334

1

The three of them were sitting in the arbor watching the sun go down over her damp melon fields—Alexa herself, her neighbor Arcadius, and the pretty Hebrew bride he’d brought back from Thebes. Arcadius, once again, was describing his recent mysterious experience in Egypt, where in some shattered temple the immortal Plato had addressed the old man, not in Latin but a kind of Greek, and shown him various cheap-jack signs and wonders—a phoenix, of course; then a crew of blind children who had prophesied in perfect strophe and antistrophe, the holocaust of earth; finally (Arcadius drew this miracle from his pocket and placed it on the dial) a piece of wood that had metamorphosed to stone.

Alexa picked it up: a like but much larger hunk of petrified wood dignified G.’s work table at the Center: russet striations giving way to nebular sworls of mauve, yellow, cinnabar. It had come from a sad and long-since-deleted curio shop on East 8th. Their first anniversary.

She dropped the stone into the old man’s proffered palm. “It’s beautiful.” No more than that.

His fingers curled round it. Dark veins squirmed across white flesh. She looked away (the lowest clouds were now the color flesh should be), but not before she had imagined Arcadius dead, and swarming. No, the historical Alexa would have dreamt up nothing so patently medieval. Ashes? At most.

He flung the stone out into the steaming field.

Merriam rose to her feet, one arm extended in a gesture of protest. Who was this strange girl, this wisp of a wife? Was she, as Alexa might have wished, just a new mirror image of herself? Or did she represent something more abstract? Their eyes met. In Merriam’s, reproach; in Alexa’s, an answering guilt contested against her everyday skepticism. It came down to this, that Arcadius, and Merriam too in a subtler way, wanted her to accept this scrap of rock as proof that lunatics in Syria have died and then risen from their graves.

An impossible situation.

“It’s growing chilly,” she announced, though this was as patent a fiction as any Arcadius had brought back from the Nile.

The path back home dipped down almost to touch the unfinished pool. A small brown toad squatted on the rib cage of the handsome wrestler that Gargilius had shipped up from the south. He had waited two years so, in mud and dust, for the pool to be done and his pedestal to be raised. Now the marble was discolored.

Merriam said, “Oh look!” The toad got off. (Have I ever seen a toad alive, or only pictures of toads in Nature World? Had there been toads that summer in Augusta? or in Bermuda? in Spain?) Out of the long grass, a deep burp. And again the burp.

The timer on the oven?

No, there was still—she checked her watch—a quarter-hour before Willa’s pies came out and her own daube went in.

Merriam faded to a gape. Worn strips of maple replaced the damp, elaborate grass, and the toad—

It was the garbage bell. Had she remembered? She rose and rounded the bend of corridor into the kitchen just as the platform inside the shaft dropped. Bags from 7 and 8 came down the chute, rattling, and far below, muffled, it all smashed together into the smasher. But her own garbage was still waiting in the pail, unsorted and unwrapped.

Let it, she thought. She tried to return to the villa, closing her eyes and clutching for the talismanic image that would place her there: a wedge of sunlight, a window, sky, and the slight sway of the pine.

Alexa was reclining on the double bed. Timarchus knelt before her, head bowed (he was a new boy, Sarmatian, and rather shy), offering his mistress, on a scalloped tray, a small cake covered with pineae. (She was hungry.) “But I won’t touch it,” she told herself.

To Timarchus she said: “This afternoon when the bailiff can spare you, my boy, go down by the pool with a rag and rub the statue where it’s stained. Ever so gently, you know, just as though the stone were skin. It will take days, but—” She sensed that there was something wrong with the boy.

A smile. “Timarchus?”

He raised his head in answer: the olive skin formed two small, smooth hollows where eyes would have been.

It wouldn’t do. She ought to have known better by now than to try to bull her way through once she’d lost contact. The result was inevitably nightmares and silliness.

She set to work. It was, anyhow, nearly three o’clock. She spread a page of the Times across the counter and emptied the pail over it. A story in the second column caught her attention: a plane had been stolen from the Military Fair at Highland Falls. Apparently it had been flown away. But why? To have found out she would have had to brush aside a skum of eggshell, peelings, paper, sweepings, and a week’s worth of shit and husks from Emily’s cage.

Actually, she was not that curious. She made a tiny bundle, over and under, around and under once more, the only skill surviving from her flirtation with origami twenty years before. Her Japanese instructor, with whom she had also conducted a flirtation, had had to agree to a vasectomy as a condition of entering the U.S. It left the tiniest scar. His name was Sebastian… Sebastian… His last name escaped her.

She put the bundle on the platform.

She stopped in the doorway to untie, strand by strand the knot of muscle from her forehead down to her shoulders. Then four deep breaths. Noises seeped into this brief stillness: the icebox, the higher pitched purr of the filter, and, intermittently, a grinding whine that she had never understood. It seemed to come from the apartment overhead but she never remembered to ask what it might be.

Was there somewhere she was supposed to have gone?

This time it was the timer. Willa’s pies had a fine glaze. Alexa had used one of her own (real) eggs to brush the crust, a courtesy that would probably be invisible to Willa, who was capable of only the broadest gastronomic distinctions, as between beef and ice cream. The casserole squeezed in beside the rice pudding she was doing for Larry and Tom, who, lacking an oven of their own, paid for their time in Alexa’s with tickets to the opera from their subscription series, an informal, inflexible contract of many years’ standing. She closed the door, reset the timer, rewound and unplugged the instruction cassette.

And that, except for the mail, was that.

The key was in the penny dish, and the elevator, god bless it, was alive and well and only one floor off. Plotting how in coming up she would escape them by reading her mail, she read the graffiti going down: obscenities, the names of politicians, and everywhere (even the ceiling) “love,” which some patient cynic edited, each time it was scratched into the paint, to “Glove.” the super’s endearing theory was that this was all the work of lumpen-prole delivery men, the residents themselves being too well-bred and status-conscious to muck up their own walls. Alexa had her doubts about this, since she’d added her own tiny “shit” coming home drunk last year from her section’s Xmas party. There it was, just below the cloudy plastic cover of the Inspection Certificate, as humorless now, as ineloquent as all the rest. the doors opened, stuck, strained, and opened all the way.

The mailman was just beginning to stuff the boxes, so she said “Hello, Mr. Phillips,” and asked the polite question or two from her standard casework repertoire of family, weather, teevee. Then she went out to the street and tested the air. It was palatable, but beyond that something suddenly seemed wonderfully right.

A sky of curdled cloud, a bit of breeze that flapped the fringe of the canopy. As it moves from a smaller to a larger space, an answering expansion of the spirit. The concrete swept clean. And?

She only realized what the wonder had been when it was taken from her: out of the third brownstone in the row across the street a woman wheeled a baby buggy. She had been alone.

The buggy descended to the pavement at a controlled jounce and was steered inexorably toward Alexa.

The woman (whose hat was exactly the same dismaying brown as the inside of the elevator) said, “Hello, Mrs. Miller.”

Alexa smiled.

They talked about babies. Mr. Phillips, who had finished up inside, told them about the preciosities of the two younger Phillipses: “I asked them what the dickens it was, a leaky sieve or what—”

It came to her, where she was supposed to be. Loretta had phoned last night when she was half asleep and she hadn’t written it down. (Loretta’s middle name was Dickens, and she claimed, in some complicated way, to be a descendant.) The appointment was for one o’clock and the Lowen School was on the other side of town. Panic whelmed up. It couldn’t be done, she told herself: and the panic subsided.

“Do you know what it turned out to be?” Mr. Phillips insisted.

“No, what?”

“A planetarium.”

She tried to think what this could possibly mean. “That’s astonishing,” she said and the woman who had known her name agreed.

“That’s what I told my wife later—astonishing.”

“A planetarium,” Alexa said, as she retreated toward the mailboxes. “Well, well.”

There was the winter number, one season overdue, of Classics Journal; a letter with a Burley, Idaho, postmark (from her sister Ruth); two letters for G., one from the Conservation Corporation that was probably an appeal for funds (as, with equal probability, Ruth’s letter would be); and the crucial letter from Stuyvesant High School.

Tank had been accepted. He didn’t have a scholarship but that, considering G.’s income, was only to be expected.

Her first reaction was sodden disappointment. She had wanted to be relieved of the decision and now it was squarely before her again. Then, when she realized she’d been hoping Stuyvesant would refuse him, she felt as sodden guilt.

She could hear the phone ringing from the elevator. She knew it would be Loretta Couplard wanting to know why she’d missed their appointment.

She used the wrong key for the top lock. “My house is on fire,” she thought, “and my children are burning.” (And, as a kind of appendix to this thought: Have I ever seen a ladybug alive? Or only pictures of them on nursery-rhyme cassettes?)

It was a wrong number.

She settled down with the Classics Journal, which had gone, as everything did these days, from paper to flimsy. An article on the Sibyl in the Satyricon; a compendium of the references in Aristotle’s Poetics; a new method of dating the letters of Cicero. Nothing she could use for therapy.

Then, with a mental squaring of her shoulders against her sister’s devious demands, she began the letter:

March 29, 2025 Dear Alexa—

thank you and god-bless for the bundle of good things, they seem practically new so i guess i should thank Tancred too for his gentleness, thanks, Tank! Remus and the other kids certainly can use clothes, esp. now. it has been the worst winter ever for us—and thats going back 23 yrs. before i arrived—but we are well dug in & cozy as mice.

my news? well, since i last wrote you i have been getting into baskets! it certainly solves the problem of those long winter evenings. Harvey who is our big expert on just about everything—he’s 84, would you believe that?—taught me and Budget, tho she has decided to return to dear old Sodom & Gonorreah (pun?) that was right at the low point of the Great Freeze, now with the sap running and birds singing— and its so beautiful, Alexa, i wish you could be here to share it—i get awfully restless sitting in front of my pile of withies, but i seem to be stuck with the job since its our biggest moneymaker now that the presents are sold, (did you get the two jars i sent you at Christmas?) i wish you’d write more often since you are so good at it. i always am so happy to hear from you, Alexa, esp. whats been happening to that Roman alter-ego of yours, sometimes i want to return to the 3rd cent, or whenever and try and talk sense into the other “you.” she/you seems so much more receptive and open, tho i suppose we all are inside our heads & the hard thing is to get those feelings working on the outside!

but don’t let me preach at you. that has always been my worst fault—even here! again you and Tank are invited to come visiting for as long as you like, i’d invite Gene too if i thot there was any chance he’d come, but i know what his opinion is of the Village….

i tried to read the book you sent with the bundle, by that Saint, i thot from the title it would be really trashy & exciting but 10 pages was as far as i could get. i gave it to elder Warren to read & he says to tell you its a great book but he couldn’t disagree more, he would like to meet you & talk about the early Christian communities, i feel so committed now to our way of Life that i don’t think i’ll ever be getting back east, so unless you do visit the Village we may never see each other again, i appreciate your offering the flight fare for me and Remus to come out but the elders wont let me accept money for so light a purpose when we have to do without so many more important things, i love you—you must know that—& i always pray for you and for Tancred & for Gene too.

your sister, Ruth

p.s. please, Alexa—not Stuyvesant! its hard to explain why i feel as strongly about this as i do without giving offense to G. but do I have to explain? give my nephew at least half a chance to live a human life!

Depression came down on her like August smog, thick and smarting. Ruth’s Utopian gush, silly as it could be at times, or sinister, always made Alexa see her own life as strenuous, futile, and unworthy. What had she to show for all her effort? She’d composed that inventory so often it was like filling out her weekly D-97 for the Washington office. She had a husband, a son, a parakeet, a psychotherapist, sixty-four per cent equity in her pension fund, and an exquisite sense of loss.

It wasn’t a fair summation. She loved G. with a sad, complicated, forty-four-year-old love, and Tancred unequivocably. She even loved Emily Dickinson to the brink of sentimentality. It wasn’t just and it wasn’t reasonable that Ruth’s letters should do this to her, but it did her no good to argue against her mood.

Bernie’s advice for coping with these minor disasters was just to go on agonizing at full steam while maintaining oneself in a state of resolute inaction. Finally the boredom became worse than the pain. Going off into the past was escapism at best and could lead to a nasty case of dichronatism. So she sat on the worn-out settee hidden in the setback of the corridor and considered all the ways in which her life was rotten through and through until, at a quarter to four, Willa came for her pies.

Willa’s husband, like Alexa’s, was in thermal salvage, which was still a rare enough specialization to have made a loose kind of friendship inevitable between them, despite their natural New York-bred reluctance to get involved with anyone living in the same building. Thermal salvage, on the miniature scale of oven-sharing, was basically all that united Alexa and Willa too, but it didn’t serve them as well for conversational fodder as it did their husbands. Willa, who claimed to have scored a prodigious 167 on the I.Q. part of her Regents, was a pure specimen of the New French Woman celebrated in the movies of twenty years ago, and indeed in all French movies. She did nothing and cared for nothing and, with a precise feeling for the mathematics involved, deployed the little green pluses and pink minuses from Pfizer’s labs to hold her soul steady at zero. By never for a moment relaxing at the effort, she had made herself as pretty as a Chevrolet and mindless as a cauliflower. Five minutes talking to her and Alexa had regained every shred of her usual self-esteem.

Thereafter the afternoon rolled down the track to evening with a benign predictability, making brief stops at all the local stations. The casserole came out looking as formidable and joyful as the last still on the recipe cassette. Loretta finally did phone and they made a new appointment for Thursday. Tancred came home an hour late, having adventured into the park. She knew, he knew she knew, but as part of his moral education Tank was obliged to invent a pleasant, undetectable fiction (a game of chess with Dicky Myers).

At 5:50 she brought out the rice pudding, which had gone all brown and peculiar. Then, just before the news, the office called and took Saturday away—a disappointment as usual as rain or dimes lost into telephones.

G. arrived not more than half an hour late.

The casserole was a religious experience.

“Is it real?” he asked. “I can’t tell.”

“The meat isn’t meat, but I used real pork fat.”

“It’s incredible.”

“Yes.”

“Is there any more?” he asked.

She doled out the last rosette (Tank got the sauce) and watched, with an immemorial indulgence, husband and son eat her tomorrow’s lunch.

After dinner G. took to the tub and meditated. Once he was deep into alpha rhythms Alexa came and stood beside the toilet and looked at him. (He didn’t like being looked at. Once he’d almost beat up a boy in the park who wouldn’t stop staring.) The too hairy body, the drooping, volute lobes and muscled neck, curve and countercurve, the thousand colors of the shadowed flesh called from her the same mixture of admiration and perplexity that Echo must have felt gazing at Narcissus. With each year of their marriage he had become stranger and stranger to her. At times—and these the times she loved him best—he seemed scarcely human. Not that she blinded herself to his flaws (he was—who isn’t?—riddled); rather that the core of him seemed never to have known anguish, fear, doubt—even, in any important way, pain. He possessed a serenity that the facts of his life did not warrant, and which (here was the thorn on which she could not resist rubbing her finger) excluded her. Yet just when his self-sufficiency seemed most complete and cruelest he would turn round and do something incongrously tender and vulnerable, until she’d wonder if it were all just her own iciness and bitchery that kept them, twenty-five days in a month, so far apart.

His concentration faltered (had she made a noise, leaning back against the sink?) and broke. He looked up at her smiling (and Echo replied): “What are you thinking, A.?”

“I was thinking—” She paused to think. “—how wonderful computers are.”

“They’re wonderful, all right. Any special reason?”

“Well, for my first marriage I relied on my own judgment. This time …”

He laughed. “Actually, confess it, you just wanted me out of the bathtub so you could do the dishes.”

“Actually, not.” (Though she was aware, even as she said this, that the squeeze bottle of disinfectant was in her hand.)

“I’m done anyhow. No, don’t bother with the syphon. Or the dishes. We’ve established a partnership—remember?”

That night as they lay next to each other in bed, sharing each other’s warmth but not touching, she fell into a landscape, half nightmare and half purposed reverie. The villa had been stripped of its furnishings. The air was urgent with smoke and a continual cheng-cheng of finger cymbals. The mystae waited for her to lead them into the city. As they stumbled down Broadway, past heaps of junked-out cars, they chanted the praise of the god in thin, terrified voices—Alexa first, then the god-bearer and the cista-bearer, the neatherd and the guardian of the cave, and then the whole rout of Bacchae and mutes: “Woo-woo-woo, a-woo-woo-woo!” Her fawnskin kept slipping between her legs and tripping her. At 93rd Street, and again at 87th, unwanted children mouldered on compost heaps. It was one of the scandals of the present administration that these little corpses should be left to rot where anyone walking by could see them.

At last they came to the Met (so they couldn’t have been going down Broadway, after all) and she mounted the crisp stone steps with dignity. A great crowd had gathered in anticipation—many of them the same Christians who had been clamoring for the destruction of the temple and its idols. Once inside, the noise and the stench disappeared, as though some obliging servant had whisked a rain-drenched cloak from her shoulders. She sat, in the semidarkness of the Great Hall, beside her old favorite, a late Roman candybox of a sarcophagus from Tarsus (the first gift the Museum had ever received). Stone garlands drooped from the walls of the tiny, doorless bungalow; just below the eaves winged children, Erotes, pantomimed a hunt. The back and lid were unfinished, the tablet for the inscription blank. (She had always filled it in with her own name and an epitaph borrowed from Synesius, who, praising the wife of Aurelian, had said: “The chief virtue of a woman is that neither her body nor her name should ever cross the threshold.”)

The other priests had fled the city at the first rumor of the barbarians’ approach, and only Alexa, with a tambourine and a few silk ribbons, now was left. Everything was collapsing—civilizations, cities, minds—while she was constrained to wait for the end inside this dreary tomb (for the Met is really more a charnelhouse than a temple), without friends, without faith, and pretend for the sake of those who waited outside, to perform whatever sacrifice their terror demanded.

2

The teaching assistant, a brisk, muscular boy in tights and a cowboy hat, left Alexa alone in an office no larger than the second bedroom, so-called, of a MODICUM apartment. She suspected that Loretta was punishing her for her absence the day before yesterday, so she might as well settle down and watch the reels the assistant had left with her. The first was a pious, somber account of the genius and tribulations of Wilhelm Reich, Alexander Lowen, and Kate Wilkenson, foundress and still titular president of the Lowen School.

The second reel presented itself as being the work of the students themselves. Things wobbled, faces were cerise and magenta, the blurry children were always intensely aware of the camera. All this candid-seeming footage was cunningly edited to suggest that (at least here at the Lowen School): “Learning is a side-effect of joy.” Unquote, Kate Wilkenson. The children danced, the children prattled, the children made (so gently, so unproblematically) love, of sorts. Even mathematics, if not an out-and-out ecstasy, became an entertainment. Here, for instance, sat a little fellow about Tank’s age in front of a teaching machine. On the screen a frantic Mickey Mouse, caught in the cleft of a steep, slippery parabola, was shrieking to be saved: “Help! oh help me, I’m trapped!”

Doctor Smilax chuckled and the parabolas began filling with water, inexorably. It rose above Mickey’s ankles, above his knees, above the two white buttons on his shorts.

Alexa felt an uncomfortable tickle of memory.

“Y equals x-squared plus 2, does it?” In his anger the evil scientist’s flesh-shield flickered, revealing glimpses of the infamous skull beneath. “Then, try this on for size, Earthling!” Using his fingerbone as chalk, he scribbled on the magic blackboard (it was actually a computer): Y = x2 - 2.

The parabola tightened. The water rose level with Mickey’s chin, and when he opened his mouth a final wave diminished his would-have-been scream to a mere, silly gargle.

(It had been thirty years ago, or longer. The blackboard was wiped clean and she had punched the keys for a final equation: x2, and then 8, and then the operant key for Subtract. She had actually clapped her hands with glee when the pathetic little Mickey Mouse had been crushed to death by the tightening of the parabola.)

As, in the movie, he was crushed to death now, as he had been crushed to death each day for decades all about the world. It was a fantastically successful textbook.

“There is a lesson in that,” said Loretta Dickens Couplard, entering the room and filling it.

“But not about parabolas especially,” had replied before she’d turned round. They looked at each other.

The thought that came, unexpected and so dissembled, was: How old she looks! how altered! The twenty years that had merely nibbled at Alexa (twenty-four, in fact) had simply heaped themselves on Loretta Couplard like a blizzard. In ’02 she had been a passably pretty girl. Now she was a fat old hen.

Dissembling, Alexa stood up and bent forward to kiss the pink doughy cheek (they would not, so long as a kiss lasted, see each other’s dismay), but the earphones reined her in inches short of her goal.

Loretta completed the gesture.

“Well then—” (after this memento mori) “—let’s go into my shambles, shall we?” Alexa, smiling, disconnected herself from the viewer.

“It’s out the door and around the corner. The school is spread out over four buildings. Three of them official landmarks.” She led the way, lumbering down the dark hall and chattering about architecture. When she opened the door to the street the wind reached into her dress and made a sail of it. There seemed to be enough orange Wooly© on her to rig up a fair-sized yawl.

East 77th was innocent of traffic except for a narrow, not very busy, bicycle path. Potted ginkgos dotted the concrete and real grass pressedup voluptuously through the cracks. Rarely did the city afford the pleasure of ruins, and Alexa drank it in.

(Somewhere she had seen a wall, all built of massive blocks of stone. Birds rested in the cracks where mortar had been chipped away and looked down at her. It had been the underside of a bridge—a bridge that had lost its river.)

“Such weather,” she said, lingering beside one of the benches.

“Yes, April.” Loretta, who was still being blown apart, was reluctant to take the hint.

“It’s the only time, except for maybe a week in October, that New York is even viable.”

“Mm. Why don’t we talk out here then? At least until the children claim it for their own.” Then, once they’d plunked themselves down: “Sometimes, you know, I almost think I’d like the street rezoned again. Cars make such a soothing noise. Not to mention the graft I have to pay.” She made a honking sound through her nose, expressive of cynicism.

“Graft?” Alexa asked, feeling it was expected of her.

“It comes under ‘maintenance’ in the budget.”

They regarded the windy month of April. The young grass fluttered. Strands of red hair whipped Loretta’s face. She clamped a hand upon her head.

“What do you think it costs to keep this place going for one school-year—what do you think?”

“I couldn’t begin to … I’ve never … ”

“A million and a half. Just slightly under.”

“It’s hard to believe,” she said. (Could she have cared less?)

“It would be a lot more if it weren’t that half of us, including me, is paid directly from Albany.” Loretta went on, with aggrieved relish, to render an accounting of the school’s finances circumstantial enough to have satisfied the Angel of Judgment. Alexa could not have felt more embarrassed if Loretta had begun to relate the unseemliest details of her private life. Indeed, between old school chums a friendly titbit or two might have helped restore a lapsed intimacy. In the old days Alexa had even once been in the same room while Loretta was getting laid by the Geology lab assistant. Or was it vice versa? In any case there had been few secrets between them. But to bring up a subject like one’s own private income so blatantly, and then to dwell upon it this way— it was shocking. Alexa was aghast.

Eventually a hint of purposefulness became apparent in the drift of Loretta’s indiscretions. The school was kept alive by a grant from the Balanchine Foundation. Beyond an annual lump sum of fifty thousand dollars, the Foundation awarded scholarships to thirty-two entering students. Each year the school had to round up a new herd of qualified candidates, for the grant was conditional upon maintaining a sixty/forty ratio between paying and scholarship students.

“So now you see,” Loretta said, nervously dallying with her big zipper, “why your phone call was such a boon.”

“No, I don’t see, entirely.” Was she angling, God forbid, for a donation? Alexa tried to think of anything she might have said on the phone that could have given Loretta so false an estimate of G.’s tax bracket. Their address, certainly, couldn’t have led her to this mistake: West 87th was distinctly modest.

“You spoke of working for the Welfare Department,” Loretta said, with a sense of having laid down all her cards.

The zipper, having reach aphelion, began to descend. Alexa stared at it with candid incomprehension.

“Oh, Alexa, don’t you see? You can scout them up for us.”

“But surely in all New York City you don’t have any trouble finding thirty-two candidates? Why, you told me there was a waiting list!”

“Of those who can pay. The difficulty is getting scholarship students who can meet the physical requirements. There are enough bright kids in the slums, especially if you know what tests to use to find them, but by the time they’re ten years old, eleven years old, they’re all physical wrecks. It’s the combination of a cheap synthetic diet and the lack of exercise.” The zipper, rising, snagged in orange Wooly©. “The grant is from the Balanchine Foundation—oh dear, now see what I’ve done—so there has to be at least a pretense of these kids becoming dancers. Potentially.”

The zipper wouldn’t budge. The movement of her shoulders slowly spread apart the opened top of the dress, creating a vast decolletage.

“I’ll certainly keep my eyes opened,” Alexa promised.

Loretta made a final attempt. Somewhere something ripped. She rose from the bench and forced an operatic laugh. “Let’s repair inside, shall we?”

On the way to the office Loretta asked all the questions she’d so far neglected—what sports Tancred played, what programs he watched, what subjects he was most apt at, and what his ambitions were, if any.

“Right now he’s talking about whaling. In general we’ve tried not to coerce him.”

“Is coming here his own idea then?”

“Oh, Tank doesn’t even know we’ve applied. G. and I—that’s Gene, my husband, we call each other by our initials—we thought it would be best if we let him finish out the semester in peace where he is.”

“P.S. 166,” Loretta said, just to prove that she had gone over the application.

“It’s a good school for the early grades, but after that… ”

“Of course. Democracy can be carried too far.”

“It can,” Alexa conceded.

They had reached the shambles, which was neither an office nor a bedroom nor yet a restaurant altogether. Loretta rearranged the upper part of her person inside a maroon sweater and tucked the lower, grosser half of herself out of sight behind an oak desk. Alexa at once felt herself more friendly disposed to her.

“I hope you don’t think I’m being too pokey?”

“Not at all.”

“And Mr. Miller? What does he do?”

“He’s in heat-retrieval systems.”

“Oh.”

(G. would always add, at this point, “I fight entropy for a living.” Should she?)

“Well. Most of our parents, you know, come from the humanities. Like us. If Tancred should come to the Lowen School, it’s not likely that he’ll ever follow in his father’s technological footsteps. Does Mr. Miller realize that?”

“We’ve discussed it. It’s funny—” in evidence she laughed, once, meagerly, through her nose “—but it’s actually G. who’s been more in favor of Tank coming here. Whereas my first thought was to enroll him at Stuyvesant.”

“Did you apply there?”

“Yes. I’m still waiting to hear if he’s been accepted.”

“It would be cheaper, of course.”

“We’ve tried not to let that be a consideration. G. went to Stuyvesant, but he doesn’t have good feelings about it. And while I enjoyed my education well enough, I can’t see that it’s enriched my life so awfully much more than G.’s that I can feel justified in my uselessness.”

“Are you useless?”

“Yes, relative to an engineer. The humanities! What good has it done for either of us, practically? I’m a caseworker and you’re teaching kids the same things we learned so that they can grow up to do what? At best, they’ll be caseworkers and teachers.”

Loretta nodded her head consideringly. She seemed to be trying to keep from smiling. “But your husband disagrees?”

“Oh, he feels his life has been wasted too.” This time her laughter was genuine.

Loretta, after only a moment more of noncommittal silence, joined her. Then they had coffee, from actual beans that Loretta ground herself, and small hard cookies covered with pignoli. They were imported from South America.

3

Towards the end of his campaign against the Marcomanni, the Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote: “Consider the past: such great changes of political supremacies. One may foresee as well the things which will be. For they will certainly take the same form. Accordingly, to have contemplated human life for forty years is the same as to have contemplated it for ten thousand years. For what more will you see than you have seen already?”

Alexa wrote in ballpoint (it was after eleven, G. was asleep) in the empty back pages of Tank’s fifth-grade project about the moon. She remembered to stick in the date: April 12, 2025. Now the page balanced. She tried the sounds of various openings in her head but they were all stiff with civility. Her usual Introibo, an apology for being late to reply, was this once not so. (What would Bernie have said? He’d have said, “Clear the air—say what you’re really feeling!”)

The pen moved slowly, forming large upright letters.

It was peanut butter, the very thickest. But she slogged on through it.

She waited for the last term of the series.

The new Monsanto commercial came roaring through the wall: YOU LOOK SO PRETTY IN SHOES! YOU LOOK SO NICE IN—

“Turn that down!” she called in to her son, and wrote:

She realized that, probably, Ruth wouldn’t know what she meant. And she wasn’t entirely sure she meant it.

At the very beginning of the First World War, as the Germans advanced towards the Marne and the Austrians pressed northward into Poland, a thirty-four-year-old ex-high school teacher living in a Munich rooming house had just completed the first draft of what was going to be the best-selling book of 1919 throughout Germany. In his introduction he wrote:

she began again, on a fresh sheet.

The second page of the second letter was filled. Reading it over she realized it could never be mailed to her sister. Their relationship, already rickety, would never support the weight of this much honesty. But she finished the sentence anyhow:

A quarter of a millennium after the Meditations and fifteen hundred years before The Decline of the West, Salvian, a priest of Marseilles, described the process whereby the free citizens of Rome were gradually reduced to a condition of serfdom. The upper classes had arranged the tax laws to their own convenience and then administered them crookedly to their further convenience. The entire burden of supporting the army—Rome’s army, of course, was vast, a nation within a nation—fell on the shoulders of the poor. The poor grew poorer. Finally, reduced to utter destitution, some fled from their villages to live among the barbarians, even though (as Salvian notes) they did give off a dreadful odor. Others, living far from the frontiers, became bagaudae, or homemade vandals. The majority, however, rooted to the land by their property and families, had to accept the terms of the rich potentiores, to whom they made over their houses, their lands, their possessions, and at last the freedom of their children. The birth rate declined. All Italy became a wasteland. Repeatedly the Emperors were obliged to invite the politer barbarians across the borders to “colonize” the abandoned farms.

The condition of the cities at this time was even less agreeable than that of the countryside. Burned and pillaged by barbarians and then by the troops (themselves mostly recruits from lands bordering the Danube) that had been sent in to dispel these invaders, the cities existed, if at all, in ruins. “Though doubtless no one wished to die,” Salvian writes, “still no one did anything to avoid death,” and he welcomes the advent of the Goths into Gaul and Spain as being a release from the despotism of a totally corrupt government.

Alexa wrote.

She crossed out “miles” and wrote “stadia.”

For a moment in the mirror of art, for the blinking of an iris, Alex a witnessed her life the wrong way round. Instead of a modern house-wife fantasying herself in classical poses, the past stiffened and became actual and she thought she could see clearly, across the span of years, the other Alexa, the sad contemporary self she usually managed to avoid, a shrill woman in a silly dress who had been equal to the small demands neither of her marriage nor of her career. A failure or (which was possibly worse) a mediocrity.

“And yet,” she told herself.

And yet: didn’t the world, to keep on going, need just such people as she was? It had only been a moment. The question had restored a comfortable perspective, and she would end her epistle to Gargilius with some chilly, true-to-life endearment. She would write—

But her pen had disappeared. It was not on the desk, it was not on the rug, it was not in her pocket.

The upstairs noise had begun.

Two minutes to twelve. She might reasonably complain, but she didn’t know who lived in the apartment above, or even for certain that that was where the sound came from. “Cheng-cheng,” and then, after a pause, “Cheng-cheng.”

“Alexa?” She could not place the voice (a woman’s?) summoning her. There was no one in the room.

“Alexa.”

Tancred stood in the doorway, looking a perfect cupid with an old silky shawl knotted at his hips, lemon on chocolate.

“You startled me.”

Her left hand had lifted automatically to her lips, and there, lapsing back into existence, was the ballpoint.

“I couldn’t sleep. What time is it?”

He stepped toward the table soundlessly and stood with one hand resting on the arm of a chair, his shoulders level with hers, his eyes steady as a laser beam.

“Midnight.”

“Could we play a game of cards?”

“And what about tomorrow?”

“Oh, I’ll get up. I promise.”

G., when he begged a favor, always smiled; Tancred, a better tactician, remained perfectly solemn.

“Well, get out the cards. One game and then we both have to get to bed.”

While Tancred was out of the room, Alexa tore out her own pages from “What the Moon Means to Me.” A face clipped from a news magazine came unstuck and fluttered to the rug. She stooped and got it.

“What were you writing?” Tancred asked, beginning, neatly, to shuffle.

“Nothing. A poem.”

“I wrote a poem,” he admitted, excusing hers.

She cut. He began to deal.

She studied the newsprint face. It seemed oddly devoid of experience despite its years, like a very young actor got up as a very old man. The eyes regarded the camera lens with the equanimity of a star.

Finally she had to ask: “Who is this?”

“That! You don’t know who that is? Guess.”

“Some singer?” (Could it be Don Hershey? Already?)

“It’s the last astronaut. You know, the three who landed on the moon. the other two are both dead.” Tank took the scrap of paper from her and returned it to its place in his project. “Now he is too, I guess. You start.”

4

From Roman times until the closing years of the 20th Century the Bay of Morbihan on the southern coast of Brittany had been the source of the world’s most delectable seed oysters. Then in the late 80’s the oystermen of Locmariaquere were alarmed to notice that their seedlings sickened when they were transplanted and that soon even those that remained in their native waters had become unpalatable. Researchers hired by the departement of Morbihan eventually tracked down the source of infection to wastes dumped into the estuary of the Loire, some sixty miles down the coast. (Ironically, the polluter was a subsidiary branch of the pharmaceutical concern that had supplied the investigators.) By the time this was discovered, sad to say, the Morbihan oyster was extinct. However, in death the species bequeathed mankind its final inestimable gift, a monomolecular pearl, Morbehanine.

As synthesized by Pfizer, Morbehanine quickly became the most popular drug in all countries where it was not prohibited usually in some gentling combination with the traditional. Modified by narcotizing agents it was marketed as Oraline; with caffeine it became Koffee; with tranquilizers Fadeout. In its crude form it was used only by the half million or so members of the intellectual elite who practiced Historical Analysis. Unmodified Morbihanine induces a state of intensely experienced “daydreaming ” in which usual relationships of figure-to-field are reversed. During a common hallucinogenic high the self remains a constant while the environment, as in dreams, undergoes transformation. With Morbehanine the landscape that one inhabits, after the initial “fixing” period, is not much more malleable than our own everyday world, but one is aware of one’s slightest action in this landscape as a free, spontaneous, willed choice. It was possible to dream responsibly.

What determines the outlines of the alternate world is the subject’s sum knowledge of the period he chooses to fix during his first trips. Without continuous research one was apt to create a fantasy life as monotonous as the afternoon sex features. Most people, sensibly, preferred the mild, multidirectional zonk of Oraline, its euphoric illusion of freedom every which way.

For the few, however, the more strenuous pleasures of Pure Will were worth a greater effort. A century before the same people had covered themselves with useless degrees in the humanities, filling the graduate schools to overflowing. Now, with Morbihanine, there was a use for all the history history students are forever studying.

It had often been debated, among analysands, whether Historical Analysis was the best way to work out one’s problems or the best way to escape them. The elements of psychotherapy and of vicarious entertainment were inextricably knotted. The past became a kind of vast moral gymnasium in which some preferred a hard workout in the weight room of the French Revolution or the Conquest of Peru while others jiggled about lickerishly on the trampoline of Casanova’s Venice or Delmonico’s New York.

Once a particular stretch of time had been fixed, usually with the help of an expert in that era, one was no more at liberty to depart from it than one could walk away from the month of June. Alexa, for instance, was confined to a period of less than eighty years, from her birth in 334 (which was also, not coincidentally, the address of one of the buildings on East 11th Street for which she was responsible at the MODICUM office) up to the lovely pink evening when the twice-widowed Alexa, lately returned from a lifetime in the provinces, was to die of a stroke just a providential few days before the Sack of Rome. If she tried, during contact, to broach either barrier, 334 or 410, she experienced nothing more than a mild pastoral flickering—leaves, clouds, a blurry water-glass, sounds of troubled breathing, a smell of melons rotting—like the test-patterns of some sempiternal teevee network.

On Friday morning, despite the weather, Alexa took the malls downtown and arrived at Bernie’s office ten minutes early. A good-sized hole had been punched through the fiber panel of the outer door and the furniture inside was in a state of delirium. The couch had been sliced open, its innards garnishing the ruins.

“But,” Bernie pointed out cheerfully, sweeping up the fluff and plaster dust, “they never got into the office, thank God. They might have done actual harm there.”

“That’s a rosy view.”

“Well, the way I look at it, this is the best of all possible worlds.” Without a doubt he was soothed by the consolations of chemistry, but amid these ruins, why not?

“Do you know who did it?” She picked a lump of plaster off the bench, dropped it into his basket.

“Oh, I think I do. A pair of girls that the Council saddled me with has been threatening to scrub the office for months. I hope it was them—then the Council can pick up the bill.”

Like most analysts, Bernie Shaw did not make a living from his fees. Unlike most, he didn’t teach either. Instead he received a comfortable retainer from the Hell’s Kitchen Neighborhood Youth Council for occasional services as a Reader and Advisor. Bernie had an uncle on the Council’s advisory board.

“Which is just the same as Historical Analysis, really,” he would explain at parties (and thanks to the same uncle he was invited to some very good parties), “except that it doesn’t involve history or analysis.”

When the basket was full, Bernie slipped on his professional manner, and they entered the inner, vandal-proofed office. His face gelled into a handsome, immotile mask. His voice thickened to a droning baritone. His hands froze into a single neat rock of thoughtfulness, which he planted in the middle of his desk.

They faced each other across this rock and began to discuss Alexa’s other inner life—first money, then sex, then whatever odds and ends were left. Moneywise she would soon have to decide whether to accept Arcadius’s long-standing offer to buy her melon fields. His price was tempting, but it was hard to reconcile the sale of farmland—and her patrimony at that—with an affectation of republican virtue. On the other hand, the land in question could hardly be called ancestral, having been one of Popilius’s last speculations before his death.

(Alexa’s father, Popilius Flamininus—born 276 a.d., died 354 a.d.—lived most of his life as a relatively impoverished Senator of Rome. After years of vacillation he decided to follow the Empire eastward to its new capital. Accordingly, one fine day Alexa, aged ten, was bundled into an oxcart and told to wave good-bye to the pretty idiot daughter of the superintendent of their apartment house. The journey to Byzantium took them two hundred stadia to the north and no distance eastward at all, for Popilius Flamininus had discovered that his purple stripe, so useless to him in Rome, was a social and financial asset in the hillside towns of Cisalpine Gaul. By the time she’d married Gargilius, Alexa was considered, locally, a tolerable heiress.)

Bernie took up the matter of her legal position, but she could cite Domitian’s revival of the Julian laws governing the property rights of married women. Legally the fields were hers to sell.

“So the question remains. Should I?”

The answer remained, adamantly, no. Not because it was hers from her father (who would have probably advised her to take the money and run); her piety was on a grander scale—Rome! Liberty! Civilization! It was to that burning ship that duty bound her. Of course, she didn’t know it was burning. One of the knottiest problems in analysis was to keep the historical Alexa innocent of the fact that she was fighting, for the short term anyhow, a losing battle.

She might have her suspicions—who didn’t, then?—but this was reason rather for resolution than for faintheartedness. A lost battle is not a lost cause. Take Thermopylae.

The contemporary transfigure of this temptation, whether she ought to keep her job with the MODICUM office, had the same hydraheaded way of surviving her most final decisions. She didn’t, except now and then, enjoy her work. She often suspected that the great machineries of the welfare service might actually do more harm than good. Her salary was only large enough to cover the extra expenses the job involved her in. Duty in these circumstances was an article of faith as thorny as the resurrection of the body. Yet it was only this faith—and a vague conviction that a city ought to be lived in—that helped her resist G.’s gentle, persistent drift suburbsward.

They breezed through sex by mutual agreement, for in that respect the last three or four months had been unadventurously pleasant. When she indulged in daydreams just for fun they were likelier to be about barbecues than orgies.

Alexa could compensate for her stints of dieting in the present with bouts of exquisite excess in the past, fantasies which she lifted whole from Petronius, Juvenal, or the younger Pliny—salads of lettuce, leeks, and fresh mint; the cheese of Trebula; trays of Picenumine olives, Spanish pickles, and sliced eggs; a roasted kid, the tenderest of his flock, with more of milk in him than blood; asparagus covered with the willful anachronism of a Hollandaise sauce; pears and figs from Chios, and the plums of Damascus. Besides, unnecessary talk about sex tended to make Bernie nervous.

With fifteen minutes still to go a puddle of silence formed between them. She searched through the week’s memories for an anecdote to float across it. The letter she’d written last night to Merriam? No, Bernie would accuse her of literature.

The puddle spread.

“Monday night,” she said. “On Monday night I dreamed a dream.”

“Oh?”

“I think it was a dream. Maybe I tinkered with it a little before I was completely asleep.”

“Ah.”

“I was dancing out in the street with a lot of other women. In fact I was sort of leading them. Down Broadway, but I wore a palla.”

“That’s a dichronatism.” Bernie’s tone was severe.

“Yes, but as I say, I was dreaming. Then I was in the Metropolitan Museum. For a sacrifice.”

“Animal? Human?”

“One or the other. I don’t remember.”

“Blood sacrifices were prohibited in 341.”

“Yes, but in a crisis the authorities would look the other way. During the siege of Florence in 405, which was years after the destruction of the temples—”

“Oh very well.” Bernie closed his eyes, conceding the point. “So, once again the barbarians are storming the gates.” The barbarians were always storming Alexa’s gates. Bernie’s theory was that it was because her husband was fractionally a Negro. “Then what happened?”

“That’s all I remember. Except one detail earlier in the dream. There were heaps of dead babies in the cess trenches in the middle of Broadway.”

“Infanticide was a capital offense from the beginning of the third century,” Bernie pointed out.

“Probably because it was becoming too common.”

Bernie closed his eyes. Then, opening them: “Have you ever had an abortion?”

“Once, ages ago, in high school. I didn’t feel much guilt though.”

“What did you feel about the children in your dreams?”

“Anger, at the untidiness. Otherwise they were just a fact.” She looked at her hands, which seemed too large, the knuckles especially. “Like a face in a news magazine.” She looked at Bernie’s hands folded on the desk. Another silence began to form, but gracefully, without embarrassment. She remembered the moment she’d found herself alone on the street; the sunlight, her pleasure. It seemed quite reasonable that people should expose their children to die. There was what Loretta had said yesterday—“I’ve stopped trying”—but it went beyond that. As though everyone had come to see that Rome, civilization, the whole burning issue wasn’t worth the effort any longer, theirs or anyone’s. Every infanticide was the kindness of a philosopher.

“Pish,” Bernie said, when she’d said this four or five different ways. “No one sees his own culture declining till around the age of forty, and then everyone does.”

“But things had been going downhill for two hundred years.”

“Or three, or four.”

“Farmlands had become deserts. It was visible. Look at the sculpture, the architecture.”

“It’s visible with hindsight. But they could be as blind as their comfort required. Trivial poetasters like Ausonius were declared the equals of Virgil, of Homer even, and the Christians, now that they were official, were positively giddy with optimism. They expected to see the city of God shootup like an urbal renewal project.”

“Then explain those dead children.”

“Explain the living ones. Which reminds me. Last week you still hadn’t madeup your mind about Tancred.”

“I sent off the letter this morning, with a check.”

“To?”

“Stuyvesant.”

The rock on the desk split open and became two hands. “Well— there you have it.”

“What?”

“An interpretation for your dream. The blood sacrifice you were ready to make to save the city, the children on the scrapheap—your son.”

She denied it.

By three that afternoon the tops of buildings were invisible at street level.

She had walked crosstown from the office in a lukewarm drizzle, then taken the subway down to East 14th. All the way, the argument with Bernie had continued inside her, like some battery-powered toy, a novelty doll with a loop of tape that croaks after each smack of the old smacker. “Oh, don’t do that again! Oh, please don’t, I can’t stand it!” Before she’d come out through the turnstile she could smell the grease from Big San Juan’s, a dark ground of onion polk a dotted with plantain. By the time she was up on the street, her mouth was watering. She would have bought a quarter bag but customers had gathered three deep around the counters (baseball season—already?) and she saw Lottie Hanson in the crowd in front of the screen. The plantains weren’t worth the risk of a conversation. Lottie’s blowzy sexiness always affected Alexa elegiacally, like a roomful of cut flowers.

Crossing Third Avenue between 11th and 12th, a sound dopplered at her, swelling in an instant from a hum to a roar. She whirled about, scanning the fog for whatever lunatic truck or …

The sound as suddenly diminished. The street was empty. A block to the north the lights winked green. She got to the curb before the traffic—a bus and two shrill Yamahas—reached the second stripe of the ped crossing. Then, several beats after she’d figured it out, her idiot heart caught up with her panic.

A helicopter certainly, but flying lower than any she’d ever known.

Her knees took so to trembling that she had to lean against a hydrant. Long after the distant whirr had diffused into the general midday din the machineries of her glands kept her in a flutter.

Marylou Levin had taken her mother’s place at the corner with the broom and the can. A homely, slow, earnest girl who’d grow up to be a day-care worker, unless, which would probably be more profitable both for Marylou and for society, she took over her mother’s license as a sweep.

Alexa dropped a penny in the can. The girl looked up from her comic book and said thank you.

“I hoped I’d find your mother here, Marylou.”

“She’s home.”

“I’ve got a declaration she had to fill out. I didn’t get it to her last time and now the office is starting to make a fuss.”

“Well, she’s sleeping.” Marylou turned back to the comic book, a sad story about horses in a Dallas circus, then thought to add: “She relieves me at four.”

It meant either waiting or walking up to the seventeenth floor. If the M-28 wasn’t cleared through Blake’s section by tomorrow Mrs. Levin might lose her apartment (Blake had been known to do worse) and it would be Alexa’s fault.

Usually, except for the stink, she didn’t mind the stairs, but all the walking today had taken it out of her. A weariness as of heavy shopping bags focused in the small of her back. On the ninth floor she stopped in at Mr. Anderson’s to hear the poor tedious old man complain about the various ingratitudes of his adopted daughter. (Though “boarder” described that relationship more accurately.) Cats and kittens climbed over Alexa, rubbed against her, inveigled her.

On eleven her legs gave out again. She sat on the top step and listened to the commingled urgencies of a newscast one flight up and a song one flight down. Her ears filtered Latin words from the Spanish phrases.

Imagine, she thought, actually living here. Would one grow numb eventually? One would have to.

Lottie Hanson hove into sight at the landing below, clutching the rail and panting. Recognizing Alexa and conscious of having to look nice for her, she patted her damp, drizzly wig and smiled.

“Glory, isn’t it”—she caught her breath, waved her hand in front of her face, decoratively—“exciting!”

Alexa asked what.

“The bombing.”

“Bombing?”

“Oh, you haven’t heard. They’re bombing New York. They showed it on teevee, where it landed. These steps!” She collapsed beside Alexa with a great huff. The smell that had seemed so appetizing outside Big San Juan’s had lost its savor. “But they couldn’t show”—she waved her hand and it was still, Alexa had to admit, a lovely and a graceful hand—“the actual airplane itself. Because of the fog, you know.”

“Who’s bombing New York?”

“The radicals, I suppose. It’s some kind of protest. Against something.” Lottie Hanson watched her breasts lift and fall. The importance of the news she bore made her feel pleased with herself. She waited for the next question all aglow.

But Alexa had begun calculating with no more input than she had already. The notion had seemed, from Lottie’s first words, inevitable. The city cried out to be bombed. The amazing thing was that no one had ever thought to do it before.

When she did at last ask Lottie a question, it came from an unexpected direction. “Are you afraid?”

“No, not a bit. It’s funny, because usually, you know, I’m just a bundle of nerves. Are you afraid?”

“No. Just the opposite. I feel…” She had to stop and think what it was that she did feel.

Children came storming down the stairs. With a gentle “God-damn,” Lottie squeezed up against the crusty wall. Alexa pressed up to the railing. the children ran down through the canyon they’d formed.

Lottie screamed at the last of them, “Amparo!”

The girl turned round at the landing and smiled. “Oh, hi, Mrs. Miller.”

“Goddamn it, Amparo, don’t you know they’re bombing the city?”

“We’re all going down to the street to watch.”

Dazzling, Alexa thought. She’d always had a thing for pierced ears on children, had even been tempted to do Tank’s for him when he was four, but G. had interposed.

“You get your ass back upstairs and stay there till they shoot that flicking airplane down!”

“The teevee said it doesn’t make any difference where you are.”

Lottie had gone all red. “I don’t care about that. I say—”

But Amparo had already run off.

“One of these days I’m going to kill her.”

Alexa laughed indulgently.

“I am, just wait and see.”

“Not on stage, I hope.”

“What?”

“Ne pueros coram,” she explained, “populo Medea trucidet. Don’t let Medea kill her boys before the audience. It’s Horace.” She got up and bent round to see if she’d soiled her dress.

Lottie remained on the step, inert. An everyday depression began to blunt the exhilaration of the catastrophe, like fog spoiling an April day, today’s fog, today’s April day.

Smells filmed every surface like cheap skin cream. Alexa had to get out of the stairwell, but Lottie had somehow caught hold of her and she wriggled in the meshes of an indefinite guilt.

“I think I’ll go up to the battlement now,” she said, “to watch the siege.”

“Well, don’t wait for me.”

“But later there’s something I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Right. Later.”

When she was one landing up Lottie called after her—“Mrs. Miller?”

“Yes?”

“The first bomb got the museum.”

“Oh. Which museum?”

“The Met.”

“Really.”

“I thought you’d want to know.”

“Of course. Thank you.”

Like a theater just before the movie starts, reduced by the darkness to a bare geometry, the fog had erased all details and distances. Uncertain sounds sifted through the grayness—engines, music, women’s voices. She felt through her whole body the imminence of the collapse, and because now she could feel it, it was no longer debilitating. She ran along the gravel. The roof stretched on and on in front of her without perspective. At the ledge she swerved to the right. She ran on.

She heard, far off, the stolen plane. It neither approached her nor receded, as though it were executing an immense circle, searching for her.

She stood still and lifted her arms, inviting it to her, offering herself to these barbarians, fingers splayed, eyes pressed tightly closed. Commanding. She saw, beneath her but unforeshortened, the bound ox. She saw its heaving belly and desperate eyes. She felt, in her hand, the sharp obsidian.

She told herself that this was what she had to do. Not for her own sake, of course. Never for her own sake—for theirs.

Its blood drenched the gravel. It gushed and splattered. The hem of the palla was stained. She knelt in the blood and dipped her hands into the opened belly to raise the dripping entrails high above her head, tubes and wires in a slime of thick black oil. She wound herself in the soft coils and danced like some god-drenched girl at the festivals, laughing and pulling the torches from their sockets, smashing sacred articles, jeering at the generals.

No one approached her. No one asked what she had read in the haruspices. She climbed up into the jungle gym and stood peering into the featureless air, her legs braced against the thin pipes, raptured and strong with a dawning faith.

The airplane approached, audibly.

She wanted it to see her. She wanted the boys inside to know that she knew, that she agreed.

It appeared quite suddenly, and near, like Minerva sprung full-grown from the brow of Jupiter. It was shaped like a cross.

“Come then,” she said with conscious dignity. “Lay waste.”

But the plane—a Rolls Rapide—passed overhead and returned to the haze from which it had materialized.

She climbed down from the gym with a sense of loss: she had offered herself to History and History had refused. With a sense, equally, of what a fool she’d been.

She felt in her pockets for a pack of hankies but she’d run out at the office. She had her cry anyhow.

Since the Army had begun celebrating its victory the city no longer seemed a sanctuary. Therefore early the next morning Merriam and Arcadius started back home on foot. During the darkest moments of the siege, with the generosity of despair, Arcadius had given the cook and the Theban girl their freedom, so that they were returning to the villa completely unattended.

Merriam was dreadfully hungover. The road was a slough, and when they came to the cut-off, Arcadius insisted on taking the even muddier path that went through Alexa’s fields. But for all that, she felt happy as an apricot. the sun was shining and the fields steamed like some great kitchen full of soup kettles and sauceboats, as though the very earth was sending up its prayer of thanksgiving.

“Lord,” she would murmur, “Lord.” She felt like a new woman.

“Have you noticed,” Arcadius pointed out, after they’d gone some distance, “that there is nowhere any sign of them?”

“Of the barbarians? Yes, I’ve been crossing my fingers.”

“It’s a miracle.”

“Oh yes, it’s God’s work, beyond a doubt.”

“Do you think she knew?”

“Who?” she asked, in not an encouraging tone. Talk always dissipated her good feelings.

“Alexa. Perhaps she’s been sent a sign. Perhaps, after all, she danced in thanksgiving and not… the opposite.”

Merriam pressed her lips together and made no reply. It was a blasphemous proposition. God did not give signs to the servants of the abominations he loathed and comminated! And yet…

“In retrospect,” Arcadius insisted, “there’s really no other explanation.” (And yet, she had seemed altogether jubilant. Perhaps—she had heard this suggested by a priest in Alexandria—there are evil spirits whom God permits, to a limited degree and imperfectly, to see the shape of future things.)

She said, “I thought it was an obscene display.”

Arcadius didn’t contradict her.

Later, after they had circled round the base of the larger hill, the path sloped upward and grew dryer. The trees fell away on their left and permitted a view eastward across Alexa’s melon fields. Hundreds of bodies were scattered over the trampled scenery. Merriam hid her eyes but it was not so easy to escape the scent of decay, which mingled, almost pleasantly, with the odor of smashed, fermenting melons.

“Oh dear,” said Arcadius, realizing that their path would lead them straight through the midst of the carnage.

“Well, we’ll have to do it—that’s all,” Merriam said, lifting her chin with a show of defiance. She took his hand and they walked through the field of defeated barbarians as quickly as they could.

Later, Lottie came up looking for her. “I was wondering if you were all right.”

“Thank you. I just needed a breath of air.”

“The plane crashed, you know.”

“No, I hadn’t heard any more than you told me.”

“Yes—it crashed into a MODICUM project at the end of Christopher Street. One-seventy-six.”

“Oh, that’s awful.”

“But the building was just going up. No one was killed but a couple of electricians.”

“That’s a miracle.”

“I thought you might like to come down and watch the teevee with us. Mom is making Koffee.”

“I’d appreciate that.”

“Good.” Lottie held open the door. The stairwell had achieved evening a couple hours in advance of the day.

On the way downstairs Alexa mentioned that she thought she could arrange for Amparo to get a scholarship at the Lowen School.

“Would that be good?” Lottie asked, and then, embarrassed by her question, “I mean—I’ve never heard of it till just now.”

“Yes, I think it’s pretty good. My son Tancred will be going there next year.”

Lottie seemed unpersuaded.

Mrs. Hanson stood outside the door of the apartment gesturing frantically. “Hurry up, hurry up! They’ve found the boy’s mother, and they’re going to interview her.”

“We can talk about it more later,” Alexa said.

Inside, on the teevee, the boy’s mother was explaining to the camera, to the millions of viewers, what she couldn’t understand.