; the mother couldn’t reach it. “He was in the same squadron as Ted Williams. Ted Williams, Mrs. Rebes.”

What was that thumping, out in the building’s stairwell?

“Nobody shot him down, my father,” Kit said. “Those old Sabres, you know, they could be temperamental. It just blew up in mid-air. You better believe I know all about it, I’ve read every one of his letters. Every night he wrote home, and for a while there I think I had every one of them memorized.”

Was that just somebody coming upstairs? Some man, in boots, stomping upstairs?

“A war hero in love,” Kit looked towards the door. “That was my father. A war hero with orchids in his hand.”

Of course: the heavy tread came to halt outside the Rebes doorway. Kit flashed on motorcycle boots, a cop, a warrant.

“A man,” Kit began, but then the door opened and he was on his feet, once more making fists around his glass. Aw, come on. What kind of trouble was he expecting? The newcomer had a key — he was huge, but he had a key. Even the guy’s biker boots looked small on him. His fatigue jacket was open, his shirt collar open, and he went around bareheaded despite the weather. He had a kinky beard and a lot of hair. Just standing there he made the pinups on the walls flutter.

“What the hey’s going on here, Mama?”

Mama? The newcomer’s eyes were young, quick, worried.

“Who’s the boyfriend, Mama?”

Once more Kit didn’t hear the mother. It took energy enough to catch up with the change of mood — to yank his mind out of a cloud of fragments over Korea and instead get a fix on this baby brother, this Louie-Louie. The man had a good forty pounds on Junior. He had the Caribbean blood, the father’s side of the family. The beard was Castro. So was the shirt-stretching chest, the cinnamon-butter skin. Beside her younger son, the mother seemed to darken.

“You the reporter.” Louie-Louie met Kit’s stare.

The mother made introductions, but Kit didn’t offer his hand. Anyway the brother’s hands were full. He’d come in carrying a bundle of magazines, four or five slick things that caught the glare. Reading material for the invalid?

“The reporter, yeah,” he said. “So what you going to do for us?”

It must have dumped another spoonful of gall into Junior’s stew, growing up with a baby brother twice his size.

“You hear me, man? You told our story, you dig?” At least Louie-Louie hadn’t been drinking; his breath smelled of gum. “This is my family, man, the people I love, you dig? And you used us. You used us for your own gain.”

“Oh Louie-Louie,” the mother said. “You got no right.”

“You got our story, man, and now what do we get?”

“Oh see, how you talk. You know he din even use our real names.”

“You think you can just come in and get our story and then take off, man? That the way you reporters think?”

How many times did Kit have to hear this question? Leo, Junior, Zia, Bette — now Louie-Louie — how many times?

“You come in and get what you want and then you scoot. That the way it works?”

“Oh see. Oh Luis. I’m afraid I’m goin to have to apologize now. Louie-Louie, you soundin like a baby.”

“Mama why — why don’t you understand? This guy ain’t no friend of ours.”

“Missah Viddich, I do apologize.” She went on staring up her son, without so much as a glance at Kit. “You goin to have to excuse us now, Missah Viddich.”

“Ma-ma. This guy, he ain’t no kind of friend, you dig? I still can’t believe you gave him the letters.”

“Those letters would’ve stayed in a closet without this man. Junior’s letters would have stayed in a closet, and Junior would’ve stayed in a closet. My boy was a hero and nobody would’ve never knowed.”

“Aw, Mama.”

“That’s how it woulda been without this man.”

“Mama, please.” The brother broke into a whine. “Can we just talk about this? Just you and me, huh, please?”

“Way I remember, Louie-Louie, even you didn’t want to listen to those letters. Even you didn’t want nothin to do with your brother.”

*

Aw, my basementarians. You know how those ‘60s relics see Good Guys versus Bad? You know how they see, say, an argument between a man and woman? The way they see Good versus Bad, it’s totally a fairy-tale. Like, a big burly Gl grunt and a wispy weak peasant woman. Or like, a Southern sheriff in a shirt too small for his chest and a grandma on her first Freedom March, wizened but brave.

Oh see. They blind, these ‘60s guys. They soundin like a baby.

Kit had at last let go of his glass. He’d retreated towards the door; he knew a family squabble when he heard one. The mother was showing her sharper corners again. Her glare imperial, her gestures sober, Mrs. Rebes backed her remaining son towards the kitchen archway. When she snatched the glossy magazines from his hand (“You insultin this man bringin this trash, this man run an honest paper”), Kit may have glimpsed a bright flyer from Alcoholics Anonymous. But Louie-Louie wasn’t going to get his mom to look at any flyers. Not today. The big kid was teetering backwards, having trouble on the extension cords. His chest and shoulders had shrunk. No, the squabble was no mystery — and Kit’s side had won already. The mother worked fast. Kit had been sprung already, given an excuse to go, and it had happened without his putting in a word in his own defense. He’d only emptied his soft white-boy hands and drifted once more into the cold by the doorway out. Cold, on his back: the worm.

His idea had seemed so simple, so right. He would go to the woman and tell her. But he’d wound up off by himself, talking to himself. He’d wound up shaming himself with the things he’d found to talk about. How had he ever gotten started on his father? How, in a room where Junior’s ghost burned in every nook and cranny? He’d found no way to free the unhappy spirit, to start it speaking honestly. Instead new ghosts had gotten in the way: the skeletons in Kit’s closet, the hero the mother imagined, the looming Grand Jury. Too many ghosts, too much confusion. He couldn’t even set the story straight for the one person who should hear it first.

“I ain’t done with you yet!” Louie-Louie called suddenly, across the room.

The brother’s features remained powerful, though his glare had lost something. “Yeah, you,” he said. “You still got a lot to answer for.”

“Huh,” the mother said. “Little boys got to play.”

One last time, Kit looked around the overcrowded room. The Krishna curtain flapped and winked over a radiator making more noise than ever, doing its best against the deepening cold, pumping out rainbows and halos.

Chapter 7

Monday morning Corinna beat the process server to the office, but not by much. Kit was the first one in. His empty apartment drove him away, with no more than coffee and an unbuttered slice of toast to go on. Then came Corinna, heaving a big, body-length sigh to see her boss once more at his desk. Naturally, Zia arrived last. The writer showed up yawning and stomping off boot-slush, a good three quarters of an hour after the process server had gotten Kit’s signature and gone. But in the meantime Kit had said nothing about the paper. When Zia got to the office he still hadn’t explained to Corinna — to anyone — what he’d decided to do.

The process server made Kit nervous just to look at him. The man wasn’t forty yet, not much older than Kit himself really, but already he appeared to be a boozer. His pouchy, florid face called to mind vodka breakfasts. It called to mind Ad and Amby out in Monsod. Mechanical over his clipboard and mail-packet, he was with the sheriff s office. He was serving a subpoena.

Kit took the packet back to his desk, behind the reflections afloat in his glass walls.

NOTES: phone con. Asa Popkin, att’y.

(Monday AM)

criminal subpoena—2 kinds of cases, civil & criminal. Misdemeanors etc. = civil; felonies etc. more serious = criminal. Thus crim. sub., subpoena to “criminal case,” but not necess’ly for “criminals.” Name misleading. SOURCE: Asa Popkin, jr. partner at Steyes family att’ys.

EXAMPLE: Kit gets first look at papers (note hands v. spidery and task-specific as he removes & unfolds), & then K says to Corinna, Relax, relax. Nobody’s charging me with anything.

Grand jury—State-level investigations into possible crim. wrongdoing. Note possible wrongdoing: G.J. investigates, only. Cannot itself prosecute or convict.

EX.: K says to C, Relax. They just want testimony.

— Note crim. wrongdoing: G.J. covened only where felony indictments expected. District Attorney initiates. Crim. sub. required. Wording of document carries harsher implications of “crim.,” suggesting 1), hierarchy of lords & vassals, 2), finality of exorcism: In the name of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts you are hereby commanded to appear…

EX.: Looking over subp., C reveals Cosmo-Girl nerves, touching hair & belt. Says, K, you better talk to your lawyer.

Officer’s return—Receipt for papers served. Server must be officer of court; s/he delivers original plus one copy of crim. sub., & person served signs & returns copy. Note keeping original = closeness to Source, to Absolutes.

EX.: C says, K, call your lawyer. Call the guy. You told me when I signed the contract that he was a good one.

—“Off. Ret.” also name of folk song? Heard on lan & Sylvia album? Carolyn Hester? Tune comes to mind, keening Highlands thing.

EX: Trying to recall K retreats to desk, & w/ subp. in lap stares out over front cubicles. Hospital spaces. Numbed soldier returned from war. If K. called Bette now, if he reached her out on island, would she sing it for him, “Off. Ret.”? Memory: B.’s salt-raw soprano

True bill of indictment—Actual criminal charges, brought following G.J. G.J. not bound by same rules court of law; hearsay allowable, cross-examination by several officers at a time, badgering & entrapment of witn’s. Whole purpose of G.J. to generate indictment. Note dunning reminders of authority:

True bill. Authority, sanctity, ultimacy.

!—Strongly recc’d have att’y present at G.J.

!—Strongly recc’d meet w/ att’y beforehand & establish testimony.

EX.: Pop’s intensity recalls Law maniacs at Harvard, all-nighters all exam week. Pop reports rumors of “tough” G.J., speculation in yesterday’s Globe. Says, I saw your name in the paper, too, K. You were in there all weekend. Speaking to you as my client, K., I’m not sure that this delay in coming forward will cast your testimony in the best light.

Gag order, Shield law—Aspects of G.J. pertaining journalists, media.

— Gag o. judicial order to keep all testimony & exchanges w/in G.J. confidential. Not usual case. In usual case only materials produced by G.J. itself are confid’l. Only court recorder’s notes etc. confid’l. Anyone else free to speak, publish.

— Gag o. must be requested from circuit court, & judge doesn’t always agree. D. A. who wants set up G.J. quickly won’t bother.

EX.: K nodding at phone, trying sound like he knows what he’s doing: Oh yeah, the Gag o. I don’t see anything like that here.

— Shield law journalist’s right of confidentiality, re. sources. Even before G.J., journ’t. may omit details or refuse to answer when source’s safety in question. Mass. sh. law oldest in country. Colonial.

Applies esp. if source currently incarcerated (squealers die). Also family members of incarcerated source, themselves out of prison, considered vulnerable.

Re. Carlos “Jr.” Rebes, self, Sh. law irrelevant. But, Pop says, if you as my client were in touch with his family, and if in your judgment his family is facing possible abuse or serious harm.

!—Sea L can publish (see Gag o.).

!—K. can remain silent (see Sh. law).

ABUSE OR SERIOUS HARM—

EX.: K makes app’t to meet Pop @ lunch. 12:30. Eyes stray to table teepees up over desk, paper V’s taped to glass wall: Jackalope from Wyoming, etc. Cartoon paper, picked up when younger & travelling alone.

*

“Is this about the subpoena?” Corinna asked. “Is there something in that subpoena, making you do this?”

Kit kept shaking his head. By now Corinna and Zia had asked the same question, in one form or another, two or three times apiece.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Corinna kept pressing. “What do they want from you? State of Massachusetts, Grand Jury. Big shots.”

“Corinna, it’s not like I’m telling you the Grand Jury doesn’t scare me. It scares me, no question. You saw me in there.”

“Yeah but that’s just what I’m saying, Kit. You sit in your office all shrunk up over the phone, shrunk up massaging your neck — and then you come out and lock the door and say to put the message on the phone. You say, ‘Guys, we need to talk.’ Kit, I mean, what’s that Grand Jury got on you?”

“Aw, please. I’m not a criminal.”

“Kit, listen — I know about things like this. I know a Grand Jury, sometimes it’s got a rule that says no one can talk. No one can say anything about what’s going on.”

Kit hoped he looked as impressed as he felt. But once more he shook his head.

“Kit, I mean. These people and their subpoena, aren’t they the same people who said you could go down there in the first place? Said you could go down to Monsod and get yourself all banged up.” Corinna ran her glossy fingernails down one side of her face. “It’s the same people, running this Grand Jury. Same big shots.”

“Corinna. If you want to blame someone, blame me. This is my call. My decision.”

“Kit. You really want to close the paper?”

“I want to suspend publication. For the time being.”

“Well what’s that mean? How long?”

“Ah, till I’ve finished my testimony on Monsod.”

Really, Viddich? Was there really some moment of clearance out there? A point at which all this outrageous fortune settled back down into manageable office ethics — back to sea level? Kit hadn’t thought it through, or not beyond what he’d just managed to put into words. And the woman could tell. Corinna kept on complaining, her accent thickening. As her body language picked up the shoulders of her dress slipped, exposing her bra straps. She swung round in her chair, facing Zia.

“What about you, you got nothing to say? You on some drugs today, girl?”

The writer sat sunk behind the bright patchwork of her desktop. Chin down, face soft, she didn’t answer. Zia had said next to nothing in fact since Kit had come out of his office, out of note-taking actual and imaginary, and turned the lock on the hallway door. Now inside the macho collar of her jacket, of course a black leather jacket, Zia’s pout appeared to have grown more fleshy, younger. Girl. Kit remembered her in the headscarf at the Sons of Columbus. Thursday night — ow. And yet, nutty as he’d been to run out there, at the Sons of Columbus he’d wound up accomplishing something. He’d won Zia’s trust, he’d seen her secrets. Running around out of his mind, he’d done some good. But now what about today, when he was trying to do good?

“Zia,” Kit suggested, “give Rachel a call. Rachel at the Globe. She’ll be glad to hear you’re getting time off.”

Her look might have lightened up, Kit couldn’t be sure. Corinna wouldn’t let him alone. “Kit,” she said, “I don’t think you thought this through. I mean, what am I supposed to tell people when they call?” Good question. The phone had rung twice during their conversation already, and the speaker on the message machine could only be turned down so far. Twice Kit had needed to raise his voice, working against the electronic rumble of puzzled callers. Worse, he’d told the women that they’d both remain on salary. Both of them, yes, though he knew the bank balance couldn’t support it. He’d be broke by Valentine’s Day. But how could he tell Corinna that he was going to keep sending her a paycheck and not do the same for Zia?

Now came a knock on the door. A knock, something else he hadn’t considered. The way he’d been thinking — if you could call it that — the demands of carrying around the hottest story in Boston would be vaporized as soon as he closed the paper. Vaporized, poof, Star Wars. Kit thought of Junior’s father, run off to Hollywood.

The knock sounded again, more loudly.

“What about this guy, Kit?” Corinna asked. “Should I get this or not?”

At the door was Rick DeMirris, frowning at Kit’s bruises as he unzipped a parka patched with duct tape. He’d brought a list of the Monsod contractors. “The list, you know. The bad guys.” Freelancer’s initiative — no wonder Rick was Kit’s favorite. And even now Kit couldn’t resist a look. There between the front room’s partitions, still on his feet, he searched Rick’s list till found the name he wanted. Joints, fittings, misc. plumbing: Mirinex, Inc. Kit had been on to a story, this time. He’d been on to something people deserved to know, and something for which other people deserved to get spanked. It looked like he was still learning about the power of that story. It had a life of its own, regardless of what Kit might do with his shoestring newspaper.

Corinna bent over the phone’s answering machine, Zia pulled out a messed-up legal pad. Kit took DeMirris back to his private office, hoping that in there the bad news might go over more quietly.

No such luck. “Christ, Kit, you locked the door on me,” the freelancer erupted. “Can’t you at least tell me why?”

Kit gestured at the legal paper on his desk … you are hereby commanded … “There are larger issues.”

“Larger issues?” Rick yanked on his sweater. “Kit — the next issue of Sea Level, now that’s a larger issue.”

You had to admire the guy. A card-carrying member of Agitators Anonymous. He’d come in with his list, terrific initiative, and he wanted his byline. It didn’t help any when Kit reminded Rick that he still had the piece on the new MBTA station. They’ve unearthed some interesting stuff down there, Rick … it didn’t help. A few old bones under the city floor were nothing compared to what had turned up out at Monsod. Rick strode round the office arms akimbo, very Greek, and one of his quick, angry connections gave Kit an idea. Like Corinna, the freelancer pointed out that the subpoena made no mention of a gag order. “Man, you can publish,” he said. “You’re clean.” With that, Kit began thinking of Forbes Croftall.

Croftall too could come out clean, in an open Grand Jury. Not that the Senator was holding the strings, here — the investigation came under a different jurisdiction — and not that Kit knew just what the Senator was up to, yet. But doing without a gag order seemed to serve the man’s purposes. It seemed of a piece with sending Kit out to the penitentiary in the first place. It fit with CYA, looking good for the papers.

Struggling to make sense of it, struggling with working-world speed, Kit shepherded Rick out of his office. Sighing, he repeated that his mind was made up. Finally the freelancer played to the two women. “Kit,” he said loudly, “I’ve got a feeling I’m saying goodbye for the last time.” Aw, Rick. For the remainder of the morning Kit set himself up at an empty desk out front. No gag order at Sea Level: he was out where everyone could take their best shot. He would have made his callbacks from Corinna’s phone if the switching from line to line hadn’t proved so clumsy. Ma Bell was such a stick-in-the-mud monopoly, slow to make changes. Kit returned to his office but left the door open, as he worked through one no-comment after another.

He’d been putting this off for days, he hadn’t touched the memos on his kitchen table — yet compared to what he’d faced already this morning, making the calls came easy. What little he could say felt routine. Even the tone of voice was a painless charade, apologetic but businesslike. These weren’t people who knew him, or knew him more than a handshake’s worth, and didn’t he have injuries? Didn’t he have a lawyer? Soon Kit’s eyes wandered back to the list of prison contractors, lying across the subpoena on his desk.

Mirinex, Inc. If the paper had exposed its own publisher, the next issue really would have been its last. It would’ve gone out in a blaze of glory.

Topsy Otaka came by, with fresh Monsod sketches. Kit particularly liked an M.C. Escher parody — these days you saw the man’s stuff everywhere — a manipulation of perspective in which tattooed cons and suit-and-tie politicians chased each other in circles within thick prison walls. He showed the piece to Zia, propping it on the halfwall before her desk. This got something out of her at least. It got her to laugh, though darkly, full of smoke. She’d been puffing away, bent close over her legal pad, scribbling hard. As Kit stood before her he got a taste of her Marlboro, and he could pick out a word or two of her bird-like scrawl. “Oedipus,” “basement.” But when Zia spoke, she spoke to Topsy. Abruptly she told her friend about Kit’s decision for the next issue.

Topsy, open-mouthed, blinking, reached for her forearm. Kit wound up writing her a check on the spot, a kill fee.

The one person he didn’t seem to have hurt was Tad Close. The Circulation Manager came in looking happier than any of them, fashionable even, in matching beige turtleneck and mud-brown corduroys. The first issue, he announced, had already sold out both at the kiosks on Arlington Street and over in Harvard Square. “We’re big!” Tad said. “M-tellin-ya!” At least that gave Kit an opening: Yeah Tad now people want to read about Monsod but I’m afraid … Yet Kit’s news had the Circulation Manager looking, if anything, even happier. He took the chair opposite Kit, in the middle of the front room; grinning, he finger-combed his mustache.

“Kit,” he said after a bewildering moment, “you know I realize who I’m working for.”

“Really.” Kit managed a grin of his own.

“I realize, Kit, you’re a true believer. You’re a martyr, man, you’re beautiful. Look at you.”

Tad’s bullshit was a sight for sore eyes. An act of great delicacy. He had only the smallest improvisational space, a sliver between confidence and self-mockery.

“And this is a beautiful thing, closing down awhile. It’s like Carlos Castañeda out in the desert. Not doing, you know? The Yaqui way of knowledge.”

Tad went on a moment about the rightness of Kit’s decision. “But Kit,” he said then, “let me ask you something.”

And the Circulation Manager was utterly unfazed about working in public. He lay both hands palm-up on the desk between them, nothing to hide.

“Let me ask you. What do you think makes people read about the scum of the earth down in Monsod?”

“Tad. Scum of the Earth was what I was going to call the paper. Until I thought of Sea Level, Scum of the Earth was it.”

Corinna gave a startled laugh, behind Tad’s back.

“Yeah, yeah,” the Manager said. “But m’tellin’ya Kit. Ninety-nine people out of a hundred out there, they don’t want to hear about the scum in Monsod. Junkies, killers — they don’t care about those losers. The only way they’ll read about it, is if they think it’s hip.”

“Hip,” Kit said.

“Hip. They need to think it’s part of the scene.”

Zia’s laughter, behind Kit, was refreshingly acid.

“I see,” Kit said. “And what I’m doing now, this beautiful Yaqui thing, it’s also very hip.”

“Well, no offense, Kit. I realize how you feel about it.”

“It’s going to sell papers.”

“When we start up again, Kit — it’s going to be so big, the newsstands’ll have to pay us in elephant dollars. Hey, to be hip, m’tellin’ya, it’s important. It’s a dream to people. The dream business, that’s our business. Unless you’re putting out a paper for sociology professors.”

Kit didn’t take offense. In fact it was a relief bashing away like this, not having to apologize for once. After a moment he asked Tad if he’d read Hamlet.

“Oh great,” Tad said. “We’re expanding our readership base now. We’re reaching out to English professors.”

“Hamlet, Tad. You’ve read Hamlet. You know what Hamlet says he’s reading, in there?”

Tad stroked his mustache, his grin holding steady.

“Words, words, words,” Zia said.

Kit turned sideways in his chair, eyeing the writer. “Words, words, words,” he repeated, smiling. He turned back to his Circulation Manager. “I’d like to think, Tad, that we can do better than that.”

It was a relief to bash away, a relief to hear that at least one person who worked for Sea Level believed the paper would be back on the stands some day. But after the Circulation Manager had finished going over his figures and left — maybe the bank balance would stretch through Valentine’s after all — Zia noisily began to pack up. She was taking the rest of the day off. “In fact,” she said, gathering her bright blue pens, “let’s make it the rest of the week.” And there was her glare again, the equals signs on either side of her nose. Kit went to her, to the half-wall before her.

“I thought,” she said, “like, I’m a writer now, I should write. I thought, okay, this is how I deal with depression now. This is what I do instead.”

Kit checked Corinna. She glared back with eyes very different from Zia’s, very round, two zeros. Some tough arithmetic in the office today.

“I thought like, okay, it’s just a delay. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you, young lady. But I’m like, non-functional.”

Kit made a few stabs at calming her: reassurances, reminders. The woman kept shaking her head, slowly zipping up her black leather. “The coming and going, Kit, all this coming and going. It’s too much for me. I mean, when the whole enterprise seems so shaky to begin with.” Kit knew better than to touch her, to give her any provocation. Also he was finding it hard to disagree. He could feel the relief his office had given him that morning, feel its therapy in his neck and his bruises — yet nonetheless Zia was right. Sea Level had to rank among the most ill assorted menageries ever. On the one hand Kit had a fire-eater like Rick Dimirris, storming in with the names of the bad guys, and on the other hand he had a happy-face like Tad Close. And these two women couldn’t have been more at cross-purposes. One was upwardly mobile, the other downwardly. One was full-hipped in full makeup, the other all eyeliner and anorexia. They had the generational difference too: Corinna a Movement woman like Mrs. Rebes, eyes on the prize, and Zia whatever had come since.

Gently now Kit asked Zia to think about it, to check in tomorrow morning at least. But his eyes kept shifting back and forth between her and Corinna. Zia was packing away the last of her writing, smoothing her chicken-scratched legal pages before she slipped them into her satchel. Corinna was ratcheting a fresh sheet of letterhead into her typewriter and beginning to tap out a note.

The checks and balances of the working world, Viddich. And there could be no denying that it was his preferred world, no denying the relief it afforded him or the way it cleared his head of imaginary layout & pasteup. Knocking this hole in his schedule of deadlines and press days, in fact, might well have been the most difficult penance he could set himself. Kit couldn’t dissuade Zia, no. He agreed with her. When the phone rang again, he felt another distinct pick-me-up.

He couldn’t believe who was calling, though. “My uncle?” he asked Corinna.

“Uncle Pete, that’s what he says.”

Zia, her satchel over her shoulder, was coming through the halfwall doorway beside him. “Kit, the best I can tell you is, I’ll try to check in.”

“Zia, please, wait. Uncle Pete, really? Calling here?

“You want me to tell him it’s not a good time?”

“I’ll try, Kit. But I mean, a letdown like this, a disappointment like you laid on me today …”

“No no, I’ll, ah, I’ll take it in a minute.”

“You want this phone?”

“ … I’m not too big on handling that kind of disappointment.”

Zia was out the door by the time Kit and his uncle had finished their hellos. Maybe she caught Kit’s last look, uncertain, showing her — Zia, do you know the best way to test the worth of your work? — maybe she saw it, maybe not. Anyway Uncle Pete was a bad tangle, himself. A demanding tangle. Uncle Pete was the gay one, in the closet but no secret.

To begin with there was the problem of the man’s voice. “Mnhm, Kit. How’re you doing?” No way Kit could assimilate that voice. No way, not here; it made no difference even when he switched the receiver so he could no longer hear Zia’s diminishing footsteps. To properly appreciate Pete’s voice, packed in the cotton of long cattleman silences, a person had to be just finishing up a long night’s difficult calving. A person had to be standing in the flashlight’s sepia, in the placental stink. Then you had room for that voice, you were weary and pliant enough for its good sense and its capacity for hope: astonishing stuff at such an ungodly hour.

“How am I doing?” Kit said finally. “Think of how Rod Carew stands at the plate.”

Even his uncle’s laugh sounded barn-like. “.388 last year.”

“And he does it looking like a pretzel.”

“Mnhm. Are you going to get back here this summer, Kit? Are you and I going to take in a ballgame?”

“Aw, Uncle Pete. You know I’m an Easterner now.”

Then the silence. In Pete’s case, there was always more to it, more than cowboy ways or the Minnesota Shys. Kit too suffered a long tongue-tied moment, thinking how often lately he’d brought up this man’s secrets. Again and again he’d brought it up: I have an uncle who’s … He’d become a city boy, a talker.

But the hardest thing to deal with was Corinna’s note. As Kit leaned against her desk trying to think of the next icebreaker — trying to imagine why Pete had called — his Administrative Assistant yanked what she’d been writing out of her typewriter. A rackety yank. Bette’s Apple had nothing to match the loud finality of pulling a sheet out of a typewriter carriage. Then she handed it to him: a resignation letter.

It ran three lines, under the letterhead. Formal business English: I therefore give you my notice to resign, as of the end of this pay period.

“You know, Kit,” Uncle Pete said in his ear, “I’ve tried to reach you at home.”

Hard to assimilate. The distance seemed suddenly a matter of light years — and the likelihood of getting anywhere seemed far less than with this wide-faced young mother beside him. Corinna hadn’t moved, after she’d handed him the note. She hadn’t taken those round eyes from him. She was still giving him a chance.

*

The worst of the Boston’s new construction was in the old West End. Just below Beacon Hill between the expressways and the Charles, you got a series of Cold War bunkers, a chain-mail cityscape: Massachusetts General Hospital, Government Center, and one steel-and-glass cereal box after another, packed with offices and condominiums. Even the plaza spaces wore on the soul. Flat swaths of brick or concrete, they suggested a firing range. The area was one big shrine to brute force, a Fascist temple cluster, and Kit always felt particularly disheartened to find it at the foot of Beacon Hill. The Hill of course showed you the city of the previous century and earlier, the stoops and cobblestones. Kit loved its quirks of layout, architects on foot thinking of people on foot. No building stood taller than four stories and every block presented a stipple of differently colored house fronts: not exactly a rainbow, but variations on brick red and stone-gray at least, with occasional flashes of yellow or even blue.

But then you came down the Hill into an airport: monochrome, fortified, echoing. It was a wonder that anyone could walk from one neighborhood into the other without turning into a militant Marxist. Just coming off Beacon Hill and into the West End, you saw the capitalist machine breaking down. You saw the bourgeoisie hunkering into a defensive camp. All in all, it didn’t seem like the place for Corinna’s family counselor.

But here they were, Corinna and Kit going to see her Arturito’s therapist, in a not-quite-articulated test of whether she could continue to work for him.

On the MTA, the woman avoided saying anything specific about what she had in mind. Back at the office, likewise, she’d set the trip up mostly by implication. “How about,” she’d said, “you come with me and meet Arturito? Meet the boy, meet our counselor — you got time for that?” The only suggestion that her resignation depended on Kit’s answer had been a slow sideways glance at the letter in his hand. Very slow glance, her thick Latin lashes barely moving. And she’d said that today she could “use” him. In fact, now that Kit had agreed to coming, Corinna seemed concerned mostly about whether he didn’t have anything more important to do.

“You sure you don’t need to be seeing your lawyer now?” she asked. “You sure you can put that off?”

Kit nodded, folding his coat-collar up around his throat. They’d come out into the wind of the Government Center plaza. The brick flats like a firing range, the wind like a runway.

“When are you supposed to talk to that Grand Jury anyway?” Corinna asked. “Thursday?”

He nodded again.

“Hmm, Thursday. Deadline day, you know? Or I guess I should say, Thursday would’ve been our deadline day.”

Kit couldn’t catch her eyes, the way this wind whipped up her thick career-girl hair. In fact Popkin hadn’t liked being put off. It didn’t help, either, that Kit couldn’t explain with any clarity just what he found so much more important.

“Anyway you rescheduled, right?” She headed across the bricks. “You and the man, you set another time.”

Eleven o’clock, tomorrow; Popkin must’ve repeated it a dozen times. And the lawyer had told Kit to start drafting his testimony. He’d said he wanted to see something by tomorrow. Longhand, typewritten, index cards, the lawyer didn’t care — so long as he had something he could work with. Tomorrow, eleven o’clock. Popkin said Kit could even give him a recorded statement, something on cassette.

“What about your Uncle Pete?” Corinna asked. She muscled through the cold, a hardheaded bundle. “You sure there’s not some big emergency back in Minnesota?”

Again Kit shook his head. Whatever it was that had Pete so determined to talk with him, apparently it could wait. Mom was fine, Uncle Chris was fine. Then too, Kit hadn’t exactly been baring his soul either. Ah, Bette and I, ah, we haven’t been home much these last couple of days. At least Kit had arranged for the uncle to call him back at the office, that afternoon. At least he wouldn’t have to be lying to his family while sitting in his own empty kitchen.

“Okay Kit,” Corinna said. “Okay if you say so. Anyway this won’t take long, here.”

Her building was the ugliest bunker on the block. Nothing but shaded riot-proof glass at sidewalk level, and Kit couldn’t have said where the door was. But as Corinna approached she picked up speed, almost breaking into a trot. Inside, at the far end of the lobby, stood Arturo.

The nine-year-old bore only a passing resemblance to the photo on his mother’s desk. In the flesh, the boy kept showing Kit surprises, his hair especially, a carrot red curling at the tips. Irish hair. Also you couldn’t see the kid’s hands in the picture, quick-pecking dark-nailed hands; the boy was in the middle of some fantasy play when Corinna and Kit arrived. He packed a real sting when he slapped five hello.

“Not like that, Arturito,” Corinna said. “You shake hands with Mr. Viddich.”

In Kit’s grip the boy’s hand felt more ordinary, sticky with lunch and fragile. But Arturo held on several seconds longer than necessary, smirking, squint-eyed. If he’d been a few years older, and maybe eighty pounds heavier, Kit would’ve said the kid was sizing him up for a fight. Kit looked to Corinna, but she was speaking with the woman who’d brought the boy from school, a heavy old nonna with a growth on one eyelid. The two women used a shorthand neighborly Spanish, made still harder to follow by the difference in their accents. Corinna’s friend had a back-of-the-throat sound, upcountry, like the Mexicans Kit had worked with in the Carolinas.

“Hey,” the boy said, “I get it. Mama ain’t told you what the scene is yet.”

Corinna broke off her conversation, turning and taking the boy’s chin in one swift hand.

“I told you,” she said in firm English, “in this family we don’t say ain’t.”

Aw, Viddich, what have you got yourself into now? For someone whose chosen work was supposed to be bringing the news back to sea level, Kit was spending a lot of time out at the hard-to-figure farther edges. He wondered if there weren’t some quick fix he could offer Corrina. We have to close or we’re as bad as they are.

At least the mother’s conversation with her ugly old babysitter made one thing clear — she was glad he’d come. He was some sort of good luck, apparently. Maybe a last-minute substitution. Other than that, he understood only that Corinna would handle Arturito from here. After the “session” (did Kit have the expression right?), she’d take over. In his goodbyes to the sitter Kit tried warming things up with a brief display of his Spanish, and then in the elevator he floated a small trial balloon.

“Corinna,” he said, “it’s no problem you taking the afternoon off. The way we set up your weekly schedule …”

Abruptly she squatted beside her boy, whispering. No indication she still gave a hoot about her “weekly schedule.”

The counselor’s office, at first, set Kit in a more familiar world. One brown bookshelf held a dormitory-style tea setup, complete with a cheap immersion heater, and the mug read “Ver-I-Tas.” It smelled as if Dr. Halsey — finally Kit learned his name — preferred chamomile. Bifocal’d, at home behind a desk, the man wore a sweater vest in a bright scotch tartan. He looked so utterly unhip, un-streetwise, that Arturo stared wide-eyed. The first Kit had seen the boy look like his photo. The counselor knew the uses of keeping his distance, yes; he didn’t waste time. No sooner had Corinna finished introductions than Halsey thanked Kit for volunteering.

“You don’t know what it means to this child”—the doctor nodded towards Arturo—“to spend time alone with a grown man.”

The boy knew where to go, Halsey went on briskly. Just down the hall. There were toys, musical instruments, a book or two. Kit and Arturo could do whatever they liked.

“Whatever …” Kit said.

“You’ll have thirty minutes,” Halsey said. “That’s our standard stranger session.”

Kit touched his neck. He knew where Corinna was, in a corner chair, loosely embracing her boy. But he found himself unable to look at her. The doctor removed his bifocals, his longest conversational pause yet.

“You can’t imagine how much it means,” he said.

Corinna at last caught Kit’s eye, pulling her son to her till her broad head hung over his shoulder. Her look made Kit think of Bette on the beach, at the Cottage. Pleading, angry, at a loss and willing to try anything. And what had he told Bette, back in that freezing ocean wind? There’s one woman I’d like to keep if I can.

*

Arturo started in as soon as they reached the session room. “You know what the scene is now, right? This kind of scene, you’ve heard of it, right?”

Kit had heard of it. Bette might even have done the editing on a paper by one of Halsey’s mentors.

“You my father now, right?”

Experimental therapy for deprived youngsters, the approach seemed sensible. You put children together with whichever gender of adult they lacked around the home, and let them get a feel for what having a mommy or daddy might be like. Under supervision, of course. The room had a — what did you call those things? A one-way mirror?

“We play in here,” Arturo said, “and they watch in there.” One quick and dirty hand jabbed, all four fingers extended, towards the set-in mirror occupying most of one wall. “You better do good, Mister. They watch.”

Kit wasn’t yet over his surprise. That, plus the thought of his runaway wife. He took stock of the room. They’d probably hooked up the microphone overhead, among the fluorescents. There were two smallish chairs and a table, a shelf with jigsaw puzzles and games, and elsewhere Raggedy Andy and Annie slouched together with stitched-on smiles. In a corner stood a toy box. A couple of boy things lay on top, a gun and a bat, and below that a welter of surreal and plasticized colors, Kryptonite green and Superman blue and red. A nice theater.

“Hi Mom!” Arturo was in front of the mirror, waving. “Hi there, Doc Halsey! We doing fine.”

Kit exhaled deliberately. “I didn’t hear the doctor say anything about watching.”

“Yeah right.”

“We’re supposed to give him a report afterwards, aren’t we? Didn’t he say that?”

“Aw, he’s always saying that.” Arturo went on dancing before the mirror. “He won’t never let on what he’s got going here. But I figured it out right from the jump.”

The kid was a disco monkey with curly red hair, an animal Kit had never seen. Considerably more of a handful than Cecilia’s two Rucky-rats. He began undoing the complicated belt on his overcoat, saying aloud that, anyway, they were here. Here for the next half-hour. Might as well make the most…

Arturo turned around, arms dropping. “Don’t you want to say hello to my Mom, over there?”

Now why hadn’t Kit taken his coat off in the office?

“You’re my Mom’s boss, ain’t you?”

And once more he was thinking of Bette, of how she’d left him feeling naked.

“Well ain’t you?”

Kit was nodding, tongue-tied again. “Yes,” he said finally. “Yes, I’m her boss.” He worked up a frown. “And your Mom doesn’t want you saying ain’t.”

Arturo took off around the room, circling Kit in great, leaping skips. “Well I know,” skip, “there’s something weird,” skip, “going on here, Mister.” Skip. “My Mom bringing her boss, that’s weird.” He skidded to a stop at the toy box and began pulling things out in handfuls. “Right.”

“Why does it have to be weird?” Kit asked. “Why does there have to be somebody watching, or me and your Mom pulling …”

“Hey, think fast!” Arturo spun up from the box and heaved a vivid yellow ball. If Kit hadn’t gotten a hand up — if he’d still had his head back in the Woods Hole crossing — he’d have been hit in the face.

“Stop that,” he said. “Why does it have to be weird? I don’t see that there’s any tricky business going …”

“Think fast!”

This time it was a miniature Frisbee. Arturo wasn’t so good with a backhand; the thing sailed wide.

“Cut it out! I’m telling you it’s no setup here, Arturo. Yeah, I’m your Mom’s boss, but …”

“Yo, fast!”

Kit actually caught this one, a fad toy called Stretch Armstrong. A rubbery thing, an impact like a beanbag’s; the doctor had thought ahead.

“Suppose it is a setup?” he asked then. “Hey, Arturo, suppose it is. So what?”

He lobbed the Stretch Armstrong as the boy straightened back up out of the box — straightened up looking at Kit differently. The toy caught the kid in the chest.

“Suppose we say you’re right?” Kit asked. “The doctor and your Mom are watching, and myself I owe your Mom a favor.”

Grinning, Arturo grabbed up the Stretch Armstrong and put his back into a grunting return throw.

“Suppose you’re right?” Kit went on, snatching the toy in midair. “So what, my man? So what? They’re there, and we’re here. We can still have fun.”

With that they were into a game of catch with the cartoon strongman. Corinna’s boy still put everything he had into each throw, his red curls flaring and shivering (Kit imagined the doctor’s note: signs of aggression), but he was laughing along with what Kit was saying. He was yelping, agreeing in his kid’s way: yes they could still have fun, still play and tussle and talk, even if the big mirror on the wall made it look like a sham.

“Yeah, I am right!” Arturo shouted, his tongue poking through his grin.

“Yeah, and so what?” Kit made another toss.

“So what, right! Right, Mister!”

“I’m not a mister!” Kit shouted. Quickly he pulled his suit-jacket up over his head, hooking it against his hairline as he tucked his chin into his shirt collar. He adjusted the set of his sleeves and locked his elbows against his sides, so his arms poked up shrunken and misshapen.

“I’mm the Monn-sterr!” he said.

Hadn’t Kit known he’d be harder to handle than the Rucky-rats? The nine-year-old proved no easy prey, impossible to corner, and with the red plastic bat in his hands Arturo gave as good as he got. The chairs went over. One of the jigsaw puzzles spilled off the shelf. Yet as Kit galumphed around after the boy, as he enjoyed the blood rush of his first exercise in days, he knew what he was doing. After moment or two he thought of Monsod, of Junior’s sleepy glare across the stinking seepage. But even that didn’t faze him. Kit knew what he was doing, and what he wasn’t. When Arturo at last landed a blow on Kit’s bruised temple — when that singing pulsing pain in the shape of his stitches shot through him — all Kit had to do was fall on his butt, let the suit-coat slip off his head, and say, “Ouch.” Only that, and Arturo dropped his bat and looked terrified.

“I’m afraid that’s it, Arturo,” Kit said, wincing. “The Monster’s got to quit for today.”

“Oh man, I’m sorry. I’m so-so sorry.”

“It’s okay.” When Kit closed his eyes, the pattern of his stitches flickered red before him.

“Mister, really, I’m really sorry.”

“It’s okay, Arturo. We were just playing.”

The boy came a step closer. “What happened to you anyway?”

*

No, this wasn’t Monsod. Kit managed a chuckle, he made an explanation. He even let Arturo touch the sutures. Soon he and the child were finishing up their half-hour over the spilled jigsaw puzzle. The picture in the puzzle was a natural for them, a fists-up portrait of the Incredible Hulk. Kit saw no reason they couldn’t put it together on the floor, so long as Arturo first helped pick up the chairs and get the toys back in the box. Then as they sorted through the bright puzzle pieces, for the second time in three jam-packed days Kit caught the whiff of kid-sweat. The odor struck him, just now, as somehow herbal.

Their conversation — loosened up, quieted down — came round to Kit’s relationship with the boy’s mom. Corinna had told Arturo that Kit was a good boss, yeah really a good boss, but he liked another woman in the office better. “My Mom says she’s pretty, this other woman.”

“Pretty?” Kit made sure the boy saw his smile. “Arturo, the last thing that woman would like to be called is pretty.”

“Yeah, right. I heard she’s a punk rocker. But my Mom said that — that you kind of like that.”

“Oh I see. Men like me, they like women like her.”

“Right. Punk rockers, you know. Strange women.”

“Well I’m here with your Mom today, aren’t I? Think about it. I’m not gallivanting around with any strange women today.”

The boy fell silent awhile. He was working on the Hulk’s face, an American Indian face really, with strong cheekbones and a cliff-like lower lip.

“My Mom’s not pretty,” Arturo said then.

Kit denied it. He sat up from the puzzle, the subject deserved a pause, but the son repeated himself. “She might be pretty in the Dom Rep where she’s from. But in America she’s not pretty.”

“Aw, Arturo. Anybody can see what an effort she makes. Your Mom’s a woman who really cares about appearances.”

“Yeah right. Appearances.” Frowning, the boy put in the superhero’s black eye. “But when you look at my Mom you never see a movie star.”

“Well, your Mom’s not trying to be a movie star.”

“Someone really pretty, right?” Arturo turned his small, sober face towards Kit. “When you see them you think of a movie star. Maybe sometimes you think of somebody on TV, but that’s the same thing.”

Kit felt so close to the boy, so wrenched open by these last jam-packed days, he might already have put together what the kid was thinking. It had to do with the Mom unattached as far back as her son could remember, plus the pop-sexy decade the kid had grown up with. “Arturo,” Kit tried, “nobody ever marries someone because they look like a movie star.”

He’d been half-afraid the boy would start sneering again. But Arturo looked pensive, trying to understand.

“And kids,” Kit went on, “as for kids, well. I never met a kid yet who looked like a movie star.”

Now there was a sneer Kit could live with. A sneer that was nine-tenths smile. Kit grinned back, he even patted the boy’s shoulder, and after a moment he offered another good thought or two. “Your mother’s just fine, Arturo. There’ll be somebody for her, for both of you.” Kit strained to sound real, to make what he was saying come across as better than empty promises, and in so doing he recalled, for what felt like the first time in hours, precisely what had brought him here. The deal with Corinna. The unspoken test.

“Now myself—” he chuckled, straining to come across—“I’m taken, you know. I have a wife.”

The doctor knocked twice, careful to get an invitation before he put his face in. And Halsey kept his tone neutral. Only once did his voice possibly betray something, a hint of a joke when he said, Looks like you two had a nice quiet time in here. Kit wouldn’t blame Arturo if he sneered at that. But in fact Kit wasn’t paying much attention to the man. Rather it had come home to him again how unlike Monsod this was. No banging, no bellowing every time somebody opened a door. Here, instead, it felt like the last minutes before his wedding. Then too he’d sat alone in a small room with a boy, an unmarried friend from his hunting days, until a soft-spoken older gentleman came in and said that it was time.

Here too there were women in tears. Corinna sidled in behind the doctor, pinching the corners of her purse, and in the moment before Arturo went skipping into her arms, Kit could see that the mother had been crying. He could see that and a lot more, a look as complicated as the one she’d shown him back in Halsey’s office, before he’d gone off with her son. Pleading, angry, at a loss — and still willing to try.

Chapter 8

MUSEO OF THE SAINTS

A Guide for Tourists.

Diorama #21—St. Hardnose of the Bricks

The scening depicts blesséd Snigr. Hardnose late on a day, deep in masturbation over telefono and random papers.

It is to notice the overcoat. Although stained with stains from many millions of other times, overcoat must cover Snigr. Hardnose even nevertheless in his glass offizzio, which very hot place with the sun coming all over the window. It is to signify awareness of the miserable Hell Clown which is Man.

Where else was Kit going to go? As Happy Hour came on, January’s dark-already Happy Hour, he was back behind his desk calendar and table teepees. He was explaining what he’d decided to do about the paper to remaining interested parties. There was the woman who handled his layout and pasteup. There were the printers over in Somerville.

What else was he going to do? Winning back Corinna’s trust had felt terrific, sure. The young mother had been so touched that, on the way from the counselor’s, again her accent deepened. Kit you a goo man, really a goo man. You like Jimmy Carter, like ol JC on the TV — you a goo’ man and you don even know. Corinna agreed to stay with the paper at three-quarters time, temporarily. She would take a smaller paycheck, temporarily. Felt terrific. Arturito wasn’t the only boy getting therapy today. Likewise, when Kit poked Corinna’s child goodbye, a poke in the belly goodbye, the kid was quick to grab Kit’s finger but careful not to hurt it. The most loving touch he’d felt since his tumble with Bette down at the Cottage.

Nonetheless, two minutes after saying goodbye, Kit stood gulping down a soft pretzel from a vendor in the Government Center T station. He was waiting by the tracks for the trains downtown. Where else, what else? The worm was on his back. Already he could think of a hundred more useful ways he might have spent the last hour.

He had to come up with the money. He had to stop wasting time running around having emotions. Or sitting at his desk lost in the streaks of reflection along the glass.

To notice coat belt undone with tip on the floor, this is to think of the naked flesh we have hair to, and hapenis which drags on the ground beneath all.

It is to notice as well cowpoke decoration, the “tabletop Indian dwelling,” which is caked to fronting glass. The scening depicts cowpoking of mistical critter, “jackalhope.” It is to signify the critters we who are all Hell Clowns must strive forever to poke.

On the first issue, Kit himself had pitched in with Sea Level’s layout and pasteup. He’d spent a couple of hours over the T-square, the blue pencils. Today, the contractor was willing to cancel her next appointment without charging a fee. The printers, however, had already turned down work in order to keep their machines free for Number Two. Kit, sighing into the phone, tried to get the shop owner to cut him some slack.

“You know,” he tried, “my wife tells me that pretty soon we’ll do all this on computer. Layout, printing—”

The printer cut in: “These days even the wife don’t work for free.”

The wife. Kit suffered a brief, grim image of what he’d be doing if he’d gone home. Mooning from room to room, having emotions. And when he roughed up a budget that included the printer’s cancellation charge, he didn’t seem to have cash left for Corinna’s February paycheck.

Did Kit still have a paper or not? A paper and, at the same time, his conscience?

It is to notice the black telefono and the white papers, instruments of dooty. The black one stands up firm and three-dimmental over the soft cumly white one laying two-dimmental with its angle showing. In other words, we have the cunjuntin of two happisits. Two happisits, and one inside the other. This is to signify how in the struggle of everyday toilet we must be brought off as often as potent.

Mistical union of happisits rejaculates the essence of the blesséd Snigr’s theologizmo. We are hair not solely to naked butt as well to jackalhope. To this Snigr. Hardnose was consummated, the moaning when flesh and grace collide in a hole. The hole truth!

Then there was Louie-Louie Rebes, mammoth and colorful. Louie-Louie, glowering over Kit’s front wall.

The brother spoke first: “Where’s everybody at?”

Louie-Louie, and he must have made a racket coming in.

“Hey man,” he said, “you there?”

Come back, Shane. At least exhale.

The brother circled the glass towards Kit’s office. The clomp of his biker boots echoed in the American Empire spaces, and the glass rattled, the floorboards whined. Kit couldn’t believe it. When Leo Mirini went by in the hall, Kit never failed to notice. The first words he managed were by rote: “Come in, sit down. I’m sorry.” Louie-Louie’s voice, on the other hand, was as hard on the rickety office as his boots. “You come to my place, man, I come to yours. And where’s the, where’s the secretary and shit?

“Man.” Louie-Louie turned in the doorway, frowning. “Is this place really a newspaper?”

“The secretary and shit have the afternoon off,” Kit surprised himself by saying. “It’s a paper, Louie-Louie.”

As the brother had come closer, he’d appeared less intimidating. Louie-Louie took up most of Kit’s office, no question, and his outfit was the same ruckus as yesterday. A fatigue jacket over disco threads. But he’d changed the shirt, going instead for a formal look, starched white and better fitting. More than that, the man looked like he was wrestling with trouble of his own. Twisting the kinky ends of his beard, Louie-Louie wouldn’t sit. He wouldn’t take off his jacket. Now Kit was the only one talking, filling space with an abbreviated version of why Sea Level wasn’t such a crazy idea. The Phoenix, you know, had probably started with less.

Another rote. It allowed Kit to try and recall what Mrs. Rebes had told him about her younger boy. The father had left, she’d said, before he could hurt Louie-Louie. He was still a baby, she’d said.

“You know something?” the brother said suddenly. “One team I always hated was the Boston Red Sox.”

Kit blinked. “The Sox?”

“Always hated those Red Sox.”

“Well, the pitching’s weak. They need a stopper.”

“Ain’t talking about no pitching, man. Ain’t talking about no Louie Tiant. You got a Harvard mug on the desk there, you oughta know what I’m talking about. It’s racism. Man, the Red Sox’re the most lily-white organization in baseball. Always nine white guys and a big nigger with a bat. Racist team.”

Kit checked the urge to apologize. “True enough.”

“And the Celtics ain’t any better.”

“Aw, come on. The Celts were the first team to draft a black player. They made Bill Russell—”

“Man, I don’t care what they did a hundred years ago. It’s practically the ‘80s now, man.” The brother was facing the street windows, the bulgy brownstones across the way. “Practically the ‘80s, and here you got a professional ball club with white guys getting all the minutes.”

Louie-Louie had turned towards the windows, Kit realized, before he’d said “nigger.”

“White boys,” the brother went on, “that’s what brings in the money in this town. In Boston you need white boys.”

Kit exhaled slowly. In his mind’s eye was the famous Globe photo from ‘76, four or five white teens assaulting a black man on the steps of the city courthouse. They were bashing the man’s face in with a flagpole they’d grabbed off its stand.

“Boston,” Louie-Louie said.

In the photo, the white kids were using the stolen pole like a lance, thrusting the eagle at its tip into the falling man’s face. And the American flag hung rippling from their grip, filling a corner of the shot. 1976, the Bicentennial. The photo had been all over the media.

Kit began to say he understood, he agreed. Boston …

“Man, tell me something. Tell me something, okay?” Louie-Louie turned to face him, and Kit knew what he’d ask: Did you kill my brother?

“Tell me, man,” he said. “How could you come to my house and tell my Mama what a sweet old time your Daddy had with a racist Red Sox like Ted Williams?”

Kit touched his neck.

“What kind of a crazy white boy are you, telling my Mama something like that?”

He hadn’t expected to get insulted, either. “Aw, Louie-Louie. I hope that’s not the burning question that brought you all the way over here in the dead of winter.”

The younger man’s beard changed shape. He might have been smiling; the window glare left his face largely invisible.

“She gets to you, doesn’t she?” the brother said. “My Mama. She gets to your head.”

Kit managed a small grin himself. He gestured at his bruises and repeated that he’d been in bad shape when he’d come by their house. And with that a more reasonable motive for today’s visit occurred to him. “You know,” he said, “I also told your mom I’ve got no ownership of this story. No legal claim or anything.”

The younger man at last reached for a seat.

“Louie-Louie, this is your story. Yours and your mom’s.”

The brother moved with less noise. He turned the chair around before sitting and settled with his chest against the struts of the back.

“You can do what you want with it,” Kit said. “You don’t need my permission.”

Still he didn’t seem to have a handle on this big little brother, this guerilla suddenly gone soft. Almost in a whisper, Louie-Louie said he wasn’t looking for Kit’s permission.

“You know there’s a black-owned paper in town,” Kit kept on. “There’s the South End Community News, too.”

The more the merrier, he figured. Or the more the moral-er. After the Grand Jury, Sea Level’s precious scoop would be history — and who knew who Bette might be telling, out wherever she’d gone.

“Aw, that South End paper,” the brother said, “that’s mostly a gay thing, you know.”

Kit found himself looking over his desk, wondering if he didn’t have some crackers in a drawer somewhere. A bite to eat would help them both. He continued to search while Louie-Louie said that his mother called the Community News an abomination before the Spirit. “Mama, she’s old-timey,” Louie-Louie said. “But she’s sharper than what you might think. She didn’t used to be so spacey either.” Nodding, Kit found a box of Triscuits down beside his office Johnnie Walker, and a shrink-wrapped gift packet of mustard and sardines from the publication party. Wow, was he actually going to put together a meal? Grain, oil, protein, spices?

Kit spread the goodies on his desktop, then fished his jackknife from a coat pocket. Meantime the brother bundled up his fatigue jacket and laid the bundle on top of the chair back; he used it as a pillow. If he was Castro, he was a worn-out and dispirited Castro, hunched over with an ear to the chest of a fallen comrade.

“Mama didn’t used to be so down in the bottle either,” Louie-Louie said.

“Yesterday she was worse than I’d seen her before,” Kit said. “Worse by a long shot.”

“Yesterday was one of her better days.” Louie-Louie kept trying to get comfortable on his bundled jacket, shifting his baggy body. “One of her best days this week, I’d say. Viddich, man, you’re good for her.”

What? Kit picked at his food’s wrapping. Five minutes ago Louie-Louie had all but called him a racist.

“See,” the brother went on, “where my Mama’s coming from, yesterday just proved she was right going to you. Where she’s coming from, when you started in to crying that meant she could trust you.”

Kit began to open the sardines, keeping his head down.

“She believes in you, Viddich. Far as Mama’s concerned, you’re the man.”

“Aw, you know better than that.”

The brother lifted his head, exposing feathery chest hair. “Man, all I know is, my Mama’s in a bad way.”

Kit pulled together the food. He must’ve sensed something, taking on such homey activities. The squeak of the sardine tin coming apart, the muffled pop of the mustard cap twisting off — these made an appropriate soundtrack, when a kid began to lay out his family heartache. The brother even smelled like someone who needed to talk: a faint reek of metal and machine oil, as if he’d been walking too long amid parked cars. Kit recalled the Sons of Columbus and what it had meant to Zia. Today the brother had surprised him the same way Zia had back at the Sons.

And it would do him good to listen. Louie-Louie didn’t care, after all, that the man he’d found to talk to was in tatters himself. The kid was too young to pick up the low-level emissions of an overstressed soul. Accepting a sloppy, sardine-heaped Triscuit, Louie-Louie said that since Monday his mother had been taking a bottle to work.

“Ain’t like her,” he said. “She tells me she wants the job, but the way she’s carrying on she’s going to lose it.”

“Anyone at work notice?”

“Notice? Man, that place — they notice and she’s gone.”

Kit suggested that maybe they were seeing something deliberate. A pattern that the mother wanted somebody to recognize.

“Thought of that one already, man. Like, a cry for help.”

“A cry for help. She needs you to step in and be the man of the house.”

“Trying, Viddich. Swear to God I’m trying. I lost half my hours at Sears, lost all my overtime. My paycheck is diddly these days, man. All just so I could be there for her.” But Kit had heard how the mother talked to him. “Talks like I’m a baby, Viddich. How am I supposed to be the man of the house, when she’s all the time saying I’m a baby?”

“She’s trapped in old perceptions,” Kit said.

“Say what?”

“Well, there’s a lot of history between you two. Your mother still perceives you …

Hoo boy, did that feel lame. Kit bit his lips as the brother once more lifted his head.

“Say what?”

Kit should’ve left this kind of thing to Dr. Halsey.

“Psy-cho-analyze.” Louie-Louie’s beard opened again, but it wasn’t a smile. “Seems sometimes like that’s all you white boys know, is how to psychoanalyze.”

Kit went back to the food.

“You white boys all go to college and learn how to psychoanalyze. Man, I’d like to see you try it coming from where I’m coming from.” Louie-Louie jerked his bundled jacket off the chair back and started pawing through it. “I don’t come from no Minnesota, you know? And I’ve already got six credits at Northeastern.”

Kit — with all due disgust for his failure to keep his mouth shut — figured he knew the man now. The good brother, that was Louie-Louie. He’d calm down again soon enough.

“Yeah, and I know about social workers, too. Social workers and agencies and all like that, I gave my Mama the numbers. She won’t make the call.”

The brother stopped his pawing. He’d gotten hold of something in one of the pockets. His face flexed oddly, a kink in the proud nose, a ripple along the bristling hairline. Fighting down a shiver? Whatever Louie-Louie was trying to get out of his jacket, it was too big for where he’d put it. He wrestled with the olive-green bundle in his lap, the buttons straining on his Filenes Basement shirt. Kit bent once more over his office drawers, tidying things away, giving his visitor what privacy he could. But then the brother’s chair stopped creaking, and close by Kit’s lowered head there was the clunk of metal dropping on the desktop. Kit looked up to find a gun on the scarred wood.

“Seems like that’s all you white boys know,” Louie-Louie said, “is how to psychoanalyze.”

A gun, an automatic. It crowded him; it killed the light. His tall-ceilinged office collapsed like a pocket around the iron, and Kit had forgotten to breathe again. He’d misjudged his man again. Yet by the time he regained his wits, his breath — by the time he’d slapped a hand down over the cold weapon and started to say something (come on, what, something) — by then, he could see that in fact he still didn’t have to worry about Louie-Louie. The brother didn’t want anything to do with the gun. Not in his condition. Draping his bulk once more over the chair back, this time without even the cushioning of his jacket, Kit’s visitor had begun to cry.

*

It didn’t have quite the heft of GI ordnance, the officer’s.45 that Kit’s father had left behind. Louie-Louie’s piece had Euro-tech contours, like an italic capital L, and there were Japanese characters in the trademark. UN ordnance. And this was where Louie-Louie had gotten his metal-and-oil smell.

Kit began to unload. Once he took up the weapon, he discovered his hands were shaking, the second time today they’d started shaking — holding first the subpoena, now the gun. From bad to worse. Meantime Louie-Louie insisted through his tears that he’d never intended to use the thing on Kit.

“Been crazier than that,” he said, swallowing thickly.

The magazine held fifteen rounds, but Louie-Louie had brought the pistol across town nearly empty. What rounds remained were still in the magazine, not the firing chamber, and the safety was on besides. The brother said he’d “tested” the thing in the concrete hollows above the Mass Pike extension, the highway trench that bordered the South End. He’d squeezed off shots as the big trucks roared past. Afterwards he’d headed across town with just three cartridges left.

Nodding, Kit yanked out the four-fifths-empty magazine and shoved it into a pants pocket. He double-checked the chamber, triple-checked, then let the weapon sit — though, setting his elbows on the desktop, he shielded it with his upper body. By now Louie-Louie was rocking head-down, whimpering and rocking, plainly helpless despite how he made the chair shriek beneath him. He repeated he hadn’t been gunning for Kit.

“Been way crazier than that,” the brother said. “Man, I been thinking I was Superfly.”

“Where, where did you …”

“Listen to me, man. Please, please listen.” Louie-Louie pointed out that if he’d wanted to shoot Kit, he’d had plenty of chances earlier.

Not exactly reassuring. “Louie-Louie, I’m not the guy for this. Think about it.”

“Just listen, huh? For my Mama, man, for my Mama. You want to do right by her, don’t you?”

Kit pointed out that there were agencies, like the brother had said. All it took was a phone call.

“Phone calls just don’t cut it with me any more. Phone calls don’t even touch it. How do you think a phone feels when you’ve got a gun in your pocket?”

Kit eyed the weapon again, empty beneath him.

“Today,” Louie-Louie went on, “man, I wound up over to the State House.”

“What? The State House?”

“I said it’s been crazy, didn’t I? Didn’t I say that?”

“You went to the State House packing a piece?”

Grimacing against a fresh burst of tears, Louie-Louie nodded. First he’d done his testing, the brother explained, and then he’d done his walking. “From over by my side of the Mass Pike clear across to the State House. Across half the damn city.” The walk itself had come to feel like another test.

“Life, life,” Louie-Louie said, “one test after another.”

It had come to feel like proving something, overcoming something, to make it on foot from the poorest crannies of downtown to the wealthiest slope of Beacon Hill. “What was that you said earlier, man? The dead of winter?”

Kit snuck in another glance at the gun. From this angle it suggested a different letter, an N.

“That was what I was up against,” the brother said. Only after Louie-Louie had conquered the wind and the ice would he deserve the golden dome, the marble columns of the State House.

“End of the line,” he said. “To be the man — you know, the man? I had to get all the way to the end of the line.”

N for Not again, Not this time.

Gulping down sobs, wiping his hands on his bright shirt, Louie-Louie explained that by the time he reached Beacon Hill, if he’d had anything clear in his head at all, it had been a picture. “Picture of my brother, man. The photo from the trial, you know, the one they showed on the TV. In his suit, remember?” Kit remembered, he said so — he relented at last to the notion of conversation — and Louie-Louie explained that the photo “wasn’t Junior.” Even the suit wasn’t Junior’s, he said. “Picture like that, it could’ve been anybody up on the TV. Could’ve been some stranger up there.” So Junior’s brother had soldiered his way through the winter, the racist city, with an instrument in his pocket that would blast away all the fakes, the family turned to strangers.

“Louie-Louie.” Kit put a hand on the brother.

“I had to blast, man.”

“Aw, what about your mother? She hasn’t turned into a stranger yet.”

Louie-Louie shook off his hand and sat up again, still talking. He’d crossed to the State House from the Parker House. He’d heard his weary breathing echo inside the rotunda. Only a room or two farther in, aging white boys sat around giving the okay to every kind of lying and denial.

“End of the line,” he said.

“They have security there,” Kit said. “Capitol police.”

“Man, cops was part of it, don’t you get it? I said I was Superfly, didn’t I? I was everywhere.”

“But they have the new high-tech stuff, too. The setups you see in airports. Metal detectors.”

“Metal detectors ain’t right at the door, Viddich.”

Kit remembered. The State House lobby was Roman style, the Pantheon, with marble as imposing as the piece up on Leo’s desk. A tourist attraction.

“You can get in,” Louie-Louie said, “if you’re wearing a good shirt.” Talking did seem to relax him: the brother pinched his shirtfront, half-smiling.

“Did you — did you have a particular target in mind?”

“Target, huh. Target. Picture off the news in my head, and he asks me did I have a target.”

Kit suffered a mental flash flood of last Thursday’s craziness. The Monsod on TV isn’t there. Big media have been actively avoiding the truth. Meantime Louie-Louie declared that the bad guys on this story were all the same. “That’s where I was coming from, see. By the time I got to the State House, it was all the same liars and cheaters against me. Hiding the truth everywhere. Got to blast.”

Kit found himself frightened all over again. He took up the gun — a spot of oil leaked out the open magazine into his palm — and slipped it in a coat pocket.

“All those suits and ties in the lobby,” Louie-Louie said. “I was everywhere, I was in every face.”

Kit repeated that he wasn’t the one Louie-Louie should be talking to. There were hotlines, 24-hour …

“Aw, Viddich. I made it out of there, didn’t I? Made it out of there in one piece. And I made it over here, too, made it to the one man done my family any good in years now.”

Kit got his elbows back on the desktop.

“I met a hippie, man. That’s all. I met a hippie.” Louie-Louie shook his head. “Over at the State House, I ran into some kind of hippie, you believe that? And next thing I know I was back out on Beacon Street. Safe, man.”

Louie-Louie explained that, all told, he couldn’t have spent more than three minutes in the lobby. The capitol police hadn’t even spotted him, the brother believed, before the perfect target appeared. “Perfect, a big tall white guy with a big old white-guy head. You know what I’m talking about, the silver hair and the lips. Fine old white-guy head.”

Kit reminded Louie-Louie how careful he’d been, coming across town. No rounds in the chamber, the safety off.

“Well I mean, how long would that take? The guy had to stand in line, you know. He had to go through that, what do you call it, the security screen.”

Every now and then legislators came out the front door.

“Cops hadn’t even looked at me, man.”

Louie-Louie sank over the chair back again. His face, dropping, shrinking, looked for the first time like his dead brother’s.

“You know the echo in that place, man?” he said. “The echo, with all that marble …”

Gently, Kit asked about the hippie.

“Weird echo, man. Like I was everywhere.”

“Louie-Louie, you’re not that crazy. Think about it. All you needed was a nudge.”

“Huh, a nudge.”

“And then you were out of there.”

Louie-Louie roughed his beard, the hairs crackling. “Well, the guy was high.” The guy was white, a blonde throwback with hair to his armpits, in a fatigue jacket dirtier than Louie-Louie’s. The hippie had taken the brother for a free spirit like himself. “Came tugging on my arm and told me he’d just smoked a joint right there in the State House. Whispering, man. Stupid stoner whispering and giggling, in that echo.”

“He’d had a joint? He told you?”

“The ofay thought I might like a taste myself.”

Kit shook his head. Getting high in the state capitol was a good ten years out of date.

“Fucking burnout.” Talking to the floor. “Fucking total ‘60s burnout.”

After a moment Louie-Louie went on to say that he thought it was the hippie’s smell which had stopped him. “You know the smell these stoners get, man? Real sweet, you know? Gets in the clothes.” Kit was nodding, though in fact he’d never noticed that these relics had any particular odor. Instead he’d made the connection to the mother’s Catawba Pink.

“Smell like my Mama these days. Like that Catawba Pink.”

The brother broke down again. The sobs came with less intensity than before, but the big muscles in his back heaved. Kit bent beside him, his own long sorry body heaving. Everybody’s tired, he said or tried to say, everybody’s tired and battered — recalling irrelevantly that he’d gone the entire day without any Percodan. He frowned and tried harder; he brought up examples of the brother’s better judgment. “Louie-Louie, you’re talking with her minister, right? You’re talking with everyone you can, right? Louie-Louie, I saw those brochures you brought her.”

Kit bent deep, against the desk corner. He kept talking till the brother’s back went smooth under his hand.

“Man,” Louie-Louie sighed, sitting up. “I’m crying more than my Mama, these days.”

Kit, letting go, thought of Bette again. His last embrace.

“Crying in front of white folks.” Louie-Louie shook his head.

The clip of bullets in Kit’s pocket bit his thigh. He put his hand back on the desk and brought up the Grand Jury. “That’s how you nail the bad guys, Louie-Louie. That’s how you blast. There’s going to be some indictments, don’t you worry.”

Louie-Louie had heard about it. Sounding frosty all of a sudden, making up for his tears, he said his mother had told him. The media had really come after her once they learned there was going to be a Grand Jury. “A lot of calls, man.”

Kit made no response. He was picturing Louie-Louie and his mother over the Globe’s forthcoming story on the Grand Jury. He saw them reading his testimony, reading what he’d done.

“Where I’m coming from,” the brother said, “I don’t expect much from any Commonwealth of Massachusetts Grand Jury.”

Kit murmured that he still had to prepare his statement.

“Ain’t about no statement.” Louie-Louie was sounding like he had when he’d come in. “Man, everybody’s got a statement.”

Kit was a believer, yes. But what did that mean when it came to telling Louie-Louie and his mother?

“Viddich, huh, you can make your statement. But then what happens is, the court calls Mr. Super Bad. Court calls Mr. Super Bad and says, hey, my man. What do you have to say about Mr. Viddich’s, uh, allegations?”

Didn’t it mean he had to let the family know before he went into the Grand Jury? “Louie-Louie,” Kit said, “I don’t know what to tell you.”

The phone rang, astonishingly loud.

“Everything in there’s just allegations,” Louie-Louie said. “Big old white guys talking and talking.”

Another ring. It was the glass that made it so loud, extra reverberant when the outer office was empty. Kit couldn’t think of a reason not to answer.

“Kit?” Again the voice was recognizable at once. “I hope I’ve got you at a better time.”

“Creates confusion, man. Confusion, you dig?”

Uncle Pete, calling back. The connection sounded clearer than talking to the South End. And the interruption felt like a godsend, the cattleman’s flatness of the uncle’s voice just what the doctor ordered.

“What’re you grinning about, man?” Louie-Louie asked.

Aw, how could Kit take time for Pete now? How, with a new question about public record and private conscience looming before him — with the brother back in his tough-guy act, up off his chair and looming before him?

“You listening to me, Viddich? You hear what I’m telling you about confusion?”

Kit put a hand on the speaker, stage-whispering Family. He indicated he’d be off in a minute.

“Everybody here’s just fine,” the uncle was saying. “I don’t want you worrying about anything like that.”

The uncle had said he could wait, earlier. And Kit was good about calling; this weekend had been an exception.

“Uncle Pete,” he began, “you know I’m at the office now.”

“Wellsir, you see, your wife called.”

“Bette?”

“She talked to your mother. Talked a long time, Kidder. Seemed like something important.”

*

It took Kit a few minutes, while Louie-Louie snooped impatiently around the outer office, to understand that this call in fact had little to do with his wife. It wasn’t about Bette at all, it turned out. Rather, the uncle was getting in touch to let Kit know he was gay.

“What?”

“I’m gay, Kit. Homosexual. Time I came out of the closet and let everyone know me for what I am.”

Kit switched the receiver from ear to ear, then back again. Beyond his glass walls Louie-Louie, frowning, fingered one of Zia’s postcards from beneath her desk cover. The brother had warned Kit that he wasn’t much good at waiting.

Kit’s uncle sounded insect-sized: “You there, Kidder?”

The whole phone call had been like this. Pete knew that Bette had called Kit’s mom with big news, something that left the mother shaken. Afterwards “Sister Nina,” as the uncles liked to call her, had gotten on the phone with friends from church. She’d called an emergency meeting of the prayer circle. But the uncle didn’t have any idea what Bette had said. He didn’t know where Bette had called from, either, and Kit wasn’t about to explain why it mattered. The whole conversation had left him tonguetied.

Now this. “You there?”

“Here,” Kit said.

“Mm. For a minute there, wellsir. I was afraid you might hang up on me.”

“I wouldn’t do that. I wouldn’t do that.”

“No, I suppose you wouldn’t.”

Then nothing, for a long moment. Cowboy reticence. And when Uncle Pete spoke up again, gamely plowing through Kit’s dumbfoundedness, the man explained that it was in fact this very same reticence which had finally triggered his coming out. He’d been moved to see that the call from Bette had left Kit’s mom upset, tight-voiced, blinking back tears—“but you know her, Kit. She still wouldn’t talk.” Nina gave away nothing, or nothing beyond the basics. “She told Leslie and me that you weren’t hurt. That was it.”

Pete’s sister reached out instead to the church. “That tore it somehow, Kidder.”

Silence again. Kit tried to respond, but got no further than a grunt, a croak. Finally Pete asked if their sister had told him and Les the truth. Was Kit all right?

Aw, Viddich. “Uncle Pete, we’ve all — the whole family’s been playing it pretty close to the chest.”

“Right up tight against the old chest.”

“Uncle Pete, I’m sorry. I’m fine, I’m fine, but I didn’t expect this. You’re still half my father, Uncle Pete.”

“Wellsir. Good to hear.”

“I’m with you. I’m sorry about being such an asshole.” He knew the man better than to say I love you. “I’m with you on this, Uncle Pete.”

The uncle may have laughed. His voice light, he said there was no need to apologize. “Our Sister Nina’s kept her business to herself plenty of times before, without me going and doing something like this.” And Pete figured it wasn’t going to get any easier, letting people know. Kit had been the first one off the ranch to hear, partly because he was family of course — but also partly because the uncle had figured he might be more broadminded than the neighbors in Blue Earth county. “Today when you said you were an Easterner, I mean to tell you, I was glad to hear it.”

“I’m an Easterner, sure. But you raised me, Uncle Pete. That’s still true after this phone call.”

“Good to hear. But I mean to tell you, I’ve heard all about what’s happening back East. Your mother, you know, she can’t get through the day without Minnesota Public Radio.”

Kit ran a finger around the rim of his Ve-Ri-Tas mug. “Back East,” he recalled, meant the urban world generally. Not just New York and Boston, but also L.A., San Francisco.

“The gay revolution?” he asked.

“We’ve heard all about it. San Francisco, New York. Everybody’s coming out.”

Kit, interested despite the day’s wear and tear, bent towards the phone. Was Uncle Pete saying that seeing this story so much in the media had helped inspire him to come out?

“Wellsir. I guess I’d say so, yes.”

“Because you’ve heard it on the radio.”

“Not just because I’ve heard it on the radio.”

“No, no I guess not. But, Uncle Pete, telling everyone you’re homosexual — it’s hard work.”

“It’s something, all right. A test of character.”

“I’m serious. When you announce you’re gay, Uncle Pete, when you flat-out announce it, there’s a lot …”

Oh God, when had Louie-Louie come in? Kit, sitting up from the phone, spotted his visitor just as the big youngster turned away fast. The brother turned and slipped back out into the front workspaces with face averted. From behind he looked less threatening. Above his hips hung babyfat love handles.

Louie-Louie, the good brother. Kit’s uncle, oblivious, was saying something about Harvey Milk.

Come out, come out, wherever you are. From Bette to Mom to Pete to Louie-Louie — come out, come out.

The offices were getting dark. Kit, his eyes still on his visitor, reached for the light switch without standing. He found an unexpected serenity in that, a naturalness in having the switch so close and easy. Today’s blown secrets no longer rattled him. Whatever Bette had said, whatever Louie-Louie had heard, these felt like secondary aggravations. Hadn’t Kit just been thinking, himself, that he needed to start telling friends and family before they read about it in the papers? Hadn’t he just been trying to decide how to do it? His eyes adjusted easily to the fluorescents, and he caught up again on his uncle’s conversation.

“Now, Christopher,” Pete was saying, “you’re not going to pretend you never knew.”

“We all knew, sure. We ah, we knew you knew we knew.”

Once more the aging cowboy may have laughed. “You should have heard Leslie trying to explain that one.”

“Leslie, hoo boy. Lots of luck, Uncle Pete.” And how had Kit’s mother taken it? Composed again following her prayer session, she’d met Pete’s announcement with “that smile she has, you know.” Kit knew: an accepting smile, easeful, yet also neutral, at a remove. Afterwards, she’d said quietly that there was no point getting into the news from Kit’s wife, just now.

“Still playing it close to the vest, our Sister Nina.”

Again the mention of the call left Kit unfazed. “Well, we’ve all done it for years, Uncle Pete.”

“Your Uncle Leslie, wellsir. He said he wouldn’t’ve had so many women around, if he hadn’t’ve known about me.”

“Come on.”

“That’s what he said. Told me he probably would’ve married one of them, if he hadn’t’ve known about me.”

“Aw, he’s just flabbergasted. Just knocked for a loop, like I was. You’re not responsible for him wearing out half the women from there to Mankato.”

“Wellsir. I mean to say, once secrets start coming out, they’re hard to stop.”

“I hear you.” Though Kit had to wonder about his new equanimity. Tonight, after all, he might simply be too hammered to care.

“Uncle Pete,” he said, “what Les said, that just shows what this took, for you. This took courage.”

But that wasn’t what the uncle was getting at. “I mean to say, there’s evil in it.”

Evil? The word didn’t fit the man’s conversational style. He knew it, too: “Your mother now, she’s the one who can tell you about evil. She can give you chapter and verse.

“But I can see what’s the evil here,” Pete went on, more seriously. “I know this brand of evil, here. It’s too many secrets in one place.”

Another silence, on both ends.

“Too many secrets,” Pete said, “it makes people act up.”

“I hear you,” Kit said.

“That’s the evil. All these secrets packed in close. Makes people just about jump out of their skins.”

Which felt like enough for one phone call. Kit changed his tone, murmuring the kind of encouragement he’d brought up earlier for Louie-Louie. Uncle Pete I think you’ve got something there. Uncle Pete that’s great you’re still learning from this. Honest encouragement, but they’d both had enough. The uncle declared, out of nowhere, that he hadn’t eaten lunch yet. Besides, in the outer office Louie-Louie looked like he was going to start climbing the walls. And yet, as Kit went his final congratulations, his promises to call (“Pete, you know I’m good about that”), he suffered less comfortable thoughts. He suffered memories.

Impressions of sharing a house with this man had lain for years under a cover of dust. Tonight however — with this talk of evil and secrets — Pete had blasted pockets of sudden clarity. Kit recalled his uncle’s mysterious long weekends in Minneapolis-St. Paul, “meeting beef reps” way out of season. He remembered that once or twice as a teenager, he’d been alone with Pete, alone with his shirt off on a hot vacation day, and the uncle had startled him with a long, slow, full-hand stroke down his naked back to his belt line. And during the last rounds of labor trouble up in the Mesabi ore fields, the man had taken the family’s Leftie sympathies to extremes Kit had never seen. Pete had started screaming about what the miners were going through. He’d whaled against the fireplace wall with a heavy-headed poker, bending the’ thing almost at a right angle.

It couldn’t have been easy for him. Naturally Kit had been more aware of his mom’s unhappiness, her lack of a place. Nonetheless ever since he’d begun to understand that there were different approaches to loving and its tagalong mysteries, ever since his earliest misunderstandings about “69” or “the Hershey highway,” Kit had glimpsed the miseries of this fussy, unspoken-for cattleman. Now and again he’d felt something of them, those miseries, as sharply and unforgettably as the once-in-a-blue-moon sweeps of the man’s hand down his naked spine. He’d known what Pete was going through even though, whenever Kit’s mom or Uncle Leslie went so far as to indicate they knew the same, they did it by means of sideways glances and words half-spoken. Confirmations that flashed and were gone.

Uncle Pete, unlike Kit’s mom, couldn’t get what he needed from a “church family.” Every day he must have asked himself what he was doing there. Didn’t he belong in a boho downtown studio? But then what about the pleasure he took in the outdoor life, in the clatter of a Coleman stove strapped to the back of a horse? Ever since Kit had known the man was different, he’d heard him asking these questions, or overheard. He couldn’t make out the words, but he’d gotten the point. Still he’d said nothing about it, not even on the expeditions to root for Killebrew and the Twins or the hunting trips up to Leech Lake. He’d observed the same restraint as the others in the house until he was away among the smirking city boys at Exeter and Harvard and the Globe.

As he said his goodbyes tonight, Kit kept bucking up the man, voicing new approvals. “Uncle Pete, it’s for the best.” He understood that this wasn’t about him and the not-so-bad tensions he’d endured growing up. This was about the man on the other end of the line, and about what Bette had called the bright lights of history. A person had every right to cast the kind of shadow he wanted, before those lights. Nonetheless, within his uncle’s new projected shape Kit could see others, less proud. He saw shapes that had him switching the phone’s receiver from ear to ear. Kit’s uncle was old, pushing sixty. How many years had he wasted with talking to himself, whispering questions at the medicine-cabinet mirror? And how many of the people Kit loved had helped keep him there? “Sister Nina,” Uncle Leslie, the growing Kit himself — they’d all kept Pete in there babbling at the medicine cabinet. And in so doing they’d chained themselves in place too, chained themselves to silence and lies and what they believed was good for the boy. That was the home and family Kit saw now, in the bright lights of history, with the receiver sweating in his hand. A prison.

*

Diorama #22—St. Peter in the Hole

The scening depicts blesséd apissle Peter, cornverting by erection both Snigr. Hardnose (see the privys diorama) and San Luigi-Luigi of the Gorillas (who is without diorama, in this museo—donuts of all size are much appenetrated! ).

The enormity of this appissle is here indispootable. Blesséd Peter made cornverts all over the Hell-Clown world. Hardnose and Luigi-Luigi have in their case erected to receive his touch, but this makes Peter’s piece no less a hero.

His two cornverts, we see in their exstasy, have never been entered this way. Their lice have changed places forever.

Kit, kid.

Angry with himself, Kit deliberately called up Leo’s phrase. Stop this, kid. And there was Leo’s name on Kit’s desk, as well, or Leo’s company’s name. The list of Monsod contractors still sat beside the phone where Kit had left it this morning. He studied the page a moment. Once or twice he shook his head, trying to clear away the sensation of something dirty in his ears.

Louie-Louie stood at the door, half in shadow. He tapped the nearest glass wall with a fingertip.

Kit, this isn’t a museo. “That was my uncle,” he said. “He called to tell me he’s gay.”

“I heard, I heard.” Louie-Louie had a hand in his beard. “Some heavy shit there. I’m sorry, man.”

Kit shrugged. “I could’ve been more discreet myself. It’s not like I didn’t know you were here.”

“Yeah but, it’s not like I didn’t know it was family.”

With that — the word family—Kit had another idea.

“You know about my brother, right?” Louie-Louie was asking. “You know he was kind of that way too.”

Kit nodded vaguely, his eyes once more on the handwritten list beside the phone.

“Kind of, huh. Tell you, man — one way I know my Mama’s in trouble is the way she won’t admit that Junior was a homo. Just fucking doesn’t want to see it.”

Kit pulled the list towards him, the words blurring as it moved. “Louie-Louie,” he asked, “you’re at Sears now, right?”

The brother let go of his beard. What did Sears & Roebuck have to do with anything?

“You came here for help, right?” Kit had to get out of the chair. He was such a cliché, in the grip of a new idea: he actually had to get up and pace. “You reduced your load at Sears, you did what you could, but it only made things worse. Even your paycheck’s worse.”

“My paycheck’s diddly, man.”

“And finally you came here. So, Louie-Louie — suppose you had a second income? Something more flexible than Sears?”

“Say what?”

Kit made an effort to come across as though he’d thought about this a long time. With both of them in the office he didn’t really have room to pace, so he set himself at a kind of parade rest in the center of the room, one hand on a knob at the top of his tall chair. Suppose, he asked, Louie-Louie had a job where he could learn a few new skills? More importantly, suppose he had something better to do with his spare time than wander around with a gun in his pocket?

“Say what?” But after a moment the brother’s tone relaxed. “You’re talking about here, ain’t you? Talking about, I could work for your paper here.”

“A temporary assignment, yeah.”

“Man.” Louie-Louie picked at his tight shirtfront. “You got some beans, Viddich. Some beans, you know?”

Kit changed his grip on the chair’s knob. He brought up Mrs. Rebes, the way she’d feel if the brother worked for Sea Level. “She might stop calling you a baby, Louie-Louie.” Then, waiting till the big adolescent met his look: “And you might stop thinking of doing something crazy to change her mind.”

“Hey.” The brother extended a warning finger. “Back off.”

“Back off? You came to me, Louie-Louie.”

Were they going to have a fight? A fight, here between the frail antique glass? For a chair-squeezing moment that’s what it felt like. Kit remembered his lousy social skills. More than that, he realized his new plan for the brother had come on so swiftly, so ringingly, that he’d never considered what might be — think about it — a whole range of possible bad outcomes. And Louie-Louie looked like a man at the end of his rope. He was still only halfway under the fluorescents of Kit’s office, his pointing finger in the light, his scowling face in shadow. He had Kit thinking of Uncle Pete again, Pete in his half-worlds, and the thousand half-baked ideas by which his family had kept him there. Yes, the worm was on Kit’s back now. Doubts were creeping up every side of his bright new idea.

But Louie-Louie drew in his finger, dropped his arm. Meekly he stepped into Kit’s space.

“You got that kind of money?” he asked.

Exhale, Viddich. “I’ve got it, Louie-Louie.”

“From what I see”—the brother was smiling, he wanted to make this work—“doesn’t look like you’ve got two nickels to rub together.”

“I’ve got it,” Kit said. “Cash.”

He glanced once more at the list on his desk. He needed to see the name. Mirinex, Inc.

Chapter 9

My baby—

Mysteries, God knows there are mysteries, and, well. This is one of them: this sitting in front of the glass grid again, sitting gnawing at my Apple again — it’s a mystery; indeed. It’s not at all a sensible place for a girl in my position; I shouldn’t even be back in Cambridge yet; it’s only Monday and, well. Certainly I acted like I needed more time …

Yet I’ve made a decision, don’t you know. My baby, I’ve come round to something; I’ve come round and round and round.

Kit was reeling himself. His ears and face burned, but he had to blink away splatters of cold rain. The wet streamed out of his hair. As soon as he’d come in the kitchen he’d discovered the printout, unseparated pages with feeder-strips still attached, a neat white stack in the middle of the curling pink memos that still littered the breakfast table. He’d found it and stormed first around the apartment, then back out onto the sidewalks. He’d jogged for blocks in either direction, over frost-buckled brick under freezing rain.

In high school, you know (do you know about high school, wherever you are?), the sweet sixteens scribble in their diaries, scribble scribble about the season’s infatuations — and then they show off what they’ve scribbled; they reveal their heart’s secrets (o, sigh) to whoever they think might whisper them, eventually, to the person they actually want to know … So I’ve heard, at least, my baby; I never went in for that sort of thing, playing Telephone, all that silliness; in my case the stakes were much too serious for that, in high school, much too serious. What I mean to say is, well. You aren’t simply another infatuation, my dear lost baby, and my sitting here doing “input” isn’t simply an adolescent game, a make-believe-mystery, in which Little Miss Giddy comes home where she might get caught — because she wants to get caught …

My baby, I don’t believe this is that; I don’t believe I’ve fallen prey to such silliness: catch me if you can. The stakes are much too serious; and the “office in the home” is the only office I have — a room of one’s own, my baby. So if my prince should come, my prince your stepfather, if he should catch a whiff of my Cutty Sark out in the stairwell and come a-running … well. I do know the man, my baby, I know your stepfather; and he should read this, really; he needs to see whatever design I’m about to carve out on my Apple as much as I do.

Then too, “Delete” is always only a single swift touch of the key away.

Kit needed a towel. He needed a slug of scotch himself, something to take the chill off. His brand, Johnny Walker. In the liquor cabinet he found Bette’s half-finished pint of Cutty, the clipper ship on the label, the proud old vessel gone sketchy at the edges. Somehow seeing it knocked the wind out of him. It left Kit slumped on the long-unwashed linoleum, so the clip in his pocket pinched him again.

She’d known he wouldn’t be home: I do know the man. And after a slow moment sitting there, as he began working the towel over his sopping head, Kit understood that Bette’s letter (or “letter,” as she’d have put it) stung him all the worse because it was a reminder of the note he himself had left for Leo. He’d lacked the strength to face the old man. It’d been hard enough keeping up a good front for Louie-Louie, assuring the brother that he’d take care of everything — the gun and everything. After that the best Kit could manage was typing up a brief explanation for Corinna and then finally jotting a note for Leo. A memo. Black on pink, like the clutter on his kitchen table. Kit had slipped it into the Mirinex box on his way out.

He found his feet, found his drink, warmed his gullet. Now what did Bette mean, calling him a stepfather?

But as for the weekend, my baby, my weekend of decision, well. Consider this mystery: I haven’t gone far, but I’ve visited an entirely different culture. Such are the demographics, in our packed and painful corner of the continent: in half a day’s drive you can move through three or four distinct cultures, each one in place for a good hundred and fifty years now at the least. Northward it’s Boston, Chelsea, Lynn, and Salem, which I would chart as first Brahmin, then blue-collar, then immigrant, and then finally history: the witches. Southward it’s Boston, Quincy, Brockton, New Bedford, which I would chart as first the ghettos, then the estates, then the factories, and then finally history: the whale ships. Westward it’s … well. Suffice to say that to my way of thinking, wherever you go it comes to history: there’s no stretch of the map I couldn’t chart — until I traveled all the way out to, for instance, Blue Earth County, Minnesota. Suffice to say that Sunday evening I headed west, more or less, to Providence, Rhode Island.

… honestly, was it only yesterday evening? not even twenty-four hours ago?

My baby, I bolted my oceanside hideaway — a Cottage, little ghost, a packed and painful corner indeed, though I must say I’m grateful for their Cutty Sark (do you know about blue laws, where you are? our Commonwealth’s Sunday laws?) — and I flew over scotch-brightened thruways to Providence, Rhode Island. In a hospital there I found someone who I think loved me once, or loved my family at least … and in that same Providence hospital I at last settled my business regarding, well — you.

A hospital? She settled her business? Kit had to fight off starkly imagined headlines, tabloids flashing ABORTION and ADULTERY. He took up the towel again. Clumsily he massaged his head, moaning now and then into the fuzzy gloom of the cloth. After a while, he recalled Asa Popkin. Come tomorrow morning, would he be talking to the lawyer about a divorce?

Though that last bit should be redone, don’t you know, that “someone who loved me”—that bit should give me a chance to exercise my Delete (maybe); because this was someone who loved someone else in my family, not me.

Indeed, Providence itself presented rather a mystery. God knows there are mysteries, and this was another, finding what I wanted in Providence, RI; I had to do rather some digging, some research. You might say that I lifted a page from your stepfather’s book. The person I was after, the person who I think used to love me — oh God, why can’t I simply say it: the one she loved was my father — at any event I’d heard she’d remained single, this person in Providence. And so I’d come to town believing the next step would be a simple one, my business with you would be over in a trice; but I at first I found myself calling strangers. In an entirely different culture …

O, I tapped my feet, on the unknown street — Delete; back in my seat, I cranked up the heat — Delete.

In this corner of the continent, don’t you know, every culture has its Women’s Crisis Center; it’s rather a new development on the local charts, and a good one too, I’d say: every culture its own Crisis Center, each with its own Service Directory, a book of one’s own. And, well, I am a woman, and I am having a crisis … “am,” yes am, present tense, my baby; the lacerations itch, they ooze (sometimes I believe I’ll never pull anything from this Apple except worms) …

And so I borrowed a page from your stepfather; he’s quite the prize muckraker, o yes; and I called a Women’s Crisis Center. After all it was a woman I’d come to Providence to find. It couldn’t very well have been a man, could it, this person who used to love my father.

She was an unusual woman, my father’s lover, though she was also, well. She was one of us — one of our kind — with the same lapsed-Episcopal pretensions as the rest of us: the jean skirts and the nic fits. She too had gone half-blind before the endless slides of Art History, and she too was forever stopping by the mailbox to see if there wasn’t another check from home; and our paths crossed occasionally, you see, our charts overlapped (though you should understand, my baby, that this was before the proliferation of Women’s etc., a significant absence)… Though you should understand, she was unusual; she was only a year older than me, a year “ahead” of me, but already this girl possessed — at least, among us lapsed Episcopalians — a rare sense of how she was going make her way: a rare, unsullen practicality about her likes and dislikes, and about their funding. And yet she was one of us: she met my father when they shared the same seat-row on the North Shore commuter train.

Now, I came to recognize this woman’s difference, her rarity, not simply because she had an affair with my father, no; also, shortly thereafter, I myself fell into a period I’ve come to call The Rampage.

More tabloids. That Bette’s father should have cheated was shock enough. The man had never made much of an impression, compared to the likes of Cousin Cal. On him, Bette’s long-boned paleness looked watery. The father had a Vice Presidency at First Boston and an avocation for Scottish genealogy. On one wall of his den hung a framed letter from some Edinborough regimental society. Yet the news about “Fudds”—a regular sex machine, that Fudds — wasn’t the real surprise in today’s printout. What shook Kit more was that his wife should bring up, for the second time in less than a week, The Rampage. The Rampage, an in-the-bedroom version of trashing the family garden, picking the men up and putting them down.

In the photos Kit had seen from that time, his wife-to-be had worn her hair like a helmet. She’d thrust out one cowgirl hip as if it were the edge of an axe. Battle-ready. Kit lowered the printout, thinking back to the letter she’d left him last Tuesday. She’d mentioned Ivan, then. One of the very few I’ve kept in touch with. Very few, to put it mildly. Bette had gone most of their marriage without bringing up Ivan or any of her other one- and two-nighters from that time. Kit would’ve thought she’d never wanted to hear about The Rampage again.

The Rampage, The Rampage! — oh, don’t the “Cut” and “Paste” keys make it easy — The Rampage, The Rampage! “Cut” and “Paste:” just the thing for lacerations, my baby. Indeed as I consider it now, as I consider my wounds, I think that perhaps you would’ve done better to discuss this, um, “difficult period” (The Rampage!) with your stepfather, if you’d ever known your stepfather. He could have handled the subject more objectively, your handsome prince of a stepfather; he might even go so far as to say there was a prince or two before him; whereas your mother, my baby, your mother can’t think of them as princes. She finds this far too packed and painful a corner of the world for princes, your mother.

Oh, who shall I mention? perhaps that violent French post-doc who’d studied with Roland Barthes? — absolutely chockfull of theories, he was, and gifted with an innate fucker’s rhythm besides, but you had to watch him once he’d cracked the absinthe, you had to make sure there was someone else in the apartment. My baby, when I think of my Rampage partners, it’s like the old song: No way my prince will come — no way, not even if he’s that sweet teenage drug fiend who later turned up in Aerosmith: a wild thing on stage but a cuddly stuffed teddy bear off it (because you see he was far too much of teddy bear, all soft and marble-eyed) … Yes, your mother believes she ran a shameful gamut: shameful, rather predictable really, and utterly devoid of princes. Your mother’s starting to think this entire section should be redone; I scroll back up the screen and I can’t help thinking of your stepfather. One marvels at the man. Before I came upon his muckraking, I’d never thought that mere newsprint could carry such fervor; my baby, you’d have done better to discuss this with him.

But your mother, well. I’m starting to think I should have confined my input to more subtle business: to my schoolgirl self and the others who crossed the quads with me — to the whole intricate process by which “one of us” came of age. Your mother should never have mentioned her wicked past, because the mystery that matters is nothing so sensational; the mystery that matters is this other girl, the one with the unsullen practicality etc., who fell in love with my father. You need to know, you and your stepfather both — you need to understand how one of us came of age, and how my father’s one turned out, in the end, different. Let’s see … there was that thing she said to Hildreth that time Peggy and Alison were talking about the Patty Hearst kidnapping, and then there was the way Hildreth reported what she’d said, the angle of her smile (I mean Hildreth’s smile) and the way she (Hildreth again) wagged her bottle of Boone’s Farm Apple Wine, and then there was that time while Megan and I were waiting for her boyfriend (Megan’s boyfriend) to call and I myself brought up the Patty Hearst affair, and the particular angle of the irony I gave to what I said by repeating what this woman (Our Woman Now In Providence) had said … let’s see.

A subtle business, isn’t it, my baby? O, subtle — o, silliness. There were a thousand thousand faint shadings and shifts in how one of us came of age, don’t you know; there’s a veritable War and Peace to be written about us, the New England Natashas; it would include even the palest prism in a sunstruck dorm window on that long afternoon when, say, the ’60s shaded into the ’70s…

Am I playing games, here at my Apple? playing giddy teen games after all? I came to this with something serious to say: I’d decided that you were born out of my father’s affair.

I think I’ll name the woman Dee, as in Dee-lete.

Now Dee was well into Med School the last she and I spoke — that is, not long after her fling with old Fudds — and she intended to work in obstetrics (small world), and so you see at the Providence Women’s Crisis Center (new world), all your mother needed to do was ask whether there were a Doctor Dee in town. A Doctor Dee, you see, because the at-home Dee clearly had an unlisted number — something your mother’s been thinking of getting herself, lately … At any event le Centre du Crise proved remarkably helpful, and I couldn’t help but think of your stepfather, again: forever helpful and sincere and, unlike your mother, perfectly direct. Yes direct: that’s Dee, Ayy, Arrgh.

By now Kit was out of his coat and into nightclothes. Dry clothes, even warm — the bureau stood beside the radiator. The pieces of the gun ended up on top of the bureau, beside the photo of his father. He left the Percodan up there too, still untouched. Through all this Kit never lost the thread of his wife’s thinking. Her previous letter had seemed to him written in another language, if not another medium, but now it seemed he could handle a more complex wave-pattern. But that was also precisely what hurt: how well he and Bette knew each.

The entire weekend’s been like that, don’t you know, I’ve been forever thinking of some third party even in the midst of trying to reach my second party … Indeed such distractions have been buzzing about my head for longer than that: there’s a certain Ms., yes Mzzzz, a real bee in my bonnet (your stepfather will know who I mean [if I am in fact doing this input for him]); and there’s been another ghost about, lately, another half-mad apparition out of mean times (and shall I nest one clue inside another again? [you really should read this, stepfather]).

Ivan, Kit figured. The “mean times” were the Rampage, and Ivan certainly qualified as half-mad. He was the one who’d told Bette about the psychic.

You know just last week I visited, well, a medium? A woman who speaks with ghosts? — looking for you, my baby, looking for my little lost loup-garou: that’s why I went. Mysteries have their solutions, God knows, and that goes for the mystery of my visiting a medium, too; I got the idea when that other ghost in my life started to groan over the phone (o, how he does groan, over the phone) … and last week I lacked the strength to search out my real Mrs. Dee, my real mystery (o, you input imp!) … and so I began to think of you, my baby. I began to look for you — though first, wouldn’t you know it, in-Dee-rectly. In unlikely places.

But then it was also an unlikely place, unlikely indeed, to which my father’s adultery had brought me originally. Unlikely past, unlikely present. I knew about my Fudds’ carrying on of course — He & Dee were no mystery, no, not to an old Tormented Teen snooper like myself, a muckraker to rival your stepfather, really; I began with a phone number scribbled on the stub of a train ticket, and in no time I was eavesdropping on the conversation between Fudds and a certain powerful Old Boy who lent them his Duxbury hideaway (a man, I might mention, not without some power and fame even yet) for fucking. But what I’m trying to get at today, well. This isn’t simply about fucking, my baby, about fucking and finding the clues; rather it’s about the unlikely place I’ve been brought to now — a reflection, you see, of what I was brought to then — because briefly I found myself with quite another father, then, quite a different breed of man; and I liked it.

I liked it, Tormented Teen guerrilla that I was, that I am; I dug up my father’s dirty secrets because I wanted to do damage, I wanted to chart every one of my family’s soft spots — but then those very same secrets revealed my dad to be doing the damage himself: he liked it, he was the guerrilla. He even began to play roof-ball (is there roof-ball where you are, my baby? the tatty old tennis ball careening from gable to gable crazily before dropping back towards the players, towards a score?). After dinner he’d play roof-ball with my brother, my sister — even with me, a fellow family monster, a hesitant secret sharer … and he was tall enough to be a formidable opponent, on those spring evenings before the humidity wore him down. My sweet uncomplicated child, can you understand? can you suss out the subtle business at work here, the complex and unlikely challenge to the world that I saw in my high-hairlined Fudds, thanks to the complex and unlikely project by which I came of age … My other parent, don’t you know, never appeared in such a heroic light: your mother’s mother, my baby, only went on bending between her roses, her peonies, her gladiolas, her foxgloves (even now she goes on, honestly), all in a humming, loam-spotted oblivion. My father, on the other hand, looked as though he could fly, he could bounce from gable to gable all summer long (o, metaphor!); and it only added that much more to the thrill, don’t you see, because I was the only one who knew — a little more than kin, and less than kind (o, allusion!). I liked it, my baby, I quite reveled in my father’s cheating and the new breed of cat it made of him, of me: two smiling sphinxes who shared the same riddle — and so, don’t you see, I was let down badly, hurt worse than I knew, to hear him declare, one evening in the height of the June-wedding season, that he was tired.

Too tired, he declared, as I stood before him tossing and catching the dirty little ball we’d been playing with for weeks now …

Too tired, he sighed, and he put up the closely printed wall of the Wall Street Journal: too tired, and (soggily rattling the ice in his glass) he’d love another gin & tonic, with a little more gin in it this time …

Now, my baby (and anyone else who might be on the other side of the screen [aw, come on, as your stepfather would say]) — now, would it be an exaggeration, would it be rather a sensational exaggeration, if your mother were to say that she went to the family liquor cabinet, that evening, and came back in a Rampage? if she were to say that she fetched her father his damn triple-gin & tonic and then after that, for months to come (interesting word!), she didn’t drink with a man she didn’t fuck? if she were to say that the next conversation she had of any length and substance was the time towards the end of The Rampage, The Rampage! when she deliberately tried to hurt Dee as hard as she could, by letting the girl know, in no uncertain terms, how much the Steyes family likes to fuck?

“Aw, darling,” Kit said. Bette’s agonies unwound like a shell, in slow spirals, and yet they felt like too much too fast. He was still wondering who would groan on the phone. He stood to put in toast and set the kettle on a burner. What he was reading, Kit reminded himself, was the kind of life’s partner he’d asked for. A know-it-all with depth, with reach.

My baby, tiny and dead though you are, well. I’m sure you realize that I first searched out another clue or two, Teen Detective, in order to confirm my suspicions that dear old Fudds’ affair had indeed ended; you realize, I’m sure, that I couldn’t simply leave that laceration alone. I first made certain that my father no longer went traipsing off on his dubious overnight “presentations” (in Duxbury, mon pere?); and after that while I can’t recall, here before this gray grid, just when I moved into my angry little studio on Dana Street, nonetheless the answer is yes, I mean the answer to the question your mother was just asking …

Yes! I went directly to my Rampage! Yes, in that candid moment over my father’s gin-&-Journal I understood that the man was no longer a campeñero, that he was in fact just another tin-star dictator with blood on his hands and a happy banana …

Examples, God knows I have examples. I have irrefutable evidence that nine-tenths of what I said and did in those days was all about me and my father. Yes, the answer’s yes, and our mother could regale you with ugly evidence indeed, with incidents draped in transparent Freudian slips (o, games), incidents that go from backstage at a bar where Aerosmith had a gig to upstairs in the Parker House with a prominent State House Old Boy. This weekend, thanks to my little talk with Dee down in Providence, honest hindsight at last revealed that throughout this entire incident-packed period (interesting word!), I was after my father — whether after fucking him or killing him, or both … well. Hoo boy, as your stepfather would say (o, yoo hoo, my prince! yoo hoo! [but the truth is he won’t be home for hours, my baby; I’ve got plenty of time left to Delete])

The truth is, even at my most outrageous, my most Rampageous, I was just another rebel rich girl, wasn’t I? Even out on the astral plane you’ve come across the type, haven’t you? Bright but lacerated nucleii, aren’t we, grubby little handfuls struggling for greater mass against the fracturing effects of shame … My weekend journey to find you, and then my sitting here to put you into words, these are both mysteries, don’t you know — but I do wonder whether, in the end, there exist any mysteries about personality at all, these days. I do wonder if we haven’t had the mystery charted and graphed out of us, these days: nailed like Natasha into Tolstoyan immutability.

Kit followed her more with his spine than his head. He trusted his spine, and the soggy beehive hanging from it.

He trusted, as well, better sensations: the warmth of tea, full-bodied herbal stuff Bette bought in Central Square, and toast. With the sardines back at the office, it was better nourishment than he’d had in weeks. More than that, Kit thought he understood. He believed he’d figured out this “my baby” business. He wasn’t reading about adultery, or not his wife’s anyway. She hadn’t had an abortion over the weekend either.

When I at last caught up with Dee, don’t you know, she too seemed no mystery; rather she seemed the natural end result of a progression already sketched on the air at the time of our last conversation — sketched so plainly (o, history without mystery) that nothing had changed, for Dee, even though she’d rushed out of our last conversation in tears. I mean, here she was in hospital fatigues, working the Sunday shift in Emergency Trauma at Good Samaritan, in hospital fatigues and an unpretentious wedding diamond, with her hair in a sensible bob … She knew her likes and dislikes and their funding, my baby; she showed no trace of how hard I’d once tried to hurt her.

Myself on the other hand, God knows, I must have looked like rather a case, when dear old Dee first laid eyes on me… Indeed, the foremost victim of The Rampage, The Rampage! (after myself, myself!) didn’t recognize me, until I called her by her Cliffie nickname. Indeed, her first once-over — before I spoke her name — made it perfectly clear just what sort of a case she saw in me, with my Newbury Street curls and coat, my Sunday eyeliner: she saw another pampered and overcomplicated troublemaker: another rebel rich girl.

Then with her Cliffie nickname, I became three-dimensional, just like that, out of her file folder and into her heart — or more precisely, into her craw. She became angry, did Dee, frowny, and no one can frown quite like a startled woman in a gymnast’s haircut, a startled doctor at a busy station, demanding an explanation: Where are you hurt?

O, Dee, sticks and stones may break my bones, but it’s these old names that really hurt me. They ooze, they itch — for as you’ve no doubt figured out by now, my baby, I needed to ask this woman about, well. About the past, our mutual past; and naturellement, that’s what I began to see before me, right there in the Trauma Center: no sooner did some clumsy euphemism for The Rampage come from my mouth, “um, that time when I was um, more than usually sexually active”—no sooner did I mention it than I was back in it, in the worst and meanest moment of it: back the night I’d invited Dee over to the studio, back not long after too-tired Fudds had walled himself up behind his Wall (for good, I might add; he hasn’t come out since). I was back taking a night off from my Oedipal Rampaging (it’s all charted and graphed, isn’t it?) and instead steering my girl talk, my cheerful girl talk with my dear old chum Dee, well — steering our conversation towards intimate particulars.

I was cunning, in those days: little Miss Cunning Stunts … Dee brought herbal tea, she introduced me to herbal tea, and I made certain that she had a firm and thorough understanding of my situation before we’d finished our second cup. I can handle a word like “clitoris,” don’t you know, with a sang-froid that’s nothing short of clinical — though in that regard I’m hardly unique, am I, not when the Cambridge Adult Education Center is offering seminars like The Problem of Orgasm. My baby, you wouldn’t believe our ‘70s silliness: women actually refer to climax as “the big O”…

All this, you see, being just the sort of Kinsey-cold detail I offered Dee, that night over herbal tea: detail as cold as the windows on a seaside Cottage in mid-winter, and all intended to prove just how much the Steyes like to fuck.

I was a flirt, in my skirt … Delete. In my jean skirt I smile, legs Indian-style … Delete.

As I say, my baby, last night in the Trauma Center I re-experienced the entire heartless episode, the mean bitch that I was … And the present-day Doctor Dee, don’t you know, Dee on duty — she actually exhibited some of the same responses as her younger self: then (in the flowery scent of the tea) her sensible gaze had flickered because she’d been stung, and now (in the antiseptic flatness of the Center) her look clouded because she became concerned; then as my nasty-nasty unfolded, her knowing posture had faltered, on my apartment’s deeply dented hassock, and now as I tried to explain, her perch softened, on her wheeled stool; then she’d spoken from deeper in the throat with every new question, and now the same, the same … And both episodes ended in tears, o, naturellement.

Then — it had pleased me, don’t you know, it had pleased your bitch mother to send Dee out of her place crying, to break down this girl a year “ahead” (so I suppose I’ve provided an example of Dee’s unusual spirit after all: I’ve defined serene-a-Dee by its absence)… It had pleased me to see the proof that Dee had cared for old Fudds, that he’d broken her down, too.

She loved my father; hence

I had to come to Providence.

And now — well. In the Trauma Center it ruined me, because I wasn’t just resurrecting a sour old spirit, I was resurrecting a whole crucifixion, I was resurrecting the whole unhappy Testament back to that first unhappy Garden, back through the Crisis Centers and the Cutty Sark and the Cottage, through the scars across your stepfather’s lovely eyebrow … It ruined me; I was the one in tears last night, Bette like the actress, absolutely dripping onto her lapels, proud black velvet lapels (I never so much as undid my first button), dripping with shame all over again — especially, my baby, when I brought up you.

For of course I did bring up you, my baby.

I’d searched out this woman because of you — not because of me and Dee and, well …

O, all right, I suppose I was also there because I needed to apologize, to make amends: all right, that too — but not just that, not solely that. Rather I journeyed to Providence to speak with two people at once (just as I’m doing now [maybe baby]): with her and, at last, with you.

Mysteries, God knows there are mysteries, and this one strikes me now as badly done: the clues at first are nowhere to be found, and then they come in clumps, the characters seem no better than cardboard cutouts and the villain (the real father [in fact I can only guess who it might be]) remains offstage the whole time. This should all be redone; certainly I can’t let your stepfather see it (Dee was kind to me, finally, and so will be Delete).

Kit didn’t need more clues. Knowing where his wife was headed, he’d long since unplugged the phone and poured the last finger of Johnny Walker back into the bottle. He understood: during the Rampage, she’d become pregnant.

I made a shambles of the clues back in those days, too, back when you were actually folded up there inside and trying to tell me … well. A missed period, there’s a clue, and a stout New England constitution that never misses a period, there’s another; and then your mother began to suffer wooziness in the mornings — though it was wooziness I always put down to the previous night’s rotgut and reefer; oh, I made a shambles of your every clue, my baby; I didn’t want to know. And even so, long thoughts did start to creep up on me, don’t you know, during my rare empty evenings; and I fell into even webbier meditations on what I’d done to Dee, how I’d hurt her and how she’d cared.

Then behind those thoughts there came to mind three or four occasions of conception to choose from, two or three perhaps — the fact is, I can only guess at your real father, my baby; and I don’t believe it was the ghost who’s come back to haunt me lately, the groan over the phone … Then the riding accident, what else? didn’t I say the characters here were nothing but cardboard? nothing but bright grubby subatomics moving in predictable patterns? I fell from my frisky Hepburn (my baby, all my mounts are Hepburns): fell clumsy with rotgut and reefer, fell careless with showing off for some tall-in-the-saddle bedmate; I fell and after my fall I had so much bleeding that I called a halt to my, to my, well … you wouldn’t call them “antics.” But whatever you call them, with the heavy bleeding I called a halt for a while, a while that went on stretching, stretching, just as every night my long thoughts were stretching: until they became so long and dark, my imaginings, that at no point was your mother able to bring herself to a doctor (your mother, me [I, she]: perhaps all I’m really doing these days is seeking a happy medium between first person and third)…

Dee was kind, as I say — Providence-tial and kind, yesterday — though she remained bewildered, and she hadn’t quite lost her frown yet, either; she must have asked me six times if I didn’t want to take off my coat. She had the answers I’d come for, however; and once you learn the vocabulary, my baby, honestly, you start to wonder what all he the fuss was about. Once you learn an expression like “spontaneous abortion,” well. That’s nothing to cry about, is it? and neither is a statistic like one pregnancy in every four. I would guess now that Dee was deliberately, um, underplaying: that she tempered her information, in order not to upset her bizarre midnight visitor any further — as when, for instance, she claimed that miscarriages of one kind or another were so common, we couldn’t even be sure that my riding accident had had anything to do with it. She was clever, actually, not merely kind, just as the neutral blue of her hospital uniform was a color cleverly chosen: restful and reliable: true blue.

And yet Dee’s expert tone and the skill with which she later skated round my soggy offer to get together some time (perhaps on the astral plane, dear) — none of it, nonetheless, undid the basic compulsion at work in my Sunday (and in my Monday, too [I’ve got a lot to Delete])… none of it undid the decision I’d come to, the decision I’ve slept on and now input: my resolution that there’d been a fetus in the first place: there’d been something to miscarry.

Briefly you lived, my baby …

You lived, born of the worst mess of my life, and that mess was born of my father’s: you lived, and from there I scroll back, back … yet really I must Delete.

Really, this should all be, well. The lacerations itch, they ooze, and your mother can’t help but see the sheer silliness in what she’s done today, this weekend: like a talking head up on an interior screen, a perpetual electronic voice declaring: Look at you; Just look at you … (and the men have the same problem, my baby, judging from your stepfather). Your mother can’t help but cave in under the pressure of that head. My baby, I won’t deny you any longer: last night I said you lived in the face of Dee’s power to Delete, and today I’ve input the same, in the face of my own; I’ve said it, I’ve input … but I can’t print out, my baby; I can’t let your stepfather see me like this (not when he’s spending all damn day with that other Mzzzz buzzing around) …

O, what am I talking about? I came to my Apple with something simple to say, plain and simple.

This should all be redone.

*

Kit was thinking of the dead. By now he’d washed his face, splashing away a renewed spasm of moaning and near tears. He’d made more tea and reread the printout, or reread in patches while peeling away the borders and separating the pages. And he’d fought down an impulse to go searching for her again. Bette had faced enough hard cases for one day. She was coming out of this in her own good time, in her own chosen places. Patience, husband. Limit yourself to these few rooms and tools — a half-empty yellow legal pad, a decent black pen. Kit ended up back at the kitchen table, where he’d set the printout under the phone and swept the memo sheets out of the way with one lank robed arm. Thinking of the dead.

Junior was dead. Junior’s victims. Bette’s baby.

Corinna had a sister who’d been shot by a boyfriend. The women’s center across from Sea Level had lost a member to an overdose. A skeleton had turned up at the excavations for the new T station. Then there was Kit’s father, upright beside his cockpit, hard-muscled and sure. Dead.

Leaving the pad and pen untouched, Kit replugged the phone. Uncle Les picked up on the second ring. Les, the other one.

“Listen,” Kit asked as soon as he could, “where’s Mom?”

Silence. More than likely Les had been expecting something about his out-of-the-closet brother.

“Mom,” Kit said. “I, ah, I’d like to talk to my Mom.”

The uncle worked up to his answer, beginning with: “The church.” Eventually Kit understood that his mother was making spaghetti for the Loaves & Fishes dinner at Blue Earth Presbyterian. Thanks to her fundraising, her knack for organization, the church now put on these dinners three nights a week. Lots of folks in need, Les said.

Kit was nodding. It took a long moment to recall that his uncle couldn’t see him, to work up to his own responses. He admitted he’d forgotten. He hadn’t even stopped to think what time it was out West. And for another few minutes Kit commiserated about the day’s bombshell from brother Pete. It came easy — he knew what the man wanted to hear. Les, Pete’s still the same guy he’s always been. Les, he wouldn’t have told you if he didn’t care about you. He needs you.

What the man wanted to hear, though, was the best Kit could manage. There over the waiting yellow page, he had a lot of work waiting, drafting longhand till midnight or beyond. All he could spare for Uncle Les was a brisk wrap-up, but this did mean he didn’t have to say another word about wanting his mother.

Yet even once he was off the phone Kit went on staring, thinking of the dead. If the phone hadn’t rung again, and if it hadn’t been another crank call — a serious jolt even though the caller made no noise, no groan — Kit might never have gotten started on his testimony.

Chapter 10

How about this — an actual newspaper. The pages crackling as he turned them, the ink getting into his fingers. The voices remained the same, too, column after column: declarative voices, conservative, every sentence squaring another to help box in some squirming cell of evidence. An actual mainstream newspaper. Kit had swung out of bed early, fired up about his draft, his finished testimony. In thick boot-socks he’d shuffled down to the freezing stoop to meet the boy with the morning Globe. Beside his unplugged kitchen phone he took time to read, while coffee reopened the nerve-ends in his bruises.

Nobody had anything new on Monsod. Grand Jury subpoenas so far were straight out of Casablanca: Round up the usual suspects. Fire and emergency personnel, prison security, those clowns Ad and Amby. Kit saw his own name on the list again. Attached, the tag “unavailable for comment.” The Jury had called a couple of prison inmates as well. These weren’t the howlers down in solitary, the steel-shivered voices who’d turned Kit round and round. Rather the Jury would cross-examine “convicts assigned to the penitentiary workshop at the time of the disturbance.” And that was some progress, at least. That meant big media realized Monsod’s trouble had started in the workshop. They’d learned something since Thursday night, the garbage Kit had seen on TV. Nonetheless, so far the closest the investigation had come to the root problem — guys, the walls are caving in — was a subpoena for the standards supervisor on the original project. Aw, the guy was a family hire. Responsibility for keeping Monsod up to code had been foisted off on an emeritus professor at Boston College whose last construction experience had come after the hurricane of 1938.

Nothing new. Nothing better. To judge from the Tuesday wrap-up, Kit’s own eight- and ten-week-old research still had him a step ahead of the pack.

My. Are we proud? Are we?

Not particularly. Kit sat reading in his last clean suit. His trenchcoat hung over a chair, belt-tip on the linoleum, the reassembled gun bulky in one pocket. He was returning to the office as soon as he was done with his reading, his thinking. He needed to negotiate something different with Leo, and after that with Louie-Louie, but neither of them would be in before ten. Kit would have time even to turn the gun in to the police in Central Square. They took weapons no questions asked.

No, what Kit read this morning didn’t make him proud. Rather he still felt the way he had since finishing up last night, flarey and quick, bristling with ideas.

The Globe, much as he’d rushed to get it, to read it, also looked like just another paper sampler. On this table, at least. Kit turned the wide, crackling pages across the loose pink tongues of phone-memos, and across Bette’s black-&-white printout. If you saw the letter out of the corner of an eye, and against the staid design of the Globe to boot, Bette’s work appeared all ratty line breaks and hyperactive punctuation. Plus there was Kit’s work, his statement for Asa Popkin. A draft in the blocky mix of script and print he’d been using since he was a teenager, it was the most vivid thing on the table. Blue fountain pen on yellow legal paper.

Eyewitness testimony, far tougher going than the morning news. Kit had only made it through four of the five W’s, before his handwriting broke down sometime after midnight. It wasn’t fatigue that stopped him, though. It was that fifth W itself. Who, What, When, Where — he got through those in plenty of time, with energy to spare. But then came the fifth, Why. Then came Kit’s heady return to the Cottage beach, the moil of the Wood’s Hole crossing. As he’d told Bette, on that beach, first he had to direct the question towards himself. Why? Why had this happened, who did he think he was? In the winter fog that was his testimony, a good six or eight possible Kit Viddichs flickered. Kit the cowboy, there was one. The cowboy who couldn’t adjust to city life, indoor life. Or there was Kit the caveman throwback, never more than a hot evolutionary minute away from bloody murder. The new women’s magazines would like that one. Kit the crazy man flickered out there, too — an easy guy to spot, lately. And there was always, of course, Kit the klutz.

Oh, Bette said now, in his coffee-brightened head. Kit the wit.

He’d trusted none of them, finally. How could he trust these ghost rationale, ghost selves, fluttering in and out of his mind’s eye like a newspaper flying apart in a storm? In the end, as his handwriting broke down, Kit had dummied his fifth W. He’d fallen back on a mockup testimony, with mockup words like “self-defense” and “in the confusion.” Of course he admitted what he’d done. He admitted he’d hit the man a second time. When, Where. The coroner’s report, Kit wrote, would corroborate. And he went on to point out what else the coroner would corroborate. The city media had gotten Junior’s death wrong, Kit wrote, and they’d been perpetuating their mistake since last Thursday.

He went on to nail every bad guy in sight. The overhead pipes for instance, the way Garrison and the inspectors pussyfooted around any mention of the overhead pipes, that was no mystery. That was as simple as gravity: Water doesn’t run uphill. As simple as muscle power: Junior couldn’t possibly have pulled out an iron chain bolted to the wall, not even on drugs — unless the bolts were weak to begin with. The BBC inspection had actively avoided the real problem. They’d invited Kit along to make it look otherwise, CYA. But the real problem remained, the seepage from overhead, seepage that had loosened connections and softened materials all over E Level. And the faulty plumbing ran back up through D Level. Through the workshop. Conditions must’ve gotten so bad that, last Thursday morning, one of the cons had finally done something desperate.

No mystery, none of it. Kit named as well the man behind the entire bogus operation, Forbes Croftall. The Senate majority whip had the means. He had deep connections with both the construction industry and the Building Commission. And Monsod had gone up during his tenure, a project of the ‘60s.

The inspection was a sham, Kit wrote, and the motive no doubt goes back to the original contracts.

Strong words. And then this morning, Kit found the Senator in the Globe. In the “State House Notebook,” Kit found an item that some muckrakers would’ve taken for corroboration. Croftall had announced he was getting a divorce. Calling it quits after a marriage of twenty-eight years, the majority leader had read a prepared statement.

It fit, sure. Corroboration, some would say. This was 1978, and the wives of sleazeball politicians could dump their husbands more freely than in the past.

It fit — but Kit wasn’t putting together that puzzle. He wasn’t working on the bad guy around the home, but on the public figure in high office. Wasn’t trying to hang out the dirty laundry, but to hammer out the whole truth.

Even now in his clean suit, with a long and thoughtful draft before him, with a half-decent breakfast in his belly and a plan for getting rid of the gun — even now, Kit could feel the worm on his back. The doubt. That too was part of the alacrity he’d woken up with, the energy that had rocked out of solving a small mystery or two. For starters, Kit fretted over explaining what he still had to do. It wasn’t going to be easy, once he got to the office. But worse than that, harder on him, were these ghostly vagues in his testimony. To him the work remained a mockup. Words words words. Popkin might accept it, maybe even the Grand Jury, but someone in his own line of work could put their finger on the weak spots in a minute.

MEMO

To: Kit the Employee

From: Kit the Editor

One, what’s this “no doubt” in your close? “No doubt” the Senator’s covering up some peccadillo from years ago? Original sin? So, you got a paper trail on that? You got the apple? Don’t you know, you’re not going to find a cancelled check? Haven’t you heard, paying off pols is strictly a cash business?

Get rid of it.

Two, what’s this “in the confusion” crap in the fourth graph? By then, wasn’t the con too weak to do any serious damage? Weren’t you safe against the wall? Hadn’t the guard come back into the area? So, what “confusion?” Why does that smell to me like hooey? Like more original sin?

Rewrite.

An actual paper, how about it. Kit had broken off reading when the apartment buzzer sounded and, back out on the freezing stoop, he found Charley Garrison.

*

“Ten minutes. I drop you off and goodbye.”

“Forget it. I’ll ride the T.”

“The T? Leo’s not at the office, I told you.”

“I can find him.”

“Leo, he’s at the new station, I told you. The new one the T’s putting in. Ain’t no stop anywhere near there.”

“I can walk.”

“Oh, whoa. Come on, I ride you, it’s warm. Ten minutes, and you won’t never have to see me again your whole life.”

“Goodbye, Garrison. I’m going back inside now.”

“Viddich. Leo, I told you — Leo’s got what you want. He’s got what you asked for.”

“I don’t want it any more.”

Garrison pouted, Irish, young. “Well, I don’t know anything about it. ‘Course. Don’t know anything about any business between you two. But you ask me, if you’re like changing the plan between you two? Changing the arrangement? Then you owe the guy. You got some explaining to do.”

Kit tried to relax, against his building’s closed front door. He’d been standing like a Cossack, chest up, arms crossed. He’d stiffened himself against the disappointment of rushing back downstairs only to discover this wasn’t Bette.

“Viddich. You know you got some explaining to do.”

The Monsod guard fit remarkably well into the rush-hour world. He wore college gear, a down parka, a flannel shirt.

“The guy just wants to help. Leo. He’s just thinking, where else you and me ever going to get to talk?”

Of course if Garrison was a college boy, he was on the varsity. His muscular butt bulged almost as wide as his parka. Nonetheless, he wouldn’t have looked out of place over on the steps of Widener Library. The only prop that didn’t belong was that bait-shop baseball cap. You wouldn’t find a college kid in a baseball cap, not unless they were totally unhip. Nonetheless the guard was showing Kit something, playing the diplomat. He’d kept his distance, backing down the stoop steps.

“But, ten minutes in the truck — Viddich, it’s not like we’re engaged or anything.”

Garrison kept his voice down, even when the busses roared by on Mass Ave, a block away.

“You ask me,” he said, “it might be the most important ten minutes of your life.”

“The most important ten minutes of my life? I think that was yesterday when I talked to my lawyer.”

“Whoa. Tough guy.”

In fact Kit’s role-playing felt stale. Out here, coatless and pumped up, with the soft spots in his testimony behind him — stale. And he was the one who’d left Leo the note, after all. Kit touched his neck.

“Garrison,” he tried, “think about it. You shouldn’t even be talking with me.”

The guard shrugged. Kit recalled what he’d seen in the paper: the Grand Jury had called prison security.

“Hoo boy,” he said. “Now who’s playing the tough guy?”

“Viddich, I mean, you’re not the only one’s got a lawyer.”

Got a lawyer, check. In spite of himself Kit began to think of the logistics: he looked at his watch. Eight-thirty. Leo was all the way down at the new waterfront station — the work site where they’d turned up the Colonial artifacts and the Shawmut pieces. Mirinex must have landed the contract. Only a cab could make Kit’s rounds, he figured, before the appointment with Popkin. A cab plus serious cash.

“Eight-thirty,” Garrison said, his own sleeve shoved back. “You know I been standing out here a half-hour?”

Kit remained head-down, over the big knob of his wrist. He found himself making a connection to something Uncle Pete had said last night, the man’s idea of evil: secrets in too small a place. Secrets ingrown and festering. If anything other than sheer astonishment had kept Kit out in the cold talking to this guy, perhaps it had been that, the need to break open his own small place. To talk, to tell. If anything would take him across town to confront Leo, perhaps it would be that.

Garrison stood so low, down off the stoop, that Kit hardly had to raise his eyes. “You realize that anything you tell me, it’s going to go straight to my lawyer?”

The guard grinned, catching on at once. “Lawyers, that’s their job. Got to hear what everybody’s telling everybody.”

An ambulance went shrieking by, the windchill made audible. Kit had a final consideration: “Garrison, listen. Last time I talked with Leo, he told me he wasn’t the Mafia.”

Again the Irish pout. “Come on. You asking what I think you’re asking?”

Kit, straightening, recrossed his arms.

“Viddich. I’m not even supposed to be talking to you. You think I’d do anything to hurt you?”

Kit left him waiting. Left the big dogged errand boy down on the sidewalk wondering what Kit would do, while back in the warmth of his kitchen he pulled on his coat. The single noteworthy event of his few moments up there was the thump of the gun in his pocket. The whump of it swinging into place against his thigh. Kit would have to wait till lunch to stop at the police station. He couldn’t leave it here, not when there was a chance Bette might come back again. If he wanted her to find anything — if he had anything remotely resembling a strategy — it was his testimony. Kit tossed the Globe into the trash and squared the blue-specked legal paper in the center of the table. Ghosts and all, his draft went right where she’d left him the printout. Darling, here’s mine.

Still the gun nagged him, as Kit returned to Garrison and started towards his truck. The density got to him, the full pack jabbing and rejabbing his thigh. Out of nowhere, Kit recalled something from childhood, a square set of miniature books. Maurice Sendak: The Nutshell Library.

The Nutshell Library. When in fact this weight in his pocket was an unregistered weapon, and he was about to take a ride with a crooked cop. To meet a crooked money man. Kit never broke stride, there beside Garrison, but his face lengthened, sobered. He didn’t at first see the truck. He was eyeing the street. The walls of the Cambridgeport duplexes and triple-deckers were all straight lines, clapboard and shingle and aluminum siding, but at this time of year those lines were smudged with caked-on filth. A ruined geometry. And the brick sidewalks humped and wallowed, nowhere reliable.

He didn’t see the truck. He’d grown up with trucks, blockhead pickups only a hair more comfortable than a tractor. One or two might have been fancy enough to carry a Philco in the dash. But Kit didn’t see any truck like that today. Garrison’s rig was something from Star Wars.

The slate morning sky left the reflectors dark, out of luck, but they made quite a collection nonetheless. Reflector mud flaps: Yosemite Sam barking “Back off!” with teeth bared and guns drawn. Reflector pinstriping, black and silver. Reflector stick-ons that bore the CB handle and call numbers. Even the interior, once Kit had climbed into the high cab, seemed designed to glitter. Garrison had gone with creamy black Naugahyde. He had no rear window, the rig was a sleeper, and behind the seats hung black velvet curtains. The gauges had disco-purple needles and digits, and the twin gearshifts were webbed with stainless-steel diagrams.

The CB hung in mid-ceiling. Bristling with dials and hookups, to Kit the squawk box called to mind something from out of left field, a couple thousand years’ worth. He put the CB together with Leo Mirini’s dirty white block from the Coliseum. Another weight over his head. Then he and Garrison were out of the parking space, heat blasting.

“Unbelievable,” Kit said.

“Check out the sound system.”

The guard gestured, more or less indicating the sunroof, then touched a button on the 8-track. Music erupted as if from between Kit’s vertebra. A witless AOR boogie, Grand Funk Railroad. Railroad-loud, and crisp to the least tap of a tambourine.

“Quadrophonics,” Garrison shouted. “The Japs.”

“Unbelievable. You can take the high tech to the woods.”

Garrison eyed him sideways, hands high on the wheel.

“The woods are incidental,” Kit shouted. “The woods are just the backdrop.”

“Whoa. You don’t know, Viddich.” Garrison fingered down the volume. “You don’t know. I go up the Kankamangus Highway there all the time. I’m in the woods all the time.”

“I’m sure you are, Garrison. I’m sure you have lots of fun out there.”

“What are you, still a tough guy? Grand Jury don’t care if I take my baby here to the woods.”

“Take my baby to the woods. Hoo, boy.”

“What are you talking about? Like, ecology?”

“Garrison, I’m talking about perception. Talking about how you perceive.” Already Kit could see they were going by way of the city’s central artery, Memorial Drive, Storrow Drive. They were going to creep along nose to fender with a million others pushing nine o’clock. The errand boy wasn’t taking any shortcuts.

*

The woods, Kit explained, used to mean actual wilderness. “The wild, Garrison. The opposite of technology.”

But in a rig like this, he went on, the wilderness was only a pretty backdrop. Only one backdrop among many, really. “You can take your baby to the woods one weekend, then take her to the seashore the next. It’s the same easy access, same comforts. You’re not in the woods, Garrison, you’re in the technology. You’re at a party.”

The guard slowed for a yellow light, while two cars on Kit’s side accelerated through the intersection.

“I don’t get you,” Garrison said. “There something wrong with a party in the woods?”

“I’m talking about perception, about messing with perception. In my line of work, Garrison — think about it. Perception’s key. The whole job’s predicated on knowing what’s happening and where.”

“Predicated?”

Kit eased back in his bucket seat, his Nutshell Library shifting against his thigh. Stay cool, believer.

“Predicated. Pre-di-cated.” The guard made a show of checking his gauges, his heat vents. He switched off the Album-Oriented garbage.

“You get out to the woods much yourself, Viddich?”

Kit took a moment, in the quiet. “I used to,” he said. “Where I came from, Garrison, it was hard core. We had an Indian guide.”

“You’re shitting me. An Indian guide?”

Kit shrugged. “Men like that, in the woods all the time, they’re usually the outcasts. The kind that never fit in. They’re happy to find steady work.”

“Your own private Tonto. Hard core in Minnesota. Your guide have a name, Viddich?”

Actually the old man had had a whole array of names, though Kit wasn’t about to share any of them with Garrison. A tiny Ojibwa, a man who said the AA prayer every night, he was Claude at the highway turnoff. By first camp, however, he’d revert to his tribal name, Poyi Buss. Then sometimes he’d translate that as Bone Place, sometimes as Death Challenge. The range wasn’t uncommon, among Western natives. “Let me tell you something, Garrison. When I got my first buck, he put his fingers in the blood and painted stripes on my face.”

“Whoa. Hard core.”

“He made me do it too. He made me put a stripe on his face. And then he made me drink the blood.”

Kit’s driver went on making a fuss.

“Give me a break, Garrison. It was another world.”

The guard chuckled. “Oh, I don’t know. Seen what they go in for at them punk-rock clubs?”

Kit eyed the Charles River, outside. The truck had pulled onto Storrow Drive now, poking along between tie-ups. The river was stormy, spiked waves tearing up an oily surface. Or maybe it was Garrison who was oily. In Kit’s window the man’s reflection rode like scum on the water, while at last he brought up the Grand Jury.

“In there, Viddich, you got no idea what you’re going to have to deal with. You think Monsod was rough?”

The guard wasn’t even pretending to keep up with traffic, his eyes off the road. “In there you’re going to go through Monsod all over again. Every last dirty thing you did, Viddich. Inch by fucking inch.”

At least the roomy curtained cab allowed Kit to turn around smoothly, unruffled.

“You know anything about a Grand Jury, Viddich? You ever do any research like—”

“I know about a Grand Jury.”

“Meat grinder, man. Meat grinder. Don’t go by no rules like a court of law.”

“I know about a Grand Jury.”

“Oh yeah?” Garrison glanced out over Storrow again, easing ahead a car length or two. “Way I heard it, you’ve been acting kind of nutty lately.”

And here came the real heat, a closeness as if the guard had punched the controls into the red. Kit raised a hand to his window, taking in cold through his fingertips. Wearily he told Garrison to make his pitch.

“You been hiding out a lot lately, Viddich. Hiding out, no phone. Mixing booze and painkillers too.”

Kit flexed his back; the Naugahyde squeaked. Secrets, he reminded himself — secrets hurt.

“And now there’s some shit where, you’re closing the paper but you’re not? You ask me, Viddich, that’s nutty.”

“Garrison.” He frowned, putting a clamp on his surprise, his sore spots. “Aren’t you going to tell me that you have friends on the Grand Jury?”

“Whoa, tough guy.”

“Isn’t that what this is about? You’ve got friends who can do me a favor?”

“Yeah, I got friends. People like me and Leo, we got lots of friends. Sometimes, our friends are your friends.”

Now the heat was even in Kit’s fingers.

“Friends we got on that Grand Jury, they’re the tough guys. They’re men, Viddich. You ever work with men?”

“Hmm. You mean like, men who lock a convict in a closet and feed him drugs to keep him quiet?”

The guard seemed to age, his face growing longer. “Wiseass.”

“You mean like men who run a so-called public inspection and never even look at the real problem? We never even looked at those overhead pipes, Garrison.”

“Oughta kick your ass for being such a wiseass.”

Heat in his fingers, heat in his bruises. For a moment Kit could see it happen: the two of them shoving and punching in the gadget-filled space, the high cab rocking amid stalled traffic. Deliberately he exhaled.

“That’s what I’m telling the Grand Jury,” he said.

Didn’t sound too bad. After a moment, after his jaw relaxed, Kit added that once he got his paper away from Leo he was going to put the Monsod story in there as well.

“In your paper?” Garrison’s looks were turning pudgy again. “Man, nutty. Really. You think you’re ever going to put out a paper again in this town?”

Kit swiveled back to the window — and got his worst shock of the morning at the nudge of his tucked-away gun. A shock erupting through the otherwise silly image of him and Garrison in a scuffle. He spread a palm against the Plexiglass. Carefully he explained that it didn’t matter just how the story got before the public. “It won’t be news anymore,” he said, “but this isn’t about news. I’m the only witness.”

“Only surviving witness.”

Kit rolled his eyes. He distracted himself with math, trying to figure the sticker price of the truck, the cost of a gofer like Garrison.

“Whoa,” the guard was saying, “I really jabbed you there, didn’t I? Really jabbed and twisted. I’m sorry, man.”

“The story belongs before the public,” Kit said.

“I’m sorry, really. No call for that. I think it’s this traffic, you know, the old stall-n-crawl.”

Back to the diplomat?

“Gets everybody hot, you know? Traffic.” Back to the pout, the Irish Elvis. “I mean, Viddich, you yourself. Don’t you think like, you’re taking this story awfully personal?”

“Personal?”

Garrison had his eyes on the road, his rig out of first gear. He said he knew enough about the news business to know reporters weren’t supposed to get emotionally involved in their work. “It’s unprofessional. Right? What goes in the paper, that’s strictly business.”

“Journalistic distance.” Just like that, Kit found himself grinning. Looking forward to this round.

“Distance. That’s right. You’re with the media, you keep your distance. Otherwise you can’t work.”

“Sea Level isn’t a forum for me and my whining.”

“That’s right. Just look at the name, hey? Sea Level. That right there, that says everything’s like, balanced. Everything’s in its place.”

“Aw, Garrison.” Kit couldn’t hide his grinning. “Garrison, man, you’re out of date. You’re history.”

The guard, at last nosing off Storrow, could only glance away from the ramp traffic for a moment.

“What I do, it’s the future.” Kit gestured at the truck’s digital clock. “I’m alternative press.”

“What? Viddich, are you being a wiseass again?”

“Not really.” In fact he wasn’t, for all that he enjoyed this round. Or he wasn’t a wiseass any more than Tom Wolfe. “Alternative press, think about it. We started in the ‘60s and we’re headed straight for the future.”

“The future,” Garrison said, “is that Grand Jury.”

“Come on, listen. Learn something. Do you know what happened to the media in the ’60s?”

The guard heaved an incredible sigh, a varsity man after a long day at practice.

“It’s personal, Garrison. Personal voice, personal feelings — it’s all over the media already, and it’s only going to grow.”

“Grow.” A disgusted syllable.

“Don’t you see it happening? Haven’t you heard about cable television, dialing up any news you want, 24 hours a day? It’s personal, man. Your own personal alternative news. Besides that, pretty soon everyone’s going to have a computer.”

“A computer?” Garrison was squinting, trying to figure an angle. “My neighborhood, what people want is a video camera.”

“Okay, a video camera. A video camera or a computer, it’s the same phenomenon.” Warnings were going off in his head: You’re having too much fun with this. “The same, sure. Whether a person’s on camera or on the computer screen — in either case, they’re becoming part of the media. In either case, it’s not, ah, it’s not trained professionals gathering data and then putting what they select before the public.”

“What they select,” the guard said. “What they select, yeah, that’s all it is.”

“But not any more, Garrison. That’s not what’s happening with the new technology.” Kit wasn’t a cowboy, no — he liked to talk, and never more than when he had a worthwhile insight. “Now what’s starting to happen is, the public selects and produces its own news. Alternative press, it’s everywhere. It’s call-in radio, roundtable talk TV. And pretty soon everybody’s going to have a computer, and you can bet they’re going to be talking to each other too.

“Computer to computer, Garrison. Everybody’s going to have one, everybody’s going to put their story on it. One big electronic medium, and everybody’s going to be part of it.”

Off the Central Artery, the guard had picked up speed. As Kit waited for a response, the man actually beat a yellow light.

“Personal is all over the media, Garrison,” he said quietly. He flexed his thigh against his Nutshell Library. “It’s the future.”

“Viddich. Fuck you.”

Kit snorted.

“Fuck you. Really. That Grand Jury, those guys, they don’t care about your theories, Viddich. Computers and the media, who gives a fuck?”

Hardball was good, Kit figured. If the last round was hardball, that would get him ready for Leo.

“Don’t care what you did back in Minnesota, either.”

“Aw, Garrison. I knew I shouldn’t have told you.”

“You could have drunk all the blood west of the Mississippi, man. Not going to mean a thing. If you don’t have any friends in that Grand Jury, they’ll rip your balls out and hang ‘em up to dry.”

“Generally speaking,” Kit said, “people don’t try to frighten other people unless they’re frightened themselves.”

“Whoa. Viddich, myself, I’ll tell you. You ask me, I’d like to see your balls hung up to dry.”

Garrison whipped around a pothole fast enough to make the cab rock. “You know I hate to say this, Viddich. I hate to keep trying to help a bright-boy asshole like you. But our friends, man, they can still be your friends. Still.”

Kit’s turn to heave a sigh.

“You hear me, bright boy? Spite of all your bullshit, they can still be there for you. Our friends.”

“Like Forbes Croftall?”

“Fuck you.” Garrison braked hard. Kit rocked in his seat — was he bracing for a punch? — and discovered that they’d reached the site. The MTA work in progress. Outside the tinted cab window, across a flagged-off strip of waterfront cobblestones, there ranged head-high plywood walls. Support 4x4’s had been set close together, and between them ran a second layer of protection, crosshatched steel fencing. Razor wire wound along the top, shivering in the harbor winds.

“Why do I bother?” the guard was saying. “I told you, I told you — but nobody can tell a bright boy like you.”

Kit counted only two view holes in the plywood. The rest of the wall had been angrily grafitti’d, blood red, ripe black, and scraps of greasy sandwich wrappings fluttered from under the fence. Pedestrians hustled past with eyes averted. All the site needed was a skull-and-crossbones.

Garrison grabbed his arm. “Hey. Dicksuck.”

His grip hurt, but Kit didn’t try to pull free. Hardball. “Garrison,” he said. “Think about it. These friends of yours, they don’t care about you.”

The guard had grown older again, under his cap.

“You notice,” Kit said, “they didn’t send anybody higher up to come and get—”

“Harvard. Fucking rich-boy faggot Harvard.” He yanked up Kit’s bicep, the arm flopped from the elbow. “You think that impresses me? Think that scares me? Viddich, you couldn’t even begin to get what I’ve got. You couldn’t even dream about it. For starters I’ve got this truck here, can you dig it? I’ve got it free and clear.”

With his free hand Garrison smacked the steering wheel. In the thing’s leather sheathing one of the lace-holes popped.

“Let go of me, Garrison.”

“Free and clear, dicksuck. I’m not just talking a quadrophonic eight-track and a CB. I’m talking fucking four on the floor with enough power to hire out as a snowplow, and I even got the commercial license and insurance. All mine, I told you. All free and fucking clear.”

“Let go. Your boss is waiting for me.”

“Whoa, to-ugh guy. Hard co-re. You know what else I got, smart boy? Got two shotguns. Two excellent guns, right there behind your fucking head. Right there on a rack behind the curtain and Harvard here never even knew about it.”

Kit went on letting his arm hang, keeping his look unimpressed. He wasn’t about to turn his head.

“Plus my old man and me, we got six acres on a lake in New Hampshire. Six acres with fishing year-round. Any trouble comes after me, man, I’m up to my lake. Any of your college boy bullshit comes my way, I’m in my truck and I’m gone. I’m gone. Six acres. Plus my guns and my truck. That’s what I got, man, and that you don’t fuck with. You and your fucking rich boy Indian blood on the face bullshit, whoa — that bullshit means about as much to me as your computers in space sci-fi media bullshit. You just want to keep the woods beautiful for nutty faggot rich boys like yourself.

“What you got, Viddich, it don’t even touch what I got. Don’t even touch it, any of your bullshit. You ask me, the cash for this truck was the best money I ever made in my life.”

Cash, sure. Bribery was strictly a cash business.

“I got my truck, dicksuck. Got my truck and my guns and my place. You think you can get away from this shit, this city that’s falling right down into the shit? Think Harvard’ll save you? Harvard ain’t going to worry about some head case like you. You’re nobody. No friends. This newspaper of yours, you can roll it up tight and stick it up your ass for the good it’ll do you when this city goes down into the shit. Roll it tight and stick it up your ass. That’s your paper. That’s all you got. Me, I got my truck and my guns and my place. You — fuck you. You and this niggerdick up the ass you call a city. Fuck you! Fuck you all!”

*

Any time you want to tell a tourist, my basement boys and girls, take a look when our Scandie pseudo comes into The T. The T, you know the place. Uhh-nder the boardwalk, down by the se-ee-ee-ahhh (heavy breathing, get it?). Under the boardwalk and under construction: that’s The T. The club wants to be plywood partitions and steel fencing forever. Plenty of graffiti, plenty of leakage in the overhead pipes. Like dancing in the Elsinore dungeons, hey Scandie?

The T — that’s our scene, my hard cores. I’m a siren for our scene, remember, the voice of leathers and plastics everywhere. And The T, see, is about imitation. It’s an imitation wreck. And imitation, see, is our hard core. Our scene’s home sweet home.

Though, in our case, it’s not so sweet. It’s more like out ow! out. Yeah, that’s imitation, punk style — out ow! out.

Zia see, my homeys. A Movement dinosaur like this David Bowie clown — no, clone; the word is clone—he doesn’t even realize he’s a clone. He comes down into The T, down the entrance ramps and over the coffer dams, and he’s checking for Building Code violations. He’s inspecting the plumbing (what there is of it). The battle for truth goes on (and yawn). The Bastille must be taken every day.

Not in our scene, my sluts and greasers. I mean, the boy’s been bumping into me day after day for a week, he should’ve figured it out by now. In our scene we build our own Bastille. An imitation—“dig it.” Our times, they are a mimicking. Our counterculture apes the authority culture, looking for something we can wear on an earring. Something The Man doesn’t want to see on an earring, check — something that pokes fun at his worst secrets.

And now another visit from the angels on my shoulders. Cue: (that slut) Why, if it isn’t the hard-nosed muckraker. Ayy: There’s leakage. Definite leakage. And the expressway’s right overhead. Cue: Here and everywhere, big boy. Here and right up into the castle of the King. Ayy: The expressway, thousands of cars a day. Any leakage down here will undermine the supports. Cue: Frightens you, doesn’t it? Something you never wanted to see on an earring. Ayy: I’m serious. This isn’t an earring. Cue: Don’t be so sure, man. Leakage, seepage — it’s everywhere. Everybody’s got a closet.

He had rough going to reach Leo. The site was no more than a vast steep-walled pit. Echoes of the overhead traffic never faded, ringing in the heaps of waiting metal, the corrugated steel and copper pipes. Underfoot, plywood walkways wobbled on the boggy floor. When hardhats came by they always carried cable or tools, and these were bulky guys anyway, heavy-muscled in parka vests and jean jackets. Kit had to stand aside. He was aware again of his Nutshell Library. That was bad luck, that he hadn’t been able to get rid of the thing. Having it out with Leo face to face — and on his turf — felt questionable enough to begin with.

Ayy: This isn’t an earring. This is the Central Artery. Cue: This is The T, sweet butt. Only thing it’s good for is to dance. Ayy: Aw, is this a joke to you? A party? I’m trying to change the world. Cue: Yeah, and the only way to do it is to dance. Come out and dance! Come out and confront your filthiest closet selves. Ayy: (pulls Percodan from pocket, frowns at label) Cue: Come out even if it hurts. Come out especially if it hurts! Out, ow, out! Ayy: But if this is all just a big club, if nothing’s going to change. Cue: Oh, things will change, smart boy. Imitation is the sincerest form of anarchy. Ayy: What am I doing here? What?

Kit found his man at the far end of the site. Leo stood with three or four workers, against a pit wall that appeared different somehow, set back. Hatless like Kit, he might have been out for a night of disco; his still-thick Italian hair was slicked back and his overcoat was a flashy black and white check, knee-length and double-breasted. Not that Leo wasn’t one of the boys, here. As the old crew chief spoke, the workers around him moved in synch. They rocked, they shrugged. Their chests were thrust up, their knees locked back.

At the entrance Kit had only needed to mention Leo’s name. If he were here as a reporter, he couldn’t have found better access. If he were here as a reporter.

“Kit, kid.”

Kit took in the familiar mask, the satchelmouth.

“I guess Garrison found you,” Leo said.

Kit looked past him, checking the set-back wall behind him.

“You two talk?”

Kit compared the wall to the floor. A border of corrugated steel rippled up at the floor’s edge, another cofferdam close by the feet of Leo and his friends. Beyond this border the site dropped away again. A second, smaller area had been dug out, still lower. Kit couldn’t see into it, but the drop-off looked to run nearly the entire way along this side of the site.

“Hey. Kit, kid — you with us?”

“That’s the dig, isn’t it?” Kit asked. “The dig, where the archaeologists work.”

“What, down there? You interested in that stuff?”

“That’s where they’ve found the, the artifacts?”

“Invaluable artifacts.” Leo shook his head. “So invaluable those Harvard wise guys didn’t even come in today.” He shared a look with the men beside him, shaking his big head. Kit too, though in his case he was shaking off a flashback to Garrison’s raging: Fucking rich-boy faggot Harvard.

“I need to talk to you,” he said.

Leo’s smile showed some tongue. Kit couldn’t believe how he’d sounded, breathless, desperate.

“It won’t take long,” he went on. “I’ve, I’ve got other appointments.”

“Sure, Kit. You’re a busy man, sure. There’s been a lot going on over at your place.”

Jab, twist. Again Kit recalled Garrison, the secrets he’d known, the things Zia must have let slip to her Pop. Maybe Kit should have taken a break after he’d wrestled free of the guard. A walk in the sea air. But now Leo was shrugging again, nodding again, and with a flat gaze he let the hardhats know he and Kit needed some privacy.

Cue: Out, ow, out! Imitation is the sincerest form of anarchy. Ayy: (no longer with us) Yet I’ve seen this before. I’ve seen it, smelled it. Cue: Got sex on the brain? The sexual revolution, is that your ‘70s hang-up? Come out and get into Human Sexual Response! Ayy: I’ve seen graffiti like this before. I’ve smelled cold iron and standing water.

(He’s still got that bizarro sidekick, “C. Garrison.” The ghost in the uni, the prison guard. Briefly it flickers beside him.) Cue: (unimpressed) Sure, bring the cops. Cops, senators, presidents — hey, Watergate was a ’70s thing too. Come on and dance with Oedipus: the King is a motherfucker! Ayy: Then there’s the sea so close. (Garrison disappears) The muck at my boots, the wind in my face. Cue: (more serious, trying to reach him) The Talking Heads, that’s our scene. Scandie see? The Talking Heads borrow the greatest authority in the authority culture, the very definition of reality. Ayy: The sea, the wind … Cue: The Talking Heads toy with the darkest secret of all, the emptiness that shadows The Man — the fear that whatever the muckraker rakes is no big deal, whatever the believer believes in is merest rhinestone. Ayy: I’ve been here before. I have. Cue: (giving up, singing) Cellars by starlight, something in the air.

*

Leo said nothing till his friends on the crew looked like figures on a distant TV. Kit couldn’t make out faces.

“Whew,” the old man began. “If I’d had my head on straight, I’d’ve done this inside.”

He’d gone right into his act, fixing up a fat Brando smile as he pulled together his checked lapels. An act, but it worked: for the first time in a while Kit noticed the cold. The wind here whistled along the lower site’s dam, high-pitched enough to be heard through the traffic.

Or you could hear it if you were off by yourself like this. Just you and the crooked money man.

“Kit, come on.” Leo’s expression turned smutty. “You’re looking at me like I’m one of those wise guys from the Human Sexual Response.”

“I need to talk to you.”

He touched his neck. Shamed again by his voice, blinking across the cluttered pit, he noticed the surrounding factories. Sweatshops from the turn of the century, they loomed on three sides. Blunt places, efficient.

“Anyway,” Leo was saying, “I got what you want.”

“I don’t want it any more.”

“He-ey.” Leo kept his head down, fishing under his coat for a pants pocket. “Kit, at least wait’ll you see it.”

“I don’t want it, that’s what I came to tell you, I can’t take it. You can’t trick me into taking it.”

Leo brought out the cash, a thick fold in a money clip. A Nutshell Library of his own.

“You can’t trick me, Leo. I know what’s going on. After this I’m going right over to the office to explain.”

“Trick you? Kit, kid, lighten up.” Leo waggled the clip beside his broad face. “You call this a trick?”

Leo had the fistful of hardpacked cash, and all Kit had was this flyaway rush of words. “It’s — I call it a mistake, Leo. It’s the same mistake I made just last week, the same all over. I have to figure out why it happened.”

“What? What are you talking about? Kit, you don’t mind my saying so, you’re sounding kind of nutty these days.”

Kit frowned. “Garrison already tried that one, Leo.”

“Garrison, ayy. Guy like that, Kit, you’re lucky we got him to talk to you at all. He had his way, he’d rip you open and pull you out from inside.”

Still the old man smiled, holding the cash in one relaxed hand. All Kit could think was—we.

“But it’s not just a gorilla like him, says you’re sounding nutty. You should’ve heard my daughter last night. She needed some money, you should’ve heard her talking.”

To Kit, even the site’s TV-sized workmen seemed part of that we. They seemed there just to whisper about him.

“She was counting on that next paycheck, Kit. You’re no friend of hers, man. No friend of that girl.”

She needed the paycheck? But Kit had told her … “She asked you for money, Leo?”

“Yeah, she asked. What, that surprise you?”

Kit shook his head, or tried to. Just what were they talking about? Garrison, Zia?

“Kit, come on. What’s your big news?” Now Leo held the cash at his belly. “What, you expect some kind of wrestlemania here? Let it all hang out? Hey, I’ll let it all hang out.”

“Leo, I, I told you …”

“You want to know how my daughter fits into this, Kit? ‘Zia,’ huh. Hey, I didn’t set that girl up down there just so she could write about her faggot friends.”

In the surrounding factories, glare filled the windows. The winter sun in Boston: it hurt the eyes but gave no heat.

“I told that girl myself, Kit. Last night I told her. She was all excited about Esquire, I said, ‘I don’t give a shit about you and your sick faggot friends.’ I mean, her brothers, they listen to me. They understand how a man does business.”

Kit straightened his spine. “Leo, they’re not the only ones. Your sons.”

“Oh yeah? Kit, you think you know about my business?”

“I know about Sea Level, what it means for you. It’s about cash, isn’t it, Leo. A cash business, that’s what you wanted. And not for taking down to Surinam either.”

“Surinam.” The old man had never quite lost his smile, and now it came on strong again. “The scams I can play off that Surinam. It’s as good as Pozzuoli after the war.”

“Don’t change the subject. Don’t try to trick me. The cash is for right here in Boston, isn’t it.”

It was a child’s smile, Little Leo knows a secret. The man flipped and caught his money clip.

“I’m sure Forbes Croftall gets his share, for instance.”

“Ahh, Croftall.” He waved the money as if shooing a fly. “That guy never needed me to help him find trouble.”

Kit had been bracing for hardball. In one coat pocket he’d made a fist and in the other — since the gun was in the way — he’d gotten a grip on the stock and trigger.

“You’re, you’re not denying you’ve done business with Senator Croftall?”

Leo snorted. “Kit, kid. If you’re going to finger me in front of that Grand Jury, don’t do it just because I know Croftall and I carry a lot of cash. I mean, at least get me for something juicy.”

Kit had his hands out of his pockets, clasping and unclasping them against the cold.

“At least Kit, huh. Let’s think about your home, there.”

“My home?”

“It’s a nice little place, I hear. Nice Cambridge place for you and the wife. Nice wood.”

Kit couldn’t be sure of the singing in his ears. Nerves? Or the wind along the lip of the dark lower site?

“Nice old wood,” Leo went on. “Old, old, dry wood.”

Now it was nerves. “What?”

“Place like that, wood can get very dry. Downcellar out of the weather, it gets dry like a newspaper. Just like one of your old newspapers, Kit.”

The old man changed the angle of his chin. “That old wood.”

“Leo, I don’t believe this.”

“And that’s everything you own, there, right? Everything you care about’s up on the second story, there.”

“You know,” Kit said, “generally speaking, people don’t try frighten other people unless they’re—”

“Frighten you? Frighten you, I’m trying to help you.” Leo tapped his cash against Kit’s tightened chest. “Kit, stay with me here. Remember what I’m trying to tell you, here. I’m saying, you’re going to go after me in that Grand Jury, at least get me for something juicy.”

Kit backed away from the tapping, the grinning. He stumbled on the corrugated lip of the lower site’s dam; he tried to get Leo to admit he’d been talking about arson.

“Hey. You think it’s that simple, Kit? Just one word, the right word? One word, and you’ve got the old man at last?”

Kit steadied himself. “Skip it. I said what I came here to say.”

“If I were you, Kit, I’d be worried about this. About how nutty you’ve been, trying to get the old man.”

“Keep your money, Leo. I’ll find my own way out.”

“Bullshit. Bullshit, asshole. You’re going nowhere.”

Across the work site, the hardhats didn’t look quite human. Faceless over the heavy equipment, rodent-like amid plumbing and cable, they whispered together.

“You’re going nowhere till I say so, and same with the Grand Jury. That Grand Jury, ayy. You’re going to walk into a room where everybody knows your worst secret.”

Turning from the workmen, frowning down into the dig, Kit was aware of the heat in his hands. In his fists, in his pockets.

“Kit, I already gave them the note from yesterday. The note where you asked for the money.”

“Leo — no more tricks. I’m going to stop you.”

“You’re going to stop me?” The old man’s smile was his worst yet. “What’re you talking, the Crimefighter’s Code?”

“That note I left, it doesn’t matter. What you know about Sea Level, that doesn’t matter.”

“Kit, I know it all. Got my daughter right down there under my desk all this time, her and you and her junkie bitch friends across the hall too. Nothing I don’t know, Kit.”

“It doesn’t matter. Leo, when it’s just you against me, people will know the difference.”

“Got her right down there. Protecting my investment.”

“It’s just you against me now. Everybody will know what’s right.”

“The girl, you know, she told me about when you came making a play for her at the Sons of Columbus. Stoned off your ass. She told me about your wife—”

Kit pulled out the brother’s gun. Leo, openmouthed, mid-sentence, jerked his cash hand to his chest.

In time, Kit became aware of damage. His knuckles had torn against the hem of his pocket. His thinking was broken up by shouts behind his back. And uneasy, unprepared — his feelings hadn’t changed much from when he’d come onto the site, but now with this iron in his hand he was even more off-balance, a big white gooney bird with something in his beak that it would kill him to swallow. Out in the weather like this, Louie-Louie’s.38 didn’t look sleek and Euro. Rather, it appeared more of a piece with the rest of the metal here, another gray slash of naked function. Kit understood he still had the safety on, and neither of the two remaining rounds had been chambered. Yet he couldn’t drop his arm. He couldn’t take back the gesture, make the weapon disappear. Leo spoke up again: Hey, wildman, something. The old man got his hands moving, too. He had no trouble making his own bundle disappear, and when he held up his two open palms there could be no mistaking what he meant. Easy, cool it, something. Such an obvious signal, those two raised hands, sweat-pink against the site’s clay-black. Even the shouting behind Kit’s back relaxed, even the worker rodents got Leo’s message — but what Kit was most aware of was damage. Damage in his least, most fleeting images: the men behind him weren’t rodents.

Leo started talking again, words Kit imagined rather than heard. Hey, where’d you get that?

Words words words. Kit was beyond them, apart from them; he struggled instead with the muscle groups in his arm, with the blood circulation in his ears, even with his sense of smell. The gun had a thick odor, its oils warmed by Kit’s lap. He held it pointed at the shorter man’s mouth, his interior walls graffiti’d with obscenities. Dicksuck. Niggerdick up the ass. Bad damage. There was nothing sexy about the moment, a cold closed moment, the whole world collapsing around the.38. But then again, there was everything sexy about it: the muscles out of control, the mushroom density of the smell, the oil in his hand. Everything was a spasm, an outbreak.

Leo started smiling again. Hey, I thought I was supposed to be the bad guy.

The shouting behind Kit’s back was part of it, part of how standing here with a gun in another man’s face seemed like nothing but reflex and impulse. Yes, the shouting had simmered down, since Leo had raised his hands. When Kit glanced over one shoulder he saw tough guys in unsteady clusters, staring wide-eyed but keeping their distance. Nonetheless, every time one of the hardhats called, it broke up his thinking. It poked through the Expressway rumble, noise more like Garrison’s than like Leo’s, rough stuff and toilet talk. The sound of damage. Kit had heard nothing else since he’d left his testimony on the kitchen table. Then what was he doing here in the middle of it? Here between these familiar outcries, fear and bluster, warning and greed? So he got his first clear thought — from out of left field, wouldn’t you know it. He recalled a conversation somewhere about the Fifth W, the Why, about how the why always came down to the same grubby handful. To fear, bluster, hubris … Kit’s second thought, at least, was more with it: Drop the gun. Drop it. It’s wrong, absolutely the wrong thing to have in your hands in the middle of all this damage.

He was hit as soon as his arm started to fall. Whacked on the nose and then clawed across his gun hand. For a moment he thought he’d lost a finger.

“Stronzo,” Leo said.

Crumpling, his face cradled into his aching, now empty hand, Kit was astonished at the old man. He’d worried about Garrison, about Louie-Louie, never about Zia’s father. Pain rippled out across his face, across last week’s wounds, and Kit had a raw flash of Leo’s hardhat friends rushing down on him in a mob. He turtled away on his knees, directionless.

There was the lip of the lower site’s dam. The corrugated steel. Swaying against it, Kit came to himself, hunched as if in prayer over the edge of the dig. He saw the archaeologists’ grid. A checkerboard of string or twine, a loose net across half the murky floor. A net, but too weak to catch him. One moment the drop looked like six feet, the next closer to sixty.

“Cunt,” Leo was saying, above him. “Rincolo.”

And the hardhats were coming. Their boot steps, coming fast, shuddered the earth under Kit’s knees. He tried to squeeze an idea from his bleeding index finger, his former trigger finger, gashed and stained with oil. He blinked against the fresh ooze from his stitches.

“Talk,” Leo said. “You, your business, it’s nothing but talk. You think you could beat a man who really does something? Really makes something?”

Hey believer, what was that click? That click and then that clunk, just behind your head?

“Didn’t even have a round in the chamber,” Leo said. “Safety was off and you didn’t have nothing in the chamber. What, you going to shoot me with talk?”

Kit didn’t see a ladder, below him. He didn’t hear anything good from the onrushing workers. Leo! Fuckin’ A!

“Whatever happens now, cunt, I call it self defense.” And believer, what’s that against the back of your neck?

“Self defense,” Leo repeated. “How’s that for talk?”

Kit wasn’t about to make any sudden moves. It was all he could do just to master the new bloodrush of his fear, a fresh chill, stinging. Against his neck, Louie-Louie’s.38 was the worm on his back turned to worse. But he found himself starting to talk. “Leo …” Starting to talk: the old man had been right about that. It was what Kit did, talk: his business, his fallback, his last straw. And it had its advantages. It meant, for one, that Kit knew the old man. He wasn’t going to blow up, the old man, and leave a thousand loose ends hanging in the air. He wasn’t that kind of gunslinger, any more than Kit himself. There at the edge of the lower site, as he weathered his blood rush, Kit discovered again this root clarity. Starting to talk. He began even to overcome his soggy remorse over how stupid he’d been, and he may have realized his mistake — realized why all this had happened.

But then the gun came away from Kit’s neck and he took a belt across the back of his head. Once more he was nothing but nerves, shock, body.

Chapter 11

NOTES

[Remember — DON’T READ YOUR NOTES. Talk. Spontaneous.]

Thank you. [wait, applause] Thank you.

Of course I’m happy to accept this award, so weighty with esteem — and so generous with the checkbook! [wait, laughter]

I’m happy to have the Emmy, yes.

[smile, thoughtful] It’s pretty, isn’t it? Very pretty, very clean. [sincere] I always believed in my brave little newspaper; I always believed it might be good enough to get on TV.

[no smile, thoughtful] And now I stand here honored and rich, while the men I exposed as crooks lie ruined and wretched. They’ve been sent to Monsod — Monsod, my God!

LAST SEEN

Dig this: unearthing the future.

How do you tell a tourist? Zia see — if you jump to conclusions, it’s not the fall that kills you. Jump, and what does the damage is all the other dead souls out there.

This one’s a spooky one, my basementals. Spooky scary Kult Klassic. I’ve been in some undergrounds in my time; I’ve seen my share of more dead than alive. A punk’s night out is nothing if not Nosferatu in 3-D. The lips all too real and the skin hardly there. But today my Show & Tell is just the opposite. Today, it’s not the deathy revelry of the sick and abandoned, my usual hang (o, these fragments I have shored against my ruin). Instead, I’ve got the desiccated fossil of a person who should still be alive.

Justice! [wave award] Justice! [wait, applause]

And great ratings, too. [wait, laughter]

The story was a natural, wasn’t it? A public building scandal in Massachusetts — fascinating. Heroic stuff, [pause, reflect] Do you remember the scene where the bad guys had me down in the mud, tangled in twine? Do you remember? I was down and shivering and they stood up there, pointing a gun.

[pause, suspense]

A fearful moment, yes. Fearful — and heroic. [pause]

My point — aside from bragging on myself — [wait, laughter] is that we in this room understand, as professionals, the power of story. We know High Concept and how to fit it on the small screen. [smile] But outside this room [gesture, doors] remain the unprofessional. The proles — outside the media. And when I was down in that muck, tangled and exposed and scared, then I too was outside the media.

An actual long-dead, my Sandinistas. The lips turned to tree bark and the clothes hardly there. And yet the corpse is contemporary. The fossil is us.

The cutting edge, in this case, cuts backward: it’s archaeologists who’ve been hep. Dig-sters, get it? They found the guy down in the soon-to-be T, the station under excavation. Only, some Head Guy somewhere declared the find, uh, sensitive. Uh, requires further study. Uh, needs protection from public scrutiny.

Ah, but they didn’t count on our kind, did they, my compañeros? Cellars by starlight means celestial navigation, and a little razor wire and security can’t hold back the likes of us. I was in a hot minute after nightfall. Into the “lower site,” hee hee. And as for the stranger on the floor — barkeep, I’ll have whatever he had.

I could have been anybody, tangled and exposed and scared. I couldn’t have been further from a hero. [wave award]

But now [lean into mike, intimate] I’m in. I’m up here.

[pause for emphasis, & CHECK TRUSTEES. okay to keep talking?]

Now what made the difference, you ask? I went from a naked nobody in the muck to a one-man judge and jury in a silver suit. [smile] What did it? [wait] Well, my colleagues — I had to get arrested, [wait, laughter]

The police had to come and cuff me, yes. They had to hold me — actually put me in a cell. [gesture, bars] You all remember the scene, I’m sure. My heroic call to my lawyer, you remember, [gesture, telephone]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nonetheless, this one’s a weird one. It’s this year’s model, and also the last millennium’s fossil. It’s our leather, also leather-y. Like, what sort of a story have we got here? Like, a historical novel about the present?

Chapter One: In the Grid. Why, what’s that strange grid, down there? That grid or graph or sumpin, laid over the stinking earth? Why, it is a graph! A sorta 3-D graph, sticks and string! And good Lord, what’s that under square A-3 …

Chapter Two: Criticism/Self-criticism. Man, oh man, what am I doing here?

Chapter Three: All Alone by the Skele-tone. Judging from the dimensions of the pelvis (squares H-2 through H-5), and the.

Popkin had, as before, his own vocabulary. When Kit at last reached him from the phone in the police station: “Finding other counsel seems indicated.” And when Kit explained why he’d missed their appointment: “Not a useful development, certainly.”

I had to get arrested, yes. I had to make that humiliating call to my attorney. That’s what it took to become a hero.

[CHECK TRUSTEES — if no okay to go on, cut to last graphs]

Or that’s part of it, at least. [IF okay TO GO ON:]

You see, all I knew was verbal. [head down] That was my problem, before I joined the media. Everything was verbal. I was muttering, I was dreamy.

I was a loser. [wait, laughter] In order to join the winners, [smile, ESP. AT TRUSTEES] to break the grip of my word-based mucking around — word-based and low-paid [wait, laughter] — well I needed more than my lawyer. I needed the cold, stony city itself. Only when I got back out into the city did I at last realize that, nowadays, winners don’t bother with words.

[no joke, no smile]

Chapter Three: All Alone by the Skele-tone. Judging from the dimensions of the pelvis (squares H-2 through H-5), and the proportions of shoulders to head (3:1, see illustration), as well as the overall size of the remains (est. height, alive: 6’ 2”; est. weight: 180), we would conclude that the subject was a mature male of Scandinavian type, not yet 30 at the time of death. The ID we found helps too.

Chapter Four: He Died With His Boots On. L.L. Beans, in fact.

Chapter Five: He Died With His Boots On, Part II. Look there! The pockets of his disgusting coat are bulging! Your coat pocket of today is constructed so as to contain a variety of materiél, such as sammiches and weaponry and folding cash, and these yield an illuminating fossil record.

The attorney arranged to have a paralegal run over to the waterfront station. Popkin himself had no time till after five. Kit, nursing fresh aches and pains, a deep new remorse — Kit was just as happy to put off seeing the man.

I needed this cold stony city. I needed the city to show me — nowadays words get in the way, if you want to be a winner.

[no joke, no smile]

I was heading for the MTA, for my office. [upright at mike, a talking head] I had a list of the Monsod contractors in my office, a list my lawyer needed to see. And I had other reasons for heading that way, instead of for instance heading home, but I won’t go into them here.

[shake head, smile] If I went into every last little reason I did anything, you see, I’d go back to being a loser. If I wasted my time with every last shadow of motive and personality, I’d still be caught up in words words words.

[shake head] No, never mind my grubby little handful of motives. What matters is — then I saw the record store.

Your coat pocket of today is constructed so as to contain even sammiches, hero sammiches. It yields an illuminating fossil record. Why, look there — a stupid Press card! “Alternative” Press! And there — a worm on his back! Not your ordinary worm, either, just a-lookin’ for a home; rather a creature far more insidious — the worm of doubt! Good Lord, I know who this is.

Oh, my old moles. There were secrets to be gleaned here, dark secrets. But if you jump to conclusions — well, don’t. The darkest secret here turned out to be Madame Z’s. My own. A dark spell, cast by the dirty dead.

I knew the guy, my guerrilleros. I mean, for starters

… I knew this fossil. He was none other than our Pseudo, our week’s worth of contempt: the tourist.

Though of course Popkin needed to go over Kit’s own testimony, the attorney was even more interested in any “neutral documents.” He wanted to see corroboration.

“Do you have anything to back up your story?” Popkin asked, in plain English. “A memo? Even a business card?”

Kit thought of the contractors list Rick DeMirris had put together, still on his desk at the office. He thought of the card from Croftall’s aide. Between those two however there was another thought knocking, some connection to Bette.

*

The record store, that’s what I needed. [close to mike, intimate] A store in the middle of a square. A vivid full-window display, just across from the T stop. [intimate, switching to present tense]

It’s a display of a single LP: THIS JUST IN. Copy after copy of a single album checkers the window, glossy 12x12 covers strung up corner to corner, an inch or so behind the glass. [gesture to clarify] A grid.

The LP isn’t particularly bright — a deep red, except the title — but the day is. Winter sun blasts the display, the metal and glass Boston surfaces. [example: hold award to light] A sheen of cold lies over the square. And at the center of this square, this freezing turnaround under a distant sun, there’s the repeated red cover of the LP reflected in the back of its broad storefront window, reflected too in the facing windows, in the sheen of the sign for the T stop, in the windows of passing cars and trolleys, even in the glasses and visors of bundled riders and pedestrians. [w/ award under light, flash at faces nearby]

The tourist. I’d know that jacket anywhere. And even with brown rotten-apple skin, even with hair like strands of bomb wreckage — even so, there could be no mistaking that wolf’s jaw, that fadeaway forehead.

Pseudo Bowie, check. Right down to his Bean waffle stompers. All our man lacked was his sidekick, the mysterioso “Garrison.” The ghost guard never showed. Never; our tourist had put one haunt to rest at least. And I mean, we were sitting in the middle of a haunted harbor.

See, this time, my mad bombers — this time maybe I was the ghost. Madame Z, maybe. See, I didn’t just know who the guy was, I also knew where he was. I knew where he’d gone when he died. I mean, in his pockets he had Pompeii, and all of a sudden I could read Latin. I found myself going into every last little reason he had for being there.

Every shadow of a motive.

Without end it multiplies, this cover. This blank bright sheet pasted over cardboard. It multiplies and soon there’s no telling which is LP, which is the city, its carriers or passersby. A grid without end [flash award in new face w/each rep]: Talking Heads: 77. Talking Heads: 77. Talking Heads: 77. Talking Heads: 77.

[pause, lower award]

So I had my vision. I saw my new medium.

Where do we go when we die? Well, how about the MTA? So help me. Our Scandie had a pass — hey, there’s a clue — though the name on it was a woman’s. “Elizabeth,” that’s all. Last names had been erased, some kind of selective erosion, over centuries of shuffle time. See, that’s what we’re talking about here, shuffle time. Our loser of the moment (dilettante ’77) was also a tourist of the future (I mean, this is a station under excavation) and the past (I mean, his pocket was Pompeii). Shuffle time and deal again.

Kit would have expected the downtown holding cell to shake him up more. Would’ve expected some bass-heavy resonance: Your turn, tourist. But from the mucky dig site to the cell, then from the police station’s T stop to his office stairwell, Kit’s surroundings faded into sameness, into nothing. Only once was he jarred out of himself. Only as he walked towards the station’s T stop, as he paused outside a record store. The display in the window rocked him somehow. The checkerboard glare of a hot new LP.

Talking Heads: 77. That was my vision.

[CUT TO HERE — resume HERE, if trustees want — ADJUST as needed]

I rejected the old layout & pasteup. [hold up whatever printed matter available: menu?] I rejected the old grid, a grid built of words words words; every last one of them a vacillating Hamlet. [CHECK TRUSTEES; explain reference?] Every word’s a ham actor, emoting wildly first through one meaning and then another — then through a third, a fourth, a fifth. But that’s not our media [gesture, take in crowd]. That’s not the news, these days. That’s not news, it’s anarchy.

Shuffle time and deal again. It’s a subtle business, when you get a look at it. Shuffle time captures the thousand thousand faint shadings and shifts in how any one of us might look, seized in the moment. Seized in transit amid past/present/ future, with names fudged and expressions frozen. With all our shadings and shifts — subtle — that’s how these bones speak. That’s what they put me through.

Oh, my weird os. If only this were a historical novel. If only I’d just reached into his pocket and pulled out a diary, a calendar, a last, long letter to the beloved. Every hero’s got his letter, right? But no sooner did I get into his pocket (no smirking, please) than … no smirking. No joke. I got my hand in his pocket, on his fossil papers, and with that I saw the heads. Heads drifting past, talking heads. Heads in trolley car windows, drifting past. I mean, the song on the soundtrack should be “Charlie on the MTA”—yeah, toss in the ‘50s, too: Hootenanny! — because with my hand in the tourist’s pocket, all of a sudden I was with him in shuffle time, in the musty G-forces of a trolley between stations. Soundtrack: He may ride forever ‘neath the streets of Boston (a lame song, totally). And drifting past the other way, in other cars, are the heads.

These days, we have the talking head. [example: up-right at mike] The talking head. In it resides the truth as we’ve always wanted it — confined to a single simple square of the grid at a time. In it the entire complicated world is reduced to sheer surface — to coat and tie and hair style. And this head implies, of course, the TV docudrama, my thing. [flash award] Docudrama extends the rule of image-based media, affirming that the news is news. The talking head knows no limit.

[ADDRESS TO TRUSTEES] Soon it will provide the very shape of thought. The talking head. Only those who conform to it, to its simple and shapely truth, will have a place in its implacable new grid.

[address to others] I once thought I could see the world in my smudged little weekly, in its scatterbrained layout & pasteup, [shake head] But now I see Sea Level level [smile]. I see it for what it was — the world of the past. The world of the dead.

[upright at mike] For the future, look to the man in the grid. [TO TRUSTEES] Look to him, listen. Do as he says.

[goodbyes, thanks]

They’re drifting, yes. Shuffle time moves more slowly than our own-maybe to accommodate the extra layering? I could make out details on every passing face. I could hear the heads talking.

And the rest of me? My tuffgrrl biker boots, my ltaliapunk haircut? I couldn’t tell you. I couldn’t say where I was — certainly no cellar I’d ever seen. And I wasn’t too sure what Cue and Ayy were doing there either.

The record store, that was something. That took him out of his regrets. Otherwise, though, Kit moved through an unchanging drab enclosure all the way downtown and then back to his offices. He remained in the MBTA construction site, the cold sea-smelling hole where he’d met Leo. That had been his mistake, after all, going to the site. The same mistake he’d made at Monsod, the breakdown he needed to understand. The rest of his zigs and zags around the old city were nothing but a shuttling between different versions of the basic nightmare. The dig, the cell, the T, the stairs — the same.

*

Cue: Talking heads. Even you’ve got talking heads. Ayy: (moves his mouth, but it’s a head in a passing car that speaks—a young Hispanic black, kinda Castro) Talking about, I could work for your paper here. Cue: Yeah yeah yeah. Quite a trick. But talking heads? We’re the ones supposed to have the heads. We’re the punks. Ayy: (speaks for a woman this time, a blonde with aristocratic brow and lips — Farrah Fawcett my goodness) I need some time alone, Kit. Cue: O-kay. These are your motives, I get it. These are the people who motivate you. They’re reason you’re heading — wherever you’re heading. Ayy: (his own voice for once) Or, then again, maybe this just proves I’m a believer. At the end of the line, I come back to … Cue: Hey, I’m the one who does the explaining. I’m the one who’s hip. Ayy: (Castro again) Man, all I know is, my Mama’s in a bad way. Cue: Yeah yeah. All I know is, the Talking Heads are the ‘70s counterculture. They’re the emblem. The definitive imitation. Ayy: (Farrah Fawcett) History appears to me now as this awesome light getting brighter and brighter behind our backs. Cue: Imitation is the sincerest form of anarchy. We take The Man’s worst secret and we wear it on an earring. Ayy: (himself, with a wicked skull’s grin) You keep saying “we.” I don’t see anybody else but you and me. Cue: Yeah but, yeah but — you can’t be one of us. You’re the tourist. Ayy: (guess who) Psy-cho-analyze. Seems sometimes like that’s all you white boys know. Cue: O-kay. You’re saying it’s not so important, I get it. It’s not so important to suss out what’s hip and what’s ’60s — or worse … Ayy: (guess) Most of it’s sheer silliness, to be sure, utter silliness. Cue: You’re saying, come the millennium, who’s going to care? The difference between your Bob Dylan and my Elvis Costello — come the millennium, zip. No difference. Ayy: (still the bony clicksong) For starters. The punk becomes the success, over and over. For starters. But these days we can do a lot worse than that. Cue: (checks the passing trolley windows, sees only own reflection)

Nor did his building’s hallways offer better. The colorless walls might as well have been plywood and corrugated steel, and most of the equipment on the site had been abandoned. The woman’s counseling setup across the corridor from Sea Level had gotten so short on cash that half the time they had no one in the office. And Kit heard nothing behind his own door.

Ayy: These days we do a lot worse. These days we chuck the whole distinction, counterculture to culture. Outside to inside, Q to A — zip. No difference. Cue: But, but that means no alternative. No alternative press. Ayy: Or it means everything’s alternative. (I don’t even want to think about his laugh) Cue: But, but there’s still an authority. In fact the talking head provides media with a terrible authority, more than ever. Big Brother is watching. Ayy: Not from where I sit. (waves a skeletal hand at the glassed-over faces surrounding us) Not in shuffle time. Here the future looms as an endless living nexus of passageways lined with information, a worldwide web of passageways that carry us in every direction at once, with every head constantly peering in on every other. Cue: (massages forearm) And the passageways include the past, I get it. Oedipus faces off with his riddles forever. Ayy: It’s nothing but alternative, the personal all over the media. In these passageways, every least motive is made visible, every last filthy urge. Cue: Oeddie whups the Sphinx, and in the same hot minute, gets whupped by the shepherd. Ayy: It’s all in there, yes. No distance between Sphinx and shepherd. No hero, no whole truth. Only every last little shame or blemish, exposed and magnified, a dizzying highway of reflections of reflections. Cue: Man, oh man, what am I doing here? Ayy: (Castro again, out of nowhere) I said it gets crazy, didn’t I? Cue: Don’t ask me. Don’t ask the asker. Ayy: (the blonde now, natch) You must have noticed. You must have seen all the new— Cue: (massaging, struggling to pull that hand from his pocket) Z, my name is Zia, I’m going to live in Xanadu.

*

When he discovered his wife in his office, for a moment Kit thought he’d gone truly crazy at last. Invisible layout & pasteup had given way to actual hallucination.

No. Bette sat at Zia’s desk.

His wife, in her undertaker’s coat. His wife, not so much lips and hair this time as eyes, orchid-blue. She’d looked up at Kit’s entrance, she took him in wide-eyed. Then she dropped her head — lips working, face reddening — over the garish pastels of Zia’s cards. It was a smaller head than Kit remembered, no longer the vast supernatural emblem he’d confronted on the Cottage beach. No longer so unapproachable, because now Kit approached, striding around Corinna’s empty desk. Corinna was gone, Louie-Louie too: the brother Kit had been coming to see since he’d gotten out of bed that morning. But this was no more than a blip in his awareness as he swung through the openings in the office partitions, moving towards his wife. Towards her T-square of neck and shoulders, her face lifting his way again. They went right into it, a full-mouthed kiss.

“Oh honestly,” Bette said, when they broke.

Kit was sinking onto one knee, dizzy, awkward. People weren’t built to embrace when one was standing and the other was in a swivel chair.

“Silliness,” she said.

But they kissed again, more comfortably. It didn’t feel so much like sex — though there was some of that, hump against ripple even with their coats on — as like relief. For several seconds, Kit tumbled again within the balloon fabric of their marriage, at once nowhere certain and right at home. When the embrace broke off a second time he began telling her so, saying how glad he was she’d come, how much he needed her, how much …

“Kit,” Bette put in, “who was that young man who was here?”

Still on one knee, Kit shifted out of her lap. Even if he’d known how to hide his hurt, he wouldn’t have bothered.

“Oh, Kitty Chris.” That sounded better. “Isn’t my being here enough? Being here and kissing you and kissing you?”

“No way,” Kit said. “It’s not nearly enough.”

She smiled but kept him at arm’s length. Kit, despite the fog of his happiness, could see she was road-weary. Had she been back to Providence? Bette was saying she needed to understand. She needed him too, all right yes — but she didn’t understand. Kit’s testimony hadn’t mentioned anything about a Louie-Louie Rebes.

His testimony, check. Kit massaged his breastbone; the beehive within was dripping and humming at once. “He’s the brother, Bette. You can probably figure it out.”

“You hired him, Kit? You, you’re giving him work, you think that might help?”

He nodded.

“You hired him, well. And where did you expect to find the money for that?”

So here it came, three days’ worth of hard feelings. Didn’t Bette see his mud stains from the construction site? Couldn’t she tell she wasn’t the only one who was road-weary? And the first thing she wants to talk to him about is money. Kit got his hands busy, undoing his noisy coat. He stood and hoisted a chair over Zia’s halfwall.

“Kit, I’m sorry,” his wife was saying.

“Don’t be sorry.”

“You saw my — letter. You saw what I’ve been through.”

“And you saw mine.”

“Kit, I did chase them out. Your new man and Corinna, I chased them out, you see. So that you and I, well.”

They settled into facing chairs, their hands hanging over their knees, not quite touching.

“Kit, I knew you’d be here and I came here.”

“And I waited till you came. I gave you the space.”

“Oh, honestly.” Bette heaved a full-bore Aristocratic Sigh, lots of shoulder action. “You know Kit, loving you, well. It’s almost better but not quite. Almost, but not quite.”

“Almost better?” Kit wasn’t about to fall back into their stage business.

“Almost as good as, well. As good as the sort of new woman one sees in the magazines. I’m almost ‘liberated,’ don’t you know.” She’d gone lilting through that sentence, but the next was toneless, serious. “Almost unencumbered by history.”

She’d lowered her face, and seemed to study the glowing Catholic cards on Zia’s desktop.

“Sometimes I understand,” Bette said. “Sometimes I realize that my husband isn’t history. He isn’t that bust on the cornice.”

“I’m not smart enough to be history, Betts. I make a lot of mistakes.”

“Yes, yes. I suppose these past two weeks prove that.”

Patience, husband.

“Well. Kit, you see, mistakes and all, well. How could I hope to compete with you? Honestly. How could I ever match you, mistakes and all?”

“Aw, Betts.” Kit took hold of her dangling hands. “You don’t believe that.”

“Kit, how? How could I hope to come up to you? Could I outsmart you? Could I out-muscle you?”

“Come on, you’re the best. I’m the one who’s—”

“Honestly.” She wouldn’t let herself be drawn into an embrace. “Could I out-write you or out-work you? Could I out-integrity you? Could I? Really?”

“Bette, your integrity, it’s amazing. It’s in every word you say, total integrity. And what’s amazing is, at the same time, you’re playing.”

“Certainly I could never out-dream you, Kit. Precious few people in this world dream so big as you.”

Kit fought an impulse to rise and pace. Insisting he was no hero, he mentioned again the past two weeks.

“These past two weeks, my husband, you’ve been a bigger hero than ever. A tragic hero, the best kind. One day Hamlet, the next Oedipus. And I could never hope to compete, Kit.” Her voice broke, a startling echo under the high ceilings. “I could never hope to come up to you. The only thing I could do was to keep you in love with me.”

Still she resisted an embrace, letting him hold no more than one hand. With the other she finger-combed her winter-roughened haystack.

“That was the only power I had.” Tearing up, blinking, she nonetheless held head and shoulders strictly squared. “My sole advantage, don’t you know. I had to keep you in love with me.”

“Bette, I am in love with you.”

“If I kept you in love, I had a chance, you see. I had that much over you at least.”

She pulled the other hand free, lifting a single fingertip to her wet cheek. Kit looked away. But what help was he going to find? What, in the rattling ceiling-high glass, in bleached and wounded walls going back to the American Empire?

“Bette,” he tried, “we have to work out some better version of love. You and me.”

She blinked but then — astonishing him — laughed. “Oh, indeed. A better version of love.”

She laughed again, thickly, her sobs not quite past. “Oh Kit. Big ambitions, ra-ther. That’s my hero.”

Bewildered, Kit nonetheless understood he could touch her again, take her hands again. He knew the woman: she loved to think. He persisted: love in their culture was a faulty model. “All based on dominance and subversion, authority and anti-authority. Everybody’s got to use whatever advantage they’ve got on everybody else.”

“Oh, are you speaking of ‘free love,’ Kit? No hang-ups, man.” Her voice was sardonic, but her grip remained warm. “No secrets, dig it.”

With that, another idea came to Kit, a missing connection — a notion so sudden and right that he wasn’t going to waste any time saying it out loud.

“Speaking of secrets,” he said, “there’s Forbes Croftall.”

She didn’t pull her hand away, another surprise. But she drew up into Academy-girl posture.

“Forbes Croftall,” Kit repeated. “He’s been calling you, right? He’s the one.”

Nor did Bette start crying again. She was no Louie-Louie Rebes, so unused to intimacy that once anything close to the heart got spoken, the floodgates burst.

“He’s been getting in touch,” Kit said, “because a few years back, during the Rampage, he was one of them.”

“He tells me he can’t live without me,” Bette said. “He tells me he has dreams about me.”

Kit nodded, this morning’s aches and pains hot with the force of his idea. Bette’s face revealed nothing — the hamper was closed — but she began to undo her long coat.

“The first call came, let me see.” She paused at a button. “It would have been about the time you and Mirini were working out the contract. Not long ago, really.”

Kit nodded, hot, still a step ahead of her explanations.

“A curious man, Forbes. Or in a curious marriage, perhaps. ‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ said Alice. At first he would only call in the mornings, when you wouldn’t be in.”

At first. Kit remembered the two calls last night.

“And last Thursday, well. While you were at Monsod, Kit? He came by the apartment.”

*

In time, the Sea Level office began to seem like a natural for this kind of talk. An open room, a natural. Whatever was brewing behind the halfwalls eventually foamed up into plain sight. Even now, every workspace revealed touches of visible madness. Here were Zia’s gaudy postcards, there Corinna’s bulky cosmetics case, and up on Kit’s glass walls stood the fabled Wyoming jackalope. Imaginary layout & pasteup, standing in plain sight, out where Croftall’s pursuit of Kit’s wife fit right in. A dirtball direct from the grubby little handful that motivation always comes down to. You put together a decaying marriage, a dark-lit Parker House memory — simple as that, you had the dirtball. The obsession. Only later, as the Senator’s better judgment had tried to play catchup, had Croftall seen as well the possibility of using Kit to provide political cover.

The Senator needed to satisfy Leo too, Kit pointed out. A BBC inspection had to look legit, but also it couldn’t turn up anything that would cost Leo too much to fix.

Bette pointed out that, as majority leader, Croftall lived behind a screen of public power. It had been years since he’d known what it was like to be exposed.

There in Zia’s workspace, Kit and Bette could work out the whole shape of the man’s lovesickness. Now they bent together holding hands, now they eased back against the partitions. Bette explained that, last Thursday morning, the Senator never made it any further than the stairwell. “I threatened to start screaming, actually.”

Kit shook his head, picking construction-site mud from one knee. “And he still didn’t get the message? He kept calling?”

Bette heaved another of her sighs. But then she was studying Zia’s desktop again, color in her face.

“I told you before,” she said to the postcards, “Kit, I’m not strong like you. I couldn’t make him stop.”

“Aw. Betts, the man was falling apart.”

“It was history again, Kit. An old family friend, don’t you know. History. I didn’t have the strength.”

Kit had her hand again, her hand and now the back of her head. He pulled her to him, repeating the old kindnesses: the best, sweetheart, always. Bette however returned no more than a conventional squeeze. With his face in her throat Kit could feel she was nowhere near tears. Enough, husband. No seconds on the sweet talk. Sitting back, firming up his tone, Kit pointed out that the real need for strength was still to come. He told her about the meeting with Popkin.

“Asa Popkin?” Bette frowned. “Kit, I should think you’d have met with him already.”

“Easier said than done, Betts.” Kit straightened his spine and told her what had happened with Louie-Louie, with Leo.

“What?” Her frown was almost a replay from the Cottage beach. “You went to Mirini?”

Yet the story came, if not easily, without any carrying on. Kit left his neck alone. He’d never have believed the sentence, “I pulled a gun on him,” could sound so mature. Never would have believed he could sound regretful, but no longer ashamed. Bette, watching close, lost her frown.

When he was done she exhaled without theatrics. “Kit, didn’t I tell you you’d been carrying on like a tragic hero? Didn’t I?”

“It was a mistake. I know.” Could this be the voice of his work ethic? His innate respect for what people were supposed to do at these desks?

“A mistake, indeed. And I suppose it’s gotten a lot of play on your interior news. Your invisible layout and pasteup.”

Kit dropped his eyes, but again it wasn’t quite shame that stung him. It was a lesser pang. Rue.

“How’s that going, Kit? Still hard at it?”

“Ah.” Kit even smiled. “I’d say the worst is over, there. This morning I reached some closure.”

“Closure.” Bette sat back, but her stare had lost nothing. She pointed out that the mind’s fantasy function generally had nothing to do with the neat logic of introduction, development, and resolution. “It’s not a columnist up there, you know.”

Heads up. “This wasn’t strictly fantasy, Betts. It wasn’t entirely unhealthy, either.”

“Oh really? Tell that to Forbes Croftall.”

“Aw, come on. Croftall’s just the opposite, he thought the fantasy was real. I always knew it was false, I worried about it. I told my wife.”

She remained longfaced, skeptical.

“I told my wife. Other than that, I let whatever was going on up there work itself out.”

She nodded, a half-measure, her eyes shifting. Kit had a nettled moment — three days of hard feelings were going to take more than this — before unexpectedly she gripped his hand.

“Good Lord,” she said, staring. “You don’t suppose Croftall told anyone?”

Kit’s turn to back off, look away. He recalled Leo, by the lower site: Croftall never needed me to help him find trouble. And the old man was a smutmonger, no question. But by now Kit knew the way to beat the guy.

“Betts,” he said, “so long as there’s nothing more buried between you and I, it doesn’t matter if anyone else knows.”

She softened the hold on his hand, and her eyes came back to orchid blue. Yet she returned to the confrontation with Leo. “What does Popkin say?”

“Popkin, hoo boy. What’s lawyer language for ‘mistake’?”

“A mistake, indeed. The mistake, I’d say.”

“The mistake?”

“Well, this sort of thing, Kit. Banging around this old city like a one-man army.”

All Kit’s sore spots grew hot again. “The Lone Ranger.”

Bette, relaxed enough to smile, was unaware of new thinking she’d set off. “I was thinking more of that movie about a Boston underground paper.”

“I’ve been bound and determined, haven’t I?”

Now Bette heard the difference. “I do wonder,” she said more carefully, “who you’ve been trying to impress.”

“Bound and determined to put myself into events. To become the news, myself.” Kit had to stand, to move outside Zia’s workspace. “That’s what I wanted. That’s why this happened.”

“Why this happened? Oh, Kit. You mean you’re only now — oh, Kit. All I’m saying is you’ve been a tad overeager.”

He kept pacing. “I never saw it like this. Never without something in the way.”

“Something in the way?”

This didn’t stop him either. He began to thank her as he moved, to praise her. “Bette, if I’ve got you, I’m not worried about it. If I’ve got you—”

“Oh Kit. You figured out all that business about Monsod and Croftall without me.”

“But not this, Betts. Not my own head, not without you.”

“Oh, honestly. This hardly qualifies as a blinding insight.”

“I was trying to be the news. That’s it. Not the media — the news.”

In the office, walking was easier on him than it had been out in the cold. The marriage was easier on him; it felt like an extraordinary piece of luck. That he and Bette should even have met, in this disorganized city, that alone was great luck. And then that over the past couple of days they’d had time and grace to write each other the sort of long, strange messages that were all the more powerful for being so roundabout — sweet luck. Kit thanked her again. He praised her some more, putting the exclamation point with thumps of his boot heel. “Betts, I’ll tell you, the last thing you need to worry about is whether you’re strong.” Thump! “If you can stick it out through this, Betts, you’re strong.” Thump!

At that Bette thumped along. They set off a fresh rattle in Kit’s glass walls.

Kit found her face. “Bette, anyway, it was stupid. Running around trying to prove I’m a hero.”

There was his smart girl, her eyes lifting. “That’s good, Kit. And I’d add that it’s a natural hazard for someone like you, besides. Someone who believes in heroes.”

Still a believer, check. “Plus Betts, there’s something else. Something else, while I’m telling you what you mean to me. We’ve got to start having kids.”

Surprised, she showed traces of her old tatterdemalion. A few hay-hairs came loose from under her collar.

“Darling,” he said, “we’ve got to.”

He’d quit pacing, and the odors of his hard morning had caught up with him. “Next time, Betts, no more maybe, maybe not. Next time we’re in bed. Whatever we do there, it’s not going to be an accident.”

Bette allowed herself a small smile. “You want a son and heir?”

“Aw, you need this as much as I do. The woman I saw out on that Cottage beach, you know, when she needed something she wasn’t shy about saying so.”

“All right, Kitty Chris. All right, yes. Kids.”

“Thataway. I mean, out on that beach, Betts? I’ll tell you. I thought you were the movie.”

“Oh. I was frightened, you know.”

“You were incredible. You were the hit movie and the underground paper all rolled into one. It was like, ‘Arise, Arise—’”

Bette cut him off, singing the rest.

*

Singing, a rare move. Bette’s voice wasn’t bad, or not for a listener raised on the white-girl divas of acoustic guitar, early Carolyn Hester through middle Joan Baez. Arise, arise, Mary Hamilton. Arise, and come with me. Such serious material these women went in for. Full of the grave and its admonishments, full of noble gesture in the face of death. Bette quit her recital when the room’s echo made her self-conscious. She broke off giggling. Nonetheless for a moment there Kit could hear it, his wife’s root seriousness. He could hear a potent and bell-like willingness to work, determination enough perhaps even to throw off a few centuries burdened by absent fathers and the likes of Cousin Cal. And singing so open-throated and hymn-like was something else he and Bette could have together.

Recovered from her giggles, meantime, she was suggesting food. She had bread and chowder from Sage’s back at the apartment. Perhaps a little wine.

A decent meal sounded like heaven. Kit couldn’t remember when he’d been so hungry. But he knew what he’d heard, in his wife’s singing, and what part of her he needed to reach. The two of them had to start sharing more than stage business and sexy dinners. Before they left the office, Kit found the card from Croftall’s aide and the list of Monsod contractors. He showed her them both, explaining. And he told her more: “Before Thursday,” Kit said, “I needed to find a way to let Louie-Louie and his mother know the truth.”

Bette was brought up short. Wordless, she stared.

“Betts, I can’t just be a tourist. Another lame ofay who blunders into their lives and then walks away.”

She’d caught him by the arm, beside Corinna’s desk. She studied him, fingering the redone button at her neck. “But you say … you have to find a way.”

“Find a way, yeah. It wouldn’t be right if they found out by reading it in the papers. But it’d be even worse if I made the same mistake all over again.”

“A neutral setting, perhaps. Popkin’s office.”

“Somebody else has got to be there when I tell them, that’s for sure. It can’t just be Kit the Hit.”

Her smile wasn’t much, but her grip on his arm relaxed. At the door, they were playful-formal, after you. Yet Kit kept up the high-mindedness. The real work, he pointed out, would start after the Grand Jury was over. The real challenge was finding out if there was anybody left who would put their money behind Sea Level and, at the same time, allow Kit his conscience. “I guess,” he said, “I’ll finally find out whether this is city of my dreams.” But then part of his problem, Kit went on, was that nowadays the media itself seemed to have lost its conscience. New technology was throwing off old definitions. One moment, contemporary media looked chilly and distant and controlling (“like talking heads Uber Alles,” he said), and the next, it looked frivolous, fragmented and prying. The Fourth Estate had to reexamine every value, test every assumption. The alternative press especially. The alternative, nowadays, looked as far from the whole truth as.

“Kit,” Bette cut in, “who’s this across the hall?”

Kit had noticed it too. There was noise from inside the women’s counseling setup, unhappy noise. A moaning — surprised, grim. This with no lights on, inside. Then came a shuffling, a stumbling, then what might have been the sound of breaking glass. Not much glass — a vial, a test tube — but loud in the suddenly silent hallway.

“Hello?” Kit called.

“Is everything all right?” Bette called.

Wannabe heroes, Kit thought, the pair of them. But the next sound was a gasp or splutter, someone struggling to breathe. By the time the chair fell over, the loudest noise yet, Kit and Bette were in the door. They saw the chair at a farther desk fall, and Zia Mirini in it. Zia with no leather jacket, with one sleeve of her shirt up.

“Oh, hell,” Bette said.

Zia with foam at her mouth, a smear of blood on her exposed inner arm.

“Call 911,” Kit said.

But the phone for the women’s group had been disconnected. Bette had to take Kit’s key and run back across the hall. Meanwhile he was squatting over Zia, in the sweat-smell of her smack rush. He thumbed foam off her mouth, that Brando mouth she’d gotten from her father. The foam was the father’s too. I don’t give a shit about you or your faggot friends, Leo had said, and then he’d handed her the cash. But now Zia’s mouth was something likewise stony. Rictus lips. Kit clenched his jaw, his stomach; he forced his fingers between her teeth and swabbed what gunk he could out of her mouth. Gunk, pulp — winy. Zia’s half-shut eyelids fluttered, she jerked in a gag reflex, and for a moment Kit had a hope she would come to.

No. Her looks went still again, pale and still around his fingers. She was wearing eyeliner, sweet Jesus.

Without gagging himself, Kit cleared the breathing passages. He knew that much about overdose cases. He kept at bay the bad thoughts triggered by the pulp in her mouth, the images of another young face disappearing under vomit. He scooted down to her nerveless legs, setting them straight. Street slush clung to the hems of Zia’s jeans, and he used the cold muck to clean his fingers. Across the hall, Bette was shouting into the phone. That helped, to hear her working too. Kit hefted Zia’s thin arm over his head. When he hoisted her up, out of one eye he spotted the broken fallen syringe. Glittery antiseptic glass, dirty with blood.

“Move,” he said. “Walk.”

He knew that much about overdose cases. You had to keep the heart working.

“Move,” he said. “Live.”

At least this office had less in the way than his. Someone had knocked out the partitions, as well as the reliquary in the back. If there’d been such a martyr’s space available, no doubt Zia would have tucked herself into it. No doubt she had some nasty spectacle of self-destruction in mind, coming here, in easy reach of both Kit and her father. Coming here was a slap in the face and a cry for help at once. The poor damaged daughter might even have been thinking of Esquire.

The ideas flickered, dim, but mostly Kit didn’t have the time. He didn’t have the breath. He found a clear stretch between the desks, and while he hauled Zia up and back he used his free hand to try and get her legs moving. Bent and twisted and grunting, he lifted one knee, he nudged the other. She wasn’t responding. The toes of her biker boots dragged over the floorboards, noisy but slack. Hard work, after a hard morning. Kit stank as badly as Zia, and the knee he’d landed on at the T site was killing him. He’d been in these offices forever, midway between the money guy and the street. And whatever motives Zia might’ve had hardly mattered — they flickered, nothing more — like his own reasons for needing to save her. If Sea Level were worth anything, she had to live. If he’d done any good by letting all these secrets out of their closets, she had to live. If it meant anything to have worked out better with Bette …

Bette was back. She was in his way, uncharacteristically slouched, stooping to catch his eye.

“Twenty minutes,” she said.

Kit almost went into her. Breaking momentum took all the air he had.

“Twenty minutes, Kit. Can we keep her breathing?”

Kit, uncertain, made a face. He was still moving, shuffling, Zia hanging from his neck.

“Look’r legs,” he managed.

Frowning, Bette watched him. Kit thought of punk slam-dancing in slow motion.

“Has she moved at all, Kit?”

He thought of Zia’s gag reflex. He shook his head.

“Lay her out,” Bette ordered. “Lay her on the floor.”

His wife had to help. The first time Kit tried to lower himself, he almost pitched over headfirst. The next time, Bette knelt under him and caught Zia across the breasts. They turned her together, and Bette propped the head back so the jaw hung ajar. Jesus, the human body could seem inert. Floppy and helpless as paper. Kit himself could only drop onto his butt red-faced and gulping, with one leg splayed.

“Mouth to mouth,” Bette said. “Keep her breathing.”

Already she had her fingers between Zia’s parted teeth. She probed and then squinted into the opening, her long throat relaxed. Med School training.

“I’ll go first,” Bette said, and with that she was down on the other woman’s face. Down on that bloodless, helpless face, while her own flushed as red as something out of Zia’s postcards. At least Zia’s chest changed shape, rising as Bette blew into it. Kit noticed the writer’s shirt, a bulky blue flannel. A lumberjack shirt. Menswear. He was thinking about men, about heroes and troublemakers and men. But these were thoughts, only. They flickered, nothing more. Then he was in place beside his wife, making sure the air was reaching the sick girl’s diaphragm. Gently he laid his empty hands on her.

“Any time.”

His work was simple now. Simple and all to the good.

Content

John Domini
Talking Heads: 77

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11