The Steps of the Sun

Chapter 11

The Reagan Stir is way out past Arlington Cemetery, and a long haul. The cops ushered me out the door of Baynes’s house and down the block to where they had a little methane-powered Honda with D.C. plates. Twenty miles per hour, maximum. We all squeezed together in the front seat, which forced me to put my knees under my chin. But I didn’t feel as uncomfortable as the fat guy looked, sitting on my right with one arm and half his head out the window. We chugged along under the moonlight for about ten minutes, until we were approaching a woodshop, clearly an all-night one, at the corner of Constitution Avenue and D Street.

The fat guy with some effort pulled his head back in the car and I felt his soft belly mash against my side. The thinner one was driving with his left hand, his right being cuffed to my wrist. I really didn’t like this kind of physical intimacy one bit and I’d been repeating my mantra for the last two or three minutes. “Billy Bob,” the fat one said, “pull over at that store. I gotta use the restroom.”

“Can’t you wait?” Billy Bob said, sounding a whole lot like my mother.

“Hell, no,” the fat one said. “I’ve been waiting back at that house for an hour and a half.”

“Shit,” Billy Bob said. I figured he was going to stop but, like mothers everywhere, was going to exact payment for it. “You might have used the toilet back there.”

“Billy Bob,” Fatty said, “pull over.”

Billy Bob drove up to the woodshop and parked. It took us a minute to get out the same door that we had all gotten in. I felt God had sent me this opportunity. I’d bet a million that whatever cops were at the stadium hadn’t told Baynes on the phone that I’d decked two of their number. As far as Fatty and Billy Bob were concerned, I was just an aging tycoon.

There was an old Chinese woman at the cash register inside who looked as if she had seen all there was to see and had built no small part of the Great Wall with her own rough hands. When the three of us came in as a conjoined trio, as it were, she was reading a comic book. She looked up, laid her cigarette on the edge of an overflowing ashtray, and waited.

“I need to use the restroom,” Fatty said, clearly ill at ease.

She nodded toward the far wall. A faded print of Mao surrounded by awed children hung there, and under it on a small hook a key.

There was no room for the three of us to walk abreast, but we managed to make it single file with a little shoving around and Fatty got his key. Getting back out the door was a bit confusing, but we made it. The shop was clearly an ancient gas station, with the restroom in back.

“Why don’t you piss against a tree, for Christ’s sake?” Billy Bob said.

“If I only needed to piss I’d a done it a quarter hour ago.” I was surprised at the uncowed quality in Fatty’s voice. He had apparently developed a sense of mission over this middle-of-the-night B.M. and he was riding it. Well, I was developing a sense of mission too, although not a cloacal one.

“How in hell you going to stay handcuffed and do that?” Billy Bob said.

“Let’s look it over,” Fatty said.

In back was a room with MEN on its door. Fatty unlocked it easily enough and flipped on a little ten-watt light inside. What a grubby-looking place, with wet newspaper on the cracked linoleum floor! And what a smell! The Chinese have one of the most admirable cultural histories in the world. Their cuisine—where it still exists—is right up there with the French. Hell, they make a fine spaceship. But they’re in the Middle Ages when it comes to toilets.

As a partner in this venture, so to speak, I could see right away that it was going to be a problem for Fatty. Had I been he, I would have found a dark lawn somewhere, dropped my pants and made the best of it. But either that hadn’t occurred to Fatty and Billy Bob, or it was far beyond Fatty’s sense of propriety.

The room wasn’t big enough for the three of us. The toilet faced the doorway. Fatty tried to cool it. He walked in, dragging me by my wrist halfway into the door, which opened outward. He turned around facing me and began to loosen his belt with his free hand, while getting himself into kind of a crouch. For a moment I panicked; if I had to watch this I would rather do a month in solitary.

But as I had hoped, Fatty suddenly gave up. “Look, Billy Bob,” he said, nodding toward the handcuff that joined us, “undo this thing for a minute.”

Billy Bob looked doubtful. “What in hell…?” he said.

“Come on!” Fatty said, in desperation. “He ain’t going nowhere with you attached.”

“Okay,” Billy Bob said. He got the little magnetic key out of his pants pocket, walked in front of me and undid the cuff from Fatty’s wrist, letting it dangle from mine. Then he stepped back out the door and I followed him for a step, so that I was now all the way outside.

“Close the door,” Fatty said. He was standing in the doorway. I had already seen there was no bolt latch on the inside. Only a knob.

“Sure,” I said, casually. I took the knob firmly in my now free right hand, felt the steel heft of the door, and slammed it powerfully right into Fatty’s face. The door clicked shut and I could hear a thud. The strength in my pectorals felt like a triphammer. Then I jerked my left arm toward me with everything I had and Billy Bob’s head shot past my face and into the door. I smashed into the back of his head with my closed fist and felt him go slack. Then I turned the bolt on the men’s room door. It clicked into place beautifully.

Billy Bob was out cold with his face bloody enough that I could see the mess even by moonlight. I had no pity for him just then; he had chosen a violent profession for himself and should have been more alert. I bent down and examined his left hand for the key. It wasn’t there. I’d been afraid of that. He’d probably dropped it when I’d jerked him. I began looking around the grass as well as I could by moonlight. No luck. I dragged him over a few feet and looked where he’d been standing after he’d unlocked Fatty. Still no luck. It was just too dark. From inside the restroom came Fatty’s voice now, shouting, “Get me out of here!” He began banging on the door.

I was getting worried. I had just about made up my mind to pick up Billy Bob and carry him back to the car with me when a small miracle occurred: a light over the men’s room came on. I looked back toward the front of the building and, sure enough, Chinese Mama stood there, with her cigarette and comic book in one hand and her other on a light switch. She must have heard the commotion.

“Thank you, ma’am,” I said politely and began searching the grass with my eyes. And there it was, about a foot the other side of where Billy Bob had been standing when I’d decked him. I dragged him a bit farther, stretched out and got it. I was astonished at how steady my hand was when I unlocked us.

I looked back at Mama. Inscrutable, unperturbed. Billy Bob and I could have been discussing the weather. And the louder Fatty shouted and banged the door the calmer she looked, a genuine flower of heavenly repose all by herself. I could have kissed her. I checked out Billy Bob and figured he’d be all right in a few minutes, since his neck wasn’t twisted in any serious way. The poor son of a bitch.

I started walking toward the front of the store, where I’d seen a cigar-and-candy rack. When I came up to Mama I said, “What’s your name, ma’am?”

She took a puff from her cigarette. “Arabella Kim,” she said. “Are you Captain Belson from outer space?”

I grinned at her. “Oh yes.” And then, “I’d like to buy some cigars.” I gave her my whole forty dollars for ten cigars—cheap two-dollar ones, but what the hell—and six Mars bars. Mars seemed appropriate for a space pirate. “Keep the change,” I told her, “and I’d be obliged if you didn’t help these two for a few minutes.” I was still out of breath a bit and my voice was husky.

“Many people are on your side, Captain Belson,” she said. “People write letters to the Washington Post and say we should have your uranium. I think so.”

“Why, bless your heart,” I said, stuffing the cigars in my shirt pockets and the candy bars in my pants. There was no telephone at the store. I went over to Billy Bob’s car, lifted the hood, took out the distributor, and threw it into some bushes.

Then I stood there in the moonlight for a minute and a power realization dawned on me: I was flat broke. Here I was reborn into the world after nine months in the sky, and I had come back to be indeed naked and helpless. I took a deep breath of the night air and felt my heart speed up with it and the small hairs at the back of my neck tingle.

I had to begin somewhere. I turned and walked back into the shop and said, “Arabella, I need some cash.”

She just looked at me imperturbably. “How much?”

“I’ll sell you my watch for five hundred dollars,” I said. It had cost me eight thousand.

“One needs a watch,” she said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

She got up from her chair, went to a closed door at the back of the little shop, and opened it. I peered in. There was a small room filled with tobacco smoke, with Chinese revolutionary posters on the wall, some of them in tatters. At the back of the room was a cot with a wrinkled red coverlet on it and a tiny, wizened Chinese man lying on it reading Sports Illustrated. Probably Mr. Kim. She spoke to him in Chinese in a no-nonsense kind of way. He mumbled something that sounded surly but got off the cot meekly enough. She reached under the mattress and pulled out a little red plastic purse, opened it and took out six hundred-dollar coins. She handed them to me, smiled faintly, and said, “Keep your watch and pay me back when you sell the uranium.”

I glanced out the window to where the stacks of cordwood lay piled and said, “That uranium will put you out of business, you know.”

“It’s a dull business,” she said.

I nodded and put the coins in my pocket. “You’re a good woman, Arabella,” I said. Then I left the shop and took off toward Union Station.

I got about five minutes of exultation out of overcoming my arrest before I remembered that remark L’Ouverture had made about snobbery. The son of a bitch had a way of getting under my skin. In a sense I am a snob about good food, good china and good theater. I like Shakespeare immensely, as a matter of fact, now that I’m not trying to win points with Isabel. Bless her heart, she never knew the competition she entered when she took me on as a lover! But I like the good things of the modern world too. I thought of my running shoes. I’d bought them at a place on Forty-sixth Street a few weeks before the Isabel took off. You put your feet in a pretty little device called a Contour Reader, and the son of a bitch makes you a pair of Adidas right there. I mean right on your feet. It’s weird to watch but it feels good to have the warm polymers and rubber molded to your personal arches and to the ball and the heel and then up over the great toe. Like a Japanese massage. The machine even puts laces in, a sight more interesting to watch than most contemporary movies. And Jesus, do I love those gym shoes! Sky blue and made by electronic wizardry right before my eyes, between Madison and Fifth. Five hundred dollars. Eighty more if monogrammed. Mine have a white “B.B.” where the rubber disk used to be on a pair of Converse.

But I was pissed at L’Ouverture. Maybe because he’d pulled racism on me. I pounded along the predawn pavements, through silent suburbs and then along the “Ghost town” where all the poor blacks who did the paperwork for the U.S. Government used to live. Empty high-rise housing glowing dully by moonlight, emptier and spookier than Belson. I felt lucky to have been born in rural Ohio; those places, filled with the smells and sighs of government clerks and their dazed families, back when I was sleeping with Juno, were authentic anger factories. They used to defecate in the elevators in places like that, and do casual rapes on the staircases. No proper life for man at all.

Still, I’d picked up a lot of anger myself in my own loveless home. Anger and hunger—I could hardly tell them apart. Slap, slap went my shoes, the products of electronic sorcery and of my unique, large feet. Whump, whump went my substantial, furious heart; I could feel my quadriceps bulging against my jeans.

I began to think about railroad schedules. One thing about being a coal and wood tycoon: you learn when the trains run. A half-empty freight would be leaving Washington for New York at 5:15 A.M., and it was usually on time. I looked at my watch. I had twenty minutes.

Sometimes I think God sent me to Belson and Juno. Twenty years of space exploration by three countries had yielded nothing worth having. I, a rank amateur, had found two paradises with hardly any effort. One was a genuine Eden with food and trees and pleasant air; the other its reverse, made for the likes of St. Simeon Stylites, Origen, Cotton Mather and me. Oh, the varieties of religious experience! I had five minutes to find myself a comfortable freight car and get aboard.

The station, being electronic, had nobody around. The train was there when I arrived; it hissed a bit, made those endearing heavy clangs that trains make, and looked energetic. I found a big open car with BELSON MINES clearly stenciled on it—one of my very own. I climbed up the ladder at the side, slipped over, and let myself down. There was some coal dust at the bottom and nothing else. No way to see outside. But what the hell.

I was still panting from the run and had a godawful stitch in my side. My left wrist was painfully swollen from the handcuff when I’d jerked Billy Bob. My feet hurt like hell. Suddenly I remembered that I was a human bomb of endolin! There was no need to feel pain. I got one of the plastic packs from around my left arm, took a pinch, swallowed it with a bite of a Mars bar, and in a few minutes I felt terrific. So much for pain.

After the train got started, with more noise and vibration than the Isabel made landing on Belson, I slept for about an hour. When I awoke the sky was beginning to lighten overhead. I climbed up the ladder and was able to perch somewhat uncomfortably on the side of the slow-moving car and watch the sun coming up over misty fields. Now that I had something to compare our Earth with, I enjoyed it even more. Only one sun and one moon and no rings either, but a beautiful planet and one to treasure. Where else would you find a Canyon de Chelly or a Pacific Ocean, a Florida Keys or an India? My heart leaped to see that sweet green of summer grass on Earth, and maple trees in leaf, cattle out in fields, and birds everywhere, determined busybodies in the morning air!

The train had a forty-minute stop in Philadelphia, at a power plant. There were a couple of railroad people there to refuel the engine and oversee the unloading of some coal, but I was able to get out for a break without their noticing me. I left the terminal and did a few simple exercises. My body was stiff and sore and I added a bit of endolin to my Mars bar breakfast. There was a water fountain outside the station—my first Earth water in nine months. The sun was well up, and warm on my face.

I found myself in a shabby part of Philadelphia—one of those “Big House Slums” you read about. Population falls so fast these days that there is ample space for the poor in solar-house suburbs and town houses in the cities. The problem is they can’t heat the places in the wintertime and the solars don’t work, and the houses were so cheaply made in the first place that they were now, there among the pacified hills of a former suburb, a tatterdemalion aggregate of fallen plastic shingles, ruined lawns, cracked glass roofs and vine-clotted breezeways. It beats sleeping in doorways, but it’s a depressing sight.

I found an open drugstore and bought a six-pack of club soda, some beef jerky, a box of cookies and a pack of brown hair dye. Sixty dollars and change. As I was starting to leave the store I saw a pile of Enquirers, and sure enough, there I was on the front page. But without the beard, thank God. No one had taken a picture of me with the beard. And in the picture I looked rather well-groomed and serious. The headline read BILLIONAIRE OUTLAW FOILS COPS. I gave the man at the counter his two dollars for the paper. He didn’t even look at me. I left, reading.

It was comic in its way. I was called a “berserk eccentric” and a “financial maverick.” I especially liked “berserk eccentric,” which suited my mood: John the Baptist still slept in me.

Back in my coal car I proceeded to dye my hair, using a couple of the cans of club soda and wishing I had bought a mirror at that drugstore. What I did was pour half the liquid dye into the plastic can of soda, shake it up, and then work it into my hair and beard with my fingertips. I left it there for twenty minutes, while the train chugged its way across the border into New Jersey, and then rinsed it off with another canful. I’d have given a hundred dollars for a pocket mirror. I’d dyed a spot the size of a five-dollar piece on my left forearm, where it was at its hairiest, and I used that for a kind of control; when I rinsed it off after twenty minutes there was a patch of convincing-looking brown on my arm. I hoped that on my head and beard the results were as good.

The day was uneventful and warm. I lay around in the bottom of the car like Huckleberry Finn on his raft, or rode up on the side and watched the countryside go by and ate my beef jerky and Mars bars and drank the four other cans of club soda and had a pretty good time of it. It seemed more of a real journey than traveling halfway across the Milky Way had been.

Close to dusk, the train gave me my first view of the Manhattan skyline. It was breathtaking, as it always is to me. Yet I could have wept to know that the upper floors of all the tall buildings were vacant. It is saddening to see the city at such times and know that it was once a powerhouse and isn’t anymore, although those tall old buildings still stand there quiet and aloof from the streets below them. I’m crazy about the idea of New York. It’s one of the great inventions of the human spirit, like the fugue or the Pythagorean Theorem or the airplane—the apotheosis of the polis and still to me the world’s greatest city.

We came into Manhattan through the old Pennsylvania Railroad tunnel and climbed back aboveground at Thirty-fourth and Seventh Avenue, at the Coal Dock. What a dusty, smelly place to see New York from! Almost all the fuel for the entire city came in at that point, and there were heaps of coal the size of small mountains, with the dust from them penetrating the air everywhere; I felt I could get black lung in ten minutes.

There used to be a department store—Macy’s, I think—on Thirty-fourth Street; the old building was now used for coal storage. My train stopped there and I was able to climb down from the car unobserved. There were a lot of guards around, but they were there to keep coal thieves out; I merely nodded and walked past them. It was a quarter to eight and there was still some light in the sky. I found Fifth Avenue and headed uptown. A good many people were on the street but nobody paid attention to me. I felt fine—loose and easy in the body and pleasantly tight in the stomach. It was something like my first trip to the city that time I’d come to stay with Aunt Myra; I was an anonymous and rootless tourist, starting a new life, on my own in the world’s best place to be on your own.

There was a mirror in the window of a videosphere store at Thirty-ninth Street, and I stopped to see myself at full length. I looked like hell—like a raunchy and fragrant derelict-rapist. The dyed hair and beard were a shock, as was the coal dust smeared on my face. I was something to scare children with. One elbow of my shirt was ripped open; my pants were baggy and filthy with coal and soot; there was a stain from hair dye on my shirt collar; and the dye on my beard and hair was uneven, with dark and light clumps sticking out crazily. I could have slept on park benches for the next twenty years and nobody would have noticed me.

When I was a teenager a fine old skyscraper sat at Forty-second Street between Lexington and Third. It was Aunt Myra’s favorite piece of hopeful architecture and she was the first person to name it to me: the Chrysler Building. They tore it down a few years after the elevators were stopped by the legislature in Albany. Elevators have counterweights and the whole thing wasn’t really necessary, but Albany wanted to show the world it was energy conscious. Its decree changed New York in a horrifying way, making the upper floors of all those unconscionably tall buildings inaccessible. Above the eighth it was all emptiness, derelicts and the odd fugitive.

Now where the Chrysler Building had once been there was the Heating Emporium, an open market for coal, wood, and alcohol, together with a few more exotic combustibles; I was glad to see the Belson Fuels corner well stocked and it pleased me to stand there a moment, looking like the raunchiest and most fragrant of bums, and see that each stick of neatly stacked cordwood had the name BELSON stamped on it in purple letters. Next to it was a heap of my coal, and that was not so pleasing. It was all bituminous, and you could tell it would be foul stuff by the color. But the Mafia had all the anthracite, and they weren’t about to let go of it in a controlled market.

I walked up Fifth to Fifty-third Street and turned over toward Madison. A couple of cops gave me a hostile eye, and a family of Chinese tourists seemed as boggled by me as a Chinese permits himself to be. A member of the capitalist underclass—one of the dregs. We do these things better in Hangchow. Well, in Hangchow I’d be wearing a gray uniform and sweeping the streets with a plastic broom and touching my forelock to the fat Communist bourgeois as they daintily strolled the streets with their chubby families. I liked being a disheveled bum in New York better, with my newfound pirate’s soul.

There was no doorman at the building and I walked up to the third floor. The apartment door had three locks. I banged loudly. After a minute the locks began clicking and, finally, the door opened. There was a small Japanese maid standing there, in uniform, staring up at me in shock.

I spoke softly to her, but with authority in my voice. “Tell Miss Belson it’s her father,” I said.

The maid nodded, shut the door and locked it. I waited. After several minutes it opened again and there was Myra, tall as ever, on crutches, looking at me quizzically for a moment. Finally she said, “Jesus Christ! Daddy.” She opened the door wider. “Jesus!” she said again.

I came in and hugged her. Gently, because Myra could be hurting almost anywhere. “It’s good to see you, honey,” I said. I was crying. I hadn’t thought about Myra much in the past few years—thinking about her could make me feel terrible—but I really loved her.

“Jesus, Daddy,” she said, “did you fall in?”

I shook my head. “Something like that.”

She laughed in that sort of childish way she has. Myra is almost thirty. “Let’s sit in the living room.” I followed her as she walked with care on her aluminum crutches into the big living room with windows looking down on Fifty-third Street. Myra had never met my Aunt Myra but she had somehow arrived, as if by reincarnation, at Aunt Myra’s style in interior decoration. I seated myself on a black velvet sofa, leaned back, and lit up a cigar. “I’ll wash up after a bit,” I said. She nodded and there was an embarrassed silence for a minute. There usually is, when I see her. “How about some coffee?” she said, “or whiskey?”

“Coffee.”

“Sure,” she said, with relief. “Martha, can you fix coffee for my father, with cream and sugar. I’ll have whiskey and soda.”

She turned back toward me and seated herself carefully in an armchair that faced the sofa I was sitting on. “You were on the TV news last night.” She laughed a bit uneasily. “They showed some old holos and called you the ‘billionaire fugitive,’ but it wasn’t clear what the police wanted you for.”

“The bastards,” I said. “They don’t know what they want me for. It’s that son of a bitch Baynes, and probably the Mafia too.”

“I thought it was something like that. Is that uranium dangerous, Daddy?”

“No,” I said. “Hell, no. On the contrary. It’s the safest uranium in the universe. I feel like Galileo when those cardinals were after his ass. Have they bothered you?”

“No. Do they know you’re in New York?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’ve been sly about it. How’s your arthritis?”

She shrugged. “Same as always.”

“Hurts like hell?”

“Yes, Daddy. It hurts like hell.” She smiled at me in a way that might be described as “bravely” except that I sensed a hidden edge of blame in it. If only I had been around more during her childhood, had not been off in hotel suites dissolving corporations on paper in the middle of the night or bouncing around in bed with actresses or—let’s face it—finding ways of staying away from Anna and her fortitude, her unflinching zeal to be undeceived by the fripperies and fantasies of the world. If I hadn’t drunk so much when I was at home. If I hadn’t fought so much with Myra’s mother, bellowing my space pirate’s voice down the hallways and across the kitchens of whatever houses and apartments—in California or New York or Atlanta, or wherever my geographical yearnings took us…

Well, now I had endolin. “Myra,” I said, “I’ve got something for you.”

“Daddy.” She frowned. “I don’t need any more presents. Not even from outer space.”

“Honey,” I said, “this is no present.” I began unbuttoning my shirt, for a moment embarrassed by the sexual implications of what I was doing, being about to transfer that endolin wrapped to my sweating body to the body of my daughter sitting there in her stiff, arthritic way.

“What the hell…?” Myra said.

“It is something from another planet,” I said, pulling one of the bags filled with powder out from under the bandage that held it to my chest. I pushed aside a group of ivory netsuke and a Venetian-glass ashtray on Myra’s coffee table and set the packet of endolin down. Then I began opening the clear plastic carefully. My fingers trembled a little. “I have great hopes for you and this, Myra,” I said. I was shocked to hear my voice: vibrato, on the edge of tears. “I think it may be your anodyne…” I couldn’t finish. I got the bag open and looked at the powder sitting there, like some kind of super fix, a mainline for King Kong, that destructive fellow pirate in New York. Come on, Kong, I said to myself, do something good for someone you love, for a change.

“I’ll need to get a glass of water,” I said aloud, holding back tears. I stood up and barged into the kitchen, where Martha was putting ice in Myra’s drink of whiskey. I got a glass from a shelf and half-filled it with water. Then I grabbed a silver spoon from the sonic dishwasher and went into the living room again. I put a pinch of endolin into the water and stirred it, shakily.

“What in hell is going on, Daddy?” Myra was saying. She really was beginning to look alarmed. “You come in looking like a crazed derelict and then you pull out this Baggie of what looks like dope. They said on TV that you were a drug addict.

I let the glass sit there on the table and leaned back. I began buttoning up my shirt, less shaky now. “Well, there’s some truth in what they say, honey. I used morphine quite a bit. Got hooked on it in fact, trying to feed some dumb craving, but this isn’t morphine. No high comes with it. It’s only a painkiller.”

“I’ll try it,” she said matter-of-factly.

I stared at her. Was it this easy after all?

“Daddy,” she said, “I trust you. And I’ve tried more painkillers than you have any idea of. Believe me, I’ve swallowed a lot of chemicals in my time.” She leaned forward, somewhat stiffly, and picked up the glass. Her hand was far steadier, despite the pain, than mine had been. “What do you call this stuff?”

“Endolin,” I said. “Just drink it off. There’s no special taste.”

She nodded and downed the glassful the way a sailor downs a beer. “Endolin, eh?” she said, with an edge of cynicism in her voice. Well I couldn’t blame her for being cynical, considering the number of things she must have tried. It was a testimony to her strength that, having used morphine and probably heavier stuff, she wasn’t a junkie herself.

I said nothing. It takes endolin about three minutes to work and there was no point in talking it up. I felt nervous and got up just in time to take my coffee from Martha’s tray as she came in the swinging door from the kitchen. I looked at a couple of contemporary holographic etchings on the wall for a moment; but those damned 3-D things always hurt my eyes. I looked out the window down to the street, which was now empty. It was one of those phosphorescent sidewalks that glow green in the dark and it eased my eyes to stare at it for a minute. I was itching in several places. I should take a bath.

Just then Myra said softly, “My God, Daddy!” and I turned around. She was still seated. Her face was strange and her mouth was half open in astonishment. As I looked at her she shook her head a couple of times.

“Is something wrong?” I said, alarmed.

She shook her head again, more violently, staring at me. I took a step toward her. She was beginning to cry. “Are you all right?” I said.

Her face was very serious and the expression was one I’d never seen before. “How long does it last?” she asked.

“About six hours.”

“Will I have a hangover?”

“Nothing, honey,” I said. “No hangover.”

“Oh my God,” she said and burst into tears. I squatted somewhat awkwardly by her chair and put my arms around her and hugged her. I could feel some of that pain that had just gone out of her, feel the shock of it. After a moment she pulled gently away and stood up, not using her crutches. She began walking around the room slowly and taking an occasional little two-step. “I used to take morphine sometimes, or shoot myself full of procaine and dance for an hour or so. But the thing was I couldn’t really feel my body. And my head would be fuzzy.”

“It just takes the pain away,” I said.

Myra went over to a bookcase, put a steel ball into a box and Chinese dance music filled the room. She began dancing more confidently, her face open and surprised still. I seated myself and watched. It was overwhelming to see her moving easily like that, still a bit careful in her movements because of her long history of pain.

After a while she stopped, perspiring and smiling now. She turned the box off and came and sat beside me. She let herself cry again for a minute, very openly and easily, holding her hands in front of her and flexing her fingers. We used to play chess with ivory pieces every now and then and sometimes it would make her wince in pain just to pick up a pawn. Now her fingers seemed completely easy and supple. After a moment she stopped crying and said, “How about that, Daddy? I think I always knew you’d come through for me.”

“I wish I could have had it twenty years ago…”

“Now is good enough,” she said. “When the pain is over it’s over.” She smiled a little wistfully. “Where did it come from?”

“From the heavens,” I said. “From a star.” I pointed downtown. “A star in Pisces Austrinus, called Fomalhaut. It has a planet with only two living things on it: a kind of wonderful grass and the little, ugly plant endolin comes from.”

“What’s the planet called? Or does it have a name?”

“It’s named Belson, honey.”

Myra laughed. “Just like you and me, Daddy.”

I looked at her. “And your Great Aunt Myra.”

I took a long, hot shower after that. Myra was able to find some men’s clothes that fit well enough, and I picked a denim work shirt and a pair of jeans that were a little loose in the waist. It gave me a tinge of pride to find my waist was smaller than whatever lover of Myra’s had left his pants behind. I brushed off my electronic running shoes and put them on over a pair of clean white socks. There is nothing quite like a shower followed by clean white socks. I was becoming a small fugue of good feelings; what I needed now was Isabel. And a few million dollars.

After showering and putting on clean clothes I had a quiet drink with Myra in her living room. She had come down a bit from her high, but she smiled a lot. She asked me about my travels in space and I told her about Belson and Juno, although I didn’t mention Juno’s star. It was fun to talk with Myra that easily, leaning back into a soft couch with a drink of good whiskey, seeing her face for once relaxed and her body at ease. From time to time she would flex the fingers of a hand or work a shoulder joint just a bit, with a pleasant surprise. She wanted to know everything about endolin, and I told her everything I knew about it. How we had found it growing in fissures in Belson’s impenetrable obsidian, how I’d learned to concentrate it and preserve it. It was wonderful to sit there with the windows open in Myra’s big living room with the barely luminous New York street outside the window hushed with an August hush, and me with my clean white socks, my skin clean, my hair still dyed and my beard dyed and combed and a fresh shirt on my strong chest, letting the old guilt seep out of my pores and away into the nighttime, off to Fomalhaut and beyond, into the outer reaches.

When I went off to bed a little before midnight, the moon was shining as full as a hundred-dollar silver coin into the bedroom window. On the night before, I had been its fellow orbiter, in a kind of sublunar funk; here I was now, a fugitive, a pirate, dispossessed, but tired and happy going to bed in a New York apartment, ready to sing hymns to the joy of my new life. “For he on honey dew hath fed, and drunk the milk of paradise.” Coleridge. Another junkie. What the hell. I slept like a baby for a dozen hours.

Birds were singing when I awoke. Myra was up and had found Pain Chocolat and espresso for me and three fresh Havana cigars. Gueveras.

I dressed in jeans and a gray tee-shirt and went barefoot into the kitchen and began making an omelet with a fried banana on the side. There was coffee on the wood stove. Yellow morning sunshine came in the kitchen window as still and humane as in a Vermeer. The cup I drank my coffee from was Spode and had a decoration of two small green frogs, facing each other amiably; my heart glowed warmly to see such frogs, and on such china. Myra was wearing a blue denim smock, and walked as if on air, as if she had never gone to sleep with fire in her joints, as if she had had a childhood of skipping rope and tag and dancing. Her hair was tied loosely in back in a bun, her hazel eyes smiled. “Let me pour you more coffee,” she said, and I remembered her as a bright-eyed two-year-old, as lovely and heartwarming a thing as nature ever made. I had forgotten how much I loved my child.

“Honey,” I said to Myra, “do you know of an actress named Isabel Crawford? She was in the last Hamlet, playing the mother.”

Myra pursed her lips a moment and then nodded slowly. “British?”

“Scottish. In her forties. Very good-looking.”

“She’s a friend of yours then?”

“Sure. Do you know anything about her? I need clues. I can’t find her.”

“No, Dad, I’m sorry. I haven’t any idea at all. You could call her agent.”

“I tried that last night on your phone. Called her director too, and her hairdresser. No luck at all. They’d like to know where she is too.”

Myra nodded politely while I told her this. When I’d finished she tried to be casual, but I could tell she was picking her words with care. “Dad. Why don’t you give Mom a call? She’s in New York.”

Something went tight in my stomach at that. I tried to sound casual too. It was beginning to feel like acting school. “Oh?” I said. “Where’s she staying?”

“At your old place, Dad. The Pierre.”

Jesus! I thought, Anna at the Pierre? It didn’t sound like her at all. “What in hell is your mother doing in New York?” I said. “She always claimed to hate it here.”

“She was over for dinner a few nights ago, Dad. She said she was getting bored upstate and came down to do some shopping.” She looked at me. “Why don’t you ask her for lunch or something?”

For a moment it was a seductive idea. Whatever Anna might possess of a longshoreman’s spirit, she was a hell of a person to talk with. I’ve never really enjoyed talking with a woman as much as I did with her. And I’d never had any trouble getting it up with her—maybe because her sexuality was no threat. I thought, standing there with Myra, of how nice sex with Anna would be—a spell of rain after a three-year drought. But then I thought of that damnable popping girdle and that righteous anger and I said, “Myra, it just wouldn’t be smart. Not now. I know what you have in mind, bless your heart, and I admit there might be something to it. But I don’t need the trauma right now. There’s something fragile in my spirit, and seeing Anna might shatter it.”

Myra pursed her lips. “Okay, Dad. It’s your life.”

“Oh yes, honey,” I said. “It sure is.”