Oblivion Stories Part 3

'Carlos says in some cultures the etiquette actually calls for pa.s.sing gas in some situations.'

'The well known Korean thing about you burp to say thank you.'

'My parents had this running joke-they called a fart an intruder. They'd look at each other over the paper and be, like, "I do believe there's an intruder present."'

Laurel Manderley, who had had an idea, was rooting through her Fendi for her personal cell.

'My mom would just about drop over dead if anybody ever cut one in front of her. It's just not even imaginable.'

A circulation intern named Laurel Rodde, who as a rule favored DKNY, and who wasn't exactly unpopular but no one felt like they knew her very well despite all the time they all spent with one another, and who usually barely said a word at the working lunches, suddenly said: 'You know, did anybody when they were little ever have this thing where you think of your s.h.i.+t as sort of like your baby and sometimes want to hold it and talk to it and almost cry or feel guilty about flus.h.i.+ng it and dream sometimes of your s.h.i.+t in a little sort of little stroller with a bonnet and bottle and still sometimes in the bathroom look at it and give a little wave like, bye bye, as it goes down, and then feel a void?' There was an uncomfortable silence. Some of the interns looked at one another out of the corner of their eye. They were at a stage where they were now too adult and socially refined to respond with a drawn out semicruel 'Oooo-kaaaay,' but you could tell that a few of them were thinking it. The circulation intern, who'd gone a bit pink, was bent to her salad once more.

Citing bridgework, At.w.a.ter again declined the half piece of gum that Mrs. Moltke offered. All the parked car's windows ran in a way that would have been pretty had there been more overall light. The rain had steadied to the point where he could just barely discern the outline of a large sign in the distance below, which Amber had told him marked the nitrogen fixative factory's entrance.

'The man's conflicted, is all,' Mrs. Moltke said. 'He's about the most private man you'd ever like to see. In the privy I mean.' She chewed her gum well, without extraneous noises. She had to be at least 6'1". 'It surely weren't like that at my house growing up, I can tell you. It's a matter of how folks grow up, wouldn't you say?'

'This is fascinating,' At.w.a.ter said. They had been parked at the little road's terminus for perhaps ten minutes. The tape recorder was placed on his knee, and the subject's wife now reached over across herself and turned it off. Her hand was large enough to cover the recorder and also make liberal contact with his knee on either side. At.w.a.ter still had the same pants size he'd had in college, though these slacks were obviously a great deal newer. In the low barometric pressure of the storm, he was now entirely stuffed up, and was mouth breathing, which caused his lower lip to hang outward and made him look even more childlike. He was breathing rather more rapidly than he was aware of.

It was not clear whether Amber's small smile was for him or herself or just what. 'I'm going to tell you some background facts that you can't write about, but it'll help you understand our situation here. Skip-can I call you Skip?'

'Please do.'

Rain beat musically on the Cavalier's roof and hood. 'Skip, between just us two now, what we've got here is a boy whose folks beat him witless all through growing up. That whipped on him with electric cords and burnt on him with cigarettes and made him eat out in the shed when his mother thought his manners weren't up to snuff for her high and mighty table. His daddy was all right, it was more his mother. One of this churchy kind that's so upright and proper in church but back at home she's crazy evil, whipped her own children with cords and I don't know what all.' At the mention of church, At.w.a.ter's facial expression had become momentarily inward and difficult to read. Amber Moltke's voice was low in register but still wholly feminine, with a quality that cut through the rain's sound even at low volume. It reminded At.w.a.ter somewhat of Lauren Bacall at the end of her career, when the aged actress had begun to look more and more like a scalded cat but still possessed of a voice that affected one's nervous system in profound ways, as a child.

The artist's wife said: 'I know that one time when he was a boy that she came in and I think caught Brint playing with himself maybe, and made him come down in the sitting room and do it in front of them, the family, that she made them all sit there and watch him. Do you follow what I'm saying, Skip?'

The most significant sign of an approaching tornado would be a greenish cast to the ambient light and a sudden drop in pressure that made one's ears pop.

'His daddy didn't outright abuse him, but he was half crazy,' Amber said, 'a deacon. A man under great pressure from his own demons that he wrestled with. And I know one time Brint saw her take and beat a little baby kittycat to death with a skillet for messing on the kitchen floor. When he was in his high chair, watching. A little kittycat. Well,' she said. 'What do you suppose a little boy's toilet training is going to be like with folks like that?'

Nodding vigorously being one of his tactics for drawing people out in interviews, At.w.a.ter was nodding at almost everything the subject's wife was saying. This, together with the fact that his arms were still out straight before him, lent him a somnambulist aspect. Wind gusts caused the car to s.h.i.+mmy slightly in the clearing's mud.

By this time, Amber Moltke had s.h.i.+fted her ma.s.s onto her left haunch and brought her great right leg up and was curled kittenishly in such a way as to incline herself toward At.w.a.ter, gazing at the side of his face. She smelled of talc.u.m powder and Big Red. Her leg was like something you could slide down into some kind of unimaginable chasm. The chief outward sign that At.w.a.ter was affected one way or the other by the immense s.e.xual force field around Mrs. Moltke was that he continued to grip the Cavalier's steering wheel tightly with both hands and to face directly ahead as though still driving. There was very little air in the car. He had an odd subtle sense of ascent, as if the car were slightly rising. There was no real sign of any type of overhead view, or even of the tiny road's dropoff to SR 252 and the nitrogen works that commenced just ahead-he was going almost entirely on Mrs. Moltke's report of where they were.

'This is a man, now, that will leave the premises to break wind. That closes the privy door and locks it and turns on the exhaust fan and this little radio he's got, and runs water, and sometimes puts a rolled up towel in the crack of the door when he's in there doing his business. Brint I mean.'

'I think I understand what you're saying.'

'Most times he can't do his business if there's somebody even there. In the house. The man thinks I believe him when he says he's going to just go driving around.' She sighed. 'So Skip, this is a very very shy individual in this department. He's wounded inside. He wouldn't hardly say boo when I first met him.'

Following college, Skip At.w.a.ter had done a year at IU-Indianapolis's prestigious grad journalism program, then landed a cub spot at the Indianapolis Star, Star, and there had made no secret of his dream of someday writing a syndication grade human interest column for a major urban daily, until the a.s.sistant city editor who'd hired him told Skip in his first annual performance review, among other things, that as a journalist At.w.a.ter struck him as being polished but about two inches deep. After which performance review At.w.a.ter had literally run for the privacy of the men's room and there had struck his own chest with his fist several times because he knew that at heart it was true: his fatal flaw was an ineluctably light, airy prose sensibility. He had no innate sense of tragedy or preterition or complex binds or any of the things that made human beings' misfortunes significant to one another. He was all upbeat angle. The editor's blunt but kindly manner had made it worse. At.w.a.ter could write a sweet commercial line, he'd acknowledged. He had compa.s.sion, of a certain frothy sort, and drive. The editor, who always wore a white dress s.h.i.+rt and tie but never a jacket, had actually put his arm around At.w.a.ter's shoulders. He said he liked Skip enough to tell him the truth, because he was a good kid and just needed to find his niche. There were all different kinds of reporting. The editor said he had acquaintances at and there had made no secret of his dream of someday writing a syndication grade human interest column for a major urban daily, until the a.s.sistant city editor who'd hired him told Skip in his first annual performance review, among other things, that as a journalist At.w.a.ter struck him as being polished but about two inches deep. After which performance review At.w.a.ter had literally run for the privacy of the men's room and there had struck his own chest with his fist several times because he knew that at heart it was true: his fatal flaw was an ineluctably light, airy prose sensibility. He had no innate sense of tragedy or preterition or complex binds or any of the things that made human beings' misfortunes significant to one another. He was all upbeat angle. The editor's blunt but kindly manner had made it worse. At.w.a.ter could write a sweet commercial line, he'd acknowledged. He had compa.s.sion, of a certain frothy sort, and drive. The editor, who always wore a white dress s.h.i.+rt and tie but never a jacket, had actually put his arm around At.w.a.ter's shoulders. He said he liked Skip enough to tell him the truth, because he was a good kid and just needed to find his niche. There were all different kinds of reporting. The editor said he had acquaintances at USA Today USA Today and offered to make a call. and offered to make a call.

At.w.a.ter, who also possessed an outstanding verbal memory, retained almost verbatim the questions Laurel Manderley had left him with on the phone at Ye Olde Country Buffet after he'd summarized the morning's confab and characterized the artist as catatonically inhibited, terribly shy, scared of his shadow, and so forth. What Laurel had said didn't yet add up for her in the story was how the stuff got seen in the first place: 'What, he gives it to somebody? This catatonically shy guy calls somebody into the bathroom and says, Hey, look at this extraordinary thing I just p.o.o.ped out of me? I can't see anybody over age six doing that, much less somebody that shy. Whether it's a hoax or not, the guy's got to be some kind of closet exhibitionist,' she'd opined. Every instinct At.w.a.ter possessed had since been crying out that this was the piece's fulcrum and UBA, the universalizing element that made great soft news go: the conflict between Moltke's extreme personal shyness and need for privacy on the one hand versus his involuntary need to express what lay inside him through some type of personal expression or art. Everyone experienced this conflict on some level. Though lurid and potentially disgusting, the mode of production in this case simply heightened the conflict's voltage, underlined the stakes in bold, made it at once deep and accessible for Style Style readers, many of whom scanned the magazine in the bathroom anyway, all the salarymen knew. readers, many of whom scanned the magazine in the bathroom anyway, all the salarymen knew.

At.w.a.ter, however, was, since the end of a serious involvement some years prior, also all but celibate, and tended to be extremely keyed up and ambivalent in any type of s.e.xually charged situation, which unless he was off base this increasingly was-which in retrospect was partly why, in the stormy enclosure of the rental car with the pulverizingly attractive Amber Moltke, he had committed one of the fundamental errors in soft news journalism: asking a centrally important question before he was certain just what answer would advance the interests of the piece.

Only the third s.h.i.+ft attendant knew that R. Vaughn Corliss slept so terribly, twining in and out of the sheets with bleatings of the purest woe, foodlessly chewing, sitting up and looking wildly about, feeling at himself and moaning, crying out that no he wouldn't go there, not there not again no please. The high concept mogul was always up with the sun, and his first act after stripping the bed and placing his breakfast order was to erase the disk of the bedroom's monitor. A selected few nights' worth of these disks the attendant had slipped in during deep sleep and copied, however, as a de facto form of unemployment insurance, since Corliss's temper and caprice were well known; and the existence of these pirate disks was also known to certain representatives of Eckleschafft-Bod whose business it was to know such things.

It was only if, after sheep, controlled breathing, visualizing IV pentothal drips, and mentally reviewing in close detail a special collector's series of photographs of people on fire ent.i.tled People on Fire, People on Fire, Corliss still could not fall or fall back asleep that he'd resort to the failsafe: imagining the faces of everyone he had loved, hated, feared, known, or even ever seen all a.s.sembling and accreting as pixels into a pointillist image of a single great all devouring eye whose pupil was Corliss's own. Corliss still could not fall or fall back asleep that he'd resort to the failsafe: imagining the faces of everyone he had loved, hated, feared, known, or even ever seen all a.s.sembling and accreting as pixels into a pointillist image of a single great all devouring eye whose pupil was Corliss's own.

In the morning, the reinvented high concept cable entrepreneur's routine was invariant and always featured a half hour of pretend rowing on a machine that could simulate both resistance and crosscurrent, a scrupulously Fletcherized breakfast, and a session of the 28 lead facial biofeedback in which microelectric sensors were affixed to individual muscle groups and exhaustive daily practice yielded the ability to form, at will, any of the 216 facial expressions common to all known cultures. Corliss was in constant contact via headset cellular throughout this regimen.

Unlike most driven business visionaries he was not, when all was said and done, an unhappy man. He felt sometimes an odd complex emotion that, when broken down and examined in quiet reflection, revealed itself to be self envy, which appears near the top of certain Maslovian fulfillment pyramids as a rare and culturally specific form of joy. The sense Skip At.w.a.ter had gotten, after a brief and highly structured interface with Corliss for a WITW WITW piece on the All Ads cable channel in 1999, was that the producer's reclusive, eccentric persona was a conscious performance or imitation, and that Corliss (whom At.w.a.ter had personally liked and not found all that intimidating) was in reality a gregarious, backslapping, people type person who affected an hermetic torment for reasons which At.w.a.ter's notebooks contained several multipage theories on, none of which appeared in the article published in piece on the All Ads cable channel in 1999, was that the producer's reclusive, eccentric persona was a conscious performance or imitation, and that Corliss (whom At.w.a.ter had personally liked and not found all that intimidating) was in reality a gregarious, backslapping, people type person who affected an hermetic torment for reasons which At.w.a.ter's notebooks contained several multipage theories on, none of which appeared in the article published in Style. Style.

At.w.a.ter and Mrs. Moltke were now unquestionably breathing each other's air; the Cavalier's gla.s.s surfaces were almost entirely steamed over. At the same time, an imperfection in its gasket's seal was allowing rain droplets to enter and move in a complex system of paths down his window. These branching paths and tributaries were in the left periphery of the journalist's vision; Amber Moltke's face loomed vividly in the right. Unlike Mrs. At.w.a.ter, the artist's wife had a good firm chin with no wattles, though her throat's girth was extraordinary-At.w.a.ter could not have gotten around it with both hands.

'The shyness and woundedness must be complex, though,' the journalist said. 'Given that the pieces are public. Publicly displayed.' He had already ama.s.sed a certain amount of technical detail about the preparation of the displays, back at the Moltkes' duplex. The pieces were not varnished or in any way chemically treated. They were, however, sprayed lightly with a fixative when fresh or new, to help preserve their shape and intricate detail-evidently some of the man's early work had become cracked or distorted when allowed to dry completely. At.w.a.ter knew that freshly produced pieces of art were placed on a special silver finish tray, an heirloom of some sort from Mrs. Moltke's own family, then covered in common kitchen plastic wrap and allowed to cool to room temperature before the fixative was applied. Skip could imagine the steam from a fresh new piece fogging the Saran's interior and making it difficult to see the thing itself until the wrap was removed and discarded. Only later, in the midst of all the editorial wrangling over his piece's typeset version, would At.w.a.ter learn that the fixative in question was a common brand of aerosol styling spray whose manufacturer advertised in Style. Style.

Amber gave a brief laugh. 'We're not exactly talking the big time. Two bean festivals and the DAR craft show.'

'Well, and of course the fair.' At.w.a.ter was referring to the Franklin County Fair, which like most county fairs in eastern Indiana was held in June, quite a bit earlier than the national average. The reasons for this were complicated, agricultural, and historically bound up with Indiana's refusal to partic.i.p.ate in Daylight Savings Time, which caused no end of ha.s.sles for certain commodities markets at the Chicago Board of Trade. At.w.a.ter's own childhood experiences had been of the Madison County Fair, held during the third week of each June on the outskirts of Mounds State Park, but he a.s.sumed that all county fairs were roughly similar. He had unconsciously begun to do the thing with his fist again.

'Well, although the fair ain't exactly your big time either.'

Also from childhood experience, Skip At.w.a.ter knew that the slight squeaks and pops one could hear when Amber laughed were from different parts of her complex foundation garment as they strained and moved against one another. Her kneesized left elbow now rested on the seat back between them, leaving her left hand free to play and make tiny languid motions in the s.p.a.ce between her head and his. A head nearly twice the size of At.w.a.ter's own. Her hair was wiglike in overall configuration, but it had a high protein l.u.s.ter no real wig could ever duplicate.

His right arm still rigidly out against the Cavalier's wheel, At.w.a.ter turned his head a few more degrees toward her. 'This, though, will be very public. Style Style is about as public as you can get.' is about as public as you can get.'

'Well, except for TV.'

At.w.a.ter inclined his head slightly to signify concession. 'Except for TV.'

Mrs. Moltke's hand, with its multiple different rings, was now within just inches of the journalist's large red right ear. She said: 'Well, I look at Style. Style. I've been looking at I've been looking at Style Style for years. I don't bet there's a body in town that hasn't looked at for years. I don't bet there's a body in town that hasn't looked at Style Style or or People People or one of you all.' The hand moved as if it were under water. 'Sometimes it's hard keeping you all straight. After your girl there called, I said to Brint it was a man coming over from or one of you all.' The hand moved as if it were under water. 'Sometimes it's hard keeping you all straight. After your girl there called, I said to Brint it was a man coming over from People People when I was telling him to go on and get cleaned up for company.' when I was telling him to go on and get cleaned up for company.'

At.w.a.ter cleared his throat. 'So you see my point, then, which in no way forms any sort of argument against the piece or Mr. Moltke's -'

'Brint.'

'Against Brint's consenting to the piece.' At.w.a.ter would also every so often give a small but vigorous all body s.h.i.+ver, involuntary, rather like a wet dog shaking itself, which neither party commented on. Bits of windblown foliage hit the front and rear winds.h.i.+elds and remained for a moment or two before they were washed away. The sky could really have been any color at all and there would be no way to know. At.w.a.ter now tried to rotate his entire upper body toward Mrs. Moltke: 'But he will need to know what he's in for. If my editors give the go ahead, which I should again stress I have every confidence they ultimately will, one condition is likely to be the presence of some sort of medical authority to authenticate the . . . circ.u.mstances of creation.'

'You're saying in there with him?' The gusts of her breath seemed to strike every little cilium on At.w.a.ter's cheek and temple. Her right hand still covered the recorder and several inches of At.w.a.ter's knee on either side. Her largo pulse was visible in the trembling of her bust, which was understandably prodigious and also now pointed At.w.a.ter's way. Probably no more than four inches separated the bust from his right arm, which was still held out stiffly and attached to the steering wheel. At.w.a.ter's other fist was pumping like mad down beside the driver's door.

'No, no, not necessarily, but probably right outside, and ready to perform various tests and procedures on the . . . on it the minute Mr. Moltke, Brint, is finished. Comes out with it.' Another intense little s.h.i.+ver.

Amber gave another small mirthless laugh.

'I'm sure you know what I mean,' At.w.a.ter said. 'Temperature and const.i.tution and the lack of any sort of sign of any human hand or tool or anything employed in the . . . process of the . . .'

'And then it'll come out.'

'The piece, you mean,' At.w.a.ter said. She nodded. In a way that made no physical sense given their respective sizes, At.w.a.ter's eyes seemed now to be exactly level with hers, and without being aware of it he blinked whenever she did, though her hand's small circles often supervened.

At.w.a.ter said: 'As I've said, I have every confidence that yes, it will.'

At the same time, the journalist was also trying not to indulge himself by imagining Laurel Manderley's reaction to the faxed reproductions of the artist's pieces as they slowly emerged from the machine. He felt that he knew almost all the different permutations her face would go through.

Nor was it clear whether Mrs. Moltke was looking at his ear or at the underwater movements of her own hand up next to the ear. 'And what you're saying is then, why, to get ready, because once it comes out nothing will be the same. Because there'll be attention.'

'I would think so, yes.' He tried to turn a little further. 'Of various different kinds.'

'You're saying other magazines. Or TV, the Internet.'

'It's often difficult to predict the forms of public attention or to know in advance what -'

'But after this kind of amount of attention you're saying there might be art galleries wanting to handle it. For sale. Do art galleries do auctions, or they just put it out with a price sticker on it and folks come and shop, or what all?'

At.w.a.ter was aware that this was a very different type and level of exchange than the morning's confab in the Moltkes' home. It was hard for him not to feel that Amber might be patronizing him a bit, playing up to a certain stereotype of provincial naivete-he did this himself in certain situations at Style. Style. At the same time, he felt that to some extent she was sincere in deferring to him because he lived and worked in New York City, the cultural heart of the nation-At.w.a.ter was absurdly gratified by this kind of thing. The whole geographical deference issue could get very complicated and abstract. At the right periphery, he could see that a certain delicate pattern Amber was tracing in the air near his ear was actually the cartography of that ear, its spirals and intending whorls. Sensitive from childhood about his ears' size and hue, At.w.a.ter had worn either baseball caps or knit caps all the way through college. At the same time, he felt that to some extent she was sincere in deferring to him because he lived and worked in New York City, the cultural heart of the nation-At.w.a.ter was absurdly gratified by this kind of thing. The whole geographical deference issue could get very complicated and abstract. At the right periphery, he could see that a certain delicate pattern Amber was tracing in the air near his ear was actually the cartography of that ear, its spirals and intending whorls. Sensitive from childhood about his ears' size and hue, At.w.a.ter had worn either baseball caps or knit caps all the way through college.

Ultimately, the journalist's failure to think the whole thing through and decide just how to respond was itself a form of decision. 'I think they do both,' he told her. 'Sometimes there are auctions. Sometimes a special exhibit, and potential buyers will come for a large party on the first day, to meet the artist. Often called an art opening.' He was facing the winds.h.i.+eld again. The rain came no less hard but the sky looked perhaps to be lightening-although, on the other hand, the steam of their exhalations against the window was itself whitish and might act as some type of optical filter. At any rate, At.w.a.ter knew that it was often at the trailing end of a storm front that funnels developed. 'The initial key,' he said, 'will be arranging for the right photographer.'

'Some professional type shots, you mean.'

'The magazine has both staff photographers and freelancers the photo people like to use for various situations. The politics of influencing them as to which particular photographer they might send all gets pretty involved, I'm afraid.' At.w.a.ter could taste his own carbon dioxide in the car's air. 'The key will be producing some images that are carefully lit and indirect and tasteful and yet at the same time emphatic in being able to show what he's able to . . . just what he's achieved.'

'Already. You mean the doodads he's come out with already.'

'There will be no way to even pitch it at the executive level without real photos, I don't think,' At.w.a.ter said.

For a moment there was only the wind and rain and a whisking sound of microfiber, due to At.w.a.ter's fist.

'You know what's peculiar? Is sometimes I can hear it and then other times not,' Amber said quietly. 'That you said up to home you were from back here, and sometimes I can hear it and then other times you sound more . . . all business, and I can't hear it in you at all.'

'I'm originally from Anderson.'

'Up by Muncie you mean. Where all the big mounds are.'

'Anderson's got the mounds, technically. Though I went to school in Muncie, at Ball State.'

'There's some more right here, up to Mixerville off the lake. They still say they don't know who all made those mounds. They just know they're old.'

'The sense I get is there are still competing theories.'

'Dave Letterman on the TV talks about Ball State all the time, that he was at. He's from here someplace.'

'He graduated long before I got there, though.'

She did touch his ear now, though her finger was too large to fit inside or trace the auricle's whorls and succeeded only in occluding At.w.a.ter's hearing on that side, so that he could hear his own heartbeat and his voice seemed newly loud to him over the rain: 'But with the operative question being whether he'll do it.'

'Brint,' she said.

'Respecting the subject of the piece.'

'If he'll sit still for it you mean.'

The finger kept At.w.a.ter from turning his head, so that he could not see whether Mrs. Moltke was smiling or had made a deliberate sally or just what. 'Since he's so agonizingly shy, as you've explained. You must-he's got to be able to see already that it will be, to some extent, a bit invasive.' At.w.a.ter was in no way acknowledging the finger in his ear, which did not move or turn but simply stayed there. The feeling of queer levitation persisted, however. 'Invasive of his privacy, of your privacy. And I don't exactly get the sense, which I respect, that Mr. Moltke burns to share his art with the world, or necessarily to get a lot of personal exposure.'

'He'll do it,' Amber said. The finger withdrew slightly but was still in contact with his ear. The very oldest she could possibly be was 28.

The journalist said: 'Because I'll be honest with you, I think it's an extraordinary thing and an extraordinary story, but Laurel and I are going to have to go right to the mat with the Executive Editor to secure a commitment to this piece, and it would make things really awkward if Mr. Moltke suddenly demurred or deferred or got cold feet or decided it was all just too private and invasive a process.'

She did not ask who Laurel was. She was wholly on her left flank now, her luminous knee up next to her hand on the Daewoo unit, and only the bunched hem of his raincoat separating her knee and his, her great bosom crushed and jutting and its heartbeat's quiver bringing one breast within inches of the Talbott's shawl collar. He kept envisioning her having to strike or swat the artist before he'd respond to the simplest query. And the strange fixed grin, which probably would not photograph well at all.

Again the artist's wife said: 'He'll do it.'

Unbeknownst to At.w.a.ter, the Cavalier's right hand tires were now sunk in mud almost to the valves. What he felt as an occult force rotating him up and over toward Mrs. Moltke in clear contravention of the most basic journalistic ethics was in fact simple gravity: the compartment was now at a 20 degree angle. Wind gusts shook the car like a maraca, and the journalist could hear the sounds of thras.h.i.+ng foliage and windblown debris doing G.o.d knew what to the rental's paint.

'I have no doubt,' the journalist said. 'I think I'm just trying to determine for myself why you're so sure, although obviously I'm going to defer to your judgment because he is your husband and if anyone knows another's heart it's obviously -'

What he felt in the first instant to be Mrs. Moltke's hand over his mouth turned out to be her forefinger held to his lips, chin, and lower jaw in an intimate shush. At.w.a.ter could not help wondering whether it was the same finger that had just been in his ear. Its tip was almost the width of both of his nostrils together.

'He will because he'll do it for me, Skip. Because I say.'

'Mn srtny gld t-'

'But go on and ask it.' Mrs. Moltke backed the finger off a bit. 'We should get it out here up front between us. Why I'd want my husband known for his s.h.i.+t.'

'Though of course the pieces are so much more than that,' At.w.a.ter said, his eyes appearing to cross slightly as he gazed at the finger. Another compact s.h.i.+ver, a whisking sound of fabric and his forehead running with sweat. The cinnamon heat and force of her exhalations like one of the heating grates along Columbus Circle where coteries of homeless sat in the winter in fingerless gloves and balaklava hoods, their eyes flat and pitiless as At.w.a.ter hurried past. He had to engage the car's battery in order to crack his window, and a burst of noise from the radio made him jump.

Amber Moltke appeared very still and intent. 'Still and all, though,' she said. 'To have your TV reporters or Dave Letterman or that skinny one real late at night making their jokes about it, and folks reading in Style Style and thinking about Brint's bowel, about him sitting there in the privy moving his bowel in some kind of special way to make something like that come out. Because that's his whole hook, Skip, isn't it. Why you're here in the first place. That it's his s.h.i.+t.' and thinking about Brint's bowel, about him sitting there in the privy moving his bowel in some kind of special way to make something like that come out. Because that's his whole hook, Skip, isn't it. Why you're here in the first place. That it's his s.h.i.+t.'

It turned out that a certain Richmond IN firm did a type of specialty s.h.i.+pping where they poured liquid styrene around fragile items, producing a very light form fitting insulation. The Federal Express outlet named on the box's receipt, however, was in Scipio IN, which was also featured in the address on the Kinko's cover sheet that had accompanied Sunday's faxed photos, which faxes the next morning's Fed Ex rendered more or less moot or superfluous, so that Laurel Manderley couldn't quite see why At.w.a.ter'd gone to the trouble.

At Monday's working lunch, Laurel Manderley's deceptively simple idea with respect to the package's contents had been to hurry back and place them out on Ellen Bactrian's desk before she returned from her dance cla.s.s, so that they would be sitting there waiting for her, and not to say a word or try to prevail on Ellen in any way, but simply to let the pieces speak for themselves. This was, after all, what her own salaryman appeared to have done, giving Laurel no warning whatsoever that art was on the way.

The following was actually part of a lengthy telephone conversation on the afternoon of 3 July between Laurel Manderley and Skip At.w.a.ter, the latter having literally limped back to the Mount Carmel Holiday Inn after negotiating an exhaustive and nerve wracking series of in situ authenticity tests at the artist's home.

'And what's with that address, by the way?'

'Willkie's an Indiana politician. The name is ubiquitous here. I think he may have run against Truman. Remember the photo of Truman holding up the headline?'

'No, I mean the half. What, fourteen and a half Willkie?'

'It's a duplex,' At.w.a.ter said.

'Oh.'

There had been a brief silence, one whose strangeness might have been only in retrospect.

'Who lives on the other side?'

There had been another pause. It was true that both salaryman and intern were extremely tired and dis...o...b..bulated by this point.

The journalist said: 'I don't know yet. Why?'

To which Laurel Manderley had no good answer.

In the listing Cavalier, at or about the height of the thunderstorm, At.w.a.ter shook his head. 'It's more than that,' he said. He was, to all appearances, sincere. He appeared genuinely concerned that the artist's wife not think his motives exploitative or sleazy. Amber's finger was still right near his mouth. He told her it was not yet entirely clear to him how she viewed her husband's pieces or understood the extraordinary power they exerted. Rain and debris notwithstanding, the winds.h.i.+eld was too steamed over for At.w.a.ter to see that the view of SR 252 and the fixative works was now tilted 30 or more degrees, like a faulty altimeter. Still facing forward with his eyes rotated way over to the right, At.w.a.ter told the artist's wife that his journalistic motives had been mixed at first, maybe, but that verily he did now believe. When they'd taken him through Mrs. Moltke's sewing room and out back and pulled open the angled green door and led him down the raw pine steps into the storm cellar and he'd seen the pieces all lined up in graduated tiers that way, something had happened. The truth was he'd been moved, and he said he'd understood then for the first time, despite some prior exposure to the world of art through a course or two in college, how people of discernment could say they felt moved and redeemed by serious art. And he believed this was serious, real, bona fide art, he told her. At the same time, it was also true that Skip At.w.a.ter had not been in a s.e.xually charged situation since the previous New Year's annual YMSP2 party's bout of drunken f.a.n.n.y photocopying, when he'd gotten a glimpse of one of the circulation interns' pudenda as she settled on the Canon's plexigla.s.s sheet, which afterward was unnaturally warm.

Registered motto of Chicago IL's O Verily Productions, which for complicated business reasons appeared on its colophon in Portuguese: CONSCIOUSNESS IS NATURE'S NIGHTMARE.