The Case of Erich H.

1.

I study him for months in the big building on the corner of Frigate and Espinoza Ave. where LA cedes to an endless stretch of beige bungalows and convenience stores. The distances in those parts are too great for foot travel, hence the hackles they throw up on the shoulders of the human psyche. Hence my patient Erich H.. I can see him now in my minds eye through the barbed wiring on the roof of the complex raising a homemade astrolabe to the blue evening sky.

As the things of my marriage vacate, including the man himself, my daily trip to Taft House remains. My job entrenches itself. I feel needed. It is a good feeling, and I am lucky to have it. My co workers express their need for me with beseeching, hungry eyes. As my thoughts coalesce into perspective, the things my patients say cut less. They are an assortment of drug addicts, psychotics and schizoid personalities down on their luck. You have to always be in the proper mental state not to care. You have to be free from clutter in your own life so that words can't get their hooks in you.

I see more and more my marriage in their own wild claims and assertions. I see the old self struggling to maintain its scaffold of control up until the very last gasp. And even after the point where functionality morphs into a padded room, they continue to act as if they understand how the world works.

Sick minds know everything.

2.

As things with Bradley work themselves toward a legal resolution, I receive a new patient, a typical advanced addict, paranoid, dug into his world view like a soldier in a trench. His name is Erich H.. What separates him from the start is the level of filth he has accrued. They needed to pry him out of his little back alley where he used and ate and shat and wrote on yellow note pads. After a while, I manage to piece together Erich H's life story.

"I just wanted to have a little piece of pleasure. A little something for me after all that shit had finally washed over. Is that too much to ask?" Erich H. asks as he picks his nose, his tobacco-stained fingers rooting through his nasal locks. "A little something for me?"

Mundane psychological suffering comes from the same common place. You learn this. There is real psychological terror, the kind that rips at someone like a grease fire, the pain of the amputee, the rape and molestation victim, the mutilated. But the other side of suffering is embalmed and ritualized self-propagating obsession stemming from everything and nothing. Such is the case of Erich H. as he explores his hallowed hall of self-built pain fortified by a wasting addiction. Although he doesn't see things that way. Erich H. says the world has wronged him, his family has abandoned him, his ex wives have discarded him for other men. Muddled attributions of guilt. Tales of grandeur, of how he was before being crushed by the indifference of strangers. Drugs are merely a side note in his own special story.

"I got up at 6 am everyday made the commute," he says. "All that, I was doing all that for them." He reaches under his shirt, picks some belly button lint and fondles it beneath his nose.

"What are you doing?"

"What? Oh."

The self, if left unchecked, can be a dictator and dictators and infants are all ego, self-oblivious and self-affirming. They are monads, like early, primitive conceptions of God. They revel in their own smells. They do not stomach down time, empty moments, self-appraisal. They require a cataclysm of sensation and cascades of drama. Every moment is an uncommon terror. Consequently, Erich H. views himself as highly original: he is a writer, a graduate. He has held a day job that paid well.

"What then went wrong?" I ask, trying to coax an admission out of him. Of course, he has already told me the answer, but I want to hear it from him. After several marriages, coming into a small amount of money, he embarked upon an epic narcotics binge which left him in penury. I want to hear an equivalent narrative of some sort, an admission. Sometimes, you don't get what you want.

"I gave everything. I loved them totally and lost everything."

"That's addiction," I tell him. "That's what it does to everyone, not just you. And they probably still love you."

His look of sorrow overtakes him. He is a man of looks. Sorrow, wrath, glee.

"You think?" he asks me, making me feel like he is in dialogue with me, like he isn't totally set against the process.

I learn the basics of Erich H's story through 3 hour-long consultations in early November. I read between the lines. Erich H. is kicking cold turkey. He weeps but he does not break. He rolls cigarettes with the tobacco I charitably keep at my desk for hard cases. I'm not supposed to do that. Therea are certain things you can't do in public buildings. Taft House is also a public building even as it seems like a private nightmare. Not my nightmare. I love its groaning foundation, its peeling walls and nonsensical layout. It's like an art project representing the unwell mind in the shape of a building.

3.

Bradley Sucomb's gorgeous, crisp shirts and the way he had of always smelling OK - his lack of flowing, untamed body hair - invited me into his company. From there I discovered that once a certain line was crossed, I was in love.

Bradley Sucomb was the first well-maintained man I met after 15 years of UCLA. Unlike the men I dated as a student, candidate, whatever, he did not speak the language of double entendre wherein one's every word suggests a desire to be elsewhere. His silence was not, as they say, fecund. It was just well-groomed silence smelling of designer aftershave, imbued with the sound the wind makes as you glide down the coastal highway. He worked at a bank. He regularly slept with two other women as he married me. He continued to see them because he was a common garden-variety self-justifying sociopath.

"I didn't know what to do," he told me as he paced our flat, picking up his possessions - a glass angel, a wicker basket. He picked them up and put them down again. "Can't we go away from here for a while?"

"Going away isn't an answer."

"Then what is? What can I do to fix this?"

I often see my ex husband Bradley Sucomb in my patients, in particular, in Erich H.. They both have an addict's tendency to take a lie deep into its end game before scattering the formation beyond accurate recall. They both drink a bluff to its dregs until the bluff seems like the bluff. Men like this are good at turning your words around and making you feel like you are insatiable and demanding. Haven't they done enough for you? Haven't they given their life's blood? Did not the inmates of Taft House, that fine flawed Panopticon erected during the presidency of Howard Taft, also function as providers, consolers, and husbands? Were they not always there in some form? Did you not abandon and betray them even as you made it appear that they abandoned and betrayed you? Weren't they thoroughly fucked by destiny?

"I gave them everything," Erich H. likes saying. "You wanted money? Here, take it! You wanted to go on a trip somewhere? Go! By all means! Everything I did, I did for them!"

Erich H. rolls cigarettes spicing his morning phlegm sack which he relieves in my waste basket. I think it took him many years to evolve that, like a toad climbing out of his ancestral sea. Like with Bradley Sucumb's cigars, the way he can identify their special smells. They are men of secret olfactory interest. Erich is an artist; Brad is into cash and sex; Erich begs; Brad buys; neither has a clue why it isn't working.

4.

Taft House is five stories. It used to be a little country asylum back in the 1920s when the neighborhood was still orchard land. The bottom floor is intake. The men live on the 3rd, the women on the 2nd where it is marginally cooler. The hard cases, the one's that involve blood, shouts, and random alarming nudity, go on the 4th; isolation is on the 5th floor. In the basement of our little tower there is a recreation area with a ping pong table, some weights, a rowing machine and a television set embedded inside a wall behind plate glass. There is a little garden in the back. The unit houses 50. It should be shut down, closed for good. My favorite part of it is the roof where there's this little seating area. It's like the crow's nest. You can even see the ocean from up there on days when it's so hot the idea of the sea doesn't make sense.

I once met Dr. Hamm up there for vodka-spiked lemonade. We made a plan of it: I would bring the lemonade and he would risk smuggling in a flask of vodka. We used our ordinary coffee mugs. When he gestured out toward the horizon, mentioning the pollution of the coastal waters, the permanent demise of reef life, I felt a deep sadness well up. I asked to change the subject. This flummoxed him. He turned away, his delicately bearded profile catching the city light and embossing upon the meager, hazy distance like a souvenir photograph. That is how I knew that he had some emotional demand that I didn't want to know anything about.

At lunchtime, I walk down the street to Diego's convenience store where I buy something microwavable. Diego keeps all the meals in the same ice chest. There's a great variety of pot pies and turkey dinners and dishes people ate during the 50s as they watched Leave It To Beaver. The ice around the walls is permafrost. And then I return, running my little circle jerk in the afternoon or on alternate days doing one-on-one counseling for men and women who will not admit defeat.

These are the rudiments of my life at Taft House. When Erich H. arrives I am 39 years old and in the middle of separating from my husband. I eat a frozen meal everyday from Diego's. I do not aspire to travel. I enjoy reading in cool, open spaces like museums, churches and City Hall. I like the idea of the 1930s and 40s. I like a man's hands. I like washing the dishes and watching birds make their nests in clogged gutters. I don't vote. I don't watch what I eat. I have stopped craving sex like they say you are supposed to crave it. Sometimes I take drives in the LA hills where, hunkered between golden, grassy mounds, I feel an indescribable sense of peace. I realize that I have been seeking this peace all my life. Sometimes I didn't know that I was seeking it, but I was, always.

5.

I met Bradley Sucomb at Jennifer's wedding. Jennifer married Ted who had this thing with his voice, with breath control and posture. He was often smiling, his mouth flung wide in delight, the saliva on the inside of his cheeks like the waters of a southern sea laughing up at the sun. He and his groomsmen wore different color silk cumberbunds that reminded me of the 1001 Nights. I imagined them on horseback riding out from the secret cave, out to rape and pillage. Ted enunciated his vows and as he did so, I felt as if the world congratulated him in inverse proportions to the way in which my patients perceived themselves punished.

The contrived nature of Ted's Alexander Technique and my own failed marriage made me briefly question if my patient Erich H. wasn't right. The World of Teds did not specifically seek to crush an Erich H.. Crushing Erichs is just what Teds do. But then I brushed aside my brain and saw that both Jennifer and Ted were weeping on the altar and there was an open bar. After that, everything happened quickly. I found myself swept up. In those days, whenever I drank I drank Stingrays, their rummy sweetness leaving me in need of sangria, beer, anything to wash away the tropical undertow, depositing me on firm ground waiting for a car somewhere or back at home again in the muffled, ringing silence.

As the day turned to evening, I found myself on the beach with Ted's groomsmen. Although, I was friends with Jennifer, I gravitated to Ted's old college buddies. They were silent like me. They undid their ties, unbuttoned their shirts, and in the remaining refracted haze marched down to the clammy sea entirely naked as if to prove a point, to remind themselves of who they really were beneath their clothes. My former me would have congratulated such audacity, but now in the gesture I saw them reveal their inner Erich H.. When they returned from their swim, cocks dangling, I felt like a spartan maiden cultivated by glossy nudity into the simplistic philosophy of live or die. It felt good. I did not like that it felt good because I knew I was repeating an old pattern. We passed around a bottle of Jack Daniels.

"It's not like you would die for each other, right?" I asked, inexplicably, drunkenly. "It's not like you would even put yourselves in that position."

"Maybe that's the secret," said James, his voice carrying the pretentious steel melody of a knife cutting lies as Ted spoke with the rounded fullness of an ancient Athenian orator establishing truth. "We don't allow each other to assume that posture."

"But you've never even experienced failure," I said, chortling in my booze. After all, were they not all Harvard business school graduates? White, male, handsome, the mold of man? What transitory, laughable form could such failure take or, rather, fake? They grew cold to me, or at least I thought they did. They read in my comment my own inevitable decline. I did not play ball. Although I was a woman, the one they selected out of a slew of women on the basis of my taciturn drunkenness, they circled their wagons. All their impulses seemed crystal clear. We lit a fire. Someone rolled a joint. The joint sealed the quiet, subtle sanctimony of the circle of those men.

6.

Erich H. cannot cultivate such postures. That is part of the problem. Once his inner dictator rediscovered early childhood's outrage, he could not process the accompanying series of events leading him to me today, his face raw from a new bic shave. He spits a wad of phlegm into my waste paper basket, tucks his finger into his nose, withdraws and glances at it as if unobserved. "People suck!" he raves. "They just suck! And once you've given them everything you have had they will throw you out like garbage."

"But what about the drugs? What about taking care of yourself?"

"A little powder?!" he says in askance. "It's only a little pleasure in a shit fuck world."

I dream about Erich H. I dream he walks on a conveyor belt designed to carry luggage. One side of the conveyance represents the baggage of his father and the other the baggage of his mother.

"There are other ways of getting pleasure out of life," I say.

"If there are, I haven't seen any of them," says Erich H. "Did you know that Freud hated women? That your entire profession is founded on German Jewish misogyny?"

In another century, maybe Erich H. would be a bohemian revolutionary. Or maybe a court charlatan. Rasputin.

"There are many branches of psychology. Much of Freud's theories are now taken with a grain of salt."

"He thought all men want to fuck their mothers and kill their fathers."

Erich H. often puts things in the starkest terms.

"It seems like the things in your life have made you so unhappy."

"Not things, people. People suuuuuuck," says Erich H. elongating the word suck to emphasize an irrational certainty that reminds me of a prayer.

"Is there anything you can remember outside of people and writing that has made you happy in life, that provided you with any peace?"

"I don't know. Good question," Erich H. smiles upon me and a rainbow stretches from one mountain peak to another. That's the way it is with addicts. They pound your zone with rage and remorse until they lob a soft smile, opening you up, making you feel as if you have achieved something. "Let me think. When I was in college, I took some Astronomy classes. I really liked them."

"Why didn't you stick with it?"

"I don't know. Maybe I should have."

"Would you like some Astronomy books to read?"

"Get me some Astronomy books!" says Erich H. re-voicing my question in the form of a demand.

Erich H. does not come from an abusive family. As far as I know, whatever marriages he had collapsed of their own accord. His suffering is common. His error is common. the pain that fed it precluded the safety of decorous silence enjoyed by some. He is unstrung. I write "diagnosis: unstrung" in my Blackberry as I shop for Astronomy textbooks at the UCLA bookstore. He cracks open the first one I give him and starts to cry.

"It's so fucked up."

"What is?"

"Life."

It is 11:30. I release him to recreate and walk down to Deigo's to the frozen food chest. I root through the roaring cold. I select something and bring it up. There is a pleasant ease, a generous grace to this simple act. Tomorrow, Saturday, I have a meeting with my soon-to-be ex husband Bradley. That night I dream of the treadmill. It is the baggage carousel at LAX. I do not want to depart, but I must. I don't know where I am going. I have my tickets.

7.

"Can't we talk it over?" asks Bradley Sucomb my ex, phrasing the question as if further negotiation is only absurdly reasonable.

"We've already discussed this Bradley. There's nothing to discuss. We're meeting here today to agree upon the final details of our divorce. Pure and simple."

We sit in the outdoor patio seating of a TGI Fridays. The sunlight is too harsh and illuminates the gross foods too cleanly so that there can be little doubt of our own piggish appetites. I want Diego's frozen food chest, the echoing cleanliness of City Hall.

"Haven't I been good to you?" he asks me, his strong jaw hovering above the steak fajitas, pronouncing above the death of cattle.

"Brad, we aren't here to discuss what you are or aren't, but to simply resolve on these details."

"That is so like you! Clinical to the last drop."

I pause. The reason why I chose to meet in a public location was to avoid a scene. I understand the parallels. There is no reason to engage, and yet I prove human.

"Are you still seeing them?"

"No! No! I am not still seeing them. One! I am seeing one of them but only because she needs the support."

I lean back in my chair.

"Can't you see I'm nothing without you?" he asks. "I'm a mess. I need you to come home to. I need you to make love to."

I see the depth of his psychosis unfurl like a jumbo American flag at a used car dealership.

"Brad, you need help."

"I know, can you help me?"

"I can't help you."

"Dammit Sarah! Why do you have to be that way," he coaxes. "Can't you see, everything I did I did for you? I, look, I gave you everything! Even now, this, this. This is from me to you. I give you me."

Bradley Sucomb is Ted Lambert is Erik H. ad infinitum. I look around me, at the little Erichs and Erikas digging into their smelly platters. The only thing left is observation and very dry commentary. I boil down into an eye observing Bradley Sucomb shedding his vexatious tear. I love you.

"I don't think you know what that means," I say.

Our transformation into half lives completes itself among potted azaleas. He reaches out his broad hand from across the table.

"God damn it!" his facial expression betrays its underpinning of wrath, a wrathful inner tyrant. So, there you are.

"I mean, please! Please come back to me! Take my hand! Can't you just take my hand?!"

8.

"I'm an astronomer now!" Erich H. enthuses. "You know what I do all day? I read about the stars and about planets and light spectra and nebulae, the cosmic wombs. How cool is that?"

We sit around my desk as we always do when I think back on us, Erich and I.

"Pretty cool," I say.

"Damn straight!"

Some may call him an inverted narcissist, but I like to think of him as a little boy.

"So, what are you going to do when you get out of here?"

"Get out? I don't want to get out! I want to stay here and read. It's a great reading place."

"Maybe you could study astronomy at the community college? Plenty of older people going back."

"Study? What do you think I'm doing here? I am studying. I read two or three of these books a week. You keep buying them and I keep reading them. That's what we've got going on around here. You buy the books and I read them. We're a team."

"But you know, Erich, my job is to help you with your problems so that you can rejoin society."

"Society? Who needs society? Listen, can't I have something? Can't I have this? All I want to do is to sit around, read about Astronomy and smoke cigarettes. What's so bad about that?"

"That may be the case, but we can't keep you hear indefinitely."

"Why can't you? I mean, things are going so good! I'm the model inmate! I help with the chores and in the kitchen. Why replace me? Why not get more of me to populate this fine Bellevue?"

"You know it can't be that way."

"Why not? Why can't it be?"

Reaching my hand into the ice chest, I am cleansed of his flame. He was but a little loved spark. Once years ago a mother loved his spark until it turned into a flame, and the boy became a proud man that took from life as he had been taught to take. And for whatever reason a part of his child self remained. The screaming part. The self is problematic. People are problematic. Not just some: all. I want someone with whom I can share the little delights of Diego's ice chest. I do not want to travel. I want to stay. I want to sit in silence.

"Maybe this is something you could pursue once you get out?"

"Don't you understand? I don't want to get out! I want to stay right here, OK?"

"Erich. Listen. You can stay here for the time being, but I'm not going to bring you any more books until we start having a conversation."

"Do we have to go through all of this again?"

"A conversation about your drug addiction."

"Oh, please, OK. What do you want me to say?"

"I don't want you to say anything."

"Do you want me to say I'm sorry? OK. I'm sorry. Write that down. I'm sorry."

"Your drug addiction took your life away from you. It took everything you had."

"My drug addiction," he mocked. "All the sainted platitudes of psychotherapy. Did you know that Freud hated women?"

"You've mentioned that before."

"He thought all men want to fuck their mothers and kill their fathers."

"Yeah, you've mentioned that."

"My addiction. It's just a little powder. Can't I have some pleasure? Can't I have something?"

"But look, here you are. You ended up here on your own."

"I know!" he shouted, his face assuming its expression of wrath. "What do you want me to say? I know! I fucked up, OK? Now, can we talk about something else? Can we please talk about something else?"

For as long as he was there, Erich H. did not crack. We released him, begging to stay. For a long time, he stood out on the street by his box of astronomy books pacing and cursing. He did not know what to do. I did not want to give him a ride to the shelter because I did not want him in my personal space like I did not want Bradley Sucomb in my personal space like I didn't want to know anything more about Dr. Hamm and his environmental worries. I felt that I had given everyone so much time and that I no longer owed anyone my company. I gave everything. All mundane pain is more or less the same tangled web of self-propagating illusion. The thing about giving is there is always more left to give; there are always different ways to give.

Finally, Erich H. migrated to the park up the street. Several weeks later, he waved to me up the little hill beneath the looming Cyprus trees. He smiled at me. I guess he had been sleeping up there, star gazing. I felt a crippling feeling of connection in that smile. I waved back. It was all I could do. I knew that he was in one of his generous moods in which he wanted to speak to me about astronomy. Perhaps my mistake was always using those moments to discuss his darker side. At which point Erich H. would always say, "Do we have to discuss this now?"

Do we have to discuss this? Many men and women ride that refrain through lives of disturbed monetary and social success. The ones who crack are both lucky and in danger. Seeing how things really work is not fun. It is illuminating. Not everyone is capable of processing the information. Not my ex husband and not Erich H..

New York is a city that still exists

New York is stuck in the shape of a mid 20th century vacation spot. Its chief allure is anachronism, its chief attractions are objects and forms of the past that somehow still exist.

Of course, first stop for any tourist is Broadway. Broadway has a naturally mid 20th century feel. The heart of the attraction is a ritualistic observance of a tired art form.



Fun!  Sort of.  Snor.

Most great cities have nostalgic qualities. The difference between New York and London is that London is obviously very aware of its own historical nature.

New York doesn't recognize what is and isn't historical about itself.

The older districts of New York don't have a historical feel. History does not append easily to them because it is as if the intervening years don't exist. They feel like places that somehow still exist. They aren't necessarily rundown, but are literally as they were.



Coney Island Ave. possesses the mercantile atmosphere of the mid 20th century:



Most world cities have their exhibition of cutting edge. Take for example Berlin's Potsdammer Platz. Once riven by the Berlin wall, Potsdammer Platz set the tone for the 21st century.



In New York City, the chief structure setting the tone is a commemorative obelisk.






Entering the subway late at night feels like stepping into a 70s Bronson movie.




Another emblematic section of town is Cony Island. Everyone knows about the controversy of the dilapidated amusement park that is as much a part of New York as anything. Keep it? Or tear the whole thing down! There is no middle ground. Perhaps another city would invest some money in the area. I can't imagine Seattle tearing down Pike Place Market.

To tear down the old amusement park and put up chintzy condos. This makes sense only in a situation where people are literally living in the past.



New Yorkers are old time schemers. It makes them feel like they are world wise movers and shakers with lots of new fangled modern ideas.

I ran into them years later

Dave

I ran into Dave years later in the financial district McDonalds. When I asked him what he had been up to, he said that he had been in space.

"In space?"

"Yeah, the international space station."

He said that he had been the supply officer, which meant that his primary task was to take care of the supplies. They launched him from Kazakstan.

We dug into our meals, him the quarter pounder value meal with a side of Chicken McNuggets and a large cola, and me the value menue cheesburger and a glass of water.

"Wow, what are you doing here?" I asked him.

"You can only do that kind of work for several years. It's like you're a gymnast. You're training really hard, and then after you just can't work your way back up to that peak performance level."

"Wow, that's insane," I said.

"Being in space takes a lot out of you. It's not natural."

Dave was looking fairly prosperous, with a nice button down shirt and slacks. I noticed some graying by the temples. I knew he had been a hard worker, but I never imagined he would ever go to space.

"Good luck with everything!" he said after he was finished.

Lance

I ran into Lance years later on the Q train.

"Lance, is that you?"

I couldn't believe it.

"Garret?" he asked.

Lance, someone I knew from Margaret Perrywinkle's Academy for the Exceptional had gained, like, 300 pounds. His ass was spilling over three seats. Plus, he was wearing a swiss alpiners hat with a big peacock feather sticking out of the brim. He had an amazing handlebar mustache and a long beard that had been waxed into a sharp tip. Aside from that, he was dressed in a fairly nice suit.

"Wow." I said.

Since the train was largely depopulated, we were free to talk. Lance was just returning to Manhattan from his warehouse in Sheapshead Bay. Turns out, he made a fortune in the manufacture of Swiss alpiners hats made by unemployable hassidic Jewish religious fanatics.

"You know what the secret to work is? Do what you love..." he said.

"And so you love hats."

"Not just any hats," said Lance, "Fine crafted swiss alpine hats made by the hands of fanatical Jews."

"Wow," I said.

I had to get off in canal street to buy dollar dumplings. Lance said that he was taking the train up to the upper east side where he had an expensive apartment. He declined to give me his phone number, but said that we might bump into each other again.

I was bowled over. I watched as the train departed, Lance, larger than life surrounded by everyday people.

Steve

I ran into Steve years later, if you will believe it, while I was at on a layover in Salt Lake city on my way to visit my mother.

"Dude, check this out."

He showed me a picture of his wife.

His wife was a knockout.

Steve was just someone I knew for some reason. I'm not sure why. It was as if the sole purpose of my previous experience with him was to establish the basis for our chance encounter in the Salt Lake airport.

"I, like, buy her plastic surgery. She'll get anything done I ask."

"Really?"

"When we met, she was just average looking, but I got her a boob job, a butt job, a nose job..."

"You basically got her all the jobs."

"I got her all the jobs, and now look at her."

She was really good looking. Steve had a bunch of pictures of her in his wallet. There was a picture of her in a swimsuit on the beach, a picture of her taken from behind walking through the streets of some city.

"She likes it," Steve said.

"Likes what?"

"Likes body modification. Were thinking about getting more extreme."

"Wow," I said.

"That's my flight. Good luck with everything!"

I watched Steve board his flight to Miami. He was looking good.

***

At some point in my 30s, I began to bump into all sorts of people. One thing these encounters had in common was that the people told me what they were doing, but never asked me what I had been doing. Was I just a good listener or something?


Susan

I bumped into Susan years later in the Union Square Barnes and Noble. We were both browsing the biography section.

"I'm actually looking for my book," she said.

It turns out that Susan had become the world's foremost authority on Alice B. Toklas.

"Here it is," she said.

The book was called, "Being Toklas."

"Wow," I said. "Impressive."

"I'm actually lecturing at the Sorbonne right now. Columbia has me lecturing out here. I've done more traveling this year than ever. I'm so sick of airports. Did you know Scott and I are married?"

"Scott?"

"Yeah, Scott Swank?"

So, she married Scott Swank, another person I knew. I had no idea.

"We have seven adopted Chinese children now," she said. "Scott has immobile sperm. Read my book!"

Then, without saying goodbye, she turned and walked away. Wow, I thought. It felt like she was the barer of news about her life that was at once commonplace and yet mildly mind blowing.

B.J.

I was somewhere, some kind of theater in the round. It was dark, except for the stage. There was a guy on the stage sticking needles through his face. Then I realized, it was B.J.!

His act was an extreme must see. Lots of needles, some feces, blood, pool balls. According to the flier, he had spent years in Amsterdam. He had come straight from Amsterdam to New York.

I waited outside to say hello. "B.J.!" I shouted as he passed, draped in some kind of white silky material.

He didn't recognize me or if he did, he simply had no time to say hello as he was bundled into a limo and swallowed up by the city.

My Lunch With The Poet Bryzynsky: A One Act

Characters:

Bryzynsky
The Man
Giuseppe the Wine Merchant
Young Man
Young Man's Girlfriend
Pizza Maker 1
Pizza Maker 2

(Wide angle shot of a New York City neighborhood from the air. It is day. A Gershwin clarinet initiates, somewhat ironically abates. Camera, awkwardly, rapidly pans in on a single window, travels through the window, zeros in on a man in his underwear laying on a fetid mattress leaning up against the wall drinking from a bottle of wine. The room is chaos, a sea of bottles and clothes. The walls are bare.)

Man (thinking): I was living in a fleabag C street apartment, driving a yellow cab and drinking during my days off. They had this wine for sale down the street at Giuseppe's. IL Primitivo. Giuseppe had a limitless supply he kept in crates in the back. He showed them to me. "IL Primitivo, look!" he said. It had an almost too sweet start that suddenly dried up like a conversation with a woman you meet somewhere. Then once you think the interaction is over, there's this light bluecheese aftertaste, like an unexpected touch to chase away the long, dead years.

(The man takes a drink from the bottle. Camera pans in on the bottles label. IL Primitivo. The man wipes his mouth with his sleeve, stands, puts on a his pants which are lying on the floor the belt still attached, puts on a jacket over the incredibly filthy, wine stained undershirt and walks out into the steamy New York late morning.)

Man (narrating): I was going to meet my old NYU dorm mate Byrzynsky. Over the last 12 years, Bryzynsky has become something of a celebrity, very much as I have become an undiscovered country unto myself. It's funny what life hands you. I used to think I was more or less in control, but not anymore. You aren't in control of any of this shit.

(Man walks down the street, enters the subway, sits waiting on one of the wooden seats below. The woman sitting next to him gets up and moves severals seats down. The train comes...)

Man (on the train, thinking): We haven't seen each other in five years. I wonder if it will be awkward. I wonder if I look horrible.

(Man exits the train at Avenue J, passes out onto the street, joins Bryzynsky in line at De Farra's Pizza.)

Man: Is this the line?

Byrzynzky: Did I ever tell you about lines during the Soviet Period?

(Byrzynsky is tall, with long dark hair and a beard. Hip. Designer jeans with, a mid length coat, a gray scarf. An Eastern European intellectual dandy, with that macho Eastern European edge.)

Man: Maybe. It's been a while.

Byrzynsky: The idea wasn't so much as to produce a sense of order as it was to see how long the line could get. It was like the game Snake Xenia. Do you have Snake Xenia on your phone?

(Man digs out his old phone)

Man: Yeah. Snake.

Byrzynsky: The Snake Xenia: she is a female snake: that is her name: gets longer and longer until the only way she can continue to survive is to make a spiral starting at the outskirts and spiral in on the last morsel she will eat just before she eat's her own tail, and at that point the game will presumably end.

Man: What happens at that point? Do you win?

Byrzynsky: I've never gotten that far. It's all theoretical, like the end of time, or alchemy, or maybe communism. It's like communism. It's as if the game itself -- the totalitarian structure which is the programming -- ironically mimics in the architecture of the snake's journey the phone's ultimate fate: the fate of the obsolete technology circling down the historical whirlpool toward Fresh Kills. Have you been to Fresh Kills?

Man: The dump out on Staten Island? No.

Bryzynsky: After I published my first book of poems, caused the sensation and did the Larry King interview and all that, I started going out there. You take the train out there for as long as you can ride and then you get off and walk down this long road through the forest. There is no sense whatsoever that you are approaching the world's largest garbage pile. And then you start seeing seagulls everywhere swooping in, ane the forest is littered with stray plastic bags and broken television sets presumably people discard as if they can't tell where is the dump and where is nature.

Man: Why did you start going out there?

Bryzynsky: I don't know, man. To get away. I think at that stage I needed a journey from the familiar to the totally unknown, and there is nothing like this place. It's like: the end of the world. Like our own collective destiny. Piles and piles of trash. Of course they don't let you into the main garbage city, but they allow you to prowl the outskirts with the rest of the garbage lovers.

Man: Garbage lovers?

Bryzynsky: Or scavengers or whatever. Fresh kills attracts all types. You'd be surprised. Lots of Swedish tourists for some reason.

Man: Swedish?

Bryzynsky: Yes, Swedish. The Swedes are for some reason fascinated by Fresh Kills. Just find a Swede, say Fresh Kills and you'll start a whole conversation, they'll be like 'oh, that place! I love that place! It is the most American place!'. And then there are the scavengers, the metal detector crowd. Don't talk to those guys! They don't like it when they are interrupted because they are always just on the cusp of finding diamonds in the trash, gold, I don't know what. And then there are the people like me who go there to think.

Man: Are there lots of people who go there to think?

Bryzynsky: Eliot Spitzer

Man: Really?

Bryzynsky: I once met Eliot Spitzer out there, but he ran away when I recognized him.

(They enter the perfumed and sonorous atmosphere of De Farra's where those two guys, their eyes clouded by staring at pizzas too long, take their order.)

Man: what would you like Byrzynsky? A square pie or circular pie?

Byrzynsky: Pizza should be circular, don't you think? The dough naturally wants to take the shape of the circle. But why don't we go against the grain today and experiment with the square? Break the routine, eh? Shoot for shocking geometries. Let's have him make us a Octagon.

Man: I don't think they do that.

Bryzynsky: How do you know?

Man (to Byrzynsky): I wonder if they have any wine. (to the pizza man) Do you have any Il Primitivo wine?

Pizza man: Il Primitivo???

Man: never mind.

Byrzynsky: It's OK. You could use a release from alcohol. It's a cage, you know.

Man: I've never thought of it that way. More of a crutch. At times a pillow.

(They sit down at one of the little tables. They are surrounded by people eating pizza.)

Byrzynsky: Most things in life are like that. Liminal holding cells between one state and the next. I write about this in Flozinksy.

Man: I haven't read that.

Bryzynsky: You haven't read Flozinsky? He is this kind of Blakean God, except that he is a post-modern and lives his life inside a blue jelly bean.

Man: Liminal.

Byrzynsky: Lets extend the metaphor, shall we? You have made love to a beautiful woman and you are exhausted. Spent. It hasn't just been good: it's been great, OK? You've found your zone where control and lack of control meet and time stops like out at Fresh Kills dump, OK? Then, you lay there smoking your cigarette or joint or whatever you like to smoke during that time as you wait for your desire to rejuvenate. Recently, I have begun to smoke a pipe.

Man: what?

Byrzynsky: A pipe. (he takes a pipe out of his inside jacket pocket) I take out my pipe and have a smoke.

Man: In bed?

Byrzynsky: Yes!

Pizza man: Sicilian Square.

Man: I'll get it. (Gets the pizza, brings it back)

Bryzynsky: Did I ever tell you the story of my first poem?

Man: No. Not that I can recall.

Bryzynsky: Well, I was seven years old, living in, this pizza's really good! living in Poland. You know, that is where I am from. Poland. I am Polish.

Man: yes, I do know that. It's on the back of all your books. From Poland. Polish.

Bryzynsky: Yes, and so it is, and so it is. Well, we were quite poor in those days. My father was an engineer, and in those days being an engineer meant nothing, and my mother worked in a thimble factory. All the thimbles in the eastern block came from this factory. That was the decadent thing about the planned economy. They planned to have all the thimbles in the world produced in one factory. All the cameras or watches or whatever were produced somewhere else.

Man: Like Willy Wonka.

Bryzynsky: Yes! The Soviets would have approved of Willy Wonka's world wide schemes.

Man: All the candy comes from one place, the socks from someplace else. It is excessive. Clearly the workings of an addictive personality.

Bryzynsky: When I was a little kid I would go and I would look at the thimbles tumblling down these fantastic, science fiction like tubes and shoots, and it was like an amusement park for me. Going to the thimble factory was my favorite thing in the world. And we aren't talking about a little tiny factory here: some micro brewery. This was totally macro: like Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory -- almost a metaphore, but not, stretching on and on forever and ever like Snake Xenia at the moment of her death or rebirth: the hypothetical end state, the dream, the veil.

Man: Bizarre

Bryzynsky: Imagine the difference of a Soviet and American childhood! On the one hand you've got thimbles: these little things women put over their fingers when they are sewing, and then on the other hand you've got these video games or whatever, the guts spilling out, the Japaneseness. Meanwhile, I was growing up in these extremely spare surroundings which were nevertheless somehow connected with infinity. Everything was stripped back, bare revealing the cosmic forces. We of course lived on the outskirts in one of those old Krushchev era complexes that were once sparkling white epitomes but became gray and sooty. The paneling attracts the soot turning them into these blackened depressing monoliths. But for a kid, I remember being quite happy, playing in the little courtyard with the other kids, although we did not play on the spider but around it, hunting cats with slingshots and setting traps for drunks whose routines we had memorized.

Well, and so I think it was at this time, around 7 years old.

See, this is when I became a poet: this is when I new I was a poet. It was all connected with the falling out of my parents -- my father was having an affair with a Lithuanian prostitute named Milda -- I learned her name when my mother shouted it, shouted this strange name again and again, Milda! Milda! It's Milda! Is it Milda?! Milda!

Man: Is it Milda?

Bryzynsky: So, anyway, I don't know what it was, but all of a sudden the idea of death as void, as nothing which it certainly is, hit me. I just couldn't wrap my mind around it, here today, gone tomorrow, and not just gone but forever wiped off the face of existence! The concept terrified me. It was all I could think about. I stopped playing with the other children and spent all my time in the dirty stairwell contemplating the void. My world was shaken. This pizza is delicious. Oily.

Man: Fresh basil.

Bryzynsky: Yes, the basil! I think we all must eat more basil. Basil on everything. And it was as if all of nature could sense my thoughts, my powerful awareness of oblivion, and at school the other children one by one began to forsake me. It was as if they wanted no part of the stark realities I was grappling with.

So, coming home after school, the apartment full of my parents screaming, the only place left for me was the stairwell. And the only other living creatures in the stairwell were the ravens that would fly through the broken window on the top floor and scavenge in the garbage bags people left out by the clogged garbage shoot. Have you observed ravens?

Man: just crows and pigeons.

Bryzynsky: If you haven't observed Ravens before, you don't know how intelligent these creatures are. They are feeling creatures. They think. They observe. Watching the ravens, I felt soothed by their presence. There lives were as fleeting as mine, and once more, I was practically sure they knew what I was going through. In fact, I got the sense that that was why they were ravens! As if their intimate knowledge of destruction had led them to incarnate themselves as little black bird men, little philosophers thoughtfully pacing around the eternal winter of communist Poland. The ravens knew! I knew they knew because they would actually come right up to me and gently peck like this at my raggedy old sweater produced in Bratislava because that is where all the sweaters came from. For some reason the pecking of the ravens soothed me, and so I took out my bit of chalk and wrote a poem on the wall, next to the scrawled phone numbers of prostitutes. Perhaps Milda's number was among them.

Man: What was the poem about?

Bryzynsky: well, it was actually a dirty limerick.

Man: Interesting. So your own first poetic impulse was lewd.

Bryzynsky: It was a protest. I wrote it as if controlling my own actions from a distance. The idea of writing a poem, much less a dirty one, had not been on my childish agenda, never. I never considered the idea of writing a poem, of even writing anything unforced, for pleasure, for myself. Up until that point I had never really considered anything except the void which I had only lately begun to obsess over. And now I was writing a poem and I had this massive erection, or at least whatever it was in those days. And now ever since, I know that I am writing a good poem when I get a...

Man: I see.

Bryzynsky: An erection, a stiffy, a boner. What do you call it?

Man: I see. So, what have you been doing with yourself? You've attained such notoriety. I'm really impressed.

Bryzynsky: This last week, me and my girlfriend, my girlfriend and I, you know Serena...

Man: How could I not. Serena James. English super model. She's absolutely beautiful.

Bryzynsky: Yes, she's gorgeous, isn't she? Serena and I visited Omaha for a fashion show. We found the domestic flight so odd. Even in first class, it felt like one of those long bus journeys you take when you are 13 and have absolutely no money and are being shifted to spend the summer with some relative in Massachusetts or somewhere, and so you ride through the great American no where, and the detritus of fast food wrappers and water bottles begins to build up around you. Well, United Airlines was very much the same thing; like the re initiation of some uncomfortable American journey you thought you had escaped long ago but never did because you were always on the journey, down around the rim of the theoretical gravity well. Like Snake Xenia. It was so odd. We felt odd. We looked odd. I mean, look at me. I'm not exactly normal looking. I'm 6 foot 7 and most days I wear Armani, and Serena, well, as you know she is quite stunning, and she was wearing these Louis Vuitton shoes, very catty, very sexy. Did you know she is only 45 kilos.

Man: 45?

Bryzynsky: Yes, 45! She is like a leaf. And so I am with this mantis-like woman riding a flying, accumulating garbage pile, and we felt like we were slumming it, really, and all of a sudden, mutually, we wanted to make love.

Man: how did you know?

Bryzynsky: We have this thing. This radar for each other. It's really weird. We know.

Man: Love radar.

Byrzynsky: Yes, love radar. The question wasn't, did we want to make love? But, where were we going to do it? Were we going to join the mile high club? I never thought of this sort of thing. I've never had the passion that makes you want to make love in unusual locations, although some people feel that way like they want to make love in the movies or on the bus and that's OK! I don't judge them, but I myself have never felt that way and so casually, as a joke I made reference to it -- reference to the mile high club -- and the flight attendant, someone named Courtney or Cody or Casey: one of those names that can go either way depending on which state you are from, actually motioned with her head, did a little head jerk toward the bathroom.

Man: No way.

Bryzynsky: It was absolutely scandalous! That's what it felt like: like we had discovered the hidden scandal of the United Airlines. We made love standing up in the United Airlines airplane toilet, Serena's legs with those sexy shoes up by my ears, and then after I covered the smoke detector with my Fedora with one hand and smoked my pipe with the other.

Man: Are you serious?

Bryzynsky: Yes! And then after, when we were leaving, the flight attendants invited us to some thing, an orgy they were planning in their hotel room in Omaha. But after we left the airport and were driving to the city, it was like all of a sudden the weight of the universe descended, and we just broke down in each other's arms in the back of the limo crying. And then, after checking into the Hilton, We broke down again. Guess where?

Man: I don't know.

Bryzynsky: The Hilton stairwell!

Man: what? Oh, the stairwell. Were there birds?

(Young man approaches with his girlfriend.)

Young man: Excuse me, but are you Stanislaus Bryzynsky?

Bryzynsky: Yes, yes I am in fact.

Young man: No way. Could you autograph our pizza box?

Bryzynsky: Sure, why not, I'd be happy to. (takes the pen and signs their pizza box.

Young man: I love Flozinsky.

Bryzynsky: Flozinsky.

Young man: Flozinsky (Byrzynsky and the young man stare at each other as if they have just uttered a password).

Bryzynsky: People love Flozinsky. You know what the secret is? It's the name! The word flow coupled with a Slavic ending zinsky.

Man: Is it all that superficial?

Byrzysnky (shrugs): You know what my favorite part of the female anatomy is? The back. I think it's because the back has the biggest surface area, and a nude back reveals so much by revealing so little, and it is also like a man's back: let's be frank, a back is more or less a back, except for the subtle refinements which make it dramatically different: the slight tapering, and then the soft quality of female skin as opposed to male skin. The delicacy of the shoulder blades, the spine. Nothing captures the absence of maleness so totally and so suddenly.

Man:I kind of feel like I've slipped through.

Bryzynsky: That's a very poetic conceit.

Man: You think so?

Bryzynsky: What happened to your poetry?

Man: what poetry?

Bryzynsky: Didn't you write poetry? I always thought you wrote poetry, or intended to write poetry.

Man: I was an economics major.

Bryzynsky: Really?

Man: Yeah.

Bryzynsky: Shall I get the check? Let me pay!

Man: We could split it.

Bryzynsky: Ok, let's split it.

(Wide angled shot of Bryzynsky and the man standing out in front of De Farra's Pizza. We can't hear what they stay but they exchange parting words. The next moment we see the man leaning his head up against the window of the train. The camera focuses in on the man's glasses reflecting the setting sun from out the windows of the train. You see him exit the train in Manhattan, walk to the wine shop and buy two bottles of Il Primitovo from Guiseppi and then walk home. On the way home through the dusky city, the man recites in his thoughts the last few lines of the Dylan Thomas poem "And Death Shall Have No Dominion". He speaks slowly, sadly, as if he is deeply familiar with the lines, caressing their every cadence...

No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down...)

The End

The Aspergers Spectrum Through The Ages

As things advance, we realize that ever more people who we otherwise did not expect as being so, are actually idiot savants. This becomes clear upon a cursory historical investigation.

Cave Men

It could be said that Aspergers syndrome was an ordinary part of being a cave man. As everyone knows, cave men lacked empathy and were highly intolerant to most everything. Not only were these spear wielding barbarians emotional imbeciles: they had an obsession for shadow puppetry which went far beyond anything any sane person would consider normal.

The Greeks

The Greeks were obsessed with reasoning and logic. Take some of their more annoying philosophers: Socrates for example, who by every indication was your classic Aspergers sufferer. Socrates annoyed the shit out of anyone within range with his iron clad logical systems. Then, when some jerks told him to eat hemlock and die, Socrates took them seriously. Other Greeks who probably had a syndrome include Demosthenes who pestered everyone with his rants up in the big white building. See Tourettes Syndrome.

Monks

After the collapse of classical civilization, a new breed of obsessive compulsives emerged in the form of Monks, masking their own compulsive terror for grooming and dinner conversation behind a thin veneer of religiosity.

Dustin Pedroia

This sorry freak takes being a scrappy second baseman to a whole other level in what must be some kind of sick Aspergers redirection of the blinding chaos of fundamental human emotion into the only damn thing that makes any sense for Dustin Pedroia.

Spaniards

Me thinks the lady doth protest a bit too much?

Subway Mariachi Bands

Blissfully unaware of how annoying they are to non Asperger's sufferers, Mariachi Bands continue to get on and off the New York subway all day long, working for about enough money to buy a sandwich. What uncontrollable urges drive these Mexico obsessed savants?

Richard Dawkins

Explaining away all religious, poetic impulse using a flying Spaghetti Monster, Richard Dawkins appeals to other Aspergers sufferers though his own atrophied sense of humor and air tight, tautological nerd reasoning.

The Food and Drug Administration

Here we see a good example of organizational Aspergers syndrome. Can't eat this cheese because it looks old and moldy in comparison to the square slice of dissected and genetically reconstituted yellow matter (smooth, yellow) wrapped in a piece of plastic? School lunch programs masking a childlike obsession, a need -- a need to see others consume tater tots in as much as the tot must be ubiquitous and daily, an hourly incantation at the alter of an artfully masked tick? As if food in its diversity of colors, textures, flavors and effects overwhelmes: the pyramid itself less catalogues and more monumentalizes a transcendent urge to order total internal chaos with platonically calming geometries. Little is yet known about how departments, branches, governments and other organizational dork cones come into being rooted upon a steady supply of vexacious, monomaniacal intellects worshipping at the alter of macrocosmic governmental systems in service of unmentionable totalitarian desires.

George Lucas

George Lucas represents the mainstreaming of the symptomatic Vulcan-type personality originally devised by the hep cats who invented Star Trek and Buck Rogers in the 25th century. Little did those mustashiod, emotionally complex swingers suspect that the entire genre would one day be commandeered by the emotionless robots, androids and science officers originally scripted for comic relief purposes. See Scott Bakula.

Is that you Max?

Professor Solomon liked to think that in a small way he had been a part of it -- the 20th century. Of course he was aware of the impossibility of measuring his own impact, in the peace movement and in the break up of the Soviet block. But still, it seemed that for a while the world and he fed each other's momentum, making the aging process, his own, the world's, deeply gratifying.

After a certain line had been crossed, however, he stopped getting it. He lost track of what was going on as the world he knew birthed an equivalent world based on no principle of parity and fear, but on the simulation of these things, like a darkened equivication which perceived from the outside must look like an electronic cube with splayed wires, sparking in a vacuum.

He was 82, although his youth and the impulses of his youth still chided the stodgy impulses of his old age. Leaving NYU, he decided to contradict the wishes of his sister, currently living in Nebraska, and move East again as he had while young, as he had as a professor and cold war political tactician. This time, however, he embarked as a tourist.

He flew from New York to Frankfurt. As he had done many times in his 50s, 60s and 70s, he took the U bahn to the Frankfurt Hopfbahnhopf. At the central train station, he noticed that that old marquee whose clickety clack used to comfort him and remind him of the secret heart of travel, had gone digital therebye draining the spirit of the place, making arrivals and departures seem overly monitored and absolute, bloodless embarkations and disappearances.

He wandered the red light district immediately neighboring the train station. The red light district was a guilty pleasure. It offered him a glimpse of the realities others more courageous drank to the dregs. It withered his soul and excited him. He saw a junkie shoot heroine. The sight of the man's spiritual and physical decay gave him the shudders. Although the rational thinking part of himself saw the utility in keeping such things in the open rather than pushing them underground within a colossus of post modern developments, shopping malls, obese children, the despair that comes from having nothing really to despair about, sociological theories concocted by under read zeros driving the world to a universal state of zilch.

***

Finally, he was on the road again. The trains of the east were as they had been. Some things don't change, and the little freedoms a culture is inborn into die hard. He stuck his head out the window and breathed in the night air. The Germans and Poles were as engaging as ever without quite making contact. They looked at you, curious, fearless, remote. They seemed interested even in the lives of old men, whereas Americans had become inverted long ago, denizens of the arachnoid space.

Dozing in and out of sleep aboard the dream train, as he thought of it, he kept asking the young man sitting across form him, "Is this Gdansk? Is this Gdansk?"

He had never been to Gdansk and always wanted to go to the city of reformation architecture, revolt and kielbasa. The city on the Baltic coast, as austere as his soul perhaps. As warm.

***

"But you must come out with us!" said Stefan.

And so later he found himself at a table full of boozing Poles and Germans, a token, although young Stefan did his best. Professor Solomon made apologies and took his beer out onto the street. To the left, he could see the reflection of the setting sun on the Gdansk canal. Several tourists walked by led by a Polish guide. He found the guide's face architectural, like the face of long dead Gretchen, and as he had loved Gretchen totally, so he felt he could love the guide.

Max Von Sydow walked passed, paused as if considering something, turned, stood before Professor Solomon a pillar of gray and blond, sleet and snowy sea, the echo of voyages, of exploration and northern religion, elk, sex and death.

"Professor Solomon," said Max Von Sydow.

"How do you know who I am."

"I just know, I know certain things, come invested with a kind of knowledge, a sort of arcana, an eczema of information if you will."

Max Von Sydow was dressed in a black turtleneck with a handsome brown blazer. Something inside Professor Solomon revolted.

"What's it like to be you, so pretty?" he asked.

"Pretty?" Max Von Sydow smiled. "No one has ever mentioned. Me pretty? I know I have daisies inside but physically I have always felt like a log, like a piece of driftwood."

"You've never really known loneliness, have you? True loneliness? The task of planning your days, weeks, years totally alone." Huge tears slizzled down the professor's cheeks like raindrops on a window.

"Is that me? The sort of man who doesn't comprehend the basics?"

"So that you secretly suspect everyone else to be insane."

"You think I am this psychoanalytic type?"

"I suspect you are."

Professor Solomon sank into his beer which he gulped rapidly. "Who put you up to this?"

"Professor Solomon. You may think you know me, but you don't. See, a part of your mind thinks it knows, but you have to admit that I am external, a nothing,a figment, as is everything, these people, these cobbles, this accursedly quaint place."

"Are you even familiar with Max Von Sydow's work? Thou simulacrum?"

"Well, yes, more or less. Wild Strawberries. Old Bergman films."

"But that's just the start of it!" said Professor Solomon. "He did so much, with Bergman and with others. He seemed immortal. I'm not even sure he's dead. Is he? He may really be immortal for all we know."

"Well," said the 50ish Max Von Sydow. "I'm not sure myself, but I don't think it matters now, does it. Alive, dead. It's all on tape."

"If he's still alive, isn't this a form of plagiarism?" asked Professor Solomon.

"Now look, just stop it. Are you going to stay here sitting on this cold stoop with all the young people inside talking about the quaint old man they met, or are you going to come along?"

"Come along?"

"With me, I mean. Come with me, elsewhere, to a place other than here."

"Where will we go?"

"To a place other than here. I already said it."

He took Max Von Sydow's hand much larger than his own.

***

"I like your films."

"Thanks," said Max Von Sydow. "I myself find them indescribably miserable, like the ultimate cessation of existence. Like ritual suicide, but that's just me."

***

"Where are we?"

"Where do you think we are?"

"In a Bergman film."

"No, thank god."

"It looks like a Bergman film. Like one of his 19th century visions. Look at that clock," Professor Solomon pointed at the grandfather clock counting the seconds. It had one of those starry night sky dials with the blue background. "You're even dressed...like a 19th century banker, a petite bourgeois."

"Am I?"

"Is that a watch fob?"

Max Von Sydow grasped the golden chain, bringing out an equivalently golden watch.

"I guess so," he said. "It's my fob."

"Where is this?

"My home, I think."

Solomon looked around himself, at the antique furniture. Looking into the adjoining room, he saw a video game machine, of the stand alone variety like they used to have. Arkanoid. The pinging sounds of the game seemed to be the legitimate markers of time, the game real, the grandfather clock a prop.

"This is your place?"

"Welcome to my pad, or so to speak."

"This is kind of like your Bergman themed bachelor pad, except for that thing in there. You aren't married?"

"Well, yes and no. After so many years, the institution of marriage evolves toward friendship. The evolution is the main thing, a kind of narrative of acceptance and loathing. Sex becomes this kind of historical echo, like something from the bible, an overtone, a sense of something."

"Really? I wouldn't know."

"Or, no. It's like one of those books full of big glossy pictures of lizards."

***

Professor Solomon wanted to investigate the other room where the arcade game stood. He made to rise. As he felt himself leave the chair, his stomach heaved. The room spun and he thought he would pass out or vomit or both. He sat back down. The feelling immediately went away.

"You can't get up."

"Why not?"

"You have to stay seated there. Anchored to your chair."

"Why?"

"We're moving too fast."

"What are you talking about?"

"Help yourself to the brandy."

There was a tray of brandy, cheese and crackers before him. Beyond the big bay windows, it began to snow. Professor Solomon felt tired of the game.

"Where are we?"

"It's hard to describe."

"Are we in Stockholm?"

"Might as well be. Then again, we are far from these stupid places you think about from time to time. Very far. That's why you have to remain seated. We're actually traveling quite fast. Fractionally faster than the speed of light."

Professor Solomon looked at Max Von Sydow.

"Stockholm's a shit city," said Max Von Sydow. "I have always preferred Latin places. Spain. Central America. I feel like the women in these places are more accommodating."

***

"In case you are wondering, we are in a cave, formed by certain geological processes, approximately 300 meters beneath the surface."

"Now that you mention it, I was wondering."

"Then you are probably wondering about the oxygen, about how we are still breathing in and out," standing before him in the phosphorescent luminescence, Max Von Sydow pantomimed breathing in and out. "It's because the air, see, it comes down from a fissure in the southern wall which leads to a kind of crevasse on the planet's surface."

"What am I doing here? Is this a part of dying?" said Solomon, looking out over the cave, lit by a natural chemical process."

"Well, you could say so," said Max Von Sydow. "But then again, at this point we have to rethink certain new fangled concepts and reaffirm the old traditional intuitions. Here," he said, handing the professor a flashlight. "First there was absolute shit and then came the light."

Professor Solomon had never seen anything quite like it. The cave was remarkable. All sorts of crystals grew there. There were purple crystals, blue crystals, clear crystals, dark crimson crystals, pink crystals. Meanwhile, a babbling brook ran through it all.

"This is really beautiful," he said. "The sound of water echoing around this beautiful, indescribable Xanadu."

"I know. I knew you would like it, professor Solomon. I knew you would like it very much, and that you would feel like this is a return to something, from childhood perhaps."

"This isn't like anything from childhood."

"Not like a return? A return to something familiar? Like rediscovering a lost bag of marbles in an old wooden box, or something else American like that?"

"No."

"If you are feeling sleepy, you can lie down."

"Where can I lie down?" asked professor Solomon, all of a sudden overcome with exhaustion.

"There. In the crystal chamber," said Max Von Sydow. "Don't you remember the crystal chamber? At one point, we had a hard time getting you to come out of there. You were fascinated by the crystals and we were very worried in the beginning."

"About what?"

"About you; about the whole project."

"Where is the chamber?"

"Over there. Through that archway."

Professor Solomon went through the archway, propped his head with his jacket, lay down on the bed of crystals and closed his eyes.

German Trench Coat Lady

In the evening, they gathered in the crater. It must have been one of those craters from the bombs they had just begun to build before the very end when bomb artistry had reached its peak and the bombs they began to drop were less dropped for strategic purposes and more in a celebration of mastery.

It felt like only like yesterday, thought Sgt. Frank Starling, when they leaped out of the hatch into the night and fell into the deep green forest, their speed broken by huge white sheets sewn presumably by all sorts of women. They lost Moreno on the fall, broken on the branches or else evaporated upon the night, snagged and caught upon a flock of northward migrating storks. Because when they hit the earth they had already gone from 20 to 19 American soldiers playing hide and seek with ghosts. Over the course of their guerrilla sabotage campaign, 19 became 10 men navigating a sheer billy goat trail into Bavaria their vision distelled into flashes of water, hands on loose earth, teeth unstopping corks, releasing straps, excess baggage plummeting hundreds of meters.

McCoy lost his leg to the land mine, perhaps the only one planted in that beautiful green field on the edge of the rundown estate at the foot of the mountains. When they heard the blast, the men instinctively dove for cover and watched shifty eyed from behind the huge animal topiary neighboring the field as a man in a white tuxedo decorated with dalmatian spots dashed down a long drive toward the wounded soldier. The eccentric Baron Hansel Wolfgang Hasselhoff raised the alarm, summoning some local nuns who took McCoy away.

It was in Hasselhoff's orchards that Starling's men spent a two week stretch gorging themselves on peaches washed down with cognac. Hasselhoff himself always dressed in that weird dalmatian suit brought out new bottles of wine and brandy every evening as an incentive for the men to listen to him lecture on the science of insects, the art of the cobbler, upholstery and other random things. It was in fact in the middle of an interminable lecture on the tragic demise of Italian astronomer Giovanni Bruno that Stevens decided to walk out of the war, which meant he merely started trudging south west, a bag of peaches and cognac slug over his shoulder.

Revived by two weeks of orchard living, the men fought on, setting fire to a checkpoint house on the outskirts of Munich and removing the rivets from a large segment of railway before joining with the regiment in Dresden.

By that time however, the war was mostly over.

***

Dresden was a desolate recall of rubble and pain. The city taken as a whole reminded Starling of the fine burning cooking coals on which as a boy he cooked the oysters he caught in the cove with the other boys who grew up in the area and ran wild during the summer eating all manner of sea things, muscles, clams, the rock crabs whose shells you sucked for their sweet, salty juices.

Perhaps the true looting began when they strode the ruins of Dresden on the lookout for gleaming things. "Get down from there!" he shouted at Corporal Biggs who, after finding a diamond broach in a rock pile, climbed the bombed out steeple steps to raise his prize to the light. In a fit of ecstasy, he bounded higher and higher until he reached the top, exposed like a stylite, immediately brained by a sniper's bullet. "I can see the Elbe from here!" Biggs shouted holding the jewels aloft, his goofy voice the only sound within miles before the thinly echoing shot. He went down like a defenestrated duke, a splash of blood momentarily adorning the cloud cover.

Leonard succumbed on the road north. He had faked a semblance of arches upon enlistment out of Newark and had suffered ever since, propping his recalcitrant feet with various doomed methods. Now he could go no further and merely sat down on the roadside. He said he would wait for the medical unit to come, but no one knew what really happened to Leonard as later it was discovered that he had not returned home .

***

"Bring it out!" Barked Lt. Gracey. "Bring out your shit!"

And mechanically everyone came forward one by one dumping random items into the center of the crater. Someone shepherded in two beautiful white billy goats like soul cleansing autumnal snow. Someone emptied out a bag of German guns clanking onto the hard yellow ground. Corporal Clemens, known as 'shrimp' emerged from the crowd with a gigantic painting of an aristocratic mounted upon a rearing horse.

"That's gold!" said Corporal Clemens, tapping on the gilt frame with his rifle.

"Bring it out!" barked Gracey. "Withholding is a capital offense! Bring out your shit!"

Someone came forward with a large mounted globe containing disproved geographies from a grandfatherly era; another offered a white stone bust of an old composer or philosopher or somebody.

Then, as the mist rolled in over the crater, Lt. Gracey urinated on the head of the philosopher or the composer or the somebody. The urine's steam rose up into the night like the vapors of some primeval libation from a time when blasphemy and worship were one and the same act. Then after that solemn piss the men lit a bonfire, broke out the casks of wine and whiskey and tilted toward oblivion.

***

In the morning, Starling awoke. The men sleeping around him caked in mud and soot looked dead. There was something about embracing that look in war, about embracing the dead look. It was hard to describe. An act of camouflage. An act. He blindly grasped about his immediate vicinity for drink, and then once fortified he marched to the center of the circle, armed himself with three German lugers -- one in the belt, another in the holster, and one in the inside pocket of his jacket. Starling strode off into the forest bottle in hand.

He walked for a long time, perhaps two hours, building up a sweat, bringing himself back to life with drinking and song by recounting the things he knew.

"Bridegroom was the horse that won the Kentucky Derby in 1926," Starling said.

The site of the man in the black and white pajamas reminded him of a film he had seen about Alcatraz. The inmates of Alcatraz have hobbies. One makes chess pieces out of soap stone. Another feeds a pet mouse or a sparrow or something. After he saw two or three more of the wandering jailbirds, he began to notice how slender they were. Emaciated was the word. These jailbirds were starving. He approached one. The wandering jailbird stared him in the face. The starvation had made him all eyes, nose and mouth. The cheek skin draped against his jaw like leather tenting. Starling offered him his bottle. The jailbird declined, muttered something incomprehensible and then walked off into the mist.

Jailbird Sing, Jailbird Cry
But we all know that a jailbird can't fly

The lines came to him, something he had read as a child in a baseball dugout.

Jailbirds. Jail. Starling's uncle did a stretch in Sing Sing for armed robbery. He robbed the bathtub factory where he worked.

"Bathtub factory," Starling said.

Luger in hand, he scrambled to the top of the hill at which he came out onto a pine cone littered road.

"Pine cone road," he muttered, surveying the clearing.

Starling peered to the left and then to the right. To the north smoke trailed up from somewhere, a house or an enemy camp. Southwest, a pine branch hung low over the road carrying at its very tip a cone. He leveled the muzzle of his pistol. Heavy, like a real pistol and powerful, he had seen these things penetrate steel, but with that wacko kraut design that made no sense. His shot rang out. He missed. "Shoeless Joe Jackson played center field for the Chicago." said Starling, taking another drink, heading south away from the ominous smoke trail.

***

They had been out on the clam flats all day when Jimmy got his legs stuck. He had been digging too long in one place and had forgot to move. "Go get help!" Jimmy said. By the time help arrived, he was already up to his knees in water.

"We'll get ya out of there," said Fireman Perry himself up to his waste in freezing sea water digging frantically.

Boy Starling watched from the shore as all efforts failed. The mud could not be beat, had an army of mud backing it up ready to fill the fireman's breach. Hank from the auto body came out with a hacksaw and Doctor Bender, the strands of his comb-over flailing like rat tails, sawed Jimmy's legs off right above the knees. When they hauled him to shore, Billy was fighting the pain real well, not even crying even though now he only had two bloody stumps which trailed through the cove's little breakers leaving a scent for the sharks that later that night came thrashing.

"Guess no more clamming," Jimmy said looking up at Frank Starling age 12.

"That clay is like a vice," said Fireman Perry. "If you stay still long enough, it bonds like cement."

"It's the suction," said Doctor Bender, drenched, sitting on a drift wood log trying to get his right hand to stop shaking. "Does that sometimes," he said of his hand. Next to him lay Jimmy's legs in a paper grocery bag.

The moments of his childhood were eternally gray like the gray sky, gray sea, gray mud with splashes of red, the red of Billy's blood on the gray stones which reminded him of the red of Biggs's brain matter momentarily suspended against the Dresden sky. It was as if all that was a preamble to this; like the past was constantly giving birth to the one gray moment interspersed with flashes of memory.

Walking down pine cone road, Starling wondered if he would ever reach the front of it, when gray gave way to gold, when that thing called sex came along and cracked him open on the inside so that the golden blood of love flowed in torrents.

***

"You shall refer to me no longer as Lieutenant., but as King. I'm the King of this place, this mud, this filth. Bring out your shit! Bring it all out!"

The soldiers stood around Lt. Gracey who stood on an old carton in the center of the crater ringed round by fragrant pine. There were mutters of approval. It was as if this was the logical next step to what came before. That evening, Private Polanco brought in a large sow which they cast alive like an Indian widow onto the pyre. Then they plunged their pikes into the boiling flesh solemnly, none speaking out of turn, stubbly mouths swallowing boiling fat, gulping alcohol which had the earthy, water flavor river stones hold.

Even after the soldiers had forced themselves to forget everything associated with that rogue age, a part of each of them always disobediently remembered that meal and found all other meals lacking.

***

In the morning, Starling found his way back to the road. This time, the walk took a lot out of him. He was exhausted by the time he made it, yet he felt driven by something, some mystery unfolding within himself that found its mirror in external things. Before him stood a man on a horse. A Russian. He could tell by the hat. He looked like a Russian from another century.

Amerikanitz, said the Russian.

They walked some ways together down pine cone road passing the bottle.

Amerikanitz. That's all the Russian said.

Instead of winding to the left, they walked down a side trail to the right coming out on the edges of a huge compound. Presumably, from the look of it, a crumbling jail.

"Bathtub Factory," said Starling. "My uncle Dave did a stretch in Sing Sing."

The Russian, bottle in hand, pointed at the emaciated jailbirds milling about the yard, let out a gleeful whoop and then driving his boots into the ribs of the horse, proceeded to charge one of the poor fellows, shouting the incomprehensible words, Bizhi Yivre bizhi! The frail man, young, old, it was impossible to tell, preemptively collapsed before the onslaught of horse and man hurtling through the beleagured atmosphere. When Starling came upon him, he was clutching his stick-like calf. Starling took out his gun, leveled it at the Russian's horse, and fired. The horse collapsed. The Russian stood in the mud, wrangling with his rifle strap, struggling with the mud clogged mechanism. Starling fired again. The Russian collapsed.

Starling rummaged through the dead Russian's pockets. A gold Star of David. Leonard's. No. Someone else's. Who could say whose it was. He dropped the religious artifact on the Russian's chest.

"God save the queen," Starling said.

***

At the top of pine cone road, instead of cutting back into the forest, on a whim he decided to investigate the smoke. The trail dipped down a hill, crossed a shallow creek and then wound up again into the pine woods. He followed it north for a ways, winding up and down, until he arrived at a log cabin with a Mercedes Benz parked out front.

He pounded on the door. The door opened. The first thing he thought was Marlene Dietrich. The blond, middle aged woman was wearing a weird trench coat. The trench coat reminded him of his German pistol, of Baron Hansel Wolfgang Hasselhoff, of Germans in general. There was no use making sense of it.

"Is that your car lady?" he asked.

"Vas?"

"Is that your car!"

"Mercedes," she said.

"Gimme the keys."

"You wait."

Starling watched her walk into the inner recesses of the house. He devoured the woman with his eyes as the darkness took her. He wished he was the darkness.

She returned with a Note.

"I...will return the Mercedes of Fraulein Schmidt undamaged and in tact on the date of..."

"You gotta be kidding."

"Sign please."

"This is wartime, lady."

The lady, Fraulein Schmidt, produced a pen.

"Ok, I'll sign. Gimme the pen. Damned bureaucrats, Germans. Are you a bureaucrat?"

***

The regiment came upon the town of Wik. At least the map referred to it as Wik: a low lying zone of thatchery and pig styes on the German Polish border.

"We aren't leaving this god forsaken place until every last one of you has left his seed behind in a Kraut woman!" shouted Lt. Gracey from atop the tank.

The men standing around Lt. Gracey's jeep muttered their approval.

They had passed the point of no return shortly beyond Dresden. Perhaps Leonard had used his feet as a pretext for escape. Perhaps he had intuited savagery's onset.

The village of Wik was mostly made up of a bunch of huts with those thatched roofs. Starling did his best to save some of the horses as the barns burnt. He let the white horses flee, and the sight of them running reminded him of winter waves breaking on the dunes the day after a hurricane made landfall far to the south. Finally, he found a darkened hut. Someone had put out all the lights. He tried the door. Locked. He put his weight against it ever so slightly. The door opened. Sitting in the corner, a stray moonbeam filtering through the window, a beautiful girl in loose man's clothes huddled. She couldn't have been more than 16. It was if the encounter was scripted. So. This was Starling's time.

Starling approached her. He put his gun on the table. He began unbuttoning his jacket.

The girl cowered. Starling looked at the girl. Starling sat on the table. He lay down on the table. He unfastened his helmet and struggled out of his backpack and lay flat on his back.

"Oh, I don't know what to do! What am I supposed to do God damn it!" he said to the darkness. "I'm not good at with sort of thing, raping. God damn it!" he shouted to the rafters beyond which lay endless thatching. It was the kind of roofing Europeans burnt with torches in mad political fits.

The girl eventually rose and brought him a half empty bottle of liquor and a plate of cold stew. Starling at the stew, rapidly drank the liquor after which he started to sing Danny Boy. He was not Irish, but Jimmy had been Irish and sang it all the time out on the clam flats.

Suddenly Lt. Gracey burst into the room.

"What's going on in here, Sergeant!"

'I've raped this girl here!' slurred Starling. "And now I'm drinken up all her liquor."

"Good job soldier!"

Starling stood up and shut the door in the lieutenant's face. Then he returned to the table where he fell asleep. In the morning, the girl was gone.

Starling would think about the girl everyday for the rest of his life.

***

Sergeant Frank Starling revved the motor. Soon, he was careening joyously down pin cone road, across the creek, up to the smoky summit. He had an idea. At the bottom he turned southwest, arriving at the gates of the prison, bursting into the courtyard, slicing through the gravely mud. He stopped.

"Get in!" he said to the jailbird with the hurt leg who lay on his back in the mud half frozen staring at the sky. Starling motioned. The man slowly rose and got in.

"Where you from?" he asked the man. "Watcha do? Petty theft? Robbery? These krauts are merciless. I bet they didn't even feed you in there. Here, take a drink. I haven't done no time myself, but my uncle did a stretch in Sing Sing for robbing a bathtub factory, same factory he worked at. Smar, right? Kind of like biting the hand that feeds you, wouldn't you say? Well, whatever you did, whatever they think you did, it's over now. Now, you're going to be OK. Everything's going to be OK. You're busted out and free. The both of us. Everything is jim dandy."

They drove east past an encampment of Russians sitting by a fire. The Russians were dressed in some motley: a combination of medieval and mongol fashions. They watched the car as it passed, watched it all the way over the hump in the road.

"These people remind me of vikings. You know the vikings? They used to rape and pillage the coasts of Europe. Had these ships carved like dragons. Horned helmets. The Vikings. I liked history. History was always my favorite subject. Mr. Winkelblech's history class. Do you know Shoeless Joe Jackson batted 408 in 1911?"

The jailbird looked terrified, braced his hands on the door his feet in front of him. When Starling slowed down, the jailbird opened the door and leaped out. Starling saw him in the rear view mirror limping back down the road. "Crazy fucker," he said. "Suit yourself."

He drove down into a misty valley in the center of which was the ruin of a barn and a house both burnt to a skeletal char. His wheels got stuck in the mud and he spent some time getting loose by putting hay underneath the tires. Sometimes, pausing in his labor, he looked around. Total, utter silence. The snowy mountains in the distance sang of silence and the silence was terror, and so he sang Mac the Knife at the top of his lungs although he had an imperfect recall of the song's lyrics and so ended up repeating "It's Mac the Knife!" again and again.

"It's Mac the Knife!" sang Starling.

When he return along the road, the Russians left their campfire to throw rocks. They cracked one of the side windows. "Freulein Schmidt ain't gonna like this," said Starling as he motored along the prison's barbed wire.

***

Still, the jailbirds milled around in the courtyard. They had built a bonfire in the center. Starling stopped the car, opened the door, shouted. "Get on outta here! What are you all waiting for!?"

Suddenly, he felt full of anger. What were they waiting for? He got out of the car, trudged across the mud, seized a jailbird by the shoulders. "Don't you get it? You're free! The war is over. They can't touch you now, don't you see? All the records have been destroyed! You've got a clean slate!"

Looking around himself, he noticed that someone had removed the dead Russian. Then he noticed the smell. Flesh. They were eating the Russian's old nag, roasting it in a pit and feeding off it in increments as the outer flesh cooked. An inmate offered him some boiled red muscle which Starling took gratefully (he had missed lunch) and hunkered down. He sat by the burning horse for a long time until the stars came out. He was exhausted all of a sudden, sick of the sound of his own voice shouting "It's Mac the Knife!

"Where are you from?" after an eternity, the jailbird next to him spoke. He was a husk of a man, as if he had been inflated to bursting point and then gradually deflated so that his structure still held the suggestion of a former size. His big featured face was gray. His hands were gray. The grayness gave him an ageless feel so that Starling couldn't be sure if he was 40 or 70.

"Cape Cod."

"Ah, Cape Cod! I know it well. My brother lives in Albany."

"What's he do there?"

"He owns a paint store."

"Like house paint?"

"Sure! House paint, acrylic paint, oil paint. Any paint you want. You like paint?"

"Sure, so how long you've been here?"

"Since 2 years."

"What did you do?"

"What did I do?"

"Yeah, what did you do?"

"That's a good question."

Starling smiled. Jailbirds. Innocent to the last man, like his uncle. Uncle Dave. What a piece of work. "Well, I guess it doesn't matter much anymore," he said.

"I guess not," said the man with a brother in Albany.

"The thing I don't get is, why are you all hanging around here?"

"What are we supposed to do?"

"Go home?"

"Home?"

"Yeah, home, you know, with the wife and kids and the little doggy..."

"Why don't you go home?"

It was a question Starling didn't care to consider. "Listen," he said. "Let's get out of here."

"Where will we go?"

"I know of a place. German lady. German trench coat lady."

Starling felt full of this lonely childhood feeling like love's unmet invitation.

***

They drove through the night up the pine cone road. For some reason, Starling wanted to talk. He was a man of few words, but in the presence of the jailbird, he felt like overflowing. It was like a secret mechanism had been released. Maybe this was it. Maybe this was the prelude to the symphony.

"When I was a kid, we used to go clamming on the mud flats..." Starling began to tell the story of Jimmy who got stuck in the mud and had his legs sawed off.

***

"Who are those people?" asked Starling.

"Just animals," said the jailbird.

The powerful Mercedes headlights picked up everything along Old Pine Cone Road, including the a pack of Russians crouched like wolves around some kind of carcass.

"What are they doing here? What are you doing here?"

"Riding in this car with you."

***

Fraulein Schmidt, dressed in her trench coat opened the door and ushered them into a dimly lit parlor. The parlor was lit by two gas lamps, one by the window and the other by the entryway to the neighboring room. Framed photographs covered the walls. A clock somewhere chimed seven. A grandfather clock, somewhere in the recesses. Why did they call them grandfather clocks?

"Please sit. Schnapps?" asked Frau Schmidt, retreating to the kitchen.

The men watched her go, her golden calves.

"Some broad," said Starling.

"You think so?"

"What's the matter? Don't like dames?"

The man didn't respond, just smiled faintly and hunkered down into the arm chair.

Fraulein Schmidt brought out a bottle of schnapps and poured three large glasses full to the brim. She sat in the chair next to the fireplace and took several long swallows. Starling noticed that the prisoner couldn't take his eyes off her.

"What?" asked Fraulein Schmidt in her strong German accent. "Is something so interesting?"

The prisoner laughed. "Nothing. It's just that I never thought I would find myself in this situation. In fact I have dreamed of being in this situation, but now I do not know how to behave."

"What? You two know each other?"

"You could say that," said Fraulein Schmidt.

"You the warden's wife or something?

"Hah. That is well put," said the prisoner. "You could say she is the warden's wife. Yes."

Fraulein Schmidt choked on her schnapps, coughed, stooped over in her chair, breathing heavily.

"Why do you always wear that trench coat? Are you naked underneath or something?" asked Starling.

Then, the jailbird spoke, his voice level and commanding: "So let us drink a toast to the dead. All the dead, right Frau Schmidt? Let us toast the dead this evening."

Now Fraulein Schmidt's boggly eyes were overflowing with tears. Fraulein, Starling thought. She's a little old to be a Fraulein, but still I'd like to see what's going on underneath that trench coat.

"Schnapps and wurst," said the jailbird. "This reminds me of Saturday afternoons, just an ordinary Saturday afternoon."

By the lamplight, Starling noticed the jailbird was also crying silently.

"You got a radio or something?" asked Starling.

"Yes, I do," said Fraulein Schmidt who stood up, retreated to the other room and returned with an old timey phonograph like thing. She put on a record. The record started to play. Some kind of symphony music. German music, echoing and brassy.

Starling removed his jacket and rose to meet Fraulein Schmidt in the middle of the room. When they began to dance, softness pressing on softness, the drawstrings of her trench coat came undone. Slowly the garment relaxed its grip before pooling around her elegant red slippers creating the halo in which they moved. Starling found himself sheltering her nakedness from the hard pressing night, the ex con's gaze. He wondered if this was the beginning of the future proper, the past having run its course, the gray half-birth present worn through like old wall paper. He held her, caressed her, kissed the tears from the eyes of the naked, dancing kraut.